- His Four Hour Workweek book was on the
best-seller list for seven consecutive years.
His next books The Four Hour Body and
The Four Hour Chef became instant best-sellers.
He's an angel investor and or advisor to Facebook, Twitter,
StumbleUpon, Evernote, and Uber, among other companies.
He's Tim Ferriss, and here are his top 10 rules for success.
- I diversified identity, in some fashion.
I think this is important, so that your self-worth
isn't only associated with your start up.
That's probably a controversial recommendation.
What that means is you should actually spend time
involved with other skills.
In San Francisco, for instance, many start up founders
I know who are very efficient and effective have
their start up, rock climbing, they get outside.
They do a few things so that if one goes well,
they can remain optimistic each week.
Which is very difficult if you're only
directed at your start up.
I only invest in things that I understand
and things that I use or would use myself.
This is really really really important.
Anytime I step outside of that, is usually when
the universe kicks me in the nuts really hard,
and I lose my money.
I think it's critical to, as an entrepreneur,
scratch your own itch.
It increases the odds of success or
the probability of success.
And as an investor, I look for people who are
scratching their own itch.
When you're thinking about a product launch,
the first thing I would ask is,
is it the right time to be product launching?
So if your product isn't figured out,
if you can't fill the orders,
now is not the right time to be in the Techcrunch,
in my opinion, or in any other major media outlet.
Once you're in a major media outlet,
they're not going to cover you again,
for some period of time or ever.
If you're in the business section of The New York Times,
they're not going to cover you four weeks later
when your product is better and you're ready.
So make sure that you pick your timing.
A few things, there's paid exposure and unpaid exposure.
I like to focus on unpaid because it makes you,
it forces you to make better decisions in the beginning.
So I would read, as I always say,
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing,
1000 True Fans written by Kevin Kelly,
I would also read Bestselling Book PR and Publicity,
I think it is, by Rick Frishman F-R-I-S-H-M-A-N.
All of the techniques apply to more than books.
And learn to tell the story.
What are you focusing on?
Are you using yourself to tell the story,
and then the product is associated.
Is it a trend piece?
Are you trying to tie what you're doing into a greater trend
which is a very effective way of getting media.
In which case, you're going to need other examples.
You need to get comfortable bringing in, sort of,
cooperative competitors to create that trend piece.
Learn the art of the pitch and of messaging.
Only once you have figured that out, would I say,
then you go out and you pay to acquire people,
because now if your messaging is off,
it's costing you money.
You need to know what your unique strengths are
and be willing to delegate.
So I would say that, the question of whether
you should take a skill, learn it yourself,
delegate it to someone else, or hire a new team member,
are determined by having a very accurate self-assessment,
an assessment of your team's skills.
Not only what you can do, but what you should be doing.
That's very important.
So if you're a start up CEO or founder and you have
a team of say, two to 10 people, as soon as you have
funds to hire, you should not be focused
on the things that you are bad at.
Sounds very very intuitive but it's not because
you might have enough time to do those things,
but the question is, do you have the attention
to dedicate to those things so they're not an interruption.
Especially if you're a venture-backed start up,
and you're competing against other companies
that also have a lot of funding,
the game and the race goes to the swift
so you have to have a lot of velocity.
You need to be able to sell, whether it's Kickstarter,
whether it's New York Times,
whether it's your local newspaper,
you need to be able to communicate effectively and sell.
Which is why, when entrepreneurs as me for books to read
outside of business books,
I say On Writing Well, Bird by Bird,
all books on writing, improving communication.
David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising.
Study print ads, where you have very little space.
I think those are all very very effective.
The best entrepreneurs I've ever met
are all good communicators.
It's the one, perhaps one of the very few unifying factors.
They're exceptional communicators.
Practice is the only way to get better at communicating.
And practicing speaking does not provide you,
generally, with something to review later.
Which is why the written word is so powerful.
Writing is thought crystallized on a piece of paper
that can then be reviewed.
It's very difficult to do that with speech,
which is why I recommend people focus on
honing their skills in writing.
And take time to study good direct response ads.
Take time to, for instance, maybe develop a swipe file.
So one of the things that I did for years is,
anytime I bought something, I would identify the ad,
the phone call, the print ad, the offer,
whatever it was that made me decide to buy it,
and I would either cut it out, or record it,
put it into Evernote, whatever it might be, and save it.
