Suleika Jaouad - Invaluable Road Trips, the To-Feel List, and Artistic Homes | The Tim Ferriss Show

Suleika Jaouad traces her path from a misfit, multilingual childhood and Juilliard-bound bassist to dropping out of high school, getting into Princeton, and pursuing writing. About a year after college she was diagnosed with aggressive leukemia and spent four years in treatment, turning a 100-day journaling project into a New York Times column. After being declared cured, she struggled with the myth of 'moving on,' a PTSD diagnosis, and the wilderness of survivorship. To heal, she learned to drive at 27 and took a 15,000-mile solo cross-country road trip to visit strangers who had written to her, and she shares the journaling practices and 'to-feel list' she still uses today.

• She reported a story for New York Times Magazine on a prison hospice in a maximum-security prison, staffed by fellow prisoners caring for the dying; one man she profiled, Fernando Murillo, was later released partly because of that story.
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• About a year after graduating college she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia, fracturing her life into a before and an after.
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• After standard chemotherapy failed, her only options became experimental clinical trials, which she found more devastating than the diagnosis itself.
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• A doctor she was interviewing for a story told her she had post-traumatic stress disorder, a revelation since she'd thought PTSD was only for war veterans.
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• To heal, she first confronted a smaller fear by learning to drive, which grew into the dream of a solo cross-country road trip.
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• She built her road-trip itinerary from a wooden box of letters sent by about 22 strangers who had responded to her column.
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• When a New York Times editor offered her an essay, she declined and instead pitched a weekly column with a video component, written from the trenches of treatment without knowing how her story would end.
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• She calls the 100-day, ~15,000-mile road trip the best decision she's ever made in her life.
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• Her defining childhood experience was being a misfit in every culture; between ages 2 and 12 she lived in Switzerland, Tunisia, and the US and attended five or six schools.
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• In Morocco she asked for bread using the Tunisian word 'taboona,' which turned out to be a derogatory term for part of the female anatomy.
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• At age eight she deliberately chose the upright bass as a secondary instrument because it would inconvenience her parents the most, then fell in love with it.
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• At 16 she dropped out of high school, took free classes at Skidmore College where her dad taught, and was admitted early decision to Princeton without a high school diploma.
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• During her first months of treatment she set what she joked was a world record for consecutive Grey's Anatomy episodes watched.
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• Post-treatment imprints included a chest port, scars, infertility from chemotherapy, extreme fatigue, and a compromised immune system from a bone marrow transplant.
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• Her doctors told her she had about a 35 percent chance of long-term survival around the time she pitched the column.
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• The first five minutes of her road trip were terrifying because she accidentally drove the wrong way down a one-way avenue in midtown Manhattan.
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• Before her daily to-do list she writes a 'to-feel list,' a habit from when illness left her only about three hours of usable energy per day.
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• Her billboard message would be the epigraph of her book, a line from Cervantes: 'until death it is all life.'
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