Tim Ferriss Followers Are Impressionable Children

 

 

 

Women and children can be careless, but not men. – Don Corleone

 

I see you, Tim Ferriss lover.  You’re already defending the guy…

Let me go back.  I was a waiter once, taking orders, spitting in food, and doing a little blow after work with the hostess.  Actually, no, that wasn’t me, that was a movie.  I was just bringing the food out in a polite manner hoping for a couple bucks to be left on the table when the assholes - and their kid who threw the crayons on the floor - departed the establishment.  And the hostess was fat.  I digress.  The manager would often sit us down for little pep talks before we opened up the halls of the trough.  He had read the back cover of a book I think, and he liked to say, “Use at least three sizzle words when you first speak to a new group of customers, don’t sell food, sell the idea of the food”.  It’s actually a ubiquitous theme if you’ve read anything in marketing or sales.  The manager would walk by listening to everyone sing the sizzle words to the customers, “Welcome to blahblahblah, would you like to try our south bay fresh fish catch or the pasture grazed signature steak served on a bed of succulent oyster reduction glaze and topped off with a special side of Irish garlic potatoes created tonight by our resident chef? “

Hungry, aren’t you?  Well the reality is that most of the stuff was boiled in a bag by some finger licking degenerate in the back, not a white hat wearing chef with the manicured hands.  The floor was disgusting, the waiters were sweating, the cooks were sweating, the trash was overflowing,  the dishwasher was illegal.  That was the reality, but you didn’t want reality with your food, you wanted sizzle.

Enter Tim Ferris.   Tim has some good ideas, he’s a sharp guy.  That’s about where Tim’s ideas are going to stop for average Joe.  You see, Tim is smart.  Smarter than me, and I’m going to venture so far, reader, to say that his gray matter is of a better quality than even yours.   I’ll go another step and assert that Tim probably hails from an established, moderately wealthy family with a connection or two.  Tim attended a private high school called St. Paul’s boarding school.  To quickly show you the difference between your high school and Tim’s, his has a $24 million dollar gym and a long list of notable graduates, yours does not.   Following St. Paul’s, Tim headed over to Princeton and completed his formal academic training receiving a signed parchment from an Ivy League institution, also known as the ‘Golden Ticket of the West’.   Following his academic pursuits he seems to have made a comfortable living doing things that didn’t require too much face time with ‘The Man’.  That’s easy to assume given the picture of easy circumstances, first-rate educational experience, and the connections of a moderately wealthy Northeastern family.    Stay with me, you needed this background portrait.

Tim thinks you can quit your stupid job working for ‘The Man’, travel, work smart, and forge your own reality while virtual assistants in Mumbai sort your post-it notes.  Oh yeah, and Tim will try to convince you that you can do it without his background and titles… sizzle, sizzle, sizzle.  Would a crowd of hand amputees believe me if I told them I have fingers that type 75 words per minute, and I can train them to do it too - the fingers aren’t really that important?  If I had the right sizzle, and if they were the right amputees, you’re damn right they would believe me.  Tim had a flash of brilliance (or maybe it was more of a steady flood light) in which he realized that if he could mix enough simple productivity advice with a touch of escapism, served on a bed of sizzle, he could hit the best-seller list.  Everyone would believe if he could just find the right combination of sizzle.

The problem here is that average Joe probably can’t sell sizzle like Tim.  Tim’s book is a good read, because it makes you feel like there is some alternate reality that you can beam up to, and maybe YOU can.  You may have what it takes.  The majority, including me, will send Tim our money, read his book and head back to work.  Why?  Because I am not Tim, and I’ll speculate that you are not Tim.  Tim has the brain power of two of you, credentials from Princeton, a wealthy family behind him and a charismatic personality to go with it. Nearly anything Tim wanted to write about or do, given it had a certain flavor of legitimacy, was bound to be a hit.  Don’t feel bitter, I’m not done.

Your childhood teacher may have told you that you could be an astronaut or the President; she may have even had posters on the wall that said little witty phrases about being what you wanted to be with a big astronaut bouncing on the moon in the background.  You see?  You’ve been trained to buy the sizzle from the beginning, so it’s pretty damn easy for you.  Tim knows it, because he’s smart.  Tim knows sizzle like Bill Gates knows PC, the difference in the business model is that Tim is good at sizzle, whereas Bill made his money by making little porn machines in his ‘garage’ (I know, technically it was Windows...bear with the loose analogy).   There was more money for Bill in selling porn machines than writing books about how other people could build garage porn machines, so he just sold you a machine.  Tim figured out an ingenious way of making money with nearly no overhead – selling sizzle books.  Then he sold them to you.  And you loved it.

I’m not telling you to avoid Tim’s material.  I’ve read it and it really is, if nothing else, thought-provoking reading by my humble estimation.  What I’m telling you is that you becoming Tim’s protégé likely won’t happen, so don’t quit your day job and move to Chang Mai Thailand on a quest to be like Tim.  Yes, that was a blatant hit at Frost, writer at www.freedomtwentyfive.com.

I admire Frost’s bold move, and you should check out his page because he’s a good writer.  That said, I’m going to use Frost as an example, because he offers us a relevant case study.  He’s a young guy living in the West, educated at what I would guess to be a decent state school, middle class background, reasonable intelligence, and wants to improve his existence.  He also appears to be a rabid Tim Ferriss believer, and wishes to follow in Tim’s successful footsteps - who can blame him?  Now I want you to compare Frost’s bio with Tim’s and keep that in mind while I rub on my crystal ball.  Frost, I foresee, will end up having a great travel experience and will probably produce a decent e-book regarding his time globe hopping.  The book will be an okay read and have some interesting anecdotes, but overall, will fail to support him financially.  He’ll rationalize why he wasn’t able to set up successful online business ventures and write books like Tim does to support his vagabond lifestyle.  Eventually, he’ll return to a more typical occupation and a fixed living situation and write his travelling off as an exciting experience.

The desire to travel and feel free from the need of living life as a consuming, sniveling, sycophant to some corporate slave master (read: supervisor) is understandable – it isn’t fun, but that’s why they (over)pay you for it.   Travel for young men has been advocated for a long time, for instance, reference the ‘Grand Tour’ that was popular for European men in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  Nothing rounds someone out like a little time traveling.  Traveling, however, and living the ‘Ferriss Fantasy’ are two different animals.

I don’t advocate the vagabond, anti-American (in a geographical sense) entrepreneurial fantasy that is in vogue now.  The truth is that most people are average, you’re more likely to succeed in a rooted area where your contacts reside, the world economy sucks, competition is fierce, and this is likely the worst time to burn employment bridges.  If you want to try out some extended traveling opportunities, go for it, but don’t accept unrealistic ideas sold by charlatans.  Be bold, not reckless.   That is, unless you have the Tim Ferris royal flush poker hand, in which case, it really doesn’t matter how you bluff, does it?

“…the more favored a man is by Fortune, the more fastidiously sensitive is he; and, unless all things answer to his whim, he is overwhelmed by the most trifling misfortunes, because he is utterly unschooled in adversity.  So petty are the trifles which rob the most fortunate of perfect happiness!” – Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

 

Regards,

J.W. Black