Timothy Ferriss's Blog, page 114

Excess can sometimes be delicious.

Thanksgiving is a great example. The NYC Food Marathon, however, takes things to an entirely new level. Think of it as a 24-hour Thanksgiving on steroids: 26.2 iconic dishes in 26 locations, all hit by foot in 24 hours.

It’s one of the most insanely fun ways to spend a Saturday.

Which restaurants (and dishes) would you pick for a food marathon in your own city? Please let us know in the comments. Here are the ones we picked in NYC with the help of top chefs…

[The following is excerpted from The 4-Hour Chef.]

The 4-Hour Chef excerpt

The 4-Hour Chef has arrived and is available today.

It’s 672 pages of full-color goodness that required blood, sweat, and tears (literally) for nearly two years.  Putting it together was brutal.  In the end, I think it’s the best book I’ve written, a very unusual choose-your-own-adventure guide to learning and life.  I really hope you like it.

This week is a big ‘un.  To get us started…

- I will be on Dr. Oz today for 30+ minutes.  Full of surprises.  Find local times at the bottom-right corner here.

- All NYC cabs will soon be running a 15-second version of The 4-Hour Chef cinematic trailer.  I thought it’d be fun to carpet bomb the city.  Why not?  The trailer has nearly 1.5 million views and is now the most-viewed non-fiction book trailer of all-time.

- I’ve partnered with TaskRabbit to automate grocery shopping nationwide.  For all recipes in the first DOMESTIC section, you can order ingredients for each “lesson” with one click.  Click here to see if it’s available in your city.

- Come hang out with me in NYC today!  From 3pm-6pm ET, I’ll be signing books (my only NYC book signing!) at Panera Bread at 452 5th Avenue (at 39th).  Hope to see you there.

- If you haven’t yet, please consider buying the book as a X-mas/holiday gift!  The more, the merrier!  It’s truly a gorgeous book…easily the most beautiful thing I’ve ever made.  The 4-Hour Chef was #2 on Amazon earlier, but it’s currently getting blasted by an unexpected onslaught of Disney Nursery Rhymes.  Merciless!

- The UK edition of The 4-Hour Chef also launches today.  I’ve always wanted a simultaneous US/UK launch.  Now my friends across the pond don’t have to wait for “pants” to become “trousers”!  I’ll be visiting London in January to party with y’all.  Stay tuned.

In the meanwhile, I’ll be following Chef Thomas Keller’s instructions…

The kitchen of Thomas Keller’s Per Se in New York City. It is only one of seven restaurants in the US to be awarded three Michelin stars. (Photo from The 4-Hour Chef)

Barnes & Noble is boycotting The 4-Hour Chef in its 723 or so retail locations nationwide.

That makes me cry a little, but… Panera Bread has nearly 1,500 bakery-cafes in the US. Starting today, Monday, November 19th, I’m running an experiment with my good friends at Panera.

24 hours before the official pub date of The 4-Hour Chef, you can get an advanced copy at one of Panera’s four downtown Manhattan locations. Books will be on-sale from 10am-6pm EST. Not only that, but you can now order 4-Hour Chef-approved Slow-Carb Diet® dishes in the same locations. Just tell them you’re ordering from the “hidden menu”.

Pay ‘em a visit and check out the new set-up — it’s all a hint of things to come:

86th and Lexington Ave.

29th St. and 7th Ave.

10 Union Sq. East

39th St. and 5th Ave

For the official pub date — Tuesday, 11/20 — I’ll be signing and selling copies of The 4-Hour Chef at the 5th Avenue location from 3pm-6pm.  I’d love to see you and say hello in person!

Big things are afoot.  Plans are being schemed.  Old models shall be stress-tested.

A teaser:  If you order the hardcover of The 4-Hour Chef by 11:59pm PST tonight, you will get a $5 Amazon Gift Card automatically.  Then, the Kindle edition of The 4-Hour Chef will mysteriously drop from $9.99 to $4.99 at midnight (11/19) and remain that price until midnight 11/26.  This means:  If you order the full-color hardcover of The 4-Hour Chef  (the optimal reading experience, IMHO) before midnight tonight, you can get the Kindle edition for free!  Details here.

And not to worry: If you already ordered the hardcover, you’ll still get the $5 gift card. If you ordered the Kindle edition at a higher price, you’ll only be charged the $4.99.  Winning.

Much, much more to come.  BitTorrent and Panera partnerships are just the beginning.

Kia kaha,

Tim

###

If you missed the samples from every section, here they are again:

Front Matter:  (PDF, blog post)

Introduction:  (PDF, blog post)

Meta-Learning:  (PDF, blog post)

The Domestic:  (PDF, blog post)

The Wild:  (PDF, blog post)

The Scientist:  (PDF, blog post)

The Professional:  (PDF, blog post)

Thanksgiving 2011–Darya Pino of Summer Tomato, chowing down at my house. Food = Love.

I can’t wait for launch! Less than 48 hours away…

To whet your appetite, here are sample pages from every section of The 4-Hour Chef.  The PDFs are far prettier (and from the book), but the blog posts may load faster:

Front Matter:  (PDF, blog post)

Introduction:  (PDF, blog post)

Meta-Learning:  (PDF, blog post)

The Domestic:  (PDF, blog post)

The Wild:  (PDF, blog post)

The Scientist:  (PDF, blog post)

The Professional:  (PDF, blog post)

There is also a soundtrack (yes, a soundtrack) for The 4-Hour Chef. Here are the 29 songs.

Good news: if you already bought a print copy of The 4-Hour Chef, you’ll be getting a $5 Amazon Gift Card! This brings the effective cost from $21 down to $16. That’s more than 50% off the $35 cover price!

Until tomorrow (Monday, November 19th) at 11:59 p.m. PST, Amazon is offering a $5 gift card to anyone who orders the hardcover edition of The 4-Hour Chef. Find all the details, fine print, and naked pictures of me here. Just kidding on the naked pics.

What else might Amazon be up to this week? Hmmm… How about full-page ads in People Magazine and bus wraps in NYC? That’s just the tip of the iceberg…

“Errata” is a fancy way of saying corrections in a book or article. The 4-Hour Chef is going into a second printing, and here are a few screw-ups we caught and are fixing:

SCI

p. 472: Tanya Harding should be Tonya Harding

PRO

p. 500 (2nd to last line): eying should be eyeing

p. 505

Under Technology, (left-hand column, second line from the bottom), the sentence should read “It has a surface that can be lowered to -30ºF.” Currently it reads “45ºF.

APX:

p. 573: Correct spelling of Liechtenstein in the shorthand recipes.

p. 606: In the quote attribution at the top of the page, correct the spelling of Rain Man–should be two words.

###

Tonya Harding AND Rain Man in a cookbook?  Oh, yes.  Not to mention Calvin & Hobbes and Alessandra Ambrosio, too…

The following is a guest post by John-Clark Levin, Joe Luchsinger, and Jason Soll.

I’ve been waiting for the perfect time to publish it, and today is that day. Why? I have big battles coming next week, and they make me want to tackle the world.

By the time you finish reading this post, you’ll learn how they:

• Booked the heart of Times Square for three days for only $20

• Brought together teams of elite competitors from as far away as Nepal and New Zealand

• Organized a record-breaking competition as full-time college students…from 3,000 miles away

• Received a promotion on every page of YouTube.com, ultimately receiving over 800,000 webcast views and tens of thousands of comments during the course of the event

• Landed extensive coverage by the Wall Street Journal, ABC, NBC, CBS, and AOL News

• More than doubled the previous Guinness World Record for the Longest Continuous Handshake

After telling the crazy story behind this event, called “Shaking History,” they’ll teach:

• How systematically studying both your successes and failures can take you to the next level

• Why taking on charitable projects allows you to make astounding breakthroughs in the size and scale of your endeavors

• How to achieve spectacular results by defining your own “best practices”

• Why you can be the best in the world at something

Now, on to the story…

“This is Jason, leave a message after the beep.”

I pressed the cellphone to my head, trying to be heard over the hubbub of JFK’s Terminal 4.  “Jason, this is John-Clark.  Still no sign of the Nepalese, but they should have arrived more than an hour ago.  But listen–I’m starting to really feel sick here.  Call me back when you can.”

The arrivals lobby swam in and out of focus.  I steadied myself on a steel railing, scanning the crowd of unfamiliar faces for two people I had never met in my life.

Brothers Rohit and Santosh Timilsina had never been to the United States–Santosh, the younger one, had never been outside Nepal at all.  Yet they were about to appear on the way out of customs, and my job was to ferry them safely to their hotel in Midtown Manhattan.  The eyes of their home country were upon them, and thousands waited eagerly for news of their safe arrival.  The Nepalese government had seen them off with great fanfare.  The Brothers Timilsina had flown here from the other side of the world for a simple handshake.

It had all started almost two years before.  One of my lifelong goals had been to break a Guinness World Record and make it into the bestselling book, but I had always dismissed that as something to attempt in some future time and place.  But one night during my Freshman year of college, a startling idea came to me: now was the time.  I quickly researched records that might be possible to break, in search of the entry that would fulfill my childhood dream. When most people think of what it takes to set a Guinness World Record, they imagine holding insects in their mouth, juggling chainsaws, or pulling jumbo jets across a runway.  There is a different record, though, that all of us have experience with.  It is a gesture of good will, peace and friendship the world over: the handshake.  I found a college friend to shake hands with, and we started practicing to achieve the world’s “Longest Continuous Handshake.”  Guinness World Records sets incredibly high standards—the standing record was 10 hours, and even the slightest pause in our handshake could nullify the attempt.  With a great sense of urgency, we secured the use of our college’s main auditorium and directed well-wishers to make donations on our behalf to the Cancer Research Institute.  Two weeks to the day after the idea first came to me, we had achieved the longest handshake in human history: 10 hours, 10 minutes, 10 seconds.  But that was only the beginning of the story.

The following summer, an Australian team broke our record, and less than a month later, we took the record back with an even longer handshake.  The following year, I was doing research for an article I wrote for the Wall Street Journal about my experience breaking the handshake record, when I learned that my record had been broken by a pair of brothers from Nepal.  My second record, 15 hours, 15 minutes and 15 seconds, had been easily broken by the new attempt in Kathmandu, which clocked in at 19 hours, 35 minutes.

And it wasn’t just the Nepalese who were interested in this record.  As I researched, I found that teams from Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the UK had also notched record-breaking handshakes–each time to raise money and awareness for various charities.  What was lacking in these attempts, though, was the motivating pressure of direct competition.  Even in my own attempt, my shaking partner and I had simply decided on a time and paced ourselves until we got there.  Not much drama in that.

I talked over the problem with two college friends, Jason Soll and Joe Luchsinger.  They agreed that if there were some way to bring these teams together for a head-to-head competition, not only would the world record likely be shattered, but the impact for the charities was almost certain to be magnified greatly.  Jason could manage the event, while Joe would be my shaking partner.  It sounded like a great plan.  It was, of course, completely crazy.

Even tracking the teams down was harder than we’d imagined.  We spent countless hours scouring the internet to find contact information–and many more on the phone with journalists and editors who had covered the other teams’ previous record attempts.  The dead ends piled up throughout September and October of 2010, but eventually we had enough tentative commitments to try to find a sponsor to fly in the international teams.

To be sure, there’s room in the world for all kinds of obscure extreme sports. Skysurfing, BASE jumping, parkour–each has its own fans and its own sponsors.  But competitive handshaking might be just a little too far out there, we learned.  We spent months trying to secure sponsorship, but week after week ground by with little progress.  Energy drink companies turned us down.  Sporting good companies turned us down.  Hand sanitizer companies turned us down.  It was starting to look like the handshake competition would remain a pipe dream.

Then one of our pitches fell on the right ears. A Fortune 1000 CEO was intrigued by the idea and agreed to sponsor us personally for part of the total budget. The next week, Jason and I met with Pamela Gann, the president of our college in Southern California.  Claremont McKenna College is known for its emphasis on leadership, government and economics, and President Gann saw that handshakes were a natural fit.  She enthusiastically supported our enterprise and agreed to financially support the event as a primary sponsor.  A few other private donations rounded out the budget, and our project suddenly had life.

By now it was December, though, and our event was scheduled for January 14th.  As students all around us crammed for final exams, we worried about final votes.  Our dream venue was Times Square, New York City, but what were the chances?  Most blocks in Times Square would have cost at least $19,000 a day–far beyond our modest funding.  There was one block, though–Father Duffy Square–which was administered by the Department of Parks and Recreation instead of the Mayor’s Office.  Parks would give us the space for a nominal fee, but only if Manhattan’s Community Board 5 gave its approval.  On December 9th, a full board vote confirmed our permit overwhelmingly. Yet despite the approval, Father Duffy Square typically charges around $60,000 a day for events. But, in the 4-Hour spirit, we wanted to see how low we could take the venue fee. Because the event served to benefit charities, we were able to secure the venue for three days for only $20. I have to admit, I was feeling pretty good about myself.

My phone grated in the darkness.  I rolled over in bed and squinted at the bright screen.  The call was coming from a number with many more digits than I was used to seeing.  “Hello?”

“This is Rohit Timilsina from Nepal,” said an accented voice over the faint connection.  “Is it night there?”

The clock on my nightstand read 3:52 AM.  “Sort of,” I said.  “What can I do for you?”  Rohit told me that I would need to supply information to the United States embassy in Kathmandu, and soon.  Otherwise, he might not get his visa in time to fly to New York.  I made a call to the U.S. consular in Nepal, and the process went smoothly.  As I came to learn, the whole country was swelling with excitement about the upcoming competition.

Each team was competing on behalf of the charity of its choice.  The Nepalese, for example, were shaking on behalf of the Women’s Foundation of Nepal.  I was shaking on behalf of Teach for America.  By the rules of the event, the team that continued its handshake the longest would get a majority of the total event proceeds for its charity.  The rest of the funds raised would be divided among the other charities represented.

The final weeks before the competition were a blaze of details.  The competition site would need heaters, barricades, tables, chairs, and dozens of other essentials that we knew still weren’t everything.  Because we planned to stream a video feed of the event live around the world, we would need a high-speed internet link and a generator to power it.  Then, a real sucker punch.  Unbeknownst to us, Father Duffy Square closed every night at 1AM and didn’t reopen until the early morning.  We knew that we would now have to pack up the whole venue and move the contestants to an indoor venue during the wee hours of the morning, all while maintaining seamless handshakes.  Still, the city wanted us to arrange for private security to protect the generators and heavy equipment during the night.  As costs spiraled upward, it seemed as though the red tape was closing in around us.  Working with the bureaucracy of Gotham is always tough, but for three college students 3,000 miles away, it was maddening.

And then there was Guinness.  Guinness World Records Ltd. has a very stringent application process to ensure the rigor and safety of all record attempts, and “Longest Continuous Handshake” is one of their most unforgiving records.  Even a second’s pause in the handshake is enough to disqualify an attempt, and every moment must be carefully recorded on video.  Already perilously close to the limit of our budget, we had to recruit an all-volunteer crew of videographers.  Additionally, Guinness requires that witnesses and trained medical observers monitor the event from start to finish.  On top of all that, we would have an official Guinness World Records adjudicator on site as the records were broken.

Reams of paperwork consumed my last few days to departure.  The night before my flight, I was starting to come down with a nasty virus.  Worse, the weather forecast was looking shaky.  New York was going to be slammed with up to a foot of snow just two days before the start of the event.  A few days afterward, another blizzard was expected to batter the city.  The handshake–outdoors, as I confirmed to scores of incredulous friends and family–was wedged into a 48-hour break in the weather.  We could only hope it stayed open.

