YouSaid · the spoken record

Ricardo Semler

lines on the record: 121
first: 2017-03-19
most recent: 2017-03-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And the answer in following the theory, and people will know this, will tell you, you will be in this little village right here looking up into the sky. And these crazy, crazy concepts, which are true and which are about us, and to say that we are up here in the mountain, so time here moves a little quicker than it does at beach level. And so that you have exact twins who are born, and one is on the beach, one is on the mountain. By the end of 90 years when they meet again, the one in the mountain will be older, will be slightly older. This kind of stuff is to me what unlocks the whole possibility for people to think, boy, I can be anything, do anything, etc., because they're looking at the magical response of what life looks like, what we've learned all along to this date. And that is the key that they can eventually use to free themselves, you see?”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their mind is going all over the place, of course, and we're trying to think this through together. And I said, if you come to the end of the world, the end of the new universe, and there were a little curtain. And now you've traveled for thousands and thousands and thousands of years in your rocket ship and so forth. And now, according to this man, Mr. Einstein, you opened this little curtain at the end of the universe. Where would you be?”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get them to realize the magic of the accumulated wisdom of humankind and that poking at this magic of what we've been able to do and think in all this time, all the rest will take care of itself. And so if I sit there and say, you can do this, you can find the strength within you. It is possible you can do anything you want. You can be anything you want. I don't believe in that. And so I kept showing them things like I would say, I remember one day stepping outside them and I said, I'm going to teach you the special relativity theory of Einstein. So it's like this. You're here with me in this little village, right? Right. Now you look up and I say, how long would it take you to go to the moon? And so they'd say this and that and rockets. And then from moon to the next and on and on into Neptune and rain, great. And then to the edge of the universe.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I have, obviously, you talk way too much, so we haven't had time to talk about education, which I'd love to. as well. But of course I've taken, let's say, the last 10, 12 years, I've taken all of this effort and this risk-taking and what I'd learned before and taken it to the world of education. But I spent the first few years of that teaching six-year-olds in a public school and heavily disadvantaged kids and so forth. So it was fun to do. What I tried to do most with them was to”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Class changing path from what for the context which you were started with is a very, very rare situation. And that very, very rare situation makes for wonderful books and speeches and films, but it only makes for these wonderful, for this wonderful entertainment because it's so, so rarely true. Now, is that very dismal and disappointing to look at and say, boy, you know, now that you've put this in my face now, I'm not going to try anything, it's not even worth it. No, it's just to remember that in the passing of time of the station of life that was created or available to you in your context, there could be and should be a wonderful life. The wonderful life is not in rising all the time until you're at the top. There's nothing that's particularly interesting at the top. It just seems absolutely wonderful when you look at it from the bottom.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's wonderful. And just on that tone, Tim, to say that you're in a country that says, boy, anybody can do anything, anybody can be anything. Don't let anybody stand in your way. You can be, etc. But it's not really true at all. This is, I think, a very interesting take on this documentary and on the American dream. Even what's happening today in the US is a reaction to this. Where the fuck is my American dream that was promised to me? But the fact is that you're promising classroom of kids and as a valedictorian and speaking at conferences and egging them on at MBAs, the fact is that you cannot, you know, humanity has a very, very long story and a very, very long proof that in general your chance of changing walks of life, changing”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All multiples of seven, but it's the same people, which is extraordinary. You've seen someone who's seven, who's 14, who's 21, who's 28, who's now 56, and their dreams and their hopes and what they were actually able to do and how close they in these seven-year periods, how close they have stayed to their calling, a parent calling in life before they were born. It's an incredible situation.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And for people listening to us, it's a guy, Michael, Apted, who in 1964 decided to follow about a dozen actually more kids from very different backgrounds and in the UK and some in orphanages and some very well-off. To try and establish how much people are stuck to Their context, to their social context, and so forth. It's very interesting because he follows them every seven years, right? So it's 714, 21, 28, and so forth until 56, which was the last one. And it's quite an extraordinary way to look at humanity and see, can people really escape their social constraints and their initial lay of life? And in general, his assumption is that they cannot, and to a great sense, it bears itself out, notes him in the sense that it doesn't look like you can stray that far from the path on average.