: The New York Times Book Review’s advice and miscellaneous best-seller list — the place where self-help books go to eyeball one another — is a boisterous rolling carnival of hustlers and hacks and optimists and jokers, with the occasional naked lady, tent preacher, dog trainer or television chef thrown in for good measure. Serious books do appear there, but they’re like guests who’ve wandered into the wrong party. Among the writers who’ve appeared on that list, Tim Ferriss — author of The 4-Hour Workweek
and now The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman — is an unusually beguiling humanlike specimen. He’s a graduate of the prep school St. Paul’s and has a degree in East Asian studies from Princeton University. Timothy Ferriss is also a Guinness Book of World Records record holder for most consecutive tango spins in one minute, a feat he accomplished with a partner on “Live With Regis and Kelly.” [...] He can use without irony, as he does in “The 4-Hour Body,” lines like: “I was enjoying French food and a bottle of Bordeaux with a 25-year-old female yoga instructor new to San Francisco, fresh from the Midwest.” This poor woman lets slip that she’s unable to have an orgasm. Mr. Ferriss, as any humanitarian would, makes it a point to fix this problem for her. “I was able to facilitate orgasms,” he writes, “in every woman who acted as a test subject.” Everything about Tim Ferriss’s book declares: This is not your auntie’s self-help book. No muffled “I’m OK — You’re OK” tone here. The vibe is: I’m Superbad, bro, and I have dimples. You’re a mole person who, if you become an angel investor in my books, might someday touch the hem of my Speedo.
In "Author Timothy Ferriss says his book holds key to weight loss, great sex" for the San Jose Mercury News, Richard Scheinin wrote this about Timothy Ferriss and The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman
: Wired magazine once dubbed Timothy Ferriss "the Superman of Silicon Valley." Now he has written a choose-your-own-adventure guide for the human body: The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman. Tim Ferriss says he spent 10 years testing hundreds of fads, diets and workouts -- anything that might help readers overhaul their lives. He lives large: Only 33, he is a tango world record holder, a former national kickboxing champion, a faculty member at Singularity University (based at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View), as well as author of the bestselling "The 4-Hour Workweek."Richard Scheinin: "Any self-tests you hated doing in your research?"
Timothy: "I tested all the extremes, so the reader didn't have to. What's extreme? To attempt to reverse degenerative disc disease in my spine, I had stem cell growth factor imported from Israel and injected up and down my spine. It didn't hurt me, but it scared the hell out of me. Needles + spine = unhappy camper. I found better, less invasive options, thankfully."
From Newsweek in "The World’s Best Guinea Pig," a staff writer wrote this: Tim Ferriss is one of those personalities you want to hate, a guy so wildly successful it’s almost comedic. His productivity manifesto, The 4-Hour Workweek, was an instant New York Times bestseller when it debuted in 2007, despite Ferriss’s not knowing the first thing about publishing. He then tried angel investing, and helped fund projects like Twitter. How about a position at Princeton? Sure. Setting a Guinness world record in tango? He’s done that, too. Timothy Ferriss is the epitome of a life hacker: someone who can approach a supposedly experts-only subject and with a few tweaks turn it on its head. His latest target is personal health: The 4-Hour Body is his attempt to understand the human machine with a dose of science and a whole lot of data crunching. He’s just the right guy for the task—he’s recorded almost every workout since age 18, performed more than 1,000 blood tests, and boasts drawers full of gadgets like pulse oximeters and REM sleep trackers. Ferriss’s willingness to be a guinea pig produces some fascinating results. Using a glucometer implanted in his abdomen (ouch), he discovers that food doesn’t move into the bloodstream until hours after a meal—thus rendering useless the pre-workout energy bar—and that both cinnamon and lemon juice can quickly lower your glucose level.
From Kym McNicholas's blog on Forbes.com, "Names You Need To Know In 2011: Timothy Ferriss." Tim Ferriss is starting his own army. It’s an army that’s marching to good health and longevity. He’s devoted his life and career so far, at age 33, to traveling the world searching for the secrets to longevity and living life to the fullest. Tim is an angel investor in start-ups like Twitter, StumbleUpon, Evernote, and other Silicon Valley success stories, but he’s best known for his #1 New York Times bestselling book, “The 4-Hour Workweek.” It’s been translated into 35 languages and has been on the lists for more than three years. His life-long pursuit to teach people how to live longer, healthier lives has now culminated into what could be a huge turning point for his career and for society. It’s called “The 4-Hour Body.” It’s a book about intelligent self-experimentation, at the cusp of a revolution in medical discoveries related to self-tracking. A revolution, you might ask? Imagine people around the world taking health into their own hands, tracking their own health, their physical activity, their diets, and their medicine. And crowdsourcing that data to help find new medical discoveries cheaper and faster than ever. The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman
hit #1 on The New York Times its first week out this December. Timothy Ferriss grew up in East Hampton, NY and graduated from St. Paul's School. He received a degree in East Asian Studies from Princeton University in 2000. In 2001, at the age of 23, Ferriss founded BrainQUICKEN, a San Jose-based online company that sells sports nutrition supplements. He sold the company in January 2009 to an unnamed London-based private equity firm. He is now a full-time angel investor and has invested in the following companies: Twitter, Posterous, DailyBurn (formerly Gyminee), Reputation Defender, Foodzie, Badongo, RescueTime, and SimpleGeo. He also acts as an advisor to StumbleUpon and Shopify, which he has alluded to in interviews with Kevin Rose are in exchange for equity. He holds the Guinness Book of World Records' record for the most consecutive tango-spins in one minute. Ferriss and his dance partner Alicia Monti set the record live on the show Live with Regis and Kelly. Prior to his writing career, Ferriss served as an advisor to professional athletes and Olympians and claims he became the national champion in the 1999 USAWKF Sanshou (Chinese kickboxing) championship through a process of shoving opponents out of the ring. Critics dispute Tim Ferriss' San Shou championship claims by attributing the 1999 championship to Marvin Perry and by the omission of his victories from all major fighting databases. In 2008, Timothy Ferriss won Wired Magazine's "Greatest Self-Promoter of All Time" prize and was named one of Fast Company's "Most Innovative Business People of 2007". Ferriss has also spoken at the EG Conference. His show "Trial By Fire" aired on the History Channel in December 2008. In the show, Ferriss had one week to attempt to learn a skill normally learned over the course of many years and in the pilot episode he practiced the Japanese art of horseback archery, Yabusame. The Aspen Institute named Ferriss a 2009 Henry Crown Fellow in March, 2009. The fellowship "is designed to engage the next generation of leaders in the challenge of community-spirited leadership".
No comments:
Post a Comment