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cover art for Tim Ferriss: What Really Matters [Best Of].

Good Life Project

Tim Ferriss: What Really Matters [Best Of].

Tim Ferris has been on a mission (http://tim.blog/podcast/) to deconstruct excellence his entire adult life. It began with his own relentless experimentation and documentation, which yielded #1 New York Times bestsellers The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Chef.

In more recent years, this yearning has led him to sit down with hundreds of elite-performers and share the conversations on his award-winning podcast (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2). Tim and I recorded a Good Life Project conversation back in 2016 which you can listen to here (http://www.goodlifeproject.com/tim-ferriss/).

Today, we go in a very different direction. After the loss a number of close friends and mentors and passing the 40-year mark, Tim found himself in a contemplative and emotional space. In this week's conversation, we drop into the deep end of the pool quickly. When we sat down, he'd recently returned from an intensive 10-day silent meditation retreat. While gone, he lost yet another close friend. He was, in his own words, in an incredibly "porous" place, leading more from the heart than the head, which is a bit of a major turnaround for him.

We spent time deconstructing Tim's 10-day silent meditation experience, his struggles and awakenings and contrasted it with his earlier psychedelic experiences. We also talked about his experience with death, his decision to append audio of his most recently departed friend, Terry Laughlin, which was recorded by Terry's daughters in the hospital during his final days of life to the end of Tim's recent podcast interview with Terry (https://tim.blog/2017/10/29/terry-laughlin/).

We explore why he "threw out" the TED talk he'd prepared minutes before stepping onto the stage and, instead, talk about something deeply painful and personal from the heart. And, we explored Tim's awakening to a "softer" set of metrics to measure a life well-lived and his evolving definition of what it truly means to live a good life.

I'm so excited to share this final "Best Of" episode of 2018, as a powerful prompt to explore ways to be more intentional and proactive in the year that awaits us.

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