Over more than a decade of interviewing successful people, Tim Ferriss has noticed two specific traits that he says most of them have in common.
They practice some type of meditation regularly, he says — and they’re good at saying “no.”
Ferriss is well-acquainted with success as an early investor in tech companies like Facebook, Uber and Twitter, and as the author of multiple New York Times bestselling books. He’s interviewed hundreds of successful people — from fellow entrepreneurs and investors to athletes, entertainers and mental health experts — on “The Tim Ferriss Show,” a podcast he launched in 2014.
Practicing both skills — meditation and saying “no” when necessary — can help improve your ability to focus, says Ferriss, a bestselling author, investor and entrepreneur. Most successful people are able to “train themselves and the people around them to understand certain priorities during certain periods of time, and those are all learnable skills, in my opinion,” he says.
“That means internal and external distractions are blocked off,” Ferriss adds.
The benefits of meditation
“I would say at least 70%, probably more than 80%, [of those people] have some type of what I and even they would describe as a meditative practice, whether that’s actual meditation or something very similar in terms of [the] benefits,” says Ferriss.
That includes various types of “simple meditation” that you can do “once or twice a day… typically in the mornings,” says Ferriss, who practices Transcendental Meditation (TM) himself. TM is a proprietary form of meditation that requires participants to sit for up to 20 minutes at a time, twice per day, while silently repeating a mantra. Famous adherents include Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio.
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Billionaire Bill Gates is another proponent of meditation — a practice he picked up in his 60s after years of dismissing the practice as “a woo-woo thing tied somehow to reincarnation,” he wrote in a December 2018 blog post. He touted the practice as “an exercise for the mind” that improved his focus, even just doing it “two or three times a week, for about 10 minutes each time,” he wrote.
If more formal types of meditation don’t appeal to you, or you have trouble sitting still, other types of exercise can help you relax and improve your concentration, Ferriss says. Running can serve as a form of meditation, helping you calm your mind and focus, psychologists say.
“It could be something like swimming, running: something that has a sort of rhythmic nature to it,” Ferriss says.
Know how to say ‘no’
Most of the successful people Ferriss has interacted with are “very good at saying ‘no’ and putting on blinders in our current world of noise,” he says.
He points to a quote from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who once said he was proud to have said “no” to so many ideas, leading to his company only selling what he considered the very best products. “Focusing is about saying ‘no,'” Jobs said at Apple’s 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), adding: “You’ve got to say ‘no, no, no’ and when you say ‘no,’ you piss off people.”
Countless people, events and devices will always vie for your attention, at work and at home, and learning to say “no” to distractions can make you more productive. For some people, that means carving out a block of time — or even a dedicated workspace — to have uninterrupted focus on a project, free from social media or other people, Ferriss notes.
Some experts recommend practicing polite phrases to turn away, even temporarily, people seeking your attention when you need to focus. Try “May I take a day to get back to you?” or the more blunt, “Sorry, no,” efficiency expert Juliet Funt wrote for CNBC Make It in June 2021.
Warren Buffett agrees, summing up his philosophy on the importance of saying “no” in an interview for author James Clear’s 2018 book “Atomic Habits.”
“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything,” Buffett said.
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