2026-03-05 08:48:28
Jim Collins has published multiple international bestsellers that have sold in total more than eleven million copies worldwide, including the perennial favorite Good to Great. His writings and teachings are based on extensive research projects designed to uncover timeless principles of human endeavor that have had a lasting impact across all sectors of society. All of Jim’s books share a common thread: the study of people and how they navigate the big questions of leadership and life.
His new book is What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire, and the Self-Knowledge Imperative.
Jim will be live at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on April 9, 2026. Click here to buy your ticket.
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The post Jim Collins — What to Make of a Life and How to Maximize Your Return on Luck (#856) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-03-05 01:03:03
“We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.”
— Aldous Huxley, Island
It was cold out, but none of us were cold.
I sat with five men in the mountains of Montana. As the sun set, the fire in the center cast dancing light on our faces. Reclined against fallen trees in a tight circle, we ate mushrooms and fish we’d found under trees and along streams. The whole crew burst into laughter yet again, and one of the guides passed around a fresh batch of pine needle tea.
Bathed in warmth, I took off a layer and glanced skyward through an opening in the trees. The stars shone like crystals on black velvet, and the show—the biggest meteor shower of the year—was starting.
In that moment, there was nothing to do. Nothing to improve. Nothing to fix.
It was perfect.
***
The older I get, the more I think that self-help can be a trap. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. I say this after ~20 years of writing self-help and a lifetime of consuming it.
Spend enough time in the world of “improvement,” and you’ll notice something strange: The people most obsessed with self-help are often the least helped by it. Behind the smiles and motivational quotes, behind closed doors and after a drink or two, the truth is that they’re not able to outsmart their worries.
On one hand, perhaps this unhappiness is precisely what lands one in self-development in the first place, right? I long assumed this about myself, and it’s partially true.
On the other hand, what if self-help itself is actually creating or amplifying unhappiness?
Modern self-help contains an in-built flaw:
To continually improve yourself, you must continually locate the ways you are broken.
Fortunately, there are a few perspective shifts that make all the difference. It took me embarrassingly long to figure them out.
To get started, let’s take a fresh look at an old concept.
“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
― Abraham Maslow
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has captured the minds of hundreds of millions. It offers simplicity in a terrifyingly complex world.
Abraham Maslow’s “A Theory of Human Motivation” (1943) contains five levels, which are typically presented like the below pyramid. This one is pulled from the Wikipedia entry on the subject:
We’ve all seen it. Clear as day, you can see the goal post at the top: self-actualization.
LFG! It’s time to journal and 80/20 myself! Pass me a shaman and some modafinil.
That’s the mission. That’s the point.
Right?
But hold on. A critical footnote got lost in the shuffle. In his later writings, especially notes compiled in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971), Maslow added a sixth level above self-actualization:
Self-transcendence.
That update never quite made it out of the crib. The consultants are to blame, but that comes later.
Self-transcendence means going beyond the self—seeking connection with something greater, such as service to others, nature, art, or the divine. Why is it important? Well, for one thing, as Tony Robbins put it at an event long ago: “‘I, I, I, me, me, me’ gets to be a really fucking boring song.”
But it’s not just a boring song; it’s dangerous to your health.
“The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-help is dangerous precisely because it easily becomes self-fixation.
A focus on improving the self usually first requires finding problems with the self. This is quite the pickle. In a society that rewards problem-solving, you can end up hallucinating or exaggerating unease in order to fix it. This leaves you always in the red, always one step behind. Imagine a dog chasing its tail that has committed to being unhappy until it catches the tail… but it’s always just a few inches short. Still, it whirls around and around, “doing the work.” Perfection always recedes by one more book, one more seminar, one more habit tracker.
Put in more colorful terms, misdirected self-help turns you into a self-obsessed masturbatory ouroboros (SOMO).
To remind me of the SOMO risk, I have this sticker on my laptop:
Now, to be clear, I still love self-help. Ain’t no way Timmy can give up the sauce. There’s a place for it.
From The Bible to Seneca, and from Ben Franklin to Stephen Covey and far beyond, there’s a lot of valuable advice worth taking. I used to mainline it all—no time to waste!—and jump straight into action. This did some good, but there was a lot of collateral damage.
Why?
Because there are at least three “tectonic plates of self-help” that I couldn’t see for decades, and they dictate how much net-positive or net-negative comes from all the striving. Before you sprint, you want to calibrate your direction.