Two days after my own arrival, I was back at JFK airport, waiting for the Nepalese to arrive.  Again my phone rang with a call from a number with many digits.  “Hello?”

“This is Chandra Sharma from Nepal,” an unfamiliar voice said, clearly very close.  I whirled around.  A big man in an overcoat was waving, joined by two smaller figures who I knew had to be Rohit and Santosh.  We shook hands warmly and exchanged greetings.  Chandra, it turned out, was an American citizen who had flown out from Kathmandu at his own expense to help the Timilsina brothers cope with life in the Big Apple.  We packed into a taxi–avoiding several predatory gypsy cabs on the way–and set off for Midtown.

When we got Rohit and Santosh checked into their hotel, we began to realize just how strange and wondrous New York City must have seemed to them.  They hung back at crosswalks, quite naturally intimidated by the rush of honking cars–until Jason explained that the white walking man in the signal box meant that it was safe to cross.  Taking them into a pizzeria for dinner that night, their mouths fell open.  Rohit’s voice fell to a panicky whisper.  “What is this?”  With everything else on our plate, Jason realized that introducing the Nepalese to Neapolitan cuisine just wasn’t in the cards, so down the street they went in search of Indian food.

The next night, Team New Zealand was scheduled to arrive after being held up in San Francisco due to weather delays.  It had been a major coup to bring them out.  Alastair Galpin is the number two Guinness World Record-breaker in the world, with dozens of records to his name–including “Loudest Clap” (113 dBA, louder than some jet aircraft at 100 meters), “Most Gloves Worn on One Hand” (24 gloves), and the slightly disturbing “Most Cucumbers Snapped in One Minute” (a total of 75).  More importantly, he was the first person to set the “Longest Continuous Handshake” record.  Alastair’s partner, Don Purdon, was a triathlete and business consultant with a background in sports psychology.  With Don’s help, they had gained the advice of more than a dozen scientists and experts on how to maximize their performance.  Alastair had spent the past week with ice packs strapped to his bare arm, shaking a bottle of sandwich spread from morning to night.  Together, they made a formidable team.

As I guzzled Emergen-C in my room, Jason got the Kiwis settled, and Joe arrived with the videographers.  Reports began to drift in from home about media that had featured the event.  Excited relatives called after seeing a segment on ABC back home in Los Angeles.  Even better, the Wall Street Journal was interested in covering it.  The competitors were stunned to hear that they had 30 minutes to get dressed and travel by taxi to News Corp.’s huge steel-and-glass headquarters on Corporate Row.  Each one of them took great pleasure in initiating the business reporter interviewing us into new facets of the strange world of competitive handshaking.  “Look, I’m in it to win it,” Alastair told the Journal’s videographer, demurring on the subject of his secret techniques.  We all knew he meant it.

I awoke very late on competition day.  Jason and Joe had insisted that I get as much rest as possible, so it wasn’t until almost 4:00PM that I joined the others in the hotel lobby.  The competition was scheduled for an 8:00PM start.

Then, a worried call from Jason, who had gone down to the venue.  “We’re trying to get the heaters working, but something’s wrong.”

The sand in our hourglass was rapidly dwindling.  Sponsors, media and supporters in at least a dozen countries around the world had all been told that the live webcast would begin at eight o’clock sharp, and we couldn’t keep everyone waiting.

At the same time, with temperatures hovering several degrees below freezing, it would be very risky to start without heat.  When I arrived at Father Duffy Square, I saw the problem.  The heating unit was a new radiant model that we were told would be far better than the older liquid-fuel burners.  Trouble was, it was only glowing a feeble red–enough to keep roast beef warm, maybe, but hardly enough to overcome the full blast of a Canadian cold front.

Then the internet went down.  Jason and the volunteers were fighting to stay calm and keep the competitors warm and busy.  A crowd was beginning to form around the circle of stanchions that had been set up around us at the center of the plaza.  I checked my watch.  7:30.  Then 7:45.  Still no internet.  We were supposed to be live by now.

“Jason?” I asked as he hunched over a laptop, trying to will our WiFi to life.

“Yeah?”

“Are the paramedics all signed into the medical observer logbook for Guinness?”

“We have a problem with that.”

A problem?  He said it so neatly that it could only be a catastrophic one.

“Even though we had the contract all signed, they’re saying they won’t let the paramedics stay out in the cold like this.  They’re pulling the plug.”

Were I given to under-breath profanity muttering, this would have been the moment. Unless we could find a medical professional in–I checked my watch again–three minutes, we wouldn’t be able to start the event.  The internet was still down.

Jason called for all the teams to get into position.  The video checks were clear.  Joe and I stretched our hands, enjoying the last minutes of freedom in who knows how long.

We were late.  It seemed like the crowd was murmuring impatiently, but I’ll never know how much of that was just my own fears.  By 8:15, it was clear that the event couldn’t be delayed any longer.  Jason had found a doctor against all odds, so we decided to start the handshake and bring up the video feed once it was already underway.  The crowd–dozens of people lined the barricades now–joined in the countdown.

“Five…  Four…  Three…”  Joe and I clasped hands.  “Two… One…  Go!”  Almost automatically, we were off.  The energy of the moment wiped away any chance for reflection.  Our whole world had tunneled down to one set of pumping hands.

We began the set of protocols for controlling who was “powering the shake” at any given time.  Each hand in a handshake is like a wave, with crests and troughs running down the length of the arm.  If my crest (the top of my upward motion) lined up with Joe’s trough (the bottom of his downward motion), they would cancel out, and the shake would be interrupted.  Even if that happens twenty hours in, it’s curtains.  So we devised a set of code words and commands so that exactly one person would always be powering the shake–giving the other person a chance to go limp, relax, and maybe even catch a few winks.  Other code words governed our responses to various emergencies.  If one of us spotted an interloper trying to climb over the barricades and disrupt the shake, we would shout “Yankee!  Yankee!  Yankee!” and drop to a crouch that protected the handshake between our torsos.

The other teams had different protocols.  Behind me, I could hear the Nepalese talking quietly in their native language, while Alastair’s voice periodically cut above the crowd with reports delivered in clipped staccato: “Alastair: shaking.  Alastair: shaking.  Alastair: relaxing.”  Ahead, a team from San Francisco was chatting in English.

It’s strange how time flies when you’re shaking hands.  Before I got myself into this most unusual of sports, I had imagined that minutes would creep by–that I would have a chance to read hundreds of pages and exhaust an iPod’s worth of music in an effort to stay sane.  Instead, the motion is strangely meditative.  Keeping the shake going without the slightest pause is actually so absorbing that even conversation is often difficult.  Next thing you know, one or two or even three hours have slipped by.

About two hours had passed when I heard concerned voices behind me.  Rohit’s shoes were not warm enough, and his feet were getting dangerously cold.  If conditions didn’t improve soon, he’d have to drop out to avoid serious frostbite.  Team New Zealand was warm, though, and plugging away with scientific precision.

The volunteers tried to warm Rohit’s feet with blankets, but nothing seemed to work, and his condition was worsening.  Then, one of the Nepalese onlookers at the barricade learned what was happening, and without hesitation removed his own boots and socks and gave them to Rohit, whose feet quickly warmed.  I was stunned to see the barefoot man stay for hours more, cheering his countrymen on with a smile on his face.  The live stream was working at last, and the large Nepalese contingent waved flags and sung songs without rest.  Chandra walked the inside of the barricades, working the crowd and leading cheers with unbelievable energy.

It was around midnight, and we made the decision to go indoors an hour early due to the problems with the heater.  We had a banquet room at the Marriott Marquis, less than a block away, but the transfer would still be frighteningly complex.  The teams would be taken inside one at a time, along with two videographers and the required witnesses and medical observers.  Times Square security and NYPD would help us keep the crowds back, but once in the hotel, we were on our own.  Everyone knew that all it would take was one lunatic to ruin everything.

