Tim Ferriss

was all right if you have a parking lot and that parking lot has five to ten slots for your most important relationships family closest friends last year did you spend as much time as you would like to with those people if the answer is no which it usually is then i'm going to schedule time in advance book and pay for things for the following year calendar it before it gets crowded out immediately and so that could be long weekends could be group dinners

It could be, as I'm gonna be doing soon, hosting friends.

It could be time in Montana wilderness, which was a couple of months ago, but getting all that stuff on the calendar and creating some loss aversion by, whenever possible, paying it in advance.

Doesn't have to be expensive.

but creating a situation where it's very hard for you to cancel and get out of things.

That, I think, is the facet of self-help, in quotation marks, that gets lost.

If you focus on the self, the paradox of self-help is if you excessively focus on the self, it is almost inevitable that you're gonna be miserable.

Like, humans are not intent, the self-sufficiency

sort of mantra of self-help, if you combine it with, like, the rugged individualism of the US, which has a lot of upside, but if you take both of those in excess, people end up feeling very isolated.

And so the investing in relationships, and I do mean investing, like, really blocking out that time, in the last five years, that's been the single domino that tipped over, changes everything.

Last thing, the third thing I'll mention, and then I'll...

stop my Ted talk is how many relationships do you manage not many I really prefer very deep relationships over a broad network I'm the same way yeah how do you determine who you're going to spend your time with I mean I'm asking now I'm blown now I'm learning

Yeah, I'd say there are different tiers.

So I do have, let's just call it, shallow is not the right word because that sounds very negative.

I do have a wide network.

And I just set parameters around what is allowed and what isn't allowed in those relationships that might have more of a purely business context.

But at the very top, I would say I am giving the most time to people who are more than happy to call me on my bullshit, tell me my baby's ugly.

Whatever I might be precious about or really excited about, they're happy to tell me that it's a bad idea if it comes down to it.

So that is non-negotiable, right?

Otherwise, right, if someone's not willing to do that, raises a lot of questions about what motivations might be.