My favorite method is stopping everything for a moment. It’s amazing how difficult I find it these days to simply sit quietly.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
Question
What is your greatest fear?
Identity & self
Question
Which writers or artists most influenced your work?
Taste & recommendation
Question
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
Daily life
Question
What have you come to understand about what it means to be human?
Values & belief
Question
What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore?
Time & hindsight
Question
Which book changed the way you think, and what did it change?
Taste & recommendation
And you know, then you can just take that breath and be like, okay, time to--time to reset, you know, like, relax your grip a little bit, take in what you're doing and start again.
Adam Grant, Re:Thinking with Adam Grant, TED, 20 September 2022 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 32 →
Brian Eno
Composer, record producer and visual artist
Recorded
Max Dax, Eno's London studio, 2011, Telekom Electronic Beats, 1 January 2011
source ↗
Henry R. Kravis
Financier; co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
You have to do something like that to get rid of the tension, take your mind off what you are doing.
Katie Taylor
Irish professional boxer; Olympic champion 2012
There are days when I wake up and don't want to move, but you must show up!
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw
Founder and executive chairperson of Biocon
The only way to de-stress for me is to take one or two days off and then come back.
More from Alex Honnold
View profile →I think when I was younger, I had a lot of the fears that, that you expect from people. Like I was kind of afraid of spiders and things like that. And I think with, you know, years of dealing with fear nonstop, they've all sort of fallen away. I, I mean, I guess my greatest fear is like public embarrassment or public performance, or like what I said earlier about opera singing I'm like, that is still for sure that would be a nightmare. And like, yeah, I could do it. But I would be so bummed.
I didn’t have a lot of mentors when I – I mean I kind of just grew up in the gym, just climbing a lot. So I didn’t really have mentors. I mean I definitely had people that I looked up to and people in the climbing community, but that’s just sort of the typical hero worship style, you know. Like Peter Croft was a really prominent soloist from the generation before me and I was like, “Oh, Peter’s the man!”
Recorded
Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show, The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss, 1 January 2018
source ↗
I’ve always wished I had stronger fingers, and most of my friends always have stronger fingers.
Well, don’t you think that we are all like that? I mean in some ways the deepest fear for a lot of people is getting to the end of their life and think that they did it wrong.
Well, 20 is still slightly too old, but like my 18-year-old self, I would just tell to – I would say to just not bother going to college at all. Because like the year that I spent at Berkeley was a total waste of my time, basically. Not because there’s anything wrong with Berkeley, but because I just wasn’t passionate about what I was studying, and there’s no – there was no point in me like grinding out a year of studies that I didn’t care about.
Recorded
Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show, The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss, 1 January 2018
source ↗
some of the most noteworthy books I’ve read I guess, like A People’s History of the US, the Howard Zinn book totally changed the way I look at politics. And then in the same way I read a book recently called Sacred Economics that like totally changed the way I looked at economics.
More on daily life
- What single thing would improve the quality of your life? 211 answers
- What keeps you awake at night? 205 answers
- What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love? 42 answers
- What does the first sixty minutes of your day look like? 28 answers
- In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to? 24 answers
- In the last five years, what new belief, behaviour, or habit has most improved your life? 23 answers
Also answered this
Eliud Kipchoge, Abby Wambach, Simone Biles, Chris Hoy, Michael Phelps, Katie Taylor
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All daily life questions
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject