#813: Q&A with Tim — Three Life Commandments, 4-Hour Workweek Exercises I Still Use, The Art and Joy of Inefficiency, Stoicism Revisited, and Much More

Becoming successful in that way makes the vast majority of people more predisposed to depression and anxiety, believe it or not. When you're striving, you have the hope that once you have those things, the vast majority of your problems will vanish. By and large, that doesn't happen. The striving period gives you a mission, a feeling of purpose. Once you are the greyhound that catches the rabbit on the track, you're kind of like, okay, well, now what do I do with myself? There are things that finances solve, money can solve money problems. But the expectation is there's going to be a lot more payoff and finality to the solving of problems, which is not the case.

If you had to create a religion with just three commandments based on your life so far, what would they be? Number one, Movement is medicine. Body and mind are not separate. It's all tied together. So movement is medicine to save the self help outside the self. The more you focus on the self, the more your self problems are going to be. To save the self, look outside the self. Request what you want more of and what you want less of, just say it. A lot of the drama in life is we push off the uncomfortable conversations. We don't ask for what we want.

I right now do not use AI to write anything that is from the perspective of blank page. What I have used AI for a lot is to try to parse feedback, look at patterns and I do read through all of the comments on the community and then what I will also do. I will use AI to then try to identify for specific steps. Was there a consensus or a majority in keep or cut looking at the feedback for certain steps. Can AI pull from those separate documents and just give me the feedback specific to a particular chapter? I am using AI in that way and the degree to which it is the models have improved just in the last few weeks is remarkable. But I'm not using it for drafting from the blank page.

If I had kids, what would I encourage them to learn? Given the rapidly developing tools and ecosystem of AI, it would be writing. It would be clear written communication. I do think that ultimately there will be a lot of voice interface. But if you want to scrutinize and improve your thinking, the best way to do that that I have found is doing it through writing. That is how you freeze your thinking. It's much harder to do verbally. That is how I have found you can most directly improve your thinking, which will then inform your prompting. And I think the race goes to the best prompter, in a sense, knowing not just how to ask prompts, but what to ask from an import kind of ranking perspective.

The short answer is stoicism. Really double click on stoics and stoic philosophy. And in fact, these types of things, traffic, airport delays, other disruptions, unforeseen, unpredictable, uncontrollable, they really don't bother me. And that is trained. The stuff that bothers me is the kind of stuff, for instance, that happened last night. I'm in ketosis. I'm eating disgusting amounts of fat. I'm having a big steak for like the nth time now, and I just wanted something to break up the monotony. So I asked the bartender, hey, can you recommend any mecalss? Here I am in Texas, There's a great selection of misscall and tequila. And he's like, oh, there are a bunch of them. He's like, but I really like this one. And he recommends this thing very cas ###ually and I have it, and it ends up costing $72 for a glass.

When you see someone who has an addictive behavior, whether it's workaholism or what you consider compulsive, right? Sexual addiction could be anything. Before you seek to help the person remove that thing, think very, very, very carefully about whether or not they have another safety net. Because if it is covering up depression, if you attempt to save them, but leave them with nowhere else to turn after you've perhaps given them some degree of awarenessash guilt, shame around that behavior, they could actually end up in a very bad place. So really consider carefully what support or perhaps even what types of therapy and so on they can engage with before that crutch is taken away.

I lean towards as late as humanly possible because also plans can change and you can paint yourself into a corner publicly very easily or set of expectations too high and then you can't deliver. So I wait as long as Possible. I really don't think much at all about early traction and I'll sometimes stick out teasers, but by the time I'm putting out, say, the first chapter of a book, typically the book is done. This is the first time I've broken that rule, and that was to hold myself accountable to working with you guys in the no community. And so far it's worked pretty well. So I don't regret that.