#292: Lessons and Warnings from Successful Risk Takers

#292: Lessons and Warnings from Successful Risk Takers

The Tim Ferriss Show

This is a special episode of the podcast, which features three guests: author  Soman Chainani (@SomanChainani), author Susan Cain (@susancain), and East Rock Capital co-founder and investor Graham Duncan .All three are featured in my latest book, Tribe of Mentors, and all three share something in common: they're experts at mitigating risk. I don't view them as a throw-caution-to-the-wind; nonetheless, they've been good at capping downsides and making various career decisions that have paid off in large ways.I hope you enjoy this episode with these three brilliant guests! This podcast is brought to you by Ascent Protein , the only US-based company that offers native proteins -- both whey and micellar casein -- directly to the consumer for improved muscle health and perform
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Transcript

SpeakerA
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Optimal, minimal.

SpeakerB
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At this altitude I can run flat.

SpeakerA
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Out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

SpeakerB
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Can I ask you a personal question now?

SpeakerC
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It has been an appropriate time.

SpeakerA
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What if I did the opposite?

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

SpeakerB
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Paris show.

SpeakerA
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This episode is brought do you buy athletic greens? I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably athletic greens. I view it as all in one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in fact, in the four hour body. This is more than ten years ago and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals and whole food sourced ingredients, you'd be very hard pressed to find a more nutrientdense and comprehensive formula on the market. It has multivitamins, multimineral greens, complex probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an immunity formula, digestive enzymes, adaptogens and much more. I usually take it once or twice a day just to make sure I've covered my bases. If I miss anything I'm not aware of. Of course I focus on nutrientdense meals to begin with. That's the basis. But athletic greens makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available from travel packets. I always have them in my bag when I'm zipping around. Right now, athletic greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all in one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com TFS, you'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com tfs. As in Tim Ferriss show athleticgreens.com tfs this episode is brought to you by five bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world, with millions of subscribers, and it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday I send out five bullet points super short of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers have asked me for something short and action packed for a very long time. Because after all, the podcasts, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created five bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free. It's always going to be free. And you can learn more at Tim blog Friday. That's Tim Blog Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with, and little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribe to five bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Fibull at Friday subscribers, so check it forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe anytime. So easy peasy. Again, that's slash Friday, and thanks for checking it out if the spirit moves you. Hello ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where each episode it is my job to tease out the habits, routines, belief systems, decision making frameworks, whatever it might be, backstories, failures, and what they've learned from them that you can borrow from performers and apply in your own lives in some fashion. In this episode, we're going to feature three guests, Soman Chenani, Susan Kane, and Graham Duncan, and I won't get into their bios right now. Soman Chenani was introduced to me by Brian Coppelman, some of you may know, as the co creator of the hit show Billions, as well as a filmmaker writer director known for flicks such as Rounders, the illusionist, and the list goes on and on. Susan Kane, speaking myself as someone who considers himself an introvert who can for short periods pretend to be an extrovert. What she writes about is very, very applicable to my own life. And Graham Duncan, very understated person who tends to stay out of the public eye, out of the limelight, you may notice. For those of you who spotted the names, all three of them are featured in my latest book, tribe of Mentors, that Graham Duncan has no social media profiles in the book, and that tells you a lot about Graham. All three of them, I should note, share something in common, and that is that I would view all three as people who are very, very expert at mitigating risk. So I don't view them as a throw caution to the wind, risk it all bunch whatsoever. Nonetheless, they've been very good at capping the downside and making various career decisions and bets that have paid off very, very large. So I hope you enjoy this as much as I did, and I will let these three brilliant guests take it from here. Our guest today is Soman Chenani on Twitter at somanchenani. S-O-M-A-N-C-H-A-I-N-A-N-I on Instagram at somanc. Or you can find more about him Somanchinani. Net Soman is a detailed planner, filmmaker, and New York Times bestselling author. His debut fiction series, the School for Good and Evil, has sold more than a million copies, has been translated into more than 20 languages across six continents, and will soon be a film from Universal Pictures. A graduate of Harvard University in Columbia University's MFA film program, Soman began his career as a screenwriter and director, with his films playing at more than 150 film festivals around the world. He was recently named to the out 100 and has received the $100,000 Shasha Grant and Sun Valley Writers fellowship, both for debut writers.

SpeakerD
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So the write book can slip right inside of you and somehow wake up the part of you that's asleep. It can actually put words to the thoughts that your soul can't quite get a hold of without at least a little help. And there's so many books that have done this for me, but there's three in particular that I've read over and over and over. The first is the war of art by Stephen Pressfield, which is this slim, tiny little book about the creative process. It's almost like a Tao te ching for artists that every time you read lets you go deeper and deeper into this idea of overcoming the innate resistance that faces anybody who wants to make a change in their life, especially a creative one. And every time I read it, it lights this crazy bonfire inside of me that reminds me just how far I have to go in order to trust the creative voices inside of me instead of the ego voices. Because that's the real crisis with all creative work, is that it requires us to trust the silent voices, the ones that we actually don't hear, as loud as the positive and negative ones that are always judging the work that we do. And it's easy to mix all these voices up and end up quietly abandoning your own ambition, often before you even start your project. These eagle voices are also why I became a pharmaceutical consultant at 21 years old, hawking Viagra instead of writing fantasy books and movies like I do now. Because at the time, a pharmaceutical consultant felt like a safe job, the kind of normal job that you tell your parents about and they tell their friends about and makes you feel like you're doing something right with your life. And so these ego voices are also why I'm afraid to date Ivy Leaguers, I guess, even though I reluctantly have to admit that I am one. Because when you go to an Ivy League school, you're tagged as a success before you even accomplish anything, before you even know who you are. And so it stokes this very fragile sense of self, and it makes you play it completely safe. And ultimately, to make any real progress in my own life, I had to decondition myself from my own education and really believe that I had nothing to lose. So, yes, Pressfield's war of art, that's where I would say the yellow brick road starts. For a second book, I choose something unusual, which is a little life by Hanya Yana Gihara, which is a whopper of a novel that tracks the friendship of four male friends in New York City over the course of almost 40 years. You honestly won't find a book more polarizing or divisive, but to me, it's the greatest work of fiction I've ever read, primarily because it hits a nerve that I've struggled with my whole life, which is that all of us have baggage and wounds and pain that have shaped the way we see the world, but we so often hide it or compartmentalize it. And because of that, we close off parts of ourselves and make our lives a lot smaller. A little life reminds us that the pain we feel is shared, and it's a common human bond. We shouldn't be ashamed of it. And that if we talk about it and shine a light on it, it's the first step to becoming a whole person instead of a fragmented one. I honestly can't imagine a more ambitious or healing or moving book. But what's also funny is that a lot of people hate a little life and consider it the worst book ever written. My brother despises it, and he says, quote, it's trash. Basically the literary equivalent of rubbernecking at

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