Tim Ferriss Quote
The more absurd, the more impossible the question, the more profound the answers. Take, for instance, a question that serial billionaire Peter Thiel likes to ask himself and others: If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months? For purposes of illustration here, I might reword that to: What might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next 6 months, if you had a gun against your head? Now, let’s pause. Do I expect you to take 10 seconds to ponder this and then magically accomplish 10 years’ worth of dreams in the next few months? No, I don’t. But I do expect that the question will productively break your mind, like a butterfly shattering a chrysalis to emerge with new capabilities. The normal systems you have in place, the social rules you’ve forced upon yourself, the standard frameworks—they don’t work when answering a question like this. You are forced to shed artificial constraints, like shedding a skin, to realize that you had the ability to renegotiate your reality all along. It just takes practice.
The more absurd, the more impossible the question, the more profound the answers. Take, for instance, a question that serial billionaire Peter Thiel likes to ask himself and others: If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months? For purposes of illustration here, I might reword that to: What might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next 6 months, if you had a gun against your head? Now, let’s pause. Do I expect you to take 10 seconds to ponder this and then magically accomplish 10 years’ worth of dreams in the next few months? No, I don’t. But I do expect that the question will productively break your mind, like a butterfly shattering a chrysalis to emerge with new capabilities. The normal systems you have in place, the social rules you’ve forced upon yourself, the standard frameworks—they don’t work when answering a question like this. You are forced to shed artificial constraints, like shedding a skin, to realize that you had the ability to renegotiate your reality all along. It just takes practice.