So I had a record of everything that I bought
and why I bought it.
And then I could go back and review it and I'd be like,
"Oh, looks like I fell for this this and this,"
not in a bad way, but it looks like this tipped me from,
eh, or not interested, to yeah I'll spend
five, 50, 500, 5000 dollars on that.
I save all that.
Everything that works in sales has been done already.
You do not need to reinvent the wheel.
So just keep track of the crap that you buy,
or the awesome stuff that you buy,
and decide what was the trigger,
what pushed me over the edge?
And then just sell to people like you.
That's what I do.
It's really easy.
People are like, "Who's your market?"
I'm like, "Well, you know, I'm a 30-something SF based
tech-savvy male, so why don't I just sell to those people?"
It makes it a lot easier than trying to guess.
Ideas are worth nothing.
I mean ideas are really, they're not a dime a dozen.
They're just nothing.
All the good founders I know, even the bad founders,
can come up with ideas all day long.
It doesn't mean anything.
You have to be able to execute,
and one of the, sort of,
maxims that I was told once was,
"Your success will be measured in the number of
uncomfortable conversations you're willing to have."
So I think of it as, if an entrepreneur should, say,
start a business based on one of their passions or
if they should find the most attractive market opportunity
and build a business out of that,
whether they like it or not.
I don't think it's either or, I think you need both.
I would say, look at your credit card statement.
Identify where you spend an unusual
percentage of your income.
Were you price-insensitive?
Then how old are you, what gender are you,
where do you live, and design a product
that has all of those things intersected.
It's very easy to be seduced by doing things efficiently,
trying to do a lot of things well.
I don't believe that's the most important thing.
The most important thing is picking
the right things to do in the first place.
And that's being effective versus just being efficient.
So within a start up, it's, success I don't think
is measured by how many things you can do at once.
It's measured by how effectively you're able to pick
one or two things that are the highest priority.
And there's always going to be a seduction to
get distracted and focus on 20 things at once.
And the most effective entrepreneurs I know are very good at
focusing on one or two things
and either eliminating the rest
or delegating to other people
or outsourcing it so it's not done within the team
but it's actually to third parties.
First-time entrepreneurs tend to miscalculate is everything.
What I mean by that is
optimism has a place but I think,
even more so for the first-time entrepreneur,
you need to be pragmatically pessimistic.
What I mean by that is you need to define all the worst-case
scenarios in terms of financial loss, time loss, et cetera.
Look at what you will learn if that happens and
accept and come to terms with that before you ever start.
If you don't do that, and you go straight into
battling the world, trying to conquer the world
with rose-colored glasses on,
the first time you hit a major hiccup,
you're going to become really demoralized and you will quit.
So optimism, all that rah rah rah, that's awesome,
but you need to hope for the best
and prepare for the worst before you ever get started.
I always recommend that.
I think it's important to have at least one or two
numbers that you track on a weekly basis
so that could be for web-based properties,
or services, or products,
it could be weekly average uniques.
What it is doesn't matter that much, uh but,
matters less than having a metric
that you try to improve every week.
You can have one or two of them,
you really shouldn't have many more than that,
I don't think.
Could be conversion from sign up to, let's say,
first stage of sign up to completion of sign up.
There are many different metrics that you can use,
but I think that to keep the team focused,
especially in a small company,
it's very important to have one or two
that you focus on a weekly basis.
I think failure would be a big piece,
even though I view failure differently than,
I think, many people.
I view it as a feedback mechanism but if you look at,
even, let's say The Four Hour Workweek,
didn't start off called The Four Hour Workweek.
It was also turned down by 26 out of 27 publishers.
And hopefully pretty soon it will be celebrating
four years unbroken on the New York Times best-seller list.
And I like to, whenever possible,
illustrate those failures because people will,
everyone will face failure or mistakes.
And those are the divergent points from which
they can either go in a good direction or a bad direction.
And I want to illustrate that oftentimes
the finish line is only 100 feet from where you stand,
but it might seem that it's 100 miles away.
- Thank you guys for watching.
I made this video because Chris7820 asked me to,
so if there's a famous entrepreneur
that you want me to profile next,
leave it in the comments below, and I'll see what I can do.
I'd also love to know what you think of
Tim Ferriss as an entrepreneur and what your favorite
Tim Ferriss book is.
Mine is The Four Hour Workweek.
What's yours?
Leave it below.