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Once in a while, they pick up because it's around the house and because my wife is a bit more religious, is the Bible, but it was a wonderful set of stories, philosophy, etc. And I read it much like you would read Shakespeare, you know, and it's extraordinary because it has everything. Shakespeare has all of the human traits, if you look somewhere, you will find it either in King Lear and Hamletter and Macbeth. It's there. And the Bible was very interesting book to keep going back to get a glimpse of humanity.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Always go back to two books won by Carl Jung and this whole issue of collective unconscious, which is to me a big issue because you either are able to touch in and touch and get involved somehow in this collective unconscious, or you're doing things which are very much on your own and not significant in the sense that they're trailblazing, et cetera. They're just not connected to the world as they should be. And another one I keep going back to is very interesting because I come from a Jewish family, even though nobody was religious. There's a cultural and ethnic issue there, but I only found out actually I was Jewish maybe 10 years ago. And even though I was suspicious of it. But the one that I read, I read...”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were a total of 12 Mercedes, which I don't have. And I said, How much does it bother you? He said, Oh, it keeps me awake many nights. He said, and I keep going at it, and I'm going crazy and I'm like, I need to have these 12 more cents. And at that moment, I stopped buying any wine whatsoever.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mercedes. And he said, and I have the mercy of the first Mercedes of 1896, which is a steam Mercedes. And I have all the Mercedes in between. And I said, what do you mean? He said, no, every time there is a Mercedes that comes out, every year they come out with, let's say, six models, I buy one of each. And when Mercedes needed Himmler's car and the car that Hitler went into Paris, I lent them the cars because I have the cars. And so I was there obviously stunned at this conversation and all the smoking and I thought, Jesus, what little do I know about interesting people or freaky people around the world? And then at one point I said, well, so you just keep on collecting. He says, that, of course, I have to go. I have to go in a few days. I'm going to an auction because there are several Mercedes.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The tease has a bit of an obsession for things, and so far, and he said he collects things. I said, What do you collect? And he said, I collect Mercedes cars. So you have a lot of these. And he said, Yeah, I have a lot of these. I have 111 warehouses.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually remember it very well. It was very specific. I went to Thailand. And in Thailand I met this guy who's actually Chinese, but he was in Thailand and he was a tomato farmer and he had mini mills. He had these mini steel mills, steel mills, and he was a magnate and he'd made, he was a real tycoon he'd made enormous amounts of money, etc. And we went to have dinner with this guy. He was smoking all through the dinner. And I asked him, you know, how many cigarettes he smokes a day or packs? And he said, no, I like when in bed. And then I light all the cigarettes with another cigarette. So I never did the math on that, but it can't be very good. But anyway, so he would eat with one hand and he would puff with the other. And at no moment did he stop smoking. And then we started talking about, he said.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If one day I look at my seller and I do now, and it's about half empty or more, it is now about half empty. And I think that every time I pulled one of those bottles, it was because I was with friends or because I was feeling good or this was a great time. This must have been a good life looking at those empty holes, you know? And so that's, I think, with everything else. If you're using that time and at the end of it, you say, boy, that was a good two hours. This was worth it, then success is certainly guaranteed.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it's just a way of saying that this whole process of wine is a good comparison because one guy told me if you kept seeing what gets you into your cellar and makes you take a bottle of wine which you paid $100 for and is now worth $1,000 and drink this and be left with a little bit of glass because you end up probably not even having the courage to drink this wine that now is so valuable, et cetera, et cetera. But I've always answered that in the following way.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With for a time, I was buying much more wine than I should have because I was kind of, I got into the collector's mode about 25, 30 years ago. And so I kept buying at auctions. And of course, you get into this thing where you need to have that 1959 mouton otherwise and so forth. And so you go crazy at auction, you overpay and so forth. And one of these days I had a friend over and I opened one of these wonderful wines that were extraordinary, extraordinary year and I outbid Ford and so forth. And this stuff”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Through the use of this wisdom of present time, of which I'm very far still from it, but I just keep hammering it into my own head that this passing of time, if this podcast and conversation with you was worth it because it made me think because it was thoughtful for us and so forth, that is success and that can never be taken away no matter tomorrow I don't have the money or I don't have this or things go wrong god forbid with people. The fact is that that one hour, two hours which we spent in the broadcasting about life and thinking and exchanging, that that one was definitely worthwhile and successful and that one can no longer be taken away from you because it's now part. And when it becomes part of your history or your past, it's just building blocks of time that we're here to spend. You know, I had an interesting situation.