Just as plans for the move inside were being finalized, I started feeling very sick again.  The strange numbness in my face and hands that I had felt in the terminal at JFK returned, and I found myself shivering and short of breath.  They hustled me into the Marriott, and as I warmed up, the symptoms faded.  The other teams were brought upstairs, and the live video feed switched to a shot from inside the room.

Joe and I were taking hour-long shifts–I would power the shake for an hour and then he would take it for an hour.  Keeping up a steady diet of Power Bars and Ricola, I was starting to feel decidedly better.  Then my stomach turned.

“Joe,” I grunted while powering the shake.

“What’s up?”

I felt bad.  He had been resting.  “Joe, I’m not feeling so good again.”  Bad nausea now.  Joe powered up, and powered me down, all according to our protocol.  He called the volunteers to prepare the cameras and witnesses for a bathroom run.  I figured if I could just get to a toilet and vomit, maybe I would feel better.  “Please hurry,” I whispered.  My face was alternately prickly and numb again, and it felt like someone was squeezing my hands.  Come to think of it, someone was squeezing one of my hands.  But my left hand had no excuse.  The numbness was spreading to my back.

The camera crew was ready, and Joe and I carefully got out of our chairs and stood up.  I was more nauseous than I’d ever been in my life–and having once had a run in with tainted mussels, that’s saying something.  I was starting to think I’d throw up right there in the room, all over the expensive patterns in the carpet.

“Loosen his clothes!  Loosen his clothes!”

I was on the ground, looking up at my empty right hand.  In books, I’d always read about people waking up from losses of consciousness with a “Where am I?” sort of feeling, and a certain period of gradual reorientation, but not with me.  The vision of my open hand said it all.

“The paramedics are on their way.”

Soon, a crowd of men in coveralls tromped into the room and started taking my vitals.  I figured all this was at least making good TV for everyone watching the webcast.  It was just after 4:30AM in New York, so night owls in Nepal and early birds in London were watching everything unfold live.  I didn’t want to go to the hospital, so I was ordered to go to sleep.

By the time I awoke in the morning, everyone else had left the room and set up again in Father Duffy Square, where the heater had finally been fixed.  The night had taken its toll, though.  One team had lasted only fifteen minutes–but even Joe and I had only made it eight and a half hours.  As I crossed the barricades after breakfast on Saturday, it was down to just the Nepalese and the New Zealanders.

At eleven o’clock, the Guinness World Records adjudicator arrived.  Sara Wilcox was quick to ensure that everything had gone by the book thus far, but much to our relief, she seemed quite pleased.  The standing official Guinness World Record would be broken just after 11:45AM.  The previous Nepalese attempt, which was still technically under review, would be surpassed at 3:50PM.  Just over an hour later, they would break the longest documented attempt, a recent Canadian effort, and start out into uncharted territory.

Our webcast was part of the beta test of new live stream features for YouTube, so the event was featured in a banner that appeared over every page on the website that afternoon. YouTube, along with all of the other event partners, had rallied behind the charitable nature of this event and offered to help promote the competition. As the records fell, one by one, interest ramped up to the point that we were getting several YouTube comments every second.  Many, of course, were scatological drivel, but we were at least glad that the charities were getting so much attention.

The Nepalese were still out there, indefatigable Chandra at their head, singing encouragement to Rohit and Santosh, who seemed to be keeping up an unsustainable pace–nearly twice as fast as the New Zealanders, who were maintaining their strict regimen of vitamins and high-nutrition foods.  “Alastair: shaking.  Alastair: shaking.  Alastair: shaking.”  There weren’t as many Kiwis in the crowd as Nepalese, but Alastair and Don were making up any morale deficit with iron discipline.

Volunteers rushed in every few minutes to spoon feed them mashed potatoes or hand them bottles of Vitamin C.  The Timilsina brothers, meanwhile, were eating irregularly, and having spicy foods brought to them.  Trips to the bathroom just to urinate were difficult enough, and Jason and I feared that an attempt to make “number two” might lead the Nepalese to disqualification.  They had already had a very close shave when Rohit had put his hand under the soap dispenser on his first trip to the toilet.  The motion sensor automatically discharged a spurt of foam, and Rohit had recoiled in alarm, nearly breaking the shake.  The vagaries of what we delicately referred to as an “excretory maneuver” were scary to even consider.

It was getting into the evening again.  The sun set, and the crowd soon chanted off the final seconds to the 24-hour mark.  Donations and messages of support were pouring in from every corner of the world.  As organizers, we alternated between incredulity that the competitors could go on for another second, and terror that the contest might go on for weeks unabated.

The numbers were beginning to come in from YouTube.  More than half a million people had been watching the web cast.

Night had fallen and the massive jumbotrons lit the canyon of Times Square. As Jason and I narrated the live video feed for the growing global audience, we watched in awe as Team Nepal and Team New Zealand continued to extend the world record. Periodically, Alastair and Don would send for bananas, potatoes, and triple-shot espressos. We stirred electrolyte-enhanced beverages, placed energy candies in their mouths, and adjusted their clothing frequently. They were intensely focused, never letting their emotions take hold. They were in it to win it, and any moment now, Team Nepal could fall. Alastair and Don kept peering over their shoulders, waiting for their young, inexperienced opponents to crumble.

But Rohit and Santosh, with their country behind them, were still going strong, and were constantly smiling and laughing. Meanwhile, they were still shaking hands far too fast. Team Nepal was doing everything wrong: their clothes, nutrition, and technique seemed unsustainable. Beyond doubt, though, they were blessed with the magic of smiles, community, and heart. Chandra would occasionally hold his cell phone next to the brothers as family and friends sent words of encouragement from home. Theaters in Nepal were filled as people gathered to watch the live stream projected from an internet feed.

Before we knew it, the night had run out, and it was time to go back into the Marriott.  Guarding the two remaining teams like Secret Service agents flanking a sitting president, we managed to get them safely inside.  The Nepalese spectators formed a cordon around us, still in buoyant spirits, and led us safely to our banquet room, where many stayed for hours.

The night ground on.  Even though both teams were still going strong, the strain was beginning to tell.  By thirty hours, the body begins to physically break down, as lack of sleep causes tissues to start consuming themselves for energy.  Hallucinations can creep up almost unnoticed.

Our reservation of Father Duffy Square only went through Sunday.  If one of the teams didn’t quit soon, we would need to find another venue, and fast.  And Don’s flight back to New Zealand was Sunday afternoon, we realized.  The teams had already far outstripped even the most generous projections we had made when booking the flights, and it was coming down to the wire now.  We would have to make a decision some time in the early morning whether to make the arrangements to continue the competition into Monday.

It was pointless, though.  If the handshake continued into Monday, it could just as well go on through Tuesday, or Wednesday, or the Wednesday after that.  And changing the flight reservations would be painfully expensive.

Jason and I had a hushed conversation in one corner of the banquet room.  On the other side, a hardy contingent of Nepalese were still awake, keeping up Rohit’s morale.  We tried to judge how much gas was left in each team’s tank.  Both were clearly in pain now, but their handshakes were as steady as ever.

“Can we ask if they’d be willing to declare a draw?” Jason asked.

“I dunno,” I said.  “Like Alastair said, they’re in it to win it.”

We agreed that if one of the teams brought it up of their own accord, we would be in the clear, but the odds of that seemed fantastically remote.  We dreaded having to bring it up to the teams ourselves, but I didn’t see any way around it.

Miraculously, the New Zealanders brought it up first.

“Jason!” Don hissed across the room.  “Jason!  Can we talk to you?”

It was a quarter to four in the morning.  Thirty-one and a half hours.  Alastair’s eyes were glazed, but he was still grinding on–and the Nepalese incredibly showed no signs of slowing.  Jason and I sidled up to the table.  “What’s going on?”