“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”
— Harrington Emerson
In the last few years, my life has become much more of a joy than a grind, and that’s because I’ve focused on three tectonic plates.
Let’s take a close look at each.
Individual or Social?
Americans, in particular, worship at the altar of the rugged individualist. There are clear upsides to this. But steeped in a culture—offline and especially online—that puts the self on a pedestal; we can take self-improvement to be an end unto itself: a better self.
But is it an end unto itself? Does it automatically produce good things? I now have my doubts.
Here’s one analogy I’ve drawn for myself.
Let’s pretend that life is the game of soccer. You can work on the mechanics of soccer by yourself. You can always get better at dribbling, shooting, and running drills as a solo practitioner. You can read dozens of books, study tape, and earn a PhD in the physics of ball flight. You can post videos of stunning shots on YouTube and get showered by emojis.
But none of this is actually playing the game of soccer.
You can spend your whole life preparing for, instead of playing, the game of life.
But why would anyone, including yours truly, succumb to this?
Subconsciously, it spares you from the messiest but most rewarding game of all: human interaction. Perhaps people hurt or traumatized you long ago. You might also justify the endless polishing, as I did, with some version of “Once I’ve perfected myself, then I’ll be ready for relationships.” But here’s the rub: that practice is exactly endless. You can always get better at dribbling and penalty kicks.
Digging further, focusing on improving the self is often in service of trying to control the world, especially if things were unpredictable or unstable when growing up. Banish emotion, live by spreadsheets, and all can be well. All can be controlled, or so the illusion goes. But as soon as you’re interacting with—let alone depending on—other people, control as a construct goes out the window. And so we consciously or subconsciously avoid the messiness. This is also one of the reasons why a lot of optimizing achiever folks have a hard time in intimate relationships.
So how do I think about “self-help” now, having realized all of the above?
It is refreshingly simple: the goal is to build and improve my relationships. The sooner you get on the real field with real players, the sooner you can get to playing soccer and engaging with life. No more auto-fellating, even with the best of intentions. We’ve evolved over millions of years to be deeply social creatures, and the more you dodge that IN REAL PHYSICAL LIFE, the more you will suffer. This is why solitary confinement in prisons is often considered cruel and unusual punishment… and yet we do it to ourselves all the time.
There are a few questions that help corral this tectonic plate of intention:
Do you have an audience for your self-development? If so, be careful.
Nary a minute can be spent on social media without bumping into a CAPS-rich “HOW X CHANGED MY LIFE” or a photo carousel of an ayahuasca retreat. If only Costa Rica got a dime for every bikini-clad healer under a waterfall!
Welcome to the theater of performative self-help. I won’t belabor this, as we’ve all seen it, but I suggest reading about the insidious creep of audience capture here, and don’t forge ahead in the fame game before reading 11 reasons not to become famous. It’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle, so you should know what that genie will do to your life.
But the truth is that most of us aren’t extreme examples of this. But even minor tendencies in this direction can do extreme damage over time.
Below are a few questions that I’ve found helpful for nudging this particular tectonic plate in the right direction:
What are the fundamental assumptions behind your doing “the work”?
Let’s begin with a Buddhist parable that I first heard from the incredible Jack Kornfield.
The old Master points to a big boulder and asks a disciple, “See that large rock over there?”
“Yes,” says the disciple.
“Do you think it’s heavy?” continues the Master.
“Yes, it’s very heavy!” replies the student.
“Only if you pick it up,” smiles the Master.
Once again, the fundamental assumption behind self-help is often this: Something is not OK. Something is wrong. Something is not enough. Something needs fixing. If I can’t find it, I’ll create it.
We’ve established this. But there is a follow-on assumption that matters a lot.
If I fix the things that aren’t OK, all will be well. If I improve myself enough, if I only work hard enough, I can finally eliminate my suffering.
I hate to inform you, but this doesn’t work. I’m also thrilled to inform you that this doesn’t work. You can stop picking up a lot of boulders.
There is one book that most opened my eyes to this reframe – Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation by Bruce Tift. It offers a terrifying but ultimately liberating realization: there is no perfect escape from suffering. It doesn’t exist. But there is a way to find your long-sought unclenching, and it lies in cultivating your skill of acceptance as much as that of improvement.
Now, I can hear the chorus: Has Tim gone soft? Given up the good fight? Is he telling everyone to chill after he himself red-lined and got the spoils? How convenient! And…
Hold on a second. I’m telling you—intelligent acceptance is high-leverage. It’s probably one of the highest forms of leverage. This is an approach that helps preserve your energy for where it really matters. My early forays into Stoicism and Seneca The Younger helped set the conditions for my biggest wins from 2004–2010. Still, I only learned a small fraction of what I needed.
So how do you cultivate your skill of acceptance without becoming complacent?
This is a big question and what I love about Bruce’s book. Compared to a strictly Western or purely Eastern book, he blends them and offers a surgical guide to using both action and acceptance. You don’t have to be a bull in a china shop or a cow in the rain; there is a middle path. That middle path is where all the gold is buried.
If the only tool you have is “self-improvement,” you’ll become a hammer looking for nails in a world that is 50% screws. I tried it. It can create the veneer of success, but it will leave your inner world in turmoil.
Suffice to say, the dual dance is the most joyful. Upgrade your toolkit with that in mind. Read Bruce’s book. If it doesn’t click, try Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach, which had a large impact on my life a decade before I found Bruce’s book. In a sense, the writing of Seneca prepared me for Tara, which then prepared me for Bruce. So grab them all and thank me later.
If you want serenity, you need to be able to put the Serenity Prayer into practice. Seriously, I read it all the time.
“The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called ‘self-actualization’ is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”
― Viktor E. Frankl
How can we easily keep ourselves on the right track?
As I remind myself these days: It’s the relationships, stupid.
For a nice simple visual, let’s revise Maslow’s pyramid with all of this in mind. This is easy, as Maslow never drew his model as a rigid pyramid!
He described “classes” of needs that were unfixed, overlapping, and that could reverse in order. And believe it or not, self-actualization was only ever for the “self-actualizing minority.” In the 1960s, his work was co-opted by consultants and corporate trainers who needed a progression to sell. True story.
Given all this, and after decades of trial and error, here’s where I’ve landed:
Maslow’s Hamburger of Needs.
Ahhh… what? Not to worry. It’s the same good ol’ Maslow ingredients, but I think of it as a hamburger:
For our purposes, the meat, the whole point of the hamburger, is that middle layer: relationships. That is the center of life. The heartbeat.
As luck would have it, when you improve the heartbeat, it also feeds everything else.
You’ll notice that the meat contains Abe’s most-important addendum—the sixth level of self-transcendence. Focusing on things bigger than yourself is a critical piece of the ultimate puzzle. Faith, nature, family, meditation, causes that outlive you, etc.—take your pick. But be careful. If you do it to inflate the ego or impress others, it’s self-obsession again, not self-transcendence. If you need credit, it doesn’t count.
Of course, it should go without saying, but the top and bottom layers matter a lot. A hamburger is a giant mess without the bun. Friends will get sick of you crashing on their couch and eating their food.
But the bread and dressing layers exist to serve the middle. That’s the payload. Everything is in service of the payload. And the payload circulates benefits back to the edges, and then the cycle repeats. Even if you think this is oversimplified claptrap, temporarily assuming it’s true will help you.
What if nearly everything you focused on—calendar, habits, goals—aimed to improve your relational life somehow? What if you took this as a challenge for even a week? Your lens on the world changes dramatically.
You say yes differently.
You say no more clearly.
Your to-do list for life slowly transforms.
What if all that you focused on, all that you do, had to improve that middle layer in some fashion?
It’s a damn hard question if you’ve been on the self-help train for a while. I get it.
So let’s try something easier: What if it only changed how you approach your to-do list? Try hamburger-first each day for 1–2 weeks and tell me what happens. Add and do the things that improve your relational life FIRST. Nothing on the list? Create something. It could be as simple as cooking dinner for your spouse, complimenting at least three people a day for a week, or introducing yourself to the barista you see every morning. Getting started is how you get grooving.
For friendship makes prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
In his Moral Letters to Lucilius, Seneca the Younger famously wrote that “These individuals [who put money at the center of life] have riches just as we say that we ‘have a fever,’ when really the fever has us.”
What if self-help is similar?
Obsessing over the self never provides peace. It cannot make you whole, as you aren’t the whole. Becoming whole starts by putting down the rock you didn’t even know you were carrying.
Because at the end of the day—and at the end of a Montana night—the point was never yourself.
It was never the pyramid.
It was never the optimization.
It was the people around the fire.
The post The Self-Help Trap: What 20+ Years of “Optimizing” Has Taught Me appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-02-26 10:23:42
Please enjoy this transcript of a different kind of episode, where I am in the hot seat. Dan Harris (@danharris) interviewed me for his show, the 10% Happier with Dan Harris podcast, and I thought it was worth sharing here. We cover my most recent brain stimulation protocol, where I’ve landed on optimization, and avoiding traps of self-help. Dan is a wonderful interviewer. He is the bestselling author of 10% Happier and Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book.
Books, music, and people mentioned in the interview
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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Dan Harris: Tim Ferriss, welcome back to the show.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you, sir. Nice to be back. Nice to see you.
Dan Harris: Likewise. Let me ask you a ridiculously basic question, but I think maybe deceptively simple. I actually never know how to say, is it deceptively complex or deceptively simple? Anyway, my question really is how are you? How are you doing these days? You’ve publicly kind of gone on a ride talking about your own stuff, some of it quite heavy. I’m just curious, how are you?
Tim Ferriss: That is a both deceptively simple and complex question. My answer thankfully is really straightforward, better than ever. I feel absolutely fantastic. We could dive into how and why that’s the case if you’d like, but I would say keeping it short and sweet for the moment, I would say fantastic, better than ever, mind, body, soul, psycho-emotionally, musculoskeletally, really feeling holistically very good, optimistic, we could keep going, so I’ll let you take that anywhere you’d like to.
Dan Harris: I love to hear it. Seriously, I really do love to hear it and I would be curious to follow up and hear from you like what has brought you to this point?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I would say a few things. So, one of the risks of personal development, or let’s just call it more broadly self-help, is that it can very easily become self-infatuation or self-obsession.
Dan Harris: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And the counterbalance to that, the bet that offsets it is it’s very simple. Relationships, really doubling down, tripling down on relationships. We are evolved to be a social species, and whenever you are in isolation physically or simply in thought loops in your own head, that tends to catalyze or worsen tremendously any type of instability or OCD or depression or anxiety or fill-in-the-blank psychiatric condition. So, my policies, which were already in place last time we spoke that I have really continued to invest into are doing a past year review every year, looking at my top relationships that are nourishing, energizing energy in as opposed to energy out, and then blocking out time in advance for the entire year for extended periods of time with those people. Now extended will depend on your circumstances. For me, that could be anywhere from a long weekend to a week spending say five days in the wilderness in Montana with some of my oldest closest friends, et cetera, et cetera.
That will do — not to denigrate therapy in any way — but sometimes talking more about your problems, if it were to solve all of your problems, would’ve worked already. There’s a place for talk therapy, but it is not, nor does it need to be the only tool in the toolkits. So, simply spending time around your silly, dumb, amazing friends and laughing, whether it’s around a bottle of wine or a meal or a campfire, really, really goes a long way. So, that’s one piece of it. Second piece is to hit a familiar thread is very consistent meditation typically twice daily, 10 minutes, very, very straightforward in my case.
And then also if we’re going out to the edges a bit technologically speaking, there is something that some of your listeners may have never heard of, which is accelerated TMS. TMS stands for transcranial magnetic stimulation. It’s a type of brain stimulation that has existed for decades, but the hardware and the software, everything about these technologies has improved dramatically in the last five to 10 years, particularly in I would say the last five years.
Thanks to certain researchers like Nolan Williams out of Stanford, who sadly passed away in the last six months and others. But what accelerated TMS looks like is typically up to, let’s just call it maybe one or two years ago, accelerated TMS takes what you might do in conventional TMS over several months where you go in, you have this paddle put against your head, it produces a magnetic field that just to keep it very simple, either excites or inhibits certain parts of your brain, certain types of circuitry, and that can be applied to depression, it can be applied to neurodegenerative diseases. In fact, in some cases it can be applied to anxiety, OCD and so on, depending on the target where you place these coils. And in the case of accelerated TMS, you’re taking what you might do over three, four, five months and you’re compressing it into one week.
So, every hour on the hour, 10 hours a day for one week, you’re going in and getting, let’s just call it a few minutes, three to nine minutes of pulses on your brain, and then you take 50 minutes off, you go back in, you get hit again, and that has been referred to at least in one format. The SAINT Protocol S-A-I-N-T, they’ve shied away from it, but it was developed at Stanford and the SAINT Protocol in many, let’s call them patients, produces 70%, 80% remission of depression. That is quite durable. It’s not one shot you’re done. Typically, people will, let’s just say do a five-day sequence, then they might go in and have one to three-day booster sequences three months, six months later. And this technology has tremendous effects. I’ve experimented with this over the last handful of years. The first time I did it, it had near miraculous results.
I went from having severe and I’ve been officially diagnosed, so this is not just throwing it around loosely, but moderate, severe OCD with lots of rumination. I’m not flipping light switches or washing my hands, but I have these ruminative loops that I get caught in. People I’m sure some listening can identify with this where you just can’t turn off these kind of compulsive thought loops. Could be a grudge, could be a fear, could be something you’re planning for, could be a conversation you need to have. It just loops and loops and loops, which causes insomnia, which causes fatigue and just general wearing down of the system, which leads to depression. I’ve realized that’s my sequence. It actually starts with anxiety, not depression out of the gate. And I was having, let’s just call it seven, eight out of 10 symptoms when I went in to the first treatment, I did a five days that’s really severe for people who are not clear.
It’s really, really severe. It’s affecting every aspect of my life. Had the treatment, there was a delayed onset and even the scientists most involved with this don’t really have a great explanation for how or why this would happen, but nothing really happened for two, three weeks and then flipped a switch and had basically zero anxiety, zero rumination for, let’s call it three to four months. I’ve never experienced anything like it. And that includes psychedelic assisted therapies, which I know very well and have supported a lot of science underlying. This is a bit of a long answer I realize, but for people who are interested, I really recommend the conversation I did with Nolan Williams. Then there are different types of hardware, but I tried it then with boosters several times afterwards. Null effect, zero, didn’t work.
And I started to lose hope again because I thought this was going to be a replicable, reliable tool that I could use. I was so excited and did a Hail Mary kind of last ditch round with the accelerated TMS recently. I did this in Northern California instead of doing five days. So, keep in mind, it’s like, let’s just call it three months of TMS gets compressed into five days. Instead of doing five days, I did one day, but I pre-dosed with something called D-cycloserine, DCS, as it’s sometimes referred to in the literature, is in many ways an antiquated antibiotic that used to be used for tuberculosis and sometimes urinary tract infections, which affects the NMDA receptors in such a way. I think it’s a partial antagonist, it might be an agonist, so don’t quote me on it, but the point is this little drug that is not typically used anymore is a catalyst for neuroplasticity.
And when you take this beforehand, you can do something like one day of accelerated TMS and sometimes the results are better than what you previously, let’s just call it seven years ago, would get from three, four months. And I did one day and Dan this time around, it was just like a switch basically the next day and it has now been two or three months, and I don’t want to set expectations that it’ll be this way for everyone. It seems to be particularly effective, yes for depression, but it seems to be particularly effective in a very small sample size at this point for anxiety and OCD and it’s just a different life. It is a different life.
So, all of those things in combination plus the basics, right? The kind of basic macronutrients of health, exercise, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, diet and so on, are just doing their job together. The last one I’ll throw in and then I’ll shut up because I realize this has turned into a TED Talk, is intermittent ketosis. So, the ketogenic diet and ketosis overall, which can be achieved a few different ways, which I’m in right now, is absolutely phenomenal for addressing a lot of psychiatric pains, psychoemotional pains that are failing to be treated by medication. And there’s something called metabolic psychiatry. Chris Palmer out of Harvard and others have looked at this very closely. All right, thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Dan Harris: I just want to assure you, TED Talks are welcome here. You’re a podcaster, you know long answers are fine. So, please delete that sheepishness from your mind.
Tim Ferriss: All right, will do.
Dan Harris: I have a million follow-up questions. Let me just say just high level, a different life, those three words really did make me very happy to hear that that’s what’s going on for you.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you, Dan. Yeah, it is impossible to overstate the difference between an eight out of 10 of non-stop ruminative monkey mind with a fixation on things that are anxiety-producing to getting to a one or two out of 10. Those are two different lived experiences. They are so far apart from each other. It’s really remarkable.
Dan Harris: So you mentioned transcranial, is it magnetic stimulation, TMS?
Tim Ferriss: Magnetic stimulation. Mm-hmm.
Dan Harris: I will drop a link in the show notes for people who want to listen to Tim’s conversation with Nolan Williams, with the caveat of course that you’re not the researcher, the world’s leading expert, you’re more of the Guinea pig and patient. But can you tell us a little bit more about is TMS widely available? Is it a thing that average people can access and also how strong is the evidence?
Tim Ferriss: All right, I’m happy to tackle that with, as you said, the disclaimer, I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on the internet, but I do spend a lot of time in these waters. So, what I’ll say is that the evidence for TMS broadly, they’re decades of evidence with different applications of TMS. As we look at accelerated TMS, there’s actually I would say very compelling body of evidence. Once we get into the vanguard, which is always risky, right? You don’t necessarily want to be one of the first 100 monkeys shot in the space, but in this particular case, the pain was great enough that I decided to opt-in. Then you’re getting into the bleeding edge, which is this D-Cycloserine, DCS plus TMS. That’s very much at the outer reaches. I would say at least based on the clinic that I went to, and maybe overall for all I know I am one of perhaps 60 patients with OCD/generalized anxiety disorder who have been treated that way. So, it’s a very small number.
In terms of accessibility, there are, let me start from the top in no particular order, but I’ll just say that there’s a hardware stack. So, the two companies that I’m most familiar with, which make hardware that I’ve used myself, are BrainsWay, that’s one company and then another one is MagVenture. The hardware are different. I know people who have responded very well to both of them, so you can vet certain providers. I would say not saying this is the only way, I’m not saying it’s fair perhaps there are other technologies out there, but as you would expect, there’s a fair bolus of fly-by-night operations that are promising miracles and offering “TMS” that is actually not following any protocol whatsoever. I think that’s very unethical, but BrainsWay, MagVenture are two types of hardware and then you really want to look, it is available is the short answer. Accelerated TMS is available in a lot of major cities. It is not as widely distributed as I would like because it is generally not covered by insurance.
Accelerated TMS is generally not covered. TMS, let’s just call it conventional TMS is often covered by insurance depending on the indication, but accelerated TMS where you’re basically taking a week off work and just getting your brains up 10 hours a day for five days straight, typically not covered. And part of why I’m so excited about the implications if the data scale and are robust and show comparable or superior results with this pre-administration of this drug is that the ability of anyone, whether they are average, less financially stable or very well-heeled of taking one day off of work, is not only logistically so much easier if they’re able to pre-administer with this DCS, but it should be much less expensive.
So, I’m hoping even if people have to pay out of pocket that these breakthroughs, hopefully they’re breakthroughs with combination therapies of TMS, accelerated TMS and D-cycloserine will really make it much more widely available. That’s my hope. It’s going to take a little while, but it is available. I know there are clinics in, for instance, New York, I know there are clinics in California and Chicago that are credible. They may exist in other places as well.
Dan Harris: The other thing you mentioned in terms of having a different life is your focus on relationships, and I saw myself in that answer. There was a kind of desertification or desertification, I don’t know how you pronounce it, of my social life for many years because I was such a careerist and such a workaholic, and then in recent years have really turned that around and I see such a massive difference in my mental health. I’m curious, you mentioned that in recent years you’ve at the top of every year you make a plan to see the people who, to use the cliche fill your cup. Had you gone through a period like I did where there was a certain amount of isolation or inattention to this lever?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, for sure. There were a few different reasons for that. I don’t know if hindsight’s 20/20, but I think it’s easier to see from my vantage point now, and it’s a balancing act because there’s compulsive socializing because you are incredibly uncomfortable or afraid of being alone or with yourself.
Dan Harris: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Right. There’s compulsive socializing to distract yourself, like protect yourself from yourself, which is problematic. And then there’s compulsive isolation and I would say I probably leaned far more towards the compulsive isolation and there were two reasons for that. One was workaholism back in the day for sure, and I just felt like I was more effective, able to produce, more able to focus on business, finances, whatever it might be in isolation and there might be some truth to that. Then I would say there was also this belief that I think at the time was really implicit. I don’t think I explicitly grasped it, which was I’ve written this incredibly long essay that maybe I’ll publish at some point, but talking about some of the dangers of self-help and one of them is the following, which ties into what we’re talking about and leaning towards isolation.
This implicit belief or explicit that you need to work on yourself and fix yourself and “do the work” and then you’ll be ready to interact with other people and have a significant relationship and engage with your family if that is an option or you want it to be an option, et cetera, et cetera. So, in effect, the analogy that I’ve drawn for some friends is you want to play soccer, but first you’re going to read all the textbooks and get a master’s degree and PhD in soccer and then you’re in a practice dribbling and penalty shots and so on by yourself and you want to become as perfect a player as possible by yourself before you ever actually get on the field and play the game of soccer and you can start to believe that you’re playing soccer by yourself. There’s always more room for improvement. You’re never going to be perfect.
And if you get caught in that trap, which is the partial trap of self-help, you’re always polishing this self and it can become this real recursive dangerous trap, this fixation on the self, and you never actually fucking play soccer. And at a point you start to believe that you are, but you’re not. You’re simulating by yourself life, but not actually engaging with life. And I have, who knows, maybe this is a function of getting older. I don’t think so necessarily, but for so many decades I was interested in the cutting edge of everything, and I still am, but I’ve become interested equally in things that have lasted millennia or more than millennia.
And I recommend, if you’re trying to learn how the latest LLMs differ from one another, et cetera, you also spend some time looking at evolutionary biology and studying the things that we have evolved to optimize for to experience. And man, it’s just like, I think it was Reaganomics, right? “It’s the economy, stupid.” It’s the relationship, stupid, right? If you don’t have physical contact with people, if you have these in real life physical experiences, if you model that in animals, they become a complete disaster. They exhibit the same types of behaviors that we now see spiking in humans—anxiety, depression, lethargy, sitting in a cage, not doing anything. We need this type of contact. So I’d say that I’ve offset the bleeding edge with the very, very super dull edge of things that have lasted a long time.
Dan Harris: Amen.
Coming up, Tim talks about the perils of self-op optimization and the secret to what we actually should be optimizing for, the ketogenic diet, using AI as a means of working on your health. In other words, should you be talking to chat box about your medical stuff and much more.
The question I’m about to ask might bring us back to your unpublished essay about the dangers of self-help, but you mentioned the word optimizing and in some ways I kind of think of you as the proto-optimizer, 4-Hour Workweek.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Dan Harris: I’m just curious where you are on self-optimization now?
Tim Ferriss: I would say that I still focus on certain areas to optimize. I still pull certain levers and what I would say I have become much better at, and it takes practice, it’s going to sound so rudimentary, is asking simply what are you optimizing for before you optimize? Why are you optimizing? And it’s easy, I would say particularly if you are being shaped by social media, which seems to basically offer you the seven deadlier cardinal sins on a silver platter, you get to pick your poison. If you’re being shaped by that, then you can end up optimizing without a direction necessarily or questioned. You haven’t interrogated the direction. And that could be because you’re following someone online who’s a multi-billion dollar real estate developer/serial entrepreneur/fill in the blank and the chase for money is on. But that never really gets interrogated. I think The 4-Hour Workweek does a good job of breaking down kind of work for work’s sake and money for money’s sake.
So, for me, I have three relatives right now with rapidly progressing Alzheimer’s disease, including those who do not have the genotype. If we look at say, APOE status, right? They’re APOE 3/3, whereas I’m APOE 3/4. So, that’s scary. There are other factors to consider for Alzheimer’s. I am doing things to try not to die from something that is hopefully preventable from the perspective of cardiac health, cardiovascular health, and then also trying to mitigate my risk of neurodegenerative disease. And that’s why I’m in ketosis right now, for instance, and juries out on some of this, but very plausibly, there are mechanisms by which going into ketosis on a fairly regular basis for a few weeks at a time, let’s just say in my case two or three times a year may have neuroprotective effects, also anti-cancer effects.
And people can listen to my interviews with Dominic D’Agostino, he’s a researcher out of Florida or other people for the science behind this. And it’s also an intervention, and this comes back to your question about optimizing that is very, very well studied in the sense that I have very high confidence that the downside risk is low and very manageable, whereas if you’re just mainlining GLP-1 agonists, amazing results that we’ve seen in the literature so far. But have we had anyone on these for 10, 20 years? No, at least not 20 years. Maybe some of the first monkeys shot in the space like me with the accelerated TMS and the DCS has been on for that period of time. That doesn’t mean don’t use GLP-1 agonists, but understand that there are a lot of unknown unknowns.
With the ketogenic diet, it’s like look, the ketogenic diet in its modern incarnation using heavy cream or other types of fats, what’s designed for epileptic children, and this goes back probably 100 years at this point, if not 100 years close to it, and humans have the metabolic machinery to go into ketosis and have had that machinery for millennia upon a millennia upon millennia. That would be an example of something that passes the test for me of seemingly credible upside potential, even if we don’t understand all the mechanisms, limited downside potential that I can offset with certain prescription drugs, let’s just say because I’m a cholesterol hyper-absorber. And okay, great, we’re going to do that.