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I try to exchange these lenses of past and future for living in the present, which is the only very difficult thing to do. We talk about it, but nobody knows how to do it. You know, James Taylor said in a song that the meaning of life is to enjoy the passing of time. Enjoying the passing of time is by far the hardest thing we can ever do. And we take your thought process. We are almost constantly living in the past or in the future. And so success to me is always making sure that this passing of time is worthwhile, that this passing of time right now, that I'm not exchanging it for a hope in the future. I'm not exchanging it for something I got or had in the past, and that you're always kind of ready to survive or to withstand.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's tremendous guys that are until you kill your girlfriend, and then suddenly all those other successes don't sit very well. Now, can you do your things, have your successes, build up your metrics, et cetera, and then retire and sit tight for 20, 30 years enjoying, et cetera? Probably the feeling inside is that slow your worlds are deteriorating in the sense that your friends are dying, the press is no longer interested in you, and you become a has-been who still has a few things to nail up on the wall or remember jaded photographs of you with someone very important. And so I think that the success factor in this metric of how you measure yourself is very, very fragile. And when we stick to it, we stick to something that won't be there when we try to hold it in our hands. It has to be held.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so what is success in that past? So what I meant to say was that your home runs and the businesses you built and the money you haven't supported. It is all very, very fragile. And it's probably going to be measured with how you handle yourself in a few, very few decisive moments in your life and or in the end, you know, the last few things you did are terribly important compared to what you did before. Or this guy keeping his name, Pastorios or Pistori.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I meant to say was what is success for this guy? Was it the 34 years in which he had yachts and planes and every president, everybody would receive him, he'd do wonderful things and so forth? Or is it now so tainted by this last image of himself that he will never recover? You know, and I'm no judgment at all. I'm just saying that when you think about this, I think about some of the people who are presidents of Brazil, some people who are presidents of the US, who are there at 50 or 60, and their life is over. It's no longer a success. It keeps deteriorating as the years go by. You take someone like Clinton, who has an extraordinary mind, did a lot of good things, but did it made a few enormous mistakes with cigars and trainees that he will never recover from.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business, otherwise he wouldn't have gotten where he got. And he has his dark side as well and so forth. So he got to this point. I don't know him personally. I've never met him. But he got to this point where he was this billionaire and he had this enormous projects and he was doing wonderful things and he had on the side he had hobbies and restaurants and yachts and doing things for poor people and on and on and on and on. Now he's in jail. I don't know for how long, maybe even not that long. But the fact is that he has his hair products company and he was always very proud of his hair and you know another guy who has similar hair. And he in jail, the first thing they did was to shave him bald. So you see now...”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We know that a lot of these apparent successes and apparent things that we call home runs, they're also temporary, right? In that sense that you do something and the last mile of everything you do is probably what's going to count. This is also an ironic turn on life, which is that you go there and you spend 20, 30 years. Today, this day today, today, we had one of our biggest billionaires in Brazil fall into jail. He was in New York over the weekend and he was arrested and he's involved in a corruption charge and he was the seventh richest man in the world who's by far Brazil's richest person. His 2030 years of unearning successes and one success on top of the other were all wonderful and he obviously has a genius for”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other risk factor is how will I look to myself, to my spouse, to my kids, to my former business partners, to my people? Now, how will I look if I fall flat on my face? And I think that this element of risk is the one that doesn't bother me almost at all because I think it is so ephemeral, you know. You get a bad press or you get a bad opinion from neighbors or your wife is dismayed that you actually did this. I think all this goes away very easily and relatively quickly. It might take a few months, a few years, but all this goes away. And it's not to say that it's worth doing because if you do succeed, then you will show them all your rubber face or you'll be happier, you'll be gratified yourself, even because”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you try and deconstruct risk, I'd say there's an objective metric associated with risk. So I'm going to start this business. I'm going to take 32% of my savings and I might lose it all. So that's a kind of metric that I think is less scary because you know that it's 32%. You know that if you lose it, it's going to be trouble for some time and then some restrictions, et cetera. But it is an outside metric which you are willing to accept. If you say, I'm going to take a plane and I know that the statistical risk is zero, zero, zero, four or this or of that, or it be coming late and 100 times smaller of the plane falling. And I'll take that risk. That bit, I think, scares people very little, even though they may bring it up. I think people use it very much as an excuse because”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I think we give ourselves an enormous amount of importance into our time. And I think doing absurd things related to wasting time, I think, are a wonderful way to remind ourselves that we're neither that important nor that necessary or none of that much happens when you do absurd things with your time. And I think purposely looking like you're wasting it, I think is an absurdly wonderful thing to do.