“We’ve been talking,” Don said, “and there’s no end in sight here.  I’m dead tired–I’ll keep boxing on if I have to, but the Nepalese have got to be getting tired, too.  We think maybe they would be interested in some kind of a joint thing.  Do you know if that’s possible?”

As it happened, the Guinness adjudicator had mentioned this specifically as a possibility.  “Yeah,” I said, “Sara explicitly okayed it yesterday.”  Was it only yesterday?  I had lost almost all sense of time.  Out the huge windows, it felt like Times Square should just be cycling through the dinner crowd.

“Are you absolutely sure?”  Alastair asked pointedly, coming out of his funk.  “Are you absolutely sure that the record can be held jointly?”

“Positive,” Jason said.  “But it has to come from you.  We don’t want to impose this on either team.”

“Right.”

We slipped away, and the New Zealanders called Chandra over to propose sharing the record.  From a distance, I could see a tear running down Chandra’s cheek as they spoke.  He relayed the offer to Santosh and Rohit, who soon called us over.

They were overjoyed.  There’s something primal about humans bonding over intense physical exertion.  Maybe it’s just romanticizing to say that the immense respect the teams developed for each other was akin to the closeness shared on football teams or among soldiers, but I don’t think so.  They had pushed themselves beyond what the experts had said the human body was capable of, and emerged victorious.  Agreeing to share the record was the highest compliment they could pay each other.

Just before 5:00AM, Jason sprinted down to Father Duffy Square to fire up the generator and prepare the venue. Chandra told us that national television in Nepal was carrying our video feed from our indoor venue, and we knew that this climactic conclusion had to be seen by the world.  Once we had safely moved the teams outdoors, the cameras were rolling and the stream was live.

Jason explained the agreement to the global audience and announced that the shared world record would be 33 hours, 3 minutes.  He adjusted Team New Zealand and Team Nepal until they stood perfectly back-to-back. Raising his hands high, he began the countdown.

As Jason’s hands hovered in the air above the two greatest handshakes in history, the intensity of the moment dawned upon me: history was now in his hands. If the shakes were not broken at the exact same moment, one team would walk away victorious and the other empty-handed. After 33 of the most intense physical and mental hours of these competitors’ lives, it would all come down a fraction of a second. “Three! Two! One! Zero!”

Perfect.

Jason’s hands broke both shakes at the exact same moment, thus sealing for history an unprecedented, shared record between Team Nepal and Team New Zealand.

We all exchanged embraces and, almost reflexively, handshakes.  The Nepalese gave beautiful dhaka scarves to Alastair and Don, who reciprocated with warm wool caps from their home country.  There were many pledges of friendship and goodwill all around, followed after a well-earned sleep by heartfelt farewells the next day.

“For the first time in my life,” Alastair told me privately, “I’m so very glad that I didn’t win the sole record.”

That stuck with me on the plane back home to California.  The handshake may just be a symbolic gesture, but I saw just how real its effect can be.  I’ll always be pleased and proud that a handshake brought these inspiring competitors together first in competition and then in friendship.  It’s a lesson we can all stand to learn.

I know this won’t be the end of the line, either.  Rohit’s planning something big in Nepal, he says, and he’d like us to take part.  Something big.  In Nepal.  As I turn his words over in my mind, I realize that can only mean one thing.

Nearly two years after exchanging hugs and handshakes with the competitors and volunteers at 5:18am in Times Square, the three of us organizers find ourselves in many different places. John-Clark recently competed on Jeopardy! and is publishing a book on private navies this spring. Jason recently worked at Udacity and is pursuing his MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Joe is finishing his triple-major in Neuroscience, Psychology and Physics, minoring in both Chemistry and Biology, and is the co-author of The Gedanken Institute Book of Puzzles (to be released this winter). He is also a Senior Associate at the Baldwin Wallace Neuroscience Laboratory, which was just named Program of the Year by the Society for Neuroscience. The takeaways from the event continue to unravel. All in all, what this event demonstrated is the sheer power of the 4-Hour approach to motivation and dedication, with regard to both lifestyle and body hacking.

Why taking on charitable projects allows you to make astounding breakthroughs in the size and scale of your endeavors

For us, Shaking History’s emphasis on charity was always a driving motivational factor. Everyone knows that charitable events can go a long way to help charities and provide great personal satisfaction. What we also learned, though, was that doing something for a good cause is the best way to involve other people in what you’re doing. From booking Times Square for three days for only $20 to partnering with YouTube.com for promoting our live webcast to its millions of users, the dozens of times when luck tilted results in our favor were likely due to the charitable nature of the event. When cold-calling a corporate executive to ask for a partnership, discount, or personal favor, you will always have more success when calling on behalf of a charitable cause. Frankly, it is by far the greatest way to increase your odds of being able to do something huge. If you make those same requests to the same corporate executive on behalf of a startup, selfless favors are no longer an option. By combining the entrepreneurial lifestyle hacking methods from The 4-Hour Workweek with charitable projects, you increase the likelihood of gaining the skills, experiences, and relationships that will get allow you to succeed in future endeavors.  Centering your life around charitable causes makes it much easier to bring people on board to your vision, projects, and life.

How systematically studying both your successes and failures can take you to the next level

The three of us have always believed that in order to become successful in life, you need to be able to learn as much from your successes as your failures.  Say, for example, you’re driving your car through an intersection as the light goes from yellow to red.  A turning car comes within inches of crashing in to you, but thankfully, you drive away unscathed.  Most people will feel an overwhelming sense of relief that dwindles throughout the course of the ride.  The most effective people try to learn as much from the near miss as they would have from a collision.  When the next close call comes, they will be wiser.  All of life’s near misses grant us incredible learning opportunities: those who forcefully learn from them are at a significant advantage over those who don’t.

The three of us have spent dozens of hours carefully analyzing our event’s successes and failures. Many things went wrong during the event that we scarcely could have imagined.  It was only by careful planning and redundant logistics that Shaking History succeeded.  Some potential failures were averted in equally unexpected ways.  For example, if the Nepalese spectator had not removed his shoes, given them to Rohit, and stood out in the freezing New York winter barefoot, the entire event could have been compromised. Team Nepal would have probably called it quits early to prevent Rohit’s feet from getting frostbite. Thus, the competition would have been over shortly before 5:00am on the Saturday, January 15th. That, along with dozens of other moments, could have jeopardized everything. Talk about a near miss!

We also learned that you don’t have to have everything go right in order for an event to be a success. Despite the widespread global publicity the charities received, we were disappointed to find that only a small minority of spectators actually donated. We had used an experimental, open-ended donation platform whereby donors pledged a certain amount per hour as long as the competition ensued. We received reports that the donation form crashed occasionally and that many donors were unable to pledge. The SMS donation platform hardly brought in any funds at all. While the thousands of dollars we raised went a long way for the charities in Nepal and New Zealand, we know that we could have done a much better job. We’ve spent many hours on this subject alone and have come up with nearly twenty suggestions for improvement. When it’s time for the next event, whatever that may be, we will be much better prepared as a result of our thorough debriefing process.

How to achieve spectacular results by defining your own “best practices”

Launching a new company and transforming your body have an important element in common: you are stepping into the unknown world of complexity. Unlike training to become an Olympic runner or NBA player, Guinness World Records represent unchartered territory for human accomplishment. Training to become a star sprinter is easier now than ever before: this is because the techniques and training regimens have been defined and refined time and time again. Deciding to break a Guinness World Record is an entirely different animal. You have to be relentlessly committed to experimenting with new techniques and training methods, constantly searching for new ways to measure progress. Blindly following pre-defined best practices is not an option: breaking Guinness World Records requires intense creativity and persistence. Alastair Galpin, the #2 world record breaker that competed in our event, recounts his innovative preparation for the event:

A sports physiologist had drawn up a physical training regime for me to cover the short lead-up period, as well as given dietary and general advice. I had already begun shaking a sandwich spread bottle, which I then needed to pay more attention to. By the time Don and I left for New York, I’d shaken the jar for 165 hours. Doing so with ice packs strapped to the affected muscles had earned me strange looks in my neighbourhood, although I was more attentive to my increasingly sore right shoulder and forearm. My being left-handed and Don’s being right-handed meant we both had to learn a range of new skills with our free hand, which took perseverance.

