Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World

Hey there, Tim, Sorry for the slow response and thanks for thinking of me in this context. It has become pretty obvious of late that I’m trying to do too much, and so I started an experiment of not adding anything whatsoever to my “to-do” list, so that it wouldn’t get any longer. The result is that the items that were ALREADY on my “to-do” list onl

Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask.

“It is very important what not to do.”—Iggy Pop “Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you, just measure it in inches.”—Andy Warhol

there’s no cost now, it’s simply too easy to say yes about something deep in the future. Further, a future “yes” ultimately means that the past controls your schedule. By the time you get around to later, your calendar is already filled with prior engagements. That limits what’s possible in the moment. Few things bother me more than wanting to actu

The second is a quote from a very special man, Christopher Carmichael, “You are 99 years old, you are on your deathbed, and you have a chance to come back to right now: what would you do?” I have used this one many times when faced with difficult questions. When I met him in China seven years ago, I didn’t speak any English. So he gave me a couple

“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” –James Cameron Renowned Canadian director, best known for Titanic and Avatar

In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to? I’ve always been pretty good at saying no, but over the last couple of years I’ve come up with a new rule. If the ask is more than a week away, I almost always say no, regardless of what is it. Exceptions include family things I need to attend, and a conference or two I really wan

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours? Most of what I do looks like a failure at first. When I dropped out of business school to create my first startup, 75 percent of the people I knew thought I was going to regret it all my life, and some even said that I would end up homel

“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.” –Frederick Douglass