Today on The Parlor Room, we’re excited to share an episode from The Founder Mindset, a new podcast from our colleagues at Harvard Business School Foundry, hosted by entrepreneur and Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer Reza Satchu.
The Founder Mindset features in-depth conversations with founders, investors, and leaders about the mindset, judgment, and decisions that shape extraordinary careers and companies.
Resources
On this episode, Reza sits down with Tim Ferriss—entrepreneur, investor, bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, and host of The Tim Ferriss Show—to discuss experimentation, calibrated risk-taking, and the importance of learning faster than the competition.
Ferriss reflects on how fear-setting helped shape his decision-making, why he views most opportunities as experiments rather than permanent commitments, and how curiosity, unconventional thinking, and continuous learning have guided his career across investing, writing, podcasting, and entrepreneurship.
The conversation also explores optionality, commitment, personal impact, and why founders must learn to trust their judgment and their willingness to act under uncertainty.
Listen to more episodes of The Founder Mindset with Reza Satchu and follow the podcast on Megaphone.
You can also watch The Parlor Room on YouTube.
Transcript
Editor's Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm and may not perfectly reflect the interview's audio file.
Chris Linnane: Hi, it’s Chris. Today on The Parlor Room, we’re excited to share an episode from The Founder Mindset, the new podcast from our colleagues at Harvard Business School Foundry, hosted by entrepreneur and Harvard Business School senior lecturer Reza Satchu.
Each episode, Reza sits down with the world’s most successful entrepreneurs—including Reese Witherspoon, Kevin O’Leary, Alix Earle, and more—and pushes them to break down exactly how they commit, decide, and build for impact. These aren’t surface-level interviews. Reza himself has built multiple high-profile companies and mentored thousands of students and founders through the realities of starting and scaling ventures. So you know that each episode of The Founder Mindset is a masterclass in what it truly takes to be a founder.
And today, we’re happy to share their recent episode featuring Tim Ferriss—entrepreneur, investor, bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, and host of one of the world’s most influential podcasts. In this conversation, Tim reflects on experimentation, calibrated risk-taking, decision-making under uncertainty, and why curiosity and learning have shaped nearly every chapter of his career. What makes this especially compelling is how thoughtfully Tim approaches growth, impact, and personal evolution, not just as a founder, but as a lifelong learner.
If you enjoy this discussion, make sure to subscribe to The Founder Mindset with Reza Satchu. Now, here’s the episode.
Tim Ferriss: I, from the very beginning, have been hyper vigilant about minimizing losses.
Reza Satchu: It is actually someone who is calculating risk at all times and who isn't paralyzed by that risk.
Tim Ferriss: Most things aren't going to work out. In the world of building companies, nobody cares...
Voiceover: This is The Founder Mindset with Reza Satchu.
Reza Satchu: Every year at Harvard Business School, hundreds of students compete to gain entrance into my class, one of the most popular courses on campus, The Founder Mindset. For those who make the cut, I take them on a journey, challenging them to take risks, make commitments, and, most importantly, learn judgment.
One of the most popular aspects of the course are the guests we bring in, outstanding entrepreneurs who've had a truly profound impact on the world. Now I'm sharing my conversations with some of these founders on our show. I'm Reza Satchu, and this is The Founder Mindset.
Voiceover: What does it take to be a founder? Tim Ferriss turned experimentation into a competitive advantage, authoring multiple number one New York Times bestsellers, launching one of the world's most-influential podcasts, and investing early in companies like Uber, Facebook, Shopify, and Duolingo.
His playbook isn't about reckless bets. It's about calibrated risk, smart experiments, and learning faster than the competition.
Reza Satchu: Tim Ferriss, welcome to The Founder Mindset.
Tim Ferriss: Thanks for having me.
Reza Satchu: So most people, they look at you and they think, wow, what a remarkable story, how many things you've done. You must take so much risk. And therefore, there's some combination of risk management or luck that has allowed you to do all of these things very well. What's your reaction to that?