I asked several local businesses with cold storage if we could practise in their freezers to help our bodies adjust. All said no. Don and I went to stand in a local snow sports centre where staff was helpful and where we quickly found the weak aspects of our planning coming to the fore.

An innovation consultant, hearing my fears about my hand freezing, suggested I slide a sheath of bubble wrap packaging around my right arm, which could be pulled down over Don’s and my grip in the event of extreme cold. I made such a contraption which was to the envy of the other teams. (For more information about Alastair Galpin, visit http://www.worldrecordchase.com)

Alastair is a perfect example of the power of personal best practices.  He was not born uncommonly strong or fast or dexterous.  He was not born with a particular talent for clapping hands or snapping cucumbers.  Rather, he approaches all these endeavors with a commitment to stretching the limits of his own ability.  When Alastair sets himself a new challenge, he studies and analyzes the problem rigorously, figures out what training methods work best for him, and constantly reevaluates how those methods are working.  Over time, the techniques he’s learned have evolved into a set of best practices that allow him to approach new problems with confidence and a solid plan for success.  Developing your own best practices is a key to breaking Guinness World Records and achieving anything else that’s difficult for you.

Why you can be the best person in the entire world at something

The most inspiring and empowering takeaway of our Guinness experience, ultimately, was just how easy it was.  Two weeks to the day after first getting the idea to break a world record during his Freshman year, John-Clark had completed the longest continuous handshake in human history.  Shaking History in Times Square was much more difficult, but it was still a sobering realization that as college students, we were still able to pull it off at all.  Recordbreaking, we found, was not about vast resources or natural talent.  It is about dedication and persistence.  There’s a real sense that anyone regardless of age, talent or disability, can look through the Guinness World Records book and find something that they can become better at than anyone else on the planet.  This is worth much more than bragging rights.  Rather, we like to think of recordbreaking as a metaphor for the process of accomplishing any difficult goal.  Recordbreaking requires the same mental habits and confidence that a person needs to start a business, transform their bodies or master a new set of skills.  Once you have broken a world record, you will approach each new challenge with a greater sense of who you really are and what you are capable of achieving.

Last week, Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa Foolproof: Recipes You Can Trust sold roughly 66,000 books through BookScan. If you walk into Barnes & Noble, you will likely see walls of her books, which her publisher has paid for, just like Coca-Cola pays for the first 50 feet of Walmart placement.

I don’t have an issue with that. This is how publishing has worked for a long time.

But to compete with monolithic forces that are banning my book due to my publisher (Amazon Publishing) — 1,000+ bookstores, including all of Barnes & Noble — I can’t play their game. I have to do things differently. It’s the colonies versus the Red Coats, and I must take attack using different means.

The New York Times bestseller list is highly skewed towards print retail. This makes it a hard target for me, though I’m still gunning for it. No matter, I want to hit #1 BookScan to send a message to the incumbent world of publishing, to those who want everything to remain in the 1900′s. If The 4-Hour Chef “wins” in any capacity, authors will feel freedom to experiment. If this book “fails” because the old guard makes of an example of me, their message wins: don’t mess with the system that keeps us fat and happy, or we’ll punish you.

Enter The All-You-Can-Eat-Campaign of Goodness. This is a sniper shot directed at the heart of every member of the publishing oligarchy (not all publishers, mind you) who cares more about their parking spot at the country club than their end user: the reader. That pisses me off.

To attempt something different, I’ve recruited a small cadre of companies to make you offers that defy belief. I hope you enjoy them.

ALL OFFERS EXPIRE AT 5PM PST THIS SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17TH.

Here are the packages…

Buy 1 print book ($21) and get the following:

- One sweet, tasty hardcover that you’ll enjoy again and again for years. Also suitable for self-defense and bicep curls. I will raise a wine glass to you and your family and send good karma your way.

Buy 3 print books ($63) and get the following ($130 value and 2-hour live Q&A) — Limited to first 2,000 people:

- Exclusive 2-hour Q&A with me after launch — ask whatever you want. I’ll be drinking wine and in a sharing mood, no doubt. Limited to people who buy 3 or more books.

- 428-page PDF — The Best of The 4-Hour Workweek Forum (value: $25): The 4HWW Forum was vibrant for years, a repository of great lessons from readers, until it became simply too buggy. It’s now read-only, but I’ve curated the best material and put it all into a 428-page PDF, complete with a Table of Contents.

- 850-page PDF of full interview transcripts from Mastery by Robert Greene (value: $50). See my post, “The Magic of Apprenticeship — A How-to Guide,” for more on Robert and Mastery and how to gain control over your life. This document contains full interview transcripts that dive into the thought processes of nine living masters, including Paul Graham, Freddie Roach, and Temple Grandin.

- 3 months of Evernote Premium (value: $15)

- 3 months free of CLEAR card, (value: $40) which allows you to skip airport security lines (Example: reduced my wait time in SF from 60 minutes to less than 5 minutes).

Interested in this package? Sweet! Just buy 3 *print* books on Amazon and fill out this form: https://4hb.wufoo.com/forms/z7x2s9/

If you already bought a copy, no problem. Just buy two more copies on Amazon and fill out the same form.

Buy 25 print books ($525) and get the following ($1,008 value) — Limited to first 200 people. Get all of your Christmas shopping done in one fell swoop!

- Kindle Fire HD (value: $199) Super awesome. ‘Nuff said.

- Breville Control Grip Immersion Blender (value: $149) I’ve used this to make 100s of dishes, many of them in The 4-Hour Chef.

- CLEAR card: 2 free years (value: $179 x 2 = $358)

- Evernote Premium: 1 free year (value: $45) I use Evernote to gather all of my online and offline research in one place. It’s my external brain.

- Athletic Greens: free jug (30-day supply) (value: $97) My all-in-one nutritional insurance.

- BioTrust low-carb protein: free jug (value: $49.95) — 4g of net carbs. I get asked all the time which protein powder I use. This is the answer. I have no affiliation or affiliate link.

- Amrap Refuel: one box of Refuel bars (8 count, value: $24) Delish without fat guilt. Win-win.

- TaskRabbit: $50 of credit. One of my favorite start-ups of all-time. Addictive like crack.

- Havalon Piranta-EDGE knife (value: $36) – The first surgically-sharp knife I’ve ever owned. Less than 3 oz, includes 12 replacement blades.

Interested in this package? DON’T buy it on Amazon. Since there are only 200 spots, buy your package on this page: http://fourhourchef.eventbrite.com/ First come, first served.

FOR THE NEXT FEW PACKAGES, PLEASE NOTE: I do not want books sitting in warehouses or garages. If you order the big packages, I want every book to get to one of your customers, partners, or employees. If you need suggestions for distribution, let my team know, but I don’t want any copies going unread. This is very important to me.

Buy 250 print books ($5,250) and get the following (value: Priceless!! hahaha…) — Limited to first 20 people:

- Full-day group retreat in SF at an award-winning restaurant and/or hotel (e.g. Central Kitchen) — lunch, 4-hour jam session, dinner, and drinks, maybe more  – Theme: “Caribou and Karaoke”

- 1 hotel night in SF included

- BodyMetrix ultrasound bodyfat tester (value: $495)

- Ultimate Driving Experience (value: $500). Ride a Lamborghini or an Audi with lessons from a professional driver around a racing track in one of 14 major cities. Videos/pictures included to cherish for a lifetime.

Interested in this package? Magnanimous! DON’T buy it on Amazon. Since there are only 20 spots, buy your package on this page: http://fourhourchef.eventbrite.com/ First come, first served.