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have all these old line habits, one of them comes from Winston Churchill, which is to sit in a bathtub with a lit cigar. I'm sure it'll pass a lot of people's test of absurdity. But so sometimes I'll say, you know, now I will do nothing and I will sit in a bathroom for an hour and a half with a very long cigar and think like Winston Churchill. And I always remember this especially well because Churchill was a guy who was even in power and to an extent this happened to FDR as well when he had his polio thing in Florida. But Winston Churchill would go off a bit before Christmas and take a ship to Egypt where he would go to the same winter Palace Hotel in Luxor and he would spend 65 days there while he was running the country.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not comparing the opportunities with each other and rather compare them what would I do if I had the whole day off. The best feeling I have in my time is never the Monday and Thursday, which I do love when I get up. I'm in bed thinking today I have nothing to do. It is on that Tuesday or on that Friday when I have something set, a conference call or a visit or something and that gets canceled. That's my most wonderful moment as always when I have stuff to do and somebody cancels it. There's an enormous sense of relief no matter how important it was or which I was looking forward to when somebody cancels something I feel elated. And so I think that kind of answers a bit as well, no?”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That door is open just for you, but you say, you know, is it better to talk to these guys in Denver or to do this thing in London? But the real question was, what the hell for am I doing either of these? And I think you'll end up with the reply that the things that you can look back on, you said that was a good one, two hours, three hours of my life because I either shared something, I learned something. It felt good. These are all wonderful responses. You went to the baseball game, you're not losing two hours of your life. That's a wonderful way to spend those two hours if you love baseball on and on. And so it's not about nothingness or undoing yourself or considering yourself worthless and therefore it's not worth doing anything. But it is especially about”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I start asking myself, so what do I want to do? I could read the paper, but I don't really want to read the paper. And the news is this and that. I could read that book, but now I'm halfway there. I could, and you're stuck, I think many times with the issue that we keep ourselves so busy. And we have all of these distractions and attractions and things going at such a rate that when you actually turn off all the noise and say which of these things do I really want to do, you have much more trouble than you thought you did. And so when we put that book out there as you did and you have requests and you have opportunities, you really just kind of measure the opportunities of what to do against each other. In that sense, it's a bit like Kafka again, you know? Definitely.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you can be worried about the state of nations and poverty and immigration policies. But if there's a speck of dust in your eye, you're going to spend the next hour and a half only dealing with that. There's nothing else of any importance in the world while there's a speck in your eye and your eye is watering. So what I meant by this is that on Mondays and Thursdays, let's say I stop to think I wake up and one of the first things I do is lounge in bed, meaning I haven't had an alarm clock, I think, for 15 or 20 years, but I say I will not get out of bed. And of course, that doesn't last very long, but the feeling is good. And then I'm with the kids and so forth. And then suddenly they get into the van and they're gone. And suddenly everything is quiet in one second.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you're left with the issue of what am I doing this for? So my answer to all of this, because if you take this to its ultimate consequence, you could easily be in a situation where you say, I do nothing anymore because nothing is worth it, because nothing will reply to the issue of metrics, nothing will satisfy me enough, nothing is really worth it if we are these useless.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The French book by Saint-Espirie, which says that you are responsible for everything that you captivate. And so you kind of feel that why did I write the book in the first place? If I wrote it in first place, that means that I should go to this syndicated radio show because that'll sell more books and more people will be happy and I'll feel better on and on. And you're caught with metrics because somebody will say, so Tim, how many people listen to your podcast? Oh, a million or this and I'm number 13 or I'm number 11 and number six. And people have caught you up in their vortex of metrics as well until something happens. You retire, you die and so forth. And it goes away because you're a non-contender from there on. And then it's perfectly all right. And then you have to think who the hell is going to remember 20 years from now or 40 years from now.