Tim Ferriss: There's certainly a luck component, but I get a bit frustrated with anyone who attributes all of their outcomes to hard work or 100% luck. I mean, I think it's rarely 100% one or the other.
There's a luck factor, I would say, on the risk side from the very beginning, coming from a family without a ton of money, where money was always an issue, have been hyper vigilant about minimizing losses. I really don't view myself as a risk taker.
Reza Satchu: It's such a remarkable thing because most people would look at your life, and they'd say, this fellow has done so many things that are different that he must have sought a tremendous amount of risk. And so this concept that this is not you jumping off a cliff into shark infested waters in the middle of a hurricane. It is not that. It is actually someone who is calculating risk at all times and who isn't paralyzed by that risk.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and I think I've, by luck, certainly by the grace of timing in some cases, benefited from the angel investing. When you are trying to think systematically about investing, you have to interrogate your own thinking and be willing to change your own thinking, recognize what type of bets are recoverable versus irrecoverable.
So I think the, if anything-- and maybe this would be unexpected—but the angel investing has made me more bold in running more experiments because I just realized, most things aren't going to work out. But you don't need to get a lot of things right to have an amazing life and build an amazing business.
Reza Satchu: Well, one of the things around risk calibration is ultimately we're trying to figure out is, OK, what's my downside? And what's my upside? Now, human psychology is such that people tend to overestimate their downside.
And so one of the things you talk about is we need to define our fears as opposed to what everyone here at Harvard Business School is doing, which is defining their goals. Tell me why the concept of defining your fears is so important to actually calibrating risk.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so the fear-setting exercise which you're describing, people can find it for free online. It was important to me personally because I grew up in a family with all sorts of mental health challenges, addiction, overdoses, depression, you name it, and struggled with a lot of that myself. And I would get into these ruminative, ruminative loops that catastrophized. So to try to turn down the volume on that, came to fear setting through stoic philosophy and found it incredibly helpful, just for peace of mind.
Reza Satchu: Was the concept that, once you define your fear, you were able to realize that you could manage through it?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. It's a lot like goal setting. You want specific, measurable, realistic, timeline, blah blah blah. It's applying the same thing to what could be like a nebulous cloud of concerns and anxiety.
And I would imagine if you were to ask a lot of the students in your sections, what are your fears? do this exercise, they might come up blank. But if I were to say, what's the thing that you would do if you knew you could not fail? What would that be?
And it doesn't have to be from the menu of options that's coming straight out of the class. It could be anything. Maybe it's being a screenwriter. Who the hell knows? What is that thing?
And then since you're not already committed to that, you've told yourself, I can't do that for some set of reasons. So let's interrogate those reasons.
Reza Satchu: So is that the assumption? So when you explore these new things, is that how you're approaching it?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it is.
Reza Satchu: You deciding you want to be a tango dancer. There's obviously risk that that's not going to happen.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, sure.
Reza Satchu: But your definition is something different.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, the risk for me is largely-- I mean, I could expand on this-- but the probability of an irreversible negative outcome. And most of the risk I think that students at a place like [Harvard Business School] would fear is some type of reputational hit, being judged by others.
While they're looking left and right.
Right. And the fact of the matter is most people aren't thinking about you at all or thinking about themselves that way.
Reza Satchu: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Understanding that theoretically is very different from screwing around with tango and doing that for six months and then doing this, that, and the other thing and realizing very few things matter. And if they don't work out, that's fine. You just keep experimenting.
And as long as you have engineered for yourself a timeline so that when you will decide if this is pass/fail and if it's fail, move on to the next thing, as long as you've done that and you don't keep it open ended, I think it's very hard to fail in the long term. If, if, you are choosing your projects for maximizing learning and developing relationships that transcend that given project or startup or whatever, I just think it's a lot harder to lose long term than people realize.
Reza Satchu: So it must be true that you have confidence in your ability to see things that others don't see.
Tim Ferriss: I have confidence in my ability to wade into waters that I think are plausibly interesting, without worrying too much about it.
Reza Satchu: Now, I have a phrase which is-- served me well in my founder journey, which is, if in doubt, act. Now, what people think that means, they say, well, that's nonsense. You mean you don't know what to do, and you're just going to make an action?
