“Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.” ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
The latest from author and investor Tim Ferriss
Hi All!
Here is your weekly dose of 5-Bullet Friday, a list of what I’m pondering and exploring. I threw in an extra bullet for fun.
This edition is brought to you by The Way, the meditation app I use most often. Be sure to see their offer in the P.S.
“The Real-Life Willy Wonka Who Built Tony Hawk a Secret Desert Train” on the Death, Sex & Money podcast**.** Hat tip to Elan Lee for the great recommendation. N.D., if you see this, Elan would love to meet you, and I think the two of you would really hit it off.
_N.D. Austin is not an event planner. He designs experiences, which he says are supposed to leave you feeling transformed. He’s designed hundreds over the years, from secret sewer speakeasies to coming-of-age rituals on deserted islands to funeral board games that guide people through decades of memories. In this episode, host Anna Sale talks to skateboarding legend Tony Hawk about an experience N.D. designed for Tony’s office that mended friendships on a homemade train. And N.D. tells Anna how growing up in a doomsday cult in Alaska sparked his obsession with performance, ritual and generosity._
The Algorithm: The Hypergrowth Formula That Transformed Tesla, Lululemon, General Motors, and SpaceX by Jon McNeill, former president of Tesla. This is an incredibly tactical and concise book, and apparently the first such book written by an Elon direct report. The audiobook version clocks in at only 4.5 hours on 1x speed. I made nearly 100 highlights, and I asked my COO to read the book, as we will be emulating parts of the playbook.
From the description:
_Jon McNeill had already founded and sold six startups when Sheryl Sandberg introduced him to Elon Musk, who was looking for help at Tesla. McNeill was steeped in the lean principles that had made Toyota a global powerhouse—principles focused on achieving efficiency and optimization by incrementally improving existing systems and processes. What he learned from Elon at Tesla was its antithesis, an approach that required radical rethinking. … Elon called this five-step framework “The Algorithm.”
_I found this book because I was sent a screenshot of the chapter opener below. What a wild world:
One year ago this week, I asked my ~1.9M X followers to make stock and crypto predictions. I promised I’d report back. The outcome? As of November 3rd, they ranked the stocks 100% correctly and ranked the crypto 100% incorrectly. Read the details and methodology here.
I just saw You Can See Everything from A24, and it blew my mind. It redefines what a documentary can be, partially by creating an IV drip of WTF moments and blurring every line imaginable. It inspired the hell out of me. Editing that film almost certainly took 10 years off of the lives of Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim, and team. If they’d gone 80%, it would have been terrible. Instead, they went 100%, and it’s a masterpiece. I’ve seen all sorts of buzz online around their “marketing playbook,” but here’s their marketing secret: make the product so ridiculously good and unique that people can’t stop talking about it.
“Where am I 3/4-assing?” is the question haunting me this week. What a gift. Watch the trailer here.
Lucky #888 — My Tour of Designing Luck in China, Japan, and Korea. I did a lot of reading for this short 30-minute episode, which features a nerdy tour of China, Japan, and Korea, including a million-dollar license plate, disappearing hotel floors, a casino room designed around one gambler’s birthday, and the lucky number hiding in Toyota’s name. It’s my excuse to dust off some of my East Asian Studies and indulge a few weird interests. You can listen here.
“Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.”
― Adapted from Chuang Tzu, one of the founding figures of Daoism.
This is the first half of 至樂無樂, 至譽無譽 (Zhì lè wú lè, Zhì yù wú yù), which is decently translated as “Highest happiness [is] no happiness; Highest praise/renown [is] no praise/renown.”
The context in Chapter 18 of Zhuangzi is what makes me comfortable with the above English translation, which I love. Chuang Tzu’s point, as far as I understand it, is that when you empty yourself of the conscious striving to be happy or famous, you achieve something far better. Daoist lè (happiness, joy), rather than being a spike in emotion caused by getting what you want, is a steady undercurrent of contentment. The spiritual cousin of this quote, often misattributed to Nathaniel Hawthorne, actually comes from an anonymous “L.” in a New Orleans newspaper from 1848: “Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, seems always just beyond your grasp; but if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”
You can complement this edition of 5-Bullet Friday with my conversation with Craig Mod on epic walks in Japan and my interview with Steve Jang on K-pop, ‘han’ energy, must-see Korean films, and much more, recorded on the ground in South Korea.
And, as always, please give me feedback on X. Which bullet above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know. Just send a tweet to @tferriss and put #5BulletFriday at the end so I can find it.
Have a wonderful weekend, all.
Much love to you and yours,
Tim
I’ve explored a lot of meditation practices over the years. My current hands-down favorite, and the easiest way to get back in the habit, is The Way, taught by Zen Master Henry Shukman. Using the app for just 10–20 minutes a day has reduced my anxiety more than I would have thought possible with any app. Try it for a week, and I think you’ll notice something similar. Here are 30 days for free.
The Way leads you down a single, long-term path that covers all the key areas of a deep and fulfilling meditation practice. It’s an easy and calming way to find more ease and calm. There’s no overwhelming menu of stuff or meditation du jour, just Henry taking you on a logical progression of lessons, one manageable bite at a time. You’ll be learning skills you can actually take into your daily life. Henry’s sessions will become something you look forward to. He’s appeared on my podcast twice and is always a listener favorite. I recently chose to invest in The Way, given all the above, and I’ve been working with Henry and his team to make the app as good as humanly possible. I’ve probably sent a hundred notes on the product, and they’ve been improving it each and every week.
Now, subscribers to 5-Bullet Friday can try 30 days for free, no credit card required. Just go to TheWayApp.com/Tim. Try it for a week, and I think you’ll be more than pleasantly surprised.
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