In this episode Marcus Aurelius Anderson delves into the minds and philosophies of successful individuals like Lao Tzu, Leonardo da Vinci, Tim Ferriss, and Jocko Willink. He emphasizes the power of simplicity and shares applicable lessons from his own experiences and those of historical and contemporary warriors. Through examining the career journey and strategies of entrepreneur Tim Ferriss, Marcus illustrates how simplifying processes can lead to significant success in life, business, and leadership.
Episode Highlights:
00:45 Warrior Wisdom: Simplifying Complexity
03:23 Tim Ferriss: A Case Study in Simplicity
05:03 Applying Simplicity in Business
09:11 Daily Practices for a Simplified Life
Episode Transcript:
00:30
They muddy the water to make it seem deep. Friedrich Nietzsche. True mastery comes from deconstructing the complicated and turning it into something easy to understand and apply, which helps bring order to chaos.
00:59
The leaders, coaches, and teachers that truly want to help the people that they serve break the complex into something simple and easy to comprehend so that they can spread it to others. Those that want to make things more complicated than necessary often do so to sound intelligent and confuse others while simultaneously keeping them dependent upon them. Remember, complexity is the enemy of execution. Simplify as much as possible, whenever possible.
01:28
I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson and this is another installment of Octonon Verba’s Warrior Wisdom. In these shorter solo episodes, I’ll highlight lessons from warriors past and present in all kinds of settings from the battlefields of Italy, Greece, and Japan, and Middle East, to modern day warfare including tactics seen today in business, society, and culture. I’ll also be sharing leadership lessons based on my own teachings and experiences. The reality is this. The world is a battlefield.
01:57
And to not master these lessons leaves you grossly ill-prepared for the adversity that you will inevitably face in the future. On today’s lesson, Warrior Wisdom 215, I’m teaching one simple concept shared by Lao Tzu, Leonardo da Vinci, Tim Ferriss, and Jaco Willink that led them to success in business, leadership, and life. Lao Tzu wrote famously, to attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.
02:26
Now this sentiment is echoed by the legendary modern Taoist and martial arts icon Bruce Lee when he said, it’s not daily addition, but daily subtraction, act away at the inessentials. And that was the path to mastery. Leonardo da Vinci said, simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication. In the bestselling book, Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, the second of the four laws of combat is called simple. And that simply means to focus on simplicity and communication.
02:56
planning and execution as much as possible. Because if it’s too complex to explain to a team, then it’s not simple enough to be able to be executed in the heat of battle to win. For most of the problems and adversity that we face today in life, business and leadership, the answer is not addition and subtraction. It’s not to add more, it’s to hack away at the inessentials. Anything in excess eventually becomes its opposite. What would this look like if it were easy? Tim Ferriss.
03:24
One of the entrepreneurs that does a beautiful job of applying simplicity is Tim Ferris, who I’m surprised more people don’t know about. And here’s some backstory about Tim. After graduating from Princeton in 2000, Tim landed a job as a sales tech, but was frustrated by the monotonous 12-hour days. During one of those long work days, he researched the viability of starting a sports nutrition company and estimated that it would only cost him $5,000 to outsource everything from product to ad design. On Tim Ferris’s blog.
03:54
Tim.blog. He has some powerful information on there, one of which is 17 questions that changed my life. And he talks a little bit more about why he decided to start a supplement company. And he started by asking himself this simple question. What do I myself spend a silly amount of money on? Where did I spend a disproportionate amount of my income? And where was I basically price insensitive? And his answer was in sports supplements because at the time he was making less than 40K a year.
04:23
yet spending 500 or more per month on supplements. And then a lot of people that he was around at that time, this was the commonality of many of his male friends. So when he started BrainQuicken, which was his supplement company in 2004, it was doing incredibly well. The problem that he was running into was that he was running on caffeine all the time, working 16 hour days, and constantly on the verge of meltdown. The girlfriend that he wanted to marry eventually left him. And over the next six months of treading water and feeling trapped, he realized that
04:52
he would have to restructure the business or shut it down. It was literally killing him. Eventually he took a sabbatical for over six months just to get away from the business so that he can maintain his sanity. And ironically, by checking his email only once a day, his business increased tremendously because it forced him to get out of the way and no longer be the bottleneck. So then he began to take this concept of simplicity even further. Now asking yourself, how can I not be a bottleneck in my own business?
05:21
is not a good enough question, because it’s too vague in general. So he decided to have extreme questions which give him extreme answers to the problem. The question that he found most helpful was this. If I could only spend two hours per week on my business, what would I do? Now, honestly, we all know that that’s not possible. But if you had a gun to your head,
05:48
and you had to limit your work to only two hours per week, what would you do to keep things afloat? Now, again, this comes back to the 80-20 principle, also known as Pareto’s principle or Pareto’s law, saying that 20% of our activities are what given us 80% of our outcomes. So what 20% of customers, products, or regions are producing 80% of his profit? What factors or shared characteristics may he account for this? After many of these questions and deep reflection, he began making changes.
06:18
and he fired his highest maintenance customers and put over 90% of his retail customers on autopilot with simple terms and standardized ordering reorder processes and deepen the relationship and therefore increased order sizes with the three to five highest profit, low-headed customers that he had. Beautiful concept about simplicity. The next question that he asked was something around customer service and it looked like this. His customer service was 40 to 60 hours a week.