No, no, no. What most people do is when they're in doubt, they just stay the course. But they don't make an active decision to stay the course. They're sort of like deer in headlights.
So my point is you may want to stay the course, but you're making an active decision in your mind on staying the course so I can test my judgment. What are the frameworks that you have in place to enable you to make rapid decisions under uncertainty that are risk calibrated but that need to be done timely?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I would say it's more a rule, a policy than a framework. But for me, the cognitive load of having lots of pending decisions is worse than making some mistakes.
Reza Satchu: Yeah, right.
Tim Ferriss: Unless this is a clear one-way door, meaning irreversible, it's going to be very expensive/punishing if it's a problem, just make a decision. I don't need to think about where I'm going to sit on a flight for very long. I don't need to think about hotel.
Worst case, it's a crappy hotel, and I can't sleep. That's fine. I'll get over it.
It saves time for the things that matter.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And also, I mean, this is true with—it applies—I keep bringing up the angel investing because I think it's a microcosm of the macro in the sense that how you make decisions around like bet sizing. So if I'm making very big bets for me, then I'm almost certainly going to take longer to make those decisions.
But if I've made a decision in advance, like a meta decision, that, in a certain area, there's no way that I can predict who's going to be the winner so I'm just going to spray and pray and it's going to be 25k, 50k, it's not worth me doing four calls with that founder. It's like, unless there are clear disqualifiers, I should just get some chips on the table. And you can do that with a lot of categories of decisions.
Reza Satchu: Yeah. Well, essentially, because what you're arguing, for some set of decisions, you just make them because you're trying to save time. But also it strikes me that what you're also saying is there's value to making decisions.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there's value to making decisions. Where I would take a step further as for as much as possible in my life-- and I do see this across hundreds of people I've interviewed—the more you can make default and automatic, the better. So that could be intermittent fasting, and we're both doing that.
The health around it is so positive. But two, it's just a set of rules that are very easy to follow. So I don't have to think about it that much.
It's the simplicity of that that works. And Tony Robbins has said that complexity is the enemy of execution. I think that's really, really true because, if you look at what I try to do, at least with the books—and I do this with the podcast too, but I'm thinking about practical behavioral change.
Reza Satchu: One thing you talked about where I think we have a disconnect is you talk about how valuable options are to you. Now, of course, every option has a value, no question. I'll take the other side of it and say that we live in a society where, generally speaking, people overvalue options and undervalue commitment.
Tim Ferriss: I would agree with that.
Reza Satchu: And so what you see is a decline in marriage, a decline in home ownership, a decline in people going to church. And certainly at [Harvard Business School], where I see it most acutely, is in them making decisions around their career paths that are completely inconsistent with the impact that they want to have and the learning that they want to have. But it enables them to preserve all options.
And so I call it the curse of optionality. And so, effectively, you never actually see what you're capable of when you commit. So my argument is commitment is actually a superpower, not a sacrifice. And yes, by definition commitment means you are cutting off some options. But I'm curious whether that resonates with you, and how do you think about that in terms of maximizing options?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think they're totally compatible. There is definitely—and I do think this is partially a product of my childhood and feeling trapped in certain ways and dealing with a bunch of horrible stuff that I was like, I don't like the feeling of being trapped. So having optionality is something that gives me peace of mind.
But for me, optionality does not mean anything and everything for undefined periods of time. And even if I am, for instance, looking for feedback with split testing on, say, the title and subtitle of the four-hour workweek, when I tested it through Google AdWords, did all this stuff in bookstores with a clicker to determine what cover I picked up more than others-- but here's the takeaway from that, is I had already decided on 6 to 10 titles of subtitles that I felt good about, and then it was choosing among those 6 to 10. I was not going into the ether and asking, what should I do?
Reza Satchu: So you had a frame of reference?
Tim Ferriss: I had a frame of reference.
