I got some inspiration this morning from one of my favourite entrepreneurs and people to follow, Tim Ferriss. For those of you who don’t know, Tim is a productivity powerhouse. His successes are many but his main story is how he changed his life from working 80 hours a week and being completely burned out to traveling the world, blogging whenever he wants, investing in whatever start-ups take his fancy, and becoming a New York Times best selling author.
To review his full accolades, I highly recommend checking out Tim’s blog, and reading his best-selling book
Tim’s framework for life is what he calls “Lifestyle Design”, which is basically getting the absolute most out of what you’ve got, whenever you can, and jettisoning the rest. If the French Foreign Legion decided to do a course in minimalism, that’s how Tim lives his life.
This morning I woke up to see Tim’s latest blog article in my RSS reader. His posts have been few and far between lately, so it’s always good when they come through.
The post was a video called ‘Tim Ferriss: A Day In The Life’. It’s rare to see such an exposé on Ferriss, especially since he likes to do his own thing and stay under the radar to a certain extent.
I’ve also heard some criticism of Ferriss that, despite writing a book called ‘The Four Hour Work Week’, he’s still one of the hardest working people in his space, often clocking up more hours per week than his blogger/entrepreneur counterparts.
So I couldn’t wait to check out what this enigmatic guy does on a typical day.
Rather than go through the clip and describe what I found inspirational (you can watch it here), I wanted to write about something else he did in the way the article was published.
I live in Australia, and if you look at the article, you’ll see that the video is hosted on Hulu. We’re not allowed to watch Hulu in Australia, and neither are you if you live anywhere outside the USA (aka Centre of Everything). Which sucks bollocks.
So as soon as I saw the Hulu logo I thought there was no point, until I noticed a snippet Tim had written underneath the video, which directed international viewers to try Hotspot Shield.
Hostpot Shield, as I found out, is a really simple, free tool that temporarily shrouds your IP address so the content provider can no longer determine that you’re outside the US, allowing you to work around the IP blocker and view the content as the good Lord intended.
This is cool for one main reason.
Ferriss is saying to his followers, “look, I know it’s a bummer that this thing’s only viewable to people in the US, but I’m here for you, so here’s a neat work-around”.
He takes this approach all the time with his followers. At times when it would be far easier for him to just pump content out in whatever format suits and let it get picked up and shared among his loyal followers, he puts in the extra 2mins required to make something truly great and add the most value.
2 hours to write a good article; 2 minutes to make it awesome.
2 minutes to prove that he hasn’t sold out.
2 minutes to stick it to The Man for the benefit of his audience.
2 minutes to remind me why I read every word of his blog.
You’ve gotta put in that 2 mins every time.
The question is, what’s our 2 minutes?
What’s my 2 minutes right now?
In the absence of anything else, here’s an image of my hacked-together standing desk, which I used to write this post. Yes, it is a piece of wood on top of a cardboard box on top of a bucket. And yes I do work in my garage.
It’s the first time I’ve tried this style of writing (Ferriss uses a standing desk himself), and I don’t mind it. My feet are getting a little sore now which means I probably should wrap up soon, but I guess that’s the idea. If I was sitting down I’d be far more relaxed, less motivated to finish the post, and more likely to procrastinate.
For more on why sitting down may be killing you, check out the infographic below, and read this article from The Atlantic.
And all the best in finding your 2 minutes.
{ 2 comments }