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That quickly because you trick yourself into thinking this is six months and then it'll be okay. But we know it's not because I just had, for example, I got yesterday, I just got my two copies of the Chinese edition of my book of 1993. So it takes a little bit of time for things to happen, right? So, you know, I got the Czech Republic edition of the Seven-Day Weekend about a month ago. So this stuff just takes on a life of its own. And then every time a request comes for your time, you stutter, you know. You say, well, you know, I don't really want to take this flight and go to this place and do this. But on the other hand, I kind of have a responsibility to do that. And it's a little bit like the little prince, you know.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and going from back to front, I've been writing a book in my head now for the last two, three years, and I'm just scared of putting it out there because you are then caught in a vortex of your own making, you know. And you get a publisher and then you kind of sell them the idea that you'll be there and they're kind of saying, I'm going to do this. If I need you for the today show, you're going to be there, right? And you're kind of, yeah, I'll try and so forth. But the fact is that you didn't really want, you never really want to take on the whole weight of proving yourself, doing your thing and satisfying all the co-sponsors of your effort, right? And so there's the book launch. And there's no end, of course.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And said, boy, if I did this and I put these two companies together, and that I would have something else, if it's going to take away one of my Mondays or Thursdays or going to take one of the times or many of the times I can't pick up my kids from school, et cetera, it's certainly a bad deal, no matter how much money or what metric it is, you know.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How much do I need to have in able to lead the life that I do? And Swiss bankers used to say that you need to have 20 times more than you spend per year. And kind of as a rule of thumb, that's not bad because that says you need about a 5% return on monies you have. So if your lifestyle costs you and you say it takes me $5,000 a month to live minimally the way I want, that's $60,000. And so you need assets in the value of a million two house plus money, whatever. So because I've been always starting from what it is that I need minimally to have fun and to do the many fun things that you can do with money, I just multiply that by 20. If it's over 20, I don't wear anymore. And thankfully, I haven't worked for a while. But if I looked at the opportunity,”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wishes for things that I could buy with money, you know, my kids and my wife are constantly frustrated by the fact that there's nothing that can buy me, you know, because it's gotten to that point where I don't need it or I don't want it or it doesn't tick home my fancy and so forth. So I'm not left with metrics saying I'd love to have another this or the money. I've been doing math now, I think, Tim on my personal finances for 30 something years or more or 40 years on the same rationale, which is”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it sounds like you'll be able to do this for hours on end, but you won't. And so if you're healthy and you're in good shape and so forth and you have your entire day ahead of you and nothing to do, you start answering very, very interesting questions about what you really want and what really moves. So still going back to answer your question, the fact is that I'm not left with goals and I'm left with a whole set of wonderful processes that I love and I'd love to do again and again. But I no longer need or want to do something that I can measure. You know, the metrics, I think, have gone away. This process of doing what I want with the people I love the Taiwan, that's entirely a process on its own. It's a goal on its own. And so there's no longer, I have no.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I only do what it is I would do if I had just recently learned that I had a terminal disease. It sounds dark, but it isn't really because it's just all about the freedom that you've just gained. And these days that you've just gotten back to do whatever you want to do the way you do it. And trying to answer to yourself what you really want to do. Because in the beginning, you have these long lists of things you would do if you had the free time, but it's not really true. I'd read all these books which are sitting there and I hadn't read. I'd listen to all this music, which I hadn't. But you do this for an hour or two or three. But then it gets old as well. And there's a reason why you didn't do enough of it.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On your back, and you have three months left or six months, which happened to my parents and to people, to others before them. And I kept thinking, geez, I don't want to be in that situation where suddenly now I have to go to ball games with the kids and now I have to travel to places I haven't been and I have to write that play, which I never wrote. I said, that's crazy. So let's do something else. And that's when I started what my wife doesn't like, the name I give, but on Mondays and Thursdays, I have what I call terminal days. And terminal days are the two days a week in which my schedule is always completely clear. I have nothing. And I do on those days what I would have done had I heard this conversation from my oncologist. And so I've been doing this for quite a while. And so my weekends are with the kids and family and so forth. And Mondays and Thursdays.