Reza Satchu: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And then also you can actually run a lot of experiments in parallel so you don't have to have any superimposed mutual exclusivity where it's like, OK, I'm only going to do this startup for x period of time, and then if it doesn't work, then I'm going to try my hand at writing, like one of your students came to me with this dilemma. And I was like, well, based on what you're telling me about the scope of the writing, it sounds something you could do in the evenings and on the weekend.
So you can do both. I mean, you're going to really have to figure out self-care because you'll be burning the candle at both ends. But if you're signing up for this entrepreneurial journey, I mean, you're kind of signing up for burning the candle at both ends, no matter what. So you can run those things in parallel.
But if there's no through line, I think you have a problem. So if you have true north, which for me would be learning skills, developing relationships, with the assumption that, even if something fails per se-- like the 4-Hour Chef, my third book, was boycotted by just about everybody because it came out through Amazon Publishing and scared the shit out of everybody in the publishing world. A team I worked with on that Houghton Mifflin, HMH, I ended up working with for my next two books and ended up working with--
Reza Satchu: Well, this is your point around the cost of it's not irreversible failure, meaning what happens in these situations is, even when you fail, you learn a fair amount. You have a commitment to a mindset. How do you think you're able to not just see things differently, but to trust the process or the mindset? And is it really around the experimentation?
Tim Ferriss: I think that's part of it, but I can try to flesh it out. So I would say also I need to give credit to a teacher of mine, actually taught at [Harvard Business School] for a long time, named Ed Zschau, who then--
Reza Satchu: He was at Princeton.
Tim Ferriss: He was at Princeton for a high-tech entrepreneurship ELE 491. I still have all my notes.
Reza Satchu: It's good to see that a teacher can still have long-term impact.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I'm still in touch with Ed.
And he, I think, modeled for me—he was the first person I came across in real life who, on some level, was an exemplar of what I wanted to do. So former Congressman for Silicon Valley, former competitive figure skating athlete, ended up teaching computer science at Stanford because no one else-- I think somebody had bailed last minute, and he's like, sure, I'll try to teach this thing called computer science, way back in the day. He's taken a number of companies public, focused on teaching, and continues to do all these different things.
Reza Satchu: So tons of learning.
Tim Ferriss: He wasn't a specialist looking to be top 1%, one domain. If you're in the top 25% of two things that are rarely combined and you put those togethercould be computer science plus law degree, it could be, who knows-- suddenly you can be the one person who is the go-to source for a very, very narrow specialty.
Reza Satchu: So that's a keen insight. So for you, the idea that you could be good at multiple things felt like a life better lived than being excellent at one thing.
Tim Ferriss: I think it's a safer and more competitively advantageous approach for most people. If you want to try to be in the NBA and go up against LeBron James, like, good luck. I mean, it's very few people who are going to be able to do that. If you want to be the top 1% in concert cello players or the top 1% and fill in the blank any one thing, it's incredibly difficult to, I think, have the company-building potential or the impact possibility that you can have by combining, say, being in the top 25% of two things that are rarely combined.
Reza Satchu: By putting those together, I guess what you're arguing is effectively you're in the top 1% of whatever those two things are.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and also for me, if you look at my chronology—this is a way of getting to your question—it might look like I'm hopping around a lot. And I suppose I am, but it's not because I just get bored and then look for the next thing. It's often because I feel like I started in the blue ocean, where maybe I could count cards with a single deck blackjack table.
And then suddenly it gets really crowded, and all of a sudden that strategy doesn't work. The deck is stacked against me. And at that point, I'm like, I don't fetishize hard games. I like easy games.
Reza Satchu: Yeah, sure. Why not? So if you think about-- I mean, you have found blue oceans in the past. What are the next set of—where do we see blue oceans going forward?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy. It's really personal. I think there are blue oceans everywhere. For instance, I think that, a few years ago, everything had Web3 in its deck. If it was a startup.
And then, for a while, it was VR. Then it was AR. Now it's AI. Everybody sprinkles a little pixie dust of AI in their deck.
Reza Satchu: And the valuations go immediately up.
