#498: Josh Waitzkin and Tim Ferriss on The Cave Process, Advice from Future Selves, and Training for an Uncertain Future

A famous sage once said, 'There's only one important question, and that question is: What are you unwilling to feel?' And I think, for a lot of people, maybe the majority of people, maybe all people... many of our compulsive behaviors are to mask or override things that we don't want to feel.

If you default to efficiency and competition, you can make yourself miserable, depending on who you feel you're competing with, and you can focus on doing things really well whether or not you should be doing them in the first place—whether or not they are, in fact, the piece of the puzzle that makes a real difference.

Doing something really well doesn't automatically make it important.

I think, most of my life, I have prided myself on being the fastest salmon—just fucking thrashing like mad, making it up the rocks, dodging the grizzly bear—and being willing to suffer more than other people ... I'm not saying there isn't a place for this, but I have to be very careful about assigning too much dignity and profundity to out-suffering people.

When you have a 10, 15-year, 20-year time horizon, you can think about making decisions in a very different way—you relate to feeling rushed or pressured in a very different way.

Hyper-function and dysfunction are often right next to each other. I think another way to think about that is that your superpower is very often right next to your wound, like your biggest wound.

I get asked a lot about about writing books .. I ask them, 'If it takes twice as long, and you get half the rewards or a quarter of the rewards, and it's not a bestseller, is this still a no-brainer for you?'

I really don't view myself as a risk-taker ... I view myself, first and foremost, as a massive risk mitigator.