TN50#116, Tim Ferriss Wishes He Could Be Me, 15 May 2023
Hi Team,
Happy Monday and welcome to The Next 50 #116. I like to think of personal performance in 3 parts: physical, mental and emotional; my frameworks focus on 4 Levers: Eat, Sleep, Move, Think. This blog is my sandbox for sharing little tidbits of information that you might find useful regarding your personal performance.
Where do you go with a blog title like that!?! Stick with me.
If someone asked you what your world view is, would you have an answer? I think one of the biggest issues in the world today, especially the western world, is that most of us would not have an answer or not a very good one. In my experience the quality of a person’s world view has a lot do with their overall mindset, Mindset is primarily what I mean with my coaching bucket – THINK. As in Eat, Sleep, Move, Think.
Anyway, back to Tim.
I have been a fan of Tim Ferriss for about a decade now and on multiple occasions I’ve heard Tim lament the fact that he wishes he could have faith (the God kind, I most recently heard Tim say something like this on his podcast with Derek Sivers).
You know, life is so much simpler for those Christians or other folks who believe in God; and I agree with this sentiment 100%, in many ways life is much easier when you have faith that life doesn’t end when take your last breath here on earth. I personally get tickled when people “wish they could have faith” but that may only make sense if you’re a Jesus Guy/Gal, aka a supernaturalist, like me.
Being a follower of Jesus Christ is the big part of my worldview and I can’t imagine how much more I would mess up on a daily basis if this wasn’t the case; and man-o-man I still mess up a lot.
Anyway, back to Tim Ferriss, when I hear Tim say things about how much easier life might be if he had faith in God my snarky side is wondering if he is thinking about people like the Apostle Paul, a Christian for sure, who was beheaded in Rome; maybe not. Also you other Tim fans know how far down the rabbit hole he goes when he researches a topic; like his foray into shooting a bow and arrow while riding a horse, speed reading, learning a language, et cetera. I wonder if he did his due diligence on God, and specifically the Christian faith. Of course, if he did his normal levels of due diligence he could have still ended up with the wrong sources; like the situation Anne Rice found herself in while doing research for her book, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. Below is an excerpt from her Author’s Note:
“…And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts.
I’d never come across this kind of emotion in any other field of research, at least not to this extent. It was puzzling.
The people who go into Elizabethan studies don’t set out to prove that Queen Elizabeth I was a fool. They don’t personally dislike her. They don’t make snickering remarks about her, or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation.
They approach her in other ways. They don’t even apply this sort of dislike or suspicion or contempt to other Elizabethan figures. If they do, the person is usually not the focus of the study. Occasionally a scholar studies a villain, yes. But even then, the author generally ends up arguing for the good points of a villain or for his or her place in history, or for some mitigating circumstance, that redeems the study itself.
People studying disasters in history may be highly critical of the rulers or the milieu at the time, yes. But in general scholars don’t spend their lives in the company of historical figures whom they openly despise.
But there are New Testament scholars who detest and despise Jesus Christ. Of course, we all benefit from freedom in the academic community; we benefit from the enormous size of biblical studies today and the great range of contributions that are being made. I’m not arguing for censorship. But maybe I’m arguing for sensitivity—on the part of those who read these books. Maybe I’m arguing for a little wariness when it comes to the field in general. What looks like solid ground might not be solid ground at all…”
(a more complete version of the author’s notes can be read here…: https://coffeehousetheology.com/anne-rice-atheist-christ/)
Good thing we don’t have scholars working at NASA who don’t really like the idea of Space Travel or those people, you know, Astronauts.
If Tim and I were stuck in an elevator I would ask him a bunch of questions about performance but I would also make him listen to this podcast series: Tim Keller, Questioning Christianity, 15 short episode; these short podcasts are very scholarly as well but not exactly like Anne Rice’s experience and the scholars she referenced above.
So back to your world view, do you have one? If not, get to work. Need help? Let me know.
As always share the post with your team and anyone who might find it useful and let me know what you think!
Have a good one, Alex
PS. There are at least a billion things I’ve glossed over regarding Christianity here and I’m way over my 500-word count for this blog; so please continue the conversation with me at: alex@fpp.llc
PPS. Have questions regarding coaching, please let me know at: alex@fpp.llc
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