Tim Ferriss: And things are completely bananas. So I would say it's not chasing that for me. I mean, I placed a few bets in the sector, but I look for things that once were sexy that are no longer sexy, which is why I started building my email list 10 years ago or whatever it was when everyone was like, email is dead.
And I'm like, I don't think so. Email is dead until people have to get a job, and then email is alive and well. So I think you can excavate and reinvigorate the old in addition to looking for the new. I think there's going to be a lot of pushback to digital overwhelm, and I'm curious what forms that will take, like how might you bet on that.
Reza Satchu: If I think about for you what the next 10 years looks like, what would be fun, impactful where are you going to lean into, your set of superpowers that you have, and what are we solving for, what does that look like?
Tim Ferriss: I'm not totally sure. In part, and maybe this is a cop out, but whenever I feel like I have a reliable five-year plan, I feel like to have something—
Reza Satchu: You usually want to change it.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I feel like to have something that I feel I could execute perfectly, I'm operating so well within my sphere of comfort that I'm just not aiming high.
Reza Satchu: Correct.
Tim Ferriss: But I would say—
Reza Satchu: Because what you're minimizing is what you might learn in that five-year journey, which might actually change.
Tim Ferriss: And things in the conditions change very quickly too. So I would say something that I've been thinking a lot about-- and that's part of the reason I came in yesterday and had a dinner with a bunch of biotech folks-- is how I might use my audience now that the technology is available for this to do distributed scientific studies.
Reza Satchu: Yeah, that's very interesting.
Tim Ferriss: So how could I do that? I would need to obviously figure out how to shield myself in the hyperlitigious world of the United States.
Reza Satchu: But is this sort of around the longevity trend or just broadly speaking?
Tim Ferriss: Could be just about anything. So I mean, for instance, if I wanted to take a plausible vagus nerve stimulator that could ostensibly have these various effects, well, including, say, boosting HRV, Heart Rate Variability, well, could I give people instructions for how to assemble this thing?-- and this is where I have to cover my ass in the US—then ship them in Oura Ring or WHOOP band, something like that, and have a potentially-- and this is available now—like an at-home self blood draw kit.
I just did this the other week. I'd never seen it. It's remarkable. You just stick it on your shoulder and drain into a vial, and then you've got your sample. And hold people accountable, so we're using quantifiable metrics instead of self-reporting.
And it's highly customized potentially.
Yeah, you could really—with an n that is large enough, if you have enough people participating, you could potentially parse some really, really interesting signals from that. And that's the kind of thing that it's like, if I went to go through academic channels for that, which I've done for 10-plus years, 15 years, it takes forever.
Reza Satchu: So you're leveraging potentially your listeners.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and there are good reasons why it takes a long time to do certain things, like IRB and human ethics and all that. I get it. But I'm not giving anyone like the next thalidomide. We'd be dealing with something, and it has pretty good side effect profile.
And one of the biggest challenges for any scientific study is subject recruitment. They might recruit 20 people, and honestly, it'll take them a year and a half to do it. But I can do that in minutes. I also recognize the limitations of something like I'm describing, very hard to placebo control, blah, blah, blah. But correlations, if they're strong enough, still, like smoking and cancer as an example, can be informing.
Reza Satchu: In some ways, you're trying to simplify your life, but you're also trying to do hard things.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, this one I would like to do, because, if I can do it, it provides—and this is where I get the most payoff maybe is doing something that inspires other people to try different things. So if I could do that and maybe it leads to a publication, where it's like, it'd be pretty nice to be the co-author of a study—I've never done that.
And I would want other people with audiences to start to think about, OK, let's read about cystic fibrosis. Let's read about this. Let's read about Genzyme. Let's study a couple of case studies so you understand what you could do with your audience besides shilling the latest tchotchke. You could actually—
Reza Satchu: Have a meaningful impact.
Tim Ferriss: —have a huge impact because you could recruit very specific demographics, psychographics, profiles. And to do that through normal academic channels is very, very difficult.
