Insights from Tara Brach, Ryan Holiday, Maria Popova, and Cal Newport | The Tim Ferriss Show

This is an experimental compilation format where Tim Ferriss asks friends to send a favorite 15-30 minute clip from their own podcasts so he can share them with listeners. Tara Brach teaches the trance of unworthiness and her RAIN meditation (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture), illustrated with the golden Buddha statue covered in clay. Ryan Holiday rapid-fires a series of life-shaping questions drawn from Stoic philosophers and other thinkers. Maria Popova details her highly disciplined daily routine, sleep philosophy, and analog note-taking and indexing system for reading. Cal Newport delivers a deep dive on time management built around three C's: capture, configure, and control, plus a bonus principle of constraint.

• Tara Brach introduces the RAIN meditation, an acronym for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture, designed to dissolve the coverings over our true nature.
  00:20:29
• Maria Popova reveals that the meditation teacher who changed her life more than anyone is Tara Brach, whose free podcast meditations she discovered and uses daily.
  00:59:27
• Popova says she has listened to the exact same Tara Brach guided 'smile meditation' from the summer of 2010 every single day, on a broken 3G iPhone she uses as an iPod.
  01:00:30
• Popova describes her core reading hack: building an alternate index of key ideas (not keywords) on the blank last page of every analog book.
  01:04:11
• Tim Ferriss confesses he assumed Seneca was a Native American elder for a year or two before realizing he was a Roman, because the single name reminded him of Madonna or Sitting Bull.
  01:08:56
• Cal Newport frames any good time management system around three C's: capture, configure, and control.
  01:16:38
• Newport adds a bonus fourth principle, constraint: carefully controlling what gets onto your plate in the first place and using processes to reduce work's footprint.
  01:31:38

• In 1950s Thailand a monk's flashlight revealed gold beneath cracks in a clay-covered statue, uncovering the largest solid gold Buddha in that part of Asia.
  00:15:45
• Tara Brach names the core wound behind the trance of unworthiness as 'I'm not lovable, I'm not loved, I'm not worthy.'
  00:18:57
• Carl Rogers said it was not until he accepted himself just as he was that he was free to change, the prerequisite for true transformation.
  00:19:28
• John Boyd taught his Pentagon mentees the choice 'to be or to do', to look important versus to quietly get things done.
  00:43:20
• Stephen Colbert lost his father and several siblings in a plane crash; his mother's question 'Can you look at this in the light of eternity?' shaped his perspective.
  00:48:31
• Maria Popova argues humans are nearly as impaired as if drunk when sleeping less than half the time they normally need.
  00:57:19
• Popova calls literature 'the original internet,' with citations and allusions functioning like hyperlinks to other works.
  01:08:24
• Cal Newport credits David Allen with the 'full capture' idea, which Allen adapted from a 1970s business thinker named Dean Acheson (not Truman's Secretary of State).
  01:17:40
• Newport's own system uses Trello for tasks, Google Docs for plans, his Time Block Planner, and a desktop file called workingmemory.txt.
  01:23:22
• Newport plans his time at three scales, for him semester (instead of quarterly), weekly, and daily, calling it multi-scale planning.
  01:14:34