Tribe of mentors

Tribe of Mentors

The Question That Started Everything

Tim Ferriss turned forty and panicked. Not in the cliché car-and-mistress way. He had already done the version of midlife crisis that doesn't get its own movie: at twenty, in college, he had come close to suicide. Now, two decades later, on the cusp of his fortieth birthday, with The Four-Hour Workweek celebrating its tenth anniversary, he realized something quietly terrifying — he had no plan for after forty. The book he had written, the one that had been rejected twenty-seven times before anyone published it, had become so woven into his identity that he could no longer tell which of his goals were actually his own and which were inherited, performed, or simply borrowed from the version of himself he had been at thirty.

So he sat down and asked himself a question he now uses for almost everything — business decisions, relationship decisions, decisions about whether to get out of bed. The question is: what would this look like if it were easy? Not what is the hardest path. Not what would prove I am a serious person. Just: easy. Elegance instead of strain. He calls it a "lovely and deceptively leveraged question," and he means it. Because when you actually try to answer it, the answer is almost never what you are currently doing.

The easy answer for his crisis turned out to be this book. Instead of trying to solve forty alone, what if he assembled a tribe of mentors — a hundred or more of the world's top performers — and asked them the questions he himself wanted answered? What if he sent them all the same eleven questions and let them choose which ones to respond to? No gatekeepers, no hierarchy, no "you have to earn this." Just the assembled wisdom of people who had already lived through whatever you happen to be stuck in.