Reza Satchu: So this is a pretty exciting initiative. I mean, this is something where I could imagine, I have a thesis that most people want to live a life of impact where they're having a positive impact on the people they care about. And that can be as broad as the world. Does that resonate with you?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it resonates. It definitely resonates. I resonates. I mean, I would say that if I can leave the world hopefully—maybe a handful of people better off than they were beforehand, great. How many people at all of Harvard can tell me Alexander the Great's full name? Probably two or three. So the greatest conqueror the world has ever known. So I don't have any—I don't harbor any illusions or delusions of having people remember my name.
Reza Satchu: Well, I this also speaks to your point, where it probably frees you from the shackles of thinking about what everyone is thinking about you.
Tim Ferriss: It does that, and also to give credit where credit is due—I think about this a lot. Seth Godin I tremendous respect for. What he said, in effect, it's easy to hide behind the big, solve world hunger, impact a billion people, whatever it might be. But he said, you can't hide behind the small. So if it's like, OK, you want to impact a billion people, go out next week and impact 10 people and tell me exactly what you did.
So I tend to—maybe assume is not the right word, but in my experience, if you start small and that allows you to go to bias towards action as opposed to just patting yourself on the back for these big, grand dreams, then-- it's like Jane Goodall didn't start out as Jane Goodall in marquee lights.
Reza Satchu: She spent decades—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, in the field, doing stuff that nobody ever shit about. If you are able to prove something out on a smaller scale, I feel like you can very often push that into some type of scale. Feel free to think big. Act small next week.
Reza Satchu: Yes, correct. Well, look, I think there's no question that schools like Harvard, everyone has big dreams. And to your point, there's often a disconnect with that between their actions. And the problem with life, what happens is a lot of people see it as a series of building blocks.
They're like, OK, well, if I make this amount of money or if I achieve this set of career or if I do this, then I'll get to that phase where I'll impact tons of people. And frankly, to your point, it's much easier to do that along the way, and the probability of success of that you'll do it with more is much greater if you do it along the way.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I also think that it's easy to imagine that you yourself making a decision right now will be the same you yourself in five years, and that's rarely the case. So for instance, I also think there's safety masquerading as preserving optionality. And I mean, I know this will be right in your wheelhouse, but if people are going into management consulting or banking, they're like, I'm going to get this breadth of experience around multiple sectors.
Reza Satchu: Well, they definitely convince themselves.
Tim Ferriss: And after four or five years, then I'm going to start my startup. I have seen that happen exactly zero times.
Reza Satchu: Well, so I've heard that 1,000 times, and I've seen it about the same number.
Tim Ferriss: Because the you five years later is going to have like a Porsche gathering dust.
Reza Satchu: Correct.
Tim Ferriss: You're going to be keeping up with the Joneses who are vacationing in Ibiza or whatever nonsense.
Second—whatever it is, it's like—
And suddenly, just to feed this monster that you've created and stay in the esteem of your colleagues.
It's a trap. It's just a trap.
Yeah, Are you going to start bakery then? I don't think so.
Reza Satchu: Yeah. So what advice would you give the students you met today? They are here at Harvard, and suddenly what they're seeing is the world is changing pretty dramatically. The jobs that they thought were available to them are declining, even consulting jobs.
Private equity is a far more institutionalized, less interesting business than it was 20 years ago. The number of people going into banking is going down. And of course, you've got this AI that is apparently going to change everything, and we're trying to solve for—
Tim Ferriss: I agree with that.
Reza Satchu: —this one trait called judgment, which hopefully is the differentiator for human beings. So given these sort of seismic shifts, which both may create opportunity and turmoil, what would be the advice that you would give to these students?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and look, I hope I don't come off as like a cantankerous ass because I guess I'm pretty salty. But I would say a few things, and this is speaking as someone who has a lot of friends who went to very good business schools and so on, that in the world of building companies, nobody cares about your business degree.
And if you behave and interact with people as if you are entitled to something, you're going to have a very hard slog of things. So on the other hand, if you take what you've learned here and you use that as the payoff and then are willing, I think, to do what a lot of people are not willing to do—and this extends outside of [Harvard Business School], too. I think that if you are willing to really have hat in hand and do menial stuff and yet you still have this fancy degree, people are going to pay attention to that. If you fit the—
Reza Satchu: Well, they'll pay attention precisely because it's so differentiated.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly. Whereas if you fit the image that most people have, no offense, of like an [Harvard Business School] grad, you're done.
