#181: How to ‘Waste Money’ To Improve the Quality of Your Life

Out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

Can I answer your personal question now?

I just feel what if I did the opposite?

I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

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Again, that's Tim Blog Friday, and thanks for checking it out if the spirit moves you. Why hello there, Haljo Puchin. Long time no see. Literally in Mandarin or hisashiburijanika in Japanese.

This is Tim Ferriss.

I'm feeling a little lightheaded and a.

Little frisky today, and this episode is not going to be me deconstructing a world class performer, as I usually do an interview format over two to 3 hours.

This is not that.

This is going to be very short, hopefully very, very actionable and practical. I was asked recently how I choose my projects and what I say yes to, what I say no to, and I riffed on this and we recorded it as part of something larger that I'll be sharing in the near future. And I realized that the real question is at the root of a lot of my decisions. How can I waste money to improve my quality of life? And this seems like a bad thing, but it is not. It is trading pennies for dollars. So how can you waste money to improve the quality of your life? Well, I will delve into all of that and much more. This was spontaneous. It's off the cuff. So it is not a TED talk, but I hope you will get a lot out of it. And I was encouraged to share it because people there at the time felt like folks might like it, so please enjoy how to waste money to improve quality of life how do I determine what to delegate versus what to do on my own? This is an ongoing challenge, as it is for a lot of people. But a few of the things that I consider are first and foremost, do I understand the task and the roles and the actions to do lists, checklists involved? And this is going to sound funny, and I don't think this is necessarily the best approach for everyone. But for me, as a type a perfectionist, I like to have a base level of competency in almost anything that I delegate. And I say almost anything because I'm not a coder, for instance. So I don't need to know how to work with CSS or anything else to work with a designer. But I do know how to sketch and create mockups or wireframes so I can work with those abstraction layers and then the levels below it. The sort of implementation of that I don't need to understand as well. But in the case of, for instance, podcast editing, I went into a very imperfect tool, garageband in this case, and edited the first probably 20 or 30 episodes because I enjoyed learning that as I enjoyed learning new skills. But ultimately, once I understood how to refine the process, then I delegated. So to frame that another way, I think it was Bill Gates who said, and I'm paraphrasing, but this was in the four hour work week that when you add people to an inefficient process, you make things worse. Only when you add people to an efficient process do you make things better. And there's a book called the Mythical Man Month on software design and software development that talks about this, where if you have a late software project because the underlying process has been fucked, if you add more developers to it, you're just going to make things worse. It's just going to take longer. So I like to test drive almost every process myself first before I delegate. I think that most problems with delegation, most things that get missed, most mistakes that get made are the boss's fault, not the employee's fault or the contractor's fault. It's because the task itself wasn't clear enough in the beginning. A lot of people delegate because they don't want to do the hard thinking. You have to do the hard thinking. You should delegate because you can give hard work to someone else or time consuming work. So that's number one. I like to have a base level competency with all these things. And then how do I choose what to delegate? I will look at my highest yield activities and the way I will determine that is I will look at, for instance, my to do list, which is really a list of tasks or next actions of some type, and I will ask myself which one of these, if done, will make all of the rest easier to do or irrelevant. Right, because I'm looking for, and I've used this analogy before, the lead domino. I'm looking for the first domino. I don't want to knock down 7000 different dominoes that are downstream and have to repeat that process. I want to find the one Archimedes lever that when used effectively, makes everything else either easier to do or irrelevant. And that is what I will focus on, generally speaking, when in doubt. Also, the thing that you've been avoiding the longest is the thing that you should at least do the hard thinking on first. So what is important? Like how do I know what my most important task is to do before I check email? The 2 hours that I've blocked out for that type of deep work, whatever it is that makes you most uncomfortable. But I will look at this list and very often my highest yield activity will be related to one of my more unique abilities. I'm not saying it's unique singular to me, but for instance, part of the reason that I took, and this is not delegation, this is elimination. So we're getting very four hour work week here, but. Right, you have definition, elimination, automation, liberation. Okay, so before I liberate myself by delegating, I want to remove as much as possible. So at one point, about a year ago now, I realized that I was replaceable as an investor in the startup ecosystem. The economics were such that given deal structures and absurd things that were happening and an oversupply