Tribe of Mentors is another book of collected advice or notes or questions and answers. It is big. Here are a few ideas/points that stood out.
1. What would this look like if it were easy?
I’ve been asking myself this question about all sorts of things for the last 6 months or so, and I couldn’t remember where it came from. Now I know, because here it is, in my highlights. Thanks, Tim, or whoever it was who said this in your book. It’s a good question. I find myself having less and less patience for needless suffering, for self-induced suffering, and for hard work for hard work’s sake. I’m not sure really of the long-term effects of this shift, but… I’m interested. We’ll find out.
Along those lines, one point that’s stayed with me is to ask better questions. Here’s a good quote for that:
“Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask. After all, conscious thinking is largely asking and answering questions in your own head. If you want confusion and heartache, ask vague questions. If you want uncommon clarity and results, ask uncommonly clear questions.”
2. Be yourself because that’s better than anything else.
“I started out basically imagining I was writing for a stadium full of replicas of myself—which made things easy because I already knew exactly what topics interested them, what writing style they liked, what their sense of humor was, etc. I ignored the conventional wisdom…By focusing inward on yourself as a writer instead of outward on what you think readers will want to read, you’ll end up creating the best and most original work, and that one-in-a-thousand person who happens to love it will end up finding their way to you.”
That was a theme for so many of these responses from really, wildly successful people in a variety of fields and endeavors. So many of them said something along the lines— I stuck with my interests, or I did the thing that made sense to me, or appealed to me. Or, something like, I was working on this conventional path and pursuing “my thing” on the side, and what turned out to work, to spark, was “my thing” — the thing I was doing from the heart, with love and curiosity, not for an end goal or to prove myself, but because I found it interesting and rewarding.
3. Focus on the minutes and the hours—and the days, months, years, decades will work themselves out.
“Everybody’s impatient at a macro, and just so patient at a micro, wasting your days worrying about years. I’m not worried about my years, because I’m squeezing the fuck out of my seconds, let alone my days. It’s going to work out.”
There’s something to that whole “be in the moment” concept. I’ve hated that advice forever, because I like planning and I like big long-term goals and I like feeling like I have some idea of what’s coming, of where I’m going.
More and more I see that choosing your path is about choosing your next step, your right-now step, your best option in this moment… not about having a carefully constructed plan for every step from here to some envisioned end goal. Everything changes along the way. The map is not the territory, and the plan is not ever ever how it works out in reality, and maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s what allows life to be exhilarating and rewarding instead of boring and predictable. Maybe it’s also what creates a lot of fear and instability, but oh well. Maybe we can learn to deal with that, and let there be room for surprise and delight in the unexpected.
4. Failure is learning.
“Because I woke up the next day and the world hadn’t ended. I was free to keep fucking up and getting better. I wish at least one catastrophic failure on everyone pursuing the arts. It’s where you’ll get your superpowers from.”
“Because each one of those difficult decisions that looked like failures (at first) took me a bit closer to my real self. Each one of them empowered the real me. Each one of them woke me up from the illusion.”
5. Quality matters.
This was a common theme— that choosing quality makes a huge difference. Particularly in the things that are a regular, ongoing, or large part of your life. This makes sense and seems obvious—the quality of the stuff in your life will impact the quality of your life.
Duh.
But thinking about quality in terms of stuff is one thing.
The point that has stayed with me is thinking of quality in other, less tangible areas: questions you ask yourself, goals and opportunities you pursue, perspectives and beliefs you allow, and relationships you form.
Rather than being open to everything, available to whatever comes along—you can assess and choose. And when you choose high quality, and put energy into those high quality choices consistently, you gain incredible value in return.
Books, always books
There are about a million books recommended— this is where I found the recommendation for Finite and Infinite Games, which is an amazing book and I love the description (so much better than my wordy fumbling notes): “this small, short book provided me a vocabulary to think about the meaning of life.”
Yes. Exactly.
Really, lots of great stuff. Tribe of Mentors is a good book to flip through, find the parts that speak to you and skip the rest. I’ll end with a quote:
“Most of the world is asleep today, playing a small role in a gigantic illusion. You don’t have to be. You can choose a different life. It’s all within. You will know the answers when you take the time to find yourself and trust yourself.”
Highlights: 📖 Ferriss - Tools of Titans