Tim Ferriss - 5-Bullet Friday — August 19, 2022

Hi All!

Here is your weekly dose of 5-Bullet Friday, a list of what I’m pondering and exploring. If you enjoy it, please feel free to forward this along to friends.

What I’m watching

​Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (Amazon, Apple TV). Ursula was one of a kind. It’s almost impossible to overstate how far outside of the box she was for her generation. Much of what we take for granted now was simply unheard of when she was crafting worlds. Here is a brief snippet from Ursula’s Wikipedia page (bolding and link are mine):
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​Le Guin’s writing was enormously influential in the field of speculative fiction and has been the subject of intense critical attention. She received numerous accolades, including eight Hugos, six Nebulas, and twenty-two Locus Awards. … Le Guin influenced many other authors, including Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman, and Iain Banks. After her death in 2018, critic John Clute wrote that Le Guin had “presided over American science fiction for nearly half a century,” while author Michael Chabon referred to her as the “greatest American writer of her generation.”

What I’m reading (five-minute post)

“Lifestyles” by Morgan Housel (@morganhousel). Sometimes I just want to burn it all down and disappear. This helped me scratch that itch without any collateral damage.

What I’m listening to

“Surfing with the Alien” (YouTube, Spotify) by Joe Satriani (@chickenfootjoe). I’m having so much fun revisiting the greats from Joe Satriani. Perfect Friday writing music. Some song trivia from Wikipedia: “The song refers to the comic book character, Silver Surfer. The song was considered the 30th greatest guitar solo ever by readers of Guitar World magazine, and is one of Satriani’s most prominent shred-style tracks.”

What I’m rereading for a trip down memory lane

“The First-Ever Quantified Self Notes (Plus: LSD as Cognitive Enhancer?)” This is a fun slice of history. It combines my notes from the first-ever “quantified self” meetup at Kevin Kelly’s home in 2008 with a term paper I wrote in 1996… when I was ~19 years old! Despite the hilarious typo in the title (it wasn’t the final draft) and some overreach and correlation/causation mixing, I still maintain there are profound similarities between REM sleep and some psychedelic experiences, and I further believe that the implications for learning have yet to be properly explored.

Poem I’m pondering

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
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Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
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which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
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which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.​
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— Mary Oliver (“Messenger,” found in Mary Oliver’s collection Thirst.)
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You can complement this edition of 5-Bullet Friday with my longform interviews on The Tim Ferriss Show podcast with authors Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, and Joyce Carol Oates. I consider all three to be among the world’s greatest fiction writers.
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And, as always, please give me feedback on Twitter. Which bullet above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know. Just send a tweet to @tferriss and put #5BulletFriday at the end so I can find it.
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Have a wonderful weekend, all.
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Much love to you and yours,
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Tim

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