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other day I told my wife, and I think I said this at a talk or something that I'm facing an empty bucket list, you know. and my empty bucket list is all about saying this that my family has all everyone in my family had melanoma had a form of very drastic cancer which is very quick and and i don't know about 15 20 years ago i was already scanned and they told me at the time i already that had 100 chance of melanoma and cancer and i've actually had it two three times in the in the meantime but if you if you watch out for it of course you can be quick and remove it and i just had surgery again about three four months ago found a new one and it there's nothing to it really you you identify you know what it looks like you go there you have it moved and off you go but i kept thinking uh you know sitting in front of my my oncologist my cancer doctor looking at me and saying well ricardo this time it went you didn't see it it was on”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say it is not even naive, you know. So the whole rationale of every time we have these small choices the whole day long and by week and month and years as we go by, it's very easy to differentiate between that which is a little bit less self-serving and that which is only for your own good. And if you make enough of these choices along, I think that at these dark moments or at these moments of enormous risk, it's kind of like a destiny or a balance that is in place and that takes care of you somehow, you know?”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, going completely wrong or going completely And And my feeling there, Tim, is that if you're really not spending most of your time tricking people into things and finding ways on the side to make things work or to make money and you're not, you're doing your basic humanity is basic in place. My feeling is that you'll be all right. You'll be all right. And I think that's what carries me through in the end. It's not religious, it's not structured in any form, but it's this kind of feeling that you don't have to do all that much just to plod along without being”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so my feeling is that because of this insignificance, which is, let's say, paired with the fact that we're terribly important to ourselves and we're almost 100% of our importance to ourselves, we're also insignificant in any other regard. And we noticed that when somebody passes away or when we remember something that we'd forgotten entirely, that this stuff all becomes dust very quickly. And so my feeling when things are dark or going madly is that it doesn't seem reasonable to me. It never seemed reasonable to me for things to go completely a. And so my feeling is that”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I have a kind of an unerving and unwavering belief that we're very, very insignificant, have really no idea what's going on. We're not given. It's not given to us to understand anything that's really important. Anything that you say is really, really fundamental in life. We know nothing about. We know nothing about love. We know nothing about death. We know nothing. All the really important things we don't know. If you take, you go to a doctor and you go for a second opinion, a third opinion, et cetera, you will always realize that the first question, the first wire man, do I have this or you have this because you're nerve on this, the that, the second one, et cetera. But the third why to any doctor is that we don't know, right? Everything is that we don't know. And anything that's really important, we don't know.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that I can move on. And I think that the real fears are always somebody calls you and says, oh, for example, two, three weeks ago, somebody called me and my older kid was snowboarding and he says, I'm calling you from the hospital. We have to operate on your son. You know, things like that where your whole life just kind of falls apart beneath you. You go and do what needs to be done. But you realize how fragile it is to think that you're successful and you have these big houses and you have all these people working for you and so forth. But this stuff is all very, very delicate and very fragile. So I think there are a lot of dark moments in which you realize what little it takes for you to kind of lose everything that you were standing on, you know?”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was just scaring myself into things. Or two, that I was luckily I got through that bend in the road, et cetera. So the answer is, first of all, no, it's far from easy, even though I've been terribly lucky all along. And so if you say, let me tell me the story of the 10 companies that you started that went bust, that's easy because there's more than 10. The amount of people that you've put together to do something that became nothing, the kind of hopes you had for things that you were going to do that went nowhere, you know? And I've written plays. I put on plays and then spent a year in the theater learning all about drama and putting place together and so forth. And I've been lucky enough that most of the stuff kind of wanders off or is reasonably.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that, and some moments later, we've never come to that same financial situation anymore exactly, but I'd come to that situation looking at marriage, looking at how I was raising kids, looking at the opportunity to have a much richer life and finding myself stuck in the own traps that I'd set for myself of doing things that I still had to do because I said I was going to do them and not trying to. And so this whole process, I think there were many dark moments in which in front of, let's say, family or business or wife or choices forking of roads where looking back, I realized either that it wasn't as dark as I thought it was.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT