Hello, everyone — meet Tim Ferriss. You might know him from that time he set the Guinness World Record for the most consecutive tango spins in one minute on Live With Regis and Kelly. No? Well, how about for that time he won the USAWKF national Chinese kickboxing championship in '99? Okay, maybe not your thing. Are you into, y'know, the Internet? Well, he's been an angel investor or adviser to StumbleUpon, Posterous, Evernote, Shopify, Reputation Defender, and many more. Not into business? Fine. You know, he once had a show on The History Channel, but maybe TV doesn't impress you. Okay, how about this — in 2008, Wired magazine dubbed him, "Greatest Self-Promoter of All Time." Interested yet?
Damn straight you are.
Tim Ferriss is what we used to call a polymath, a jack-of-all-trades, and an autodidact, before James Franco came along and ruined it all for everyone. From business to fitness to dance to, well, pretty much everything, Ferriss has a peculiar and very useful knack for breaking any particular task or discipline down to its basics, finding out what makes people good at it, and distilling that into a formula for near-instant mastery. Using a bit of logic and quite a lot of gumption, he's hacked and cracked new martial arts, foreign languages, the modern workweek, and, hell, he's even reinvented publishing.
In this same way, he's hacked authorship. His The 4-Hour Workweek attacked our common notions of productivity, cementing a philosophy of less (time) is more (output), selling over a million copies, and winding up in the library of every TED-Talks-watching new economy striver. His The 4-Hour Body didn't do so bad either. Again, Ferriss broke down the mistakes most people tend to make in exercising, focused in on what successful people do, and created a path to MObama arms that didn't involve years at the gym. Both have made this expert dancer, kickboxer, and self-promoter a certified best-selling author and sought-after speaker, host, and blogger with a legion of life-hacking followers.
Oh, and on top of all that, he's got a new cookbook.
Photo: Courtesy Timothy Ferriss