Reza Satchu: But what you're precisely saying is that, at the core, a founder has to think differently, has to be different. In order to go operate in the extraordinary world, you need to be different. And so the idea here is you've got to present and do things that are different.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally. And also I would say it's like you can read all the books on boxing or soccer that you want. You could be a PhD in soccer. But until you get out on the field, you're going to realize it's a different thing.
Yeah, and so you got to get out there and take your lumps. And it doesn't have to be just this march of misery. I mean, there's a lot that you can enjoy along the way.
But I feel like, if you do the unexpected, which could be starting a podcast in 2014 or whatever-- by the way, a lot of people told me, it's too late. That ship has sailed.
Reza Satchu: Is that right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. A lot of people who had podcasts were like, ah, it's too crowded. That was in 2014. But it could be doing something like that.
It could also just be doing what people do not expect, which might be they're like, oh, this guy's going to be a pompous know it all. And you're just like, hey, I'll get the coffee.
Reza Satchu: Yeah, right.
Tim Ferriss: I'll do this, clean the shoes, whatever.
Reza Satchu: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: What I've seen amongst founders at least is like intelligence is table stakes. It's like reliability, rolling up your sleeves, no job too big or too small. And if you just do what people would not expect in a positive sense, you can really squeeze a lot out of what you learned at a place like [Harvard Business School] because the lessons are good. But you still got to get on the field.
Reza Satchu: Correct. Exactly. It's the opposite of what you think, which is you're nowhere. You've got to go back to the bottom and actually do the work.
Tim Ferriss: Another piece of advice I would give to students-- and this is advice that I give to myself. I don't give other people advice that I wouldn't or haven't given myself. And advice, it's like, take it or leave it. Everybody's different. But I'm suspicious whenever there's too much of a consensus about anything.
Reza Satchu: Hence your point, go do weird things.
Tim Ferriss: Go do weird things, yeah. Especially now, it's not going to get easier unless you train the muscle of doing that and you realize that if you fall through the ice or one leg goes through the ice, you can get back out. You'll figure it out. But after four years at McKinsey, are you going to be more or less inclined to take some harebrained risk? Less, by far. So there are certain types of weirdness that if you embrace early, develop, cultivate the habit of exploring those strange corners, which is like—
Reza Satchu: I mean, I define weird—it's interesting. When I hear you say weirdness, it's almost like be curious. Just be curious about the things that seem unusual to others.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, be curious. And also it's OK to have high conviction in yourself. You got to test that. But it's like if-- you can beat your head against a wall, trying to push forward a bad or mediocre idea, because you view yourself as a contrarian.
Reza Satchu: Yeah, right.
Tim Ferriss: And everyone tells you it's not going to work.
Reza Satchu: Yeah, at some point.
Tim Ferriss: And you've read all the amazing stories of these founders who built multi-billion dollar companies after everyone said no. Just because people are saying no does not mean your idea is good. So if you label yourself a contrarian, that's very dangerous because actually what you're saying is, I'm a conformist, but I'm just going to do the opposite.
Reza Satchu: You know what, Tim? So what I'd say to you, I'm very grateful for you coming here. And I think that part of that gratitude comes from, if I define your life, it's something I try to inspire my students, which is seek adventure. Go seek some adventure.
Trust your curiosity. Trust your judgment. Learn as much as you can. In many ways, you've benefited from what I call exponential learning. And precisely because you took those first steps of trusting your judgment, and I sort of view judgment as a muscle, that it's not linear.
And so you've got the benefit of this exponential learning. And at the end of the day, the good of that is that it enables you to hopefully impact a few people a little bit better. And I think today you impacted a lot of people.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks.
Reza Satchu: So thank you for being here.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks for having me.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Voiceover: You've been listening to The Founder Mindset with Reza Satchu.