Buy 1,000 print books ($21,000) and get the following (Priceless!!!! That’s FOUR exclamation points!) — Limited to first 6 people:

- Awesome all-expenses-paid trip somewhere in the world. You’ve seen me do this in India, Africa, and elsewhere. I don’t half-ass trips. I don’t even three-quarter-ass trips. I full-ass my trips! This will be a life-changing, amazing, all-inclusive trip somewhere in the world. High probability: high-end trip through Tuscany, dates TBD with people who sign up.

- CLEAR card: lifetime membership (value: $125,300 [$179/year x 70 years = $125,300]).

- WellnessFX Performance assessment: Early access (will not be public until late Q1 2013) to an exclusive version (value: over $700). This package builds off of of Baseline diagnostics to give people a deep look into their cardiovascular, metabolic, nutritional and hormonal health & performance. Here’s what’s included: all lab & phlebotomy fees, data in your own private WFX dashboard, and 50+ biomarkers (total cholesterol, HDL, LDL, Triglycerides, etc).

Interested in this package? Great! But…DON’T buy it on Amazon. Since there are only 6 spots, fill out this page: https://4hb.wufoo.com/forms/z7x1k9/ First come, first served. This bad boy will be epic.

Buy 4,000 books ($84,000) and get the following ($200,000 value). Limit 1 person:

- I will give two 60-minute keynotes at venues of your choice in the US or Canada, timing and content to be mutually agreed upon.

- Everything in the 1,000 book package above

Interested in this package? Words fail me. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. Now… DON’T buy it on Amazon. First, it’s impossible. Second, there is only one slot up for grabs. Fill out this page: https://4hb.wufoo.com/forms/z7x1k9/ Danke sehr!

###

In closing, let us remember one lesson that Winston Churchill delivered as perhaps the shortest commencement speech of all-time:

“Never, never, never give up.”

Deciding to fight is half the battle.

In 1902, Einstein (far right) formed “The Olympia Academy” with two friends, who met to discuss books about science and philosophy. Three years later, Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis papers vaulted him to international fame.

I’m asked “How do I find a mentor?” all the time.

I’ve never had a good answer. The sad fact is this: people you want as mentors don’t want to view themselves as pro-bono life coaches. So what to do?

First, change the question. Perhaps it’s a cliche to say that when the student is ready, the teacher appears, but it’s a prescription in disguise. Here, the better question is “How do I become an ideal apprentice?”

The best treatment of apprenticeship I’ve ever found is in Mastery, the latest book by Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power. His writing on apprenticeship, mentor cultivation, and in-depth mastery of skills makes Mastery the perfect companion book to The 4-Hour Chef, in my opinion. It’s one of the few books I made time to read cover-to-cover in the last few months.

The below article explores examples of world-class apprentices and how you can emulate them. Once you do that, growth is a foregone conclusion.

The path to greatness is simple. It’s the path followed by everyone from Renaissance artists to the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. In writing my first four books, I immersed myself in the study these types of people–some of most powerful figures in history. Over the course of many hours of thinking, researching and writing on excellence–the last four years of which were dedicated to writing my newest book–I discerned an unmistakable formula for become the best…

Today I’d like to share the first in the journey to Mastery: how to begin an apprenticeship. Throughout history, it’s always been the way that Masters acquired their education. There are many different strategies for getting yours, but make no mistake: you cannot become great without mentors and masters to teach you the necessary skills of your chosen craft.

In 1718, Josiah Franklin decided to bring his twelve-year-old son Benjamin into his lucrative, family-run candle-making business in Boston as an apprentice. His idea was that after a seven-year apprenticeship and a little experience, Benjamin would take over the business. But Benjamin had other ideas. He threatened to run away to sea if his father did not give him the choice of where he could apprentice. The father had already lost another son who had run away, and so he relented. To the father’s surprise, his son chose to work in an older brother’s recently opened printing business. Such a business would mean harder work and the apprenticeship would last nine instead of seven years. Also, the printing business was notoriously fickle, and it was quite a risk to bank one’s future on it. But that was his choice, his father decided. Let him learn the hard way.

What young Benjamin had not told his father was that he was determined to become a writer. Most of the work in the shop would involve manual labor and operating machines, but every now and then he would be asked to proofread and copyedit a pamphlet or text. And there would always be new books around. Several years into the process, he discovered that some of his favorite writing came from the English newspapers the shop would reprint. He asked to be the one to oversee the printing of such articles, giving him the chance to study these texts in detail and teach himself how to imitate their style in his own work. Over the years he managed to turn this into a most efficient apprenticeship for writing, with the added benefit of having learned well the printing business.

—

After graduating from the Zurich Polytechnic in 1900, the twenty-one-year-old Albert Einstein found his job prospects extremely meager. He had graduated near the bottom of the class, almost certainly nullifying any chance to obtain a teaching position. Happy to be away from the university, he now planned to investigate, on his own, certain problems in physics that had haunted him for several years. It would be a self-apprenticeship in theorizing and thought experiments. But in the meantime, he would have to make a living. He had been offered a job in his father’s dynamo business in Milan as an engineer, but such work would not leave him any free time. A friend could land him a well-paid position in an insurance company, but that would stultify his brain and sap his energy for thinking.

Then, a year later, another friend mentioned a job opening up in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. The pay was not great, the position was at the bottom, the hours were long, and the work consisted of the rather mundane task of looking over patent applications, but Einstein leaped at the chance. It was everything he wanted. His task would be to analyze the validity of patent applications, many of which involved aspects of science that interested him. The applications would be like little puzzles or thought experiments; he could try to visualize how the ideas would actually translate into inventions. Working on them would sharpen his reasoning powers. After several months on the job, he became so good at this mental game that he could finish his work in two or three hours, leaving him the rest of the day to engage in his own thought experiments. In 1905 he published his first theory of relativity, much of the work having been done while he was at his desk in the Patent Office.

—

From the time he was born in 1960, Freddie Roach was groomed to be a boxing champion. His father had been a professional fighter himself, and his mother a boxing judge. When Freddie was six he was promptly taken to the local gym in south Boston to begin a rigorous apprenticeship in the sport. He trained with a coach several hours a day, six days a week.

By the age of fifteen he felt like he was burned out. He made more and more excuses to avoid going to the gym. One day his mother sensed this and said to him, “Why do you fight anyway? You just get hit all the time. You can’t fight.” He was used to the constant criticism from his father and brothers, but to hear such a frank assessment from his mother had a bracing effect. Clearly, she saw his older brother as the one destined for greatness. Now Freddie determined that he would somehow prove her wrong. He returned to his training regimen with a vengeance. He discovered within himself a passion for practice and discipline. He enjoyed the sensation of getting better, the trophies that began to pile up, and, more than anything, the fact that he could now actually beat his brother. His love for the sport was rekindled.

As Freddie now showed the most promise of the brothers, his father took him to Las Vegas to help further his career. There, at the age of eighteen, he met the legendary coach Eddie Futch and began to train under him. It all looked very promising— he was chosen for the United States boxing team and began to climb up the ranks. Before long, however, he hit another wall. He would learn the most effective maneuvers from Futch and practice them to perfection, but in an actual bout it was another story. As soon as he got hit in the ring, he would revert to fighting instinctually; his emotions would get the better of him. His fights would turn into brawls over many rounds, and he would often lose.

After a few years, Futch told Roach it was time to retire. But boxing had been his whole life; retire and do what? He continued to fight and to lose, until finally he could see the writing on the wall and retired. He took a job in telemarketing and began to drink heavily. Now he hated the sport—he had given it so much and had nothing to show for his efforts. Almost in spite of himself, one day he returned to Futch’s gym to watch his friend Virgil Hill spar with a boxer about to fight for a title. Both fighters trained under Futch, but there was nobody in Hill’s corner helping him, so Freddie brought him water and gave him advice. He showed up the following day to help Hill again, and soon became a regular at Futch’s gym. He was not being paid, so he kept his telemarketing job, but something in him smelled opportunity— and he was desperate. He showed up on time and stayed later than anyone else. Knowing Futch’s techniques so well, he could teach them to all of the fighters. His responsibilities began to grow.