Intermittent fasting would be another one. During ketosis or outside of ketosis, the one thing that has most dramatically changed my blood tests with respect to specifically insulin sensitivity and avoiding prediabetes, which runs rampant in my family, intermittent fasting. In my case, that means I’m eating within an eight-hour window each day. It might be even a little shorter, like 2:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. and that’s it. I just don’t eat until 2:00 p.m. or 3:00 p.m. And for some folks, it’s arguably better for you if you do like a 12:00 noon to 8:00 p.m. kind of eating window. It’s also called time-restricted feeding. There’s a lot of good science for this, not just in animal models, but in humans. And the results I’ve seen from that are just absolutely incredible and it’s so simple because you don’t actually need to change what you eat, you’re just changing when you eat.
So, those would be two that people might think of as optimizing. And then I’m taking a handful of prescription drugs to offset the cardiovascular risk because it doesn’t matter if I am eating an all-fat diet, an all-protein diet, a vegan diet, a fill-in-the-blank diet, there are certain biomarkers that are just trash, they’re so bad. And that seems to be just straight from the code, straight from DNA. And for that reason, I’m like, “Ah, no spring chicken anymore. You know what? I think I’ll just bite the bullet and take some of these.”
And when, for instance, I talk with my doctors now, the first thing is if you have a blood test and something is out of range, my recommendation would be before you get on 12 different drugs to deal with it, and if it’s an emergency, it’s an emergency, but if it’s not an emergency, like your triglycerides are high, all right, well, it’s probably not going to kill you in the next week.
My recommendation would be talk to your doctor, replicate the test, do the test again the next week, maybe on a different day and see if you can replicate the error. Because for instance, if you had a heavy weekend of drinking or a fatty meal the night before and then you do your blood test at a.m. the next morning fasted, well, you might look like you’re on the road having heart attack in two months, but actually it was just behavior and diet. So, replicate, replicate, that would be number one. Don’t base the outcome of the basketball match on one photograph. Try to get tested more frequently and pay attention to when you’re getting tested. So, if you’re, for instance, coming back to the example I gave, if you’re taking your test, your blood test on Monday mornings, make sure your next test that you’re comparing it to is also on Monday morning.
If it’s Wednesday morning, it might be completely different. By the way, if it’s something like cortisol, testosterone, et cetera, these things have diurnal cycles. They really fluctuate throughout the day. So, if you get a test at 8:00 a.m., I’ve seen this with friends of mine, male friends who get a test at like 8:00 a.m. and I have to interrogate how they did things for them to Sherlock Holmes this, but they’re concerned about their testosterone levels or the free testosterone, they take a test at 8:00 a.m., looks great. They do another test three months later, six months later, they do it at 11:00 a.m. and it’s 200 points lower. Looks crazy. And it’s not crazy. They don’t actually — in this case, this guy had no problem. He was about to get on all sorts of hormone replacement therapy and all this stuff that is pretty powerful.
And I said, “Go back, do it at 8:00 a.m. again, two weeks. Let’s see what happens.” Guess what? It was the same as the first test. So, that’s step number one. And then when I’m looking at possible interventions for me, again, I’m not a doctor, don’t play one on the internet, but the way I approach it, and people get very little guidance on this, most doctors are overstretched, right? They get 11 minutes per patient. The easiest thing for them to do is say, “Look, this guy has a problem or this girl has a problem. If we throw these three drugs at it, it’s probably going to fix it. My job, as far as I’m concerned, as far as my time allows is to keep this person from dying. Okay. Start these three drugs.” But what I have tried to do, and I did this with my own particular cardiac situation, and I think Boston Health is the testing that I did to get a more granular understanding of things with a little higher resolution.
But since I’m a cholesterol hyper-absorber, that informs the type of drug I might take doesn’t necessarily have to be something like a statin. And there were three or four drugs that I was suggested to take and I said, “What is the longest study of these with the best side effect profile that is the most innocuous that I can start with? And we can do another test in two months. This is not an emergency. I’m not about to have a pulmonary embolism or heart attack, don’t have any arteries blocked. What is it?” And it was in my case, not everybody, something called ezetimibe, otherwise known as Zetia, very well studied, very well tolerated. I said, “Let me try this in case I am a hyper responder,” because sometimes you can be a hyper responder or a non responder, but I was like, “Let me just try it out.”
And statistically very unlikely that I would be, the doctor said. Nonetheless, tried it. Two months later, retest, guess what? I’m a hyper responder. So, I was able to use the minimum effective dose for medication and ultimately added one more thing, but how many decades of possible side effects