06:47
He wanted us to know what it would take to get that down to say two hours per week. Until mid 2004, he was the sole decision maker. So for example, if a professional athlete overseas needed some products overnighted to them and they had to go through special custom forms and all this other stuff with emails and phone calls for the fulfillment centers, he would simply tell the people that were his direct reports. Listen, I trust you from this point forward. Please don’t contact me with questions about A, B or C.
07:17
If it involves less than $100, please make the decision on your own. Take a note of the situation, how you handled it, what it costs, et cetera, and we will put it in a document of some sort, and we will review these things every week. Just focus on making the customer happy. Now, initially he expected the worst, but guess what? Everything worked out blowingly well. He later increased this threshold of trusting his employees to 500 and even $1,000.
07:45
And the reviews of these decisions went from weekly to monthly, from monthly to quarterly, and then once a year, because he had his people polished and he trusted them. This experience underscored two things for him. One, to get huge, good things done, you need to be okay with letting the small, bad things happen. And number two, people’s IQs seem to quadruple as soon as you give them responsibility and tell them that you trust them. A little bit more about Tim.
08:14
He wrote his first bestselling book in 2007 called The Four Hour Workweek. He also wrote The Four Hour Body, The Four Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, which is subtitled The Tactics, Routines and Habits of Billionaires, Icons and World Class Performers. And his most recent outing is Tribe of Mentors, Short Life Advice from the Best in the World. Now he’s sold millions of copies of these books, which also led him to create The Tim Ferriss Show.
08:42
podcast, which is incredible, which again, that’s surprising to me that more people don’t know about it, especially if you’re listening to my podcast. But he’s had some of the biggest names on there. And he always asked them questions that are very, very pertinent to what we’re talking about here today, about what was something that they found to be unique that they didn’t think would work, etc. And he’s always trying to find these little pockets, these outliers, that have these gems that we can apply in everyday life, whether it be leadership, business or relationship.
09:11
The next concept that he talks about is this notion of, could it be that everything is fine and complete just as it is? After many years as an entrepreneur and all these different successes in these different realms, he doubled and tripled down on cultivating more daily appreciation and present state awareness. One of the questions that he asked himself every single morning is, could it be that everything is fine and complete as it is? Meaning, not to always continue to demand more or to push harder for something that is fine just the way it is.
09:40
Type A personalities have a goal pursuit as default as they’re hardwiring. This is an excellent characteristic for producing achievement, but it also produces for many of them anxiety and they are constantly future focused, which means they forget about the present, they lose gratitude, et cetera. He personally decided that achievement is no more than a passing grade in life. It’s a C plus that gets you limping along to the next grade for anything more and certainly for anything worth approaching happiness.
10:08
We have to do more of the things that we want to do now in the present moment and look into the future with curiosity. You have to want what you already have. The last question that he applies, which again is something that we talked about earlier in the lesson, it was this notion of what would this look like if it were easy. And as a matter of fact, this is what happened whenever he was writing his latest book, tribe of mentors, short life advice from the best in the world. He sold millions of copies of that book.
10:37
And the way that he wrote that book was just as simple as what we’re saying with this question. He asked himself, instead of going through and interviewing hundreds of the best in the world, what would this look like if it were easy? So just hypothetically, he thought to himself, well, I would give them a few questions, similar to the ones that we’re asking right now, and send them out to all the people that he knows in his network. Again, people that are billionaires, people that are Olympic gold medal athletes.
11:05
people that are movers and shakers and all kinds of industry, people that are the best at what they do. And he sent out a list of questions and asked them, listen, answer any of these questions that you feel is pertinent or feel free to answer all of them if you would like. And when he sent out a batch like this, he had some people that didn’t respond. Some people that responded curtly, but directly saying, listen, this sounds great, but I don’t have time for this. But he did get a lot of heavy hitters that gave him a lot of information back.
11:35
So he was literally able to just get the information from that, almost like a homework assignment, give that to editors, publishers, et cetera. And they were able to organize it in a way that made a lot of sense and gave the whole book continuity. So after doing all the things that he’s did by applying this idea of what would this look like if it were easy, he was able to create that book without really lifting a finger other than the heavy lifting of thinking, what sort of question should I be asking myself? What would this really look like if it were easy?
12:06
You’re after action items to apply for the next 30 days of this lesson. Well, as I’ve said, this lesson is pretty simple based on simplicity. And so too is your action item list. Your assignment for the next 30 days is to conduct an unbiased and brutal reflection in every area of your life and see where you can simplify things. Concepts to keep in mind when applying this lesson. Complexity is the enemy of execution.
12:34
Where can you make things less complex and less complicated in your life, business, and relationships? The next concept, anything in excess eventually becomes the opposite. Where do you have unnecessary and superfluous steps, protocols, and actions in your life, business, and relationships? Finally, ask yourself, what would this problem that I’m facing look like if it were simple, if it were easy? Thus endeth the lesson.
13:02
Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this and any of the other over 200 episodes of Vox and Amverba, I highly recommend going back through the entire catalog that includes more warrior wisdom episodes like this that are shorter, as well as longer deep dive conversations with guests previously from Tim Ferriss’ show that I just mentioned, such as Christopher Summer, as well as the legendary authors, Robert Greene and Steven Pressfield. Steve was actually on Tim’s show a couple of times as well. None of these episodes are behind a paywall and they are all available for free.
13:31
So go check them out right now. While you’re there, hit subscribe and tell us about what you think about this episode in a review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to Acta Non Verba.