Working the two jobs left just enough time to sleep. It was almost unbearable, but he could withstand it because he was learning the trade for which he knew was destined. One day Virgil Hill showed him a technique he had picked up from some Cuban fighters: Instead of working with a punching bag, they mostly trained with the coach, who wore large padded mitts. Standing in the ring, the fighters half-sparred with the coach and practiced their punches. Roach tried it with Hill and his eyes lit up. It brought him back into the ring, but there was something else. Boxing, he felt, had become stale, as had its training methods. In his mind, he saw a way to adapt the mitt work for more than just punching practice. It could be a way for a trainer to devise an entire strategy in the ring and demonstrate it to his fighter in real time. It could revolutionize and revitalize the sport itself. Roach began to develop this with the stable of fighters that he now trained. He instructed them in maneuvers that were much more fluid and strategic.

Within a few years he had impressed enough young boxers with his knowledge to set up his own business. Soon he left Futch to work on his own. He quickly established a reputation for preparing his boxers better than anyone else, and within a few years he rose to become the most successful trainer of his generation.

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THE LESSON:

It is a simple law of human psychology that your thoughts will tend to revolve around what you value most. If it is money, you will choose a place for your apprenticeship that offers the biggest paycheck. Inevitably, in such a place you will feel greater pressures to prove yourself worthy of such pay, often before you are really ready. You will be focused on yourself, your insecurities, the need to please and impress the right people, and not on acquiring skills. It will be too costly for you to make mistakes and learn from them, so you will develop a cautious, conservative approach. As you progress in life, you will become addicted to the fat paycheck and it will determine where you go, how you think, and what you do. Eventually, the time that was not spent on learning skills will catch up with you, and the fall will be painful.

Instead, you must value learning above everything else. This will lead you to all of the right choices. You will opt for the situation that will give you the most opportunities to learn, particularly with hands-on work. You will choose a place that has people and mentors who can inspire and teach you. A job with mediocre pay has the added benefit of training you to get by with less— a valuable life skill. If your apprenticeship is to be mostly on your own time, you will choose a place that pays the bills—perhaps one that keeps your mind sharp, but that also leaves you the time and mental space to do valuable work on your own. You must never disdain an apprenticeship with no pay. In fact, it is often the height of wisdom to find the perfect mentor and offer your services as an assistant for free. Happy to exploit your cheap and eager spirit, such mentors will often divulge more than the usual trade secrets. In the end, by valuing learning above all else, you will set the stage for your creative expansion, and the money will soon come to you.

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Did you like this article?

It’s just the first of a 6-part series on apprenticeship, provided exclusively for this blog by Robert. Here are links to the rest, all of which teach different lessons and approaches using real-world examples:

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Part VI

Robert’s Mastery examines the lives of historical greats like Darwin, Mozart, and Henry Ford and distills the traits that made the masters. It is an excellent complement to The 4-Hour Chef. Robert also authored the massive international bestsellers The 48 Laws of Power, Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, and The 50th Law.

Dan Gable is a demi-god in the world of wrestling. He’s been called “Sports Figure of the Century” by Sports Illustrated. Why?

As an athlete, he had a 182-1 prep and college record. His single loss, in his final NCAA match, infuriated him. To make up for it, he out-trained the world and won the gold medal at the 1972 Munich Olympics…without surrendering a single point. This is like winning Wimbledon on serves alone.

Most impressive to me, as coach of the Iowa Hawkeyes, he was able to replicate his success. He had a recipe. Here are a few stats from his 21-year career:

21-year record — 355-21-5 (94.4% wins)

Big Ten record — 131-2-1 (98.5% wins)

21 Big Ten Team Titles

45 National Champions

152 All-Americans

The above video clip is from Dan Gable – Competitor Supreme, which my mom bought for me when I was 15. It changed my life.

I watched it almost every day in high school, and it kept me fighting through all the various losses in life. Didn’t finish the SAT in time? Watch Dan Gable. Have a guidance counselor laugh while telling me I don’t stand a chance of getting into Princeton? More Dan Gable. Lost my first important judo match in 7 seconds? Watch the Iowa Hawkeyes…again and again and again. Then, return to the same tournament six months later and win.

In life, there are dog fights. You must learn to enjoy them. Few people look forward to banging heads (literally or metaphorically), and therein lies the golden opportunity.

Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. But there are factors inside your control that greatly improve the odds. Being aggressive doesn’t guarantee success, but failing to be aggressive nearly always guarantees failure. In a modern world of political correctness, glad handing, and fear of offending everyone and anyone, the art of the fight is undervalued.

Remember: It’s not the size of the dog in the fight. It’s the size of the fight in the dog.

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Update:

The 4-Hour Chef is now banned by more than 1,100 bookstores nationwide. T-Minus 10 days to pub date. Let the games begin…

For The 4-Hour Chef, I want to do things differently. The above cinematic trailer is more playful than the intense 4-Hour Body trailer, and the storytelling takes a completely different approach. Today also marks the launch of the official 4-Hour Chef site, which has photos, book outlines, and more.

In total, we now have four trailer experiments:

- 1 min 13 seconds – above

- 30 seconds

- 15 seconds

- 8 seconds (created solely to see reader requests in feedback)

The trailers were directed, edited, and animated by the incredible Adam Patch. The music (except the 8-second version) was created and mixed by Luis Dubuc. Special thanks to the entire ChefSteps team for letting us use their Mr. Wizard-like food lab in Seattle.

What do you think of the full-length trailer? For a rare change, I ask that you don’t tell me here…

Please let me know in the video comments on YouTube! For a host of reasons, I only have 24 hours left to make the video “pop” on YouTube, and comments are extremely helpful for this, as are traffic and views.

Please take 30 seconds to share your thoughts here and help a brother out!

[First, from the lawyers: All the below is void where prohibited, you have to be at least 18 years of age, Drow elves get a -3 handicap, etc...]

Do you think you could create a trailer for The 4-Hour Chef?

Well, I’m putting $2,500 USD up for grabs, as well as a 60-minute conversation with me (if you like) and being showcased on this blog to 1.2 million monthly readers.

Here’s how it works:

- Create a video trailer for the book that’s between 15-90 seconds long. See The 4-Hour Chef website for content ideas.

- You must have the URL “www.fourhourchef.com” at the end for at least 2 seconds.

- You must include the Amazon link for The 4-Hour Chef (this one, but you can use your affiliate code) in the video description.

- You *cannot* use any of the footage from my trailer EXCEPT the last book shot and URL screen.

- You can use the music from my trailer or your own. For custom music, I’ve used the service AudioDraft successfully in the past. It can be had for a few hundred dollars, and I have no affiliation.

Then:

1) Upload the video to YouTube with the name “The 4-Hour Chef trailer – [your name] Submission”

2) Share via Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, and anywhere else you can. Rack up as many views as humanly possible.

3) Repeat Step 2 until 5pm EST on Saturday, November 24th. BUT NOTE: Advertising on Google, Facebook, YouTube disqualifies you and is not permitted.

Last:

- At 5pm EST on Saturday, November 24th, I will review all submissions with a team of judges.

- The best video with the most views wins the cash, phone call, and exposure for the creator. “Best” is determined by how well the video sells the book, with bonus points for creativity. That part is subjective, of course, but it’s fairer than pure view counts, which can sometimes be gamed. So, high view count is critical, but it’s not all that matters.

I will showcase the winning video in a dedicated post with links to the people (or company) who created it. This blog has more than a million monthly readers, many of whom are media and CEOs.

I’m super excited to see what you all create! Good luck!

And the behind-the-scenes 4-Hour Chef video from my friends at Epipheo Studios…