This book sounded like such a good idea. Distill the essence from hundreds of hours of podcasts with many different famous and successful people from various walks of life? Count me in. As I grabbed a copy of this book, I wondered why I hadn’t heard it referenced more often. I only heard of it from a random self-help YouTube channel in one video. It’s still reasonably recent, so it shouldn’t have totally gone out of the zeitgeist.
Having now read it, I understand. It’s not terrible, but the book is a huge missed opportunity. I can’t say that I listen to the Tim Ferris podcast, so maybe the information just isn’t there to work with, but I thought it would be a lot better than it turned out. One of the biggest problems is how little time he spends with each person. Some people are only given 1 or 2 kindle pages of information. There’s no real breakdown of what makes them tick. There’s very rarely anything to point to how they got successful. There’s also very few threads tying the book together.
The way he built the book with each person being a different chapter, I wish he did less chapters and delved a little deeper into each one. The longer profiles were usually much more interesting than the short ones. As I said, perhaps he just didn’t have interesting information to work with on some of them, but then they probably should have been cut and more time should have been given to people who had provided more interesting and in-depth information.
Alternatively, I think the book could have been drastically reformatted by concept. So, he could have had a chapter on Meditation and then gone through a whole bunch of different people and their takes on Meditation. Some might believe it needs to be done strictly, some more loosely, and some think it’s a total waste. Do a little compare and contrast between the various guests and their takes on Meditation. That could be interesting. Same for things like Nutrition. Get the perspectives of a famous Vegan and a Carnivore and compare what they have to say. Does their information stand up to scrutiny?
The book definitely did not live up to its potential. It could have used a major reformat or simply spent more time on each person. What we got instead felt very shallow most of the time and honestly, somewhat dangerous when it comes to some of his Drug advice. I’d be very skeptical of his diet and exercise information as well. Sometimes a person can be really strong/fit despite doing some really ineffective things. Like, I know a guy who is a huge proponent of the carnivore diet. He’s also very fit and he credits that diet. However, I’d suspect he could eat a much more balanced meal and still be that outwardly fit if he ate the same number of calories and worked out as much.
So, it’s a fine book to read, but I don’t think you’re going to get as much out of it as the concept would have you believe. I’d also be very skeptical of a lot of the advice in the book.