Tim Ferriss - 5-Bullet Friday — December 23, 2022

Hi All!

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

What I’m watching

​Heart Valley: Life Lessons from a Shepherd (NewYorker.com, YouTube), a short film by Christian Cargill (@christiancarg), which won Best Documentary Short at the Tribeca Film Festival. One of my takeaways: the more anxiety you have, the more real-world tasks you need. Watch the trailer here. The documentary runs just under 20 minutes. FYI that the Welsh shepherd Wilf has had at least one major stroke. I mention this because it’s context I wish I’d had up front. Special thanks to @lebowski_eth for the recommendation!

Musician I’m enjoying

“Bedia” (YouTube, Spotify) by Rajery. Watch the YouTube video. Rajery is missing the fingers on his right hand, which I didn’t realize until watching the music video. It makes the virtuoustic playing all the more impressive. The backstory: “Fighting against the odds has been part of my life ever since an old lady in a marketplace gave me poisoned meat at 11 months old. It cost me the fingers of my right hand….” (Source).

Article I’m reading

“The art and science of picking winning teams” by Ed Smith (@edsmithwriter), author of Making Decisions. For the cricket-naive folks, like me, think of “selector” as a scout or recruiter. From Wikipedia: “A selector in cricket is a person given the administrative duty to choose the players that will represent a particular team in a match. There is typically heavy scrutiny on national team selectors, including those of the major Test cricketing nations like Australia, England, and India."
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My favorite part of this article is related to the importance of accepting negative metrics if you want to outperform any consensus. Here are a few excerpts:

“Whenever someone innovates in business or in life,” argues the former poker player Caspar Berry, “they almost inevitably do so by accepting a negative metric that other people are unwilling to accept.”

When the NBA’s Houston Rockets began taking a higher proportion of (long-range) three-point shots, they were accepting the negative metric that they would miss more often. The pay-off was that shots they did convert came with a built-in premium. The trend was initially ridiculed—before being folded into orthodoxy. In 2015–16, only six out of 30 NBA teams took three-pointers in at least a third of their attempts. By 2020–21, 28 teams were doing it.

Spain’s triumphant football team of 2008–12 sometimes lined up without a striker. Neglecting to select a specialist goalscorer brings risks—as pundits regularly reminded us by imploring Spain to pick a big strong lad up front to bang in the goals. In 2012, Spain preferred the extra midfielder—expanding creative opportunities, while tolerating the negative metric of not selecting a player focused exclusively on scoring. Spain won the final of the 2012 Euros 4–0, their third major title inside four years—revealing a shrewd trade-off.

​​Podcast episode I’m listening to

“You 2.0: Decide Already!” (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast) by Hidden Brain with Shankar Vedantam.

Quote I’m pondering once again

“If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.”
​— Jack Kornfield
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You can complement this edition of 5-Bullet Friday with my interview with hospice physician Dr. BJ Miller, who has helped thousands of people to navigate the transition to death. It remains one of my all-time favorite conversations, and I’ve often applied his philosophies and lessons-learned to my life. If you only have 15 minutes, listen to BJ Miller’s profile from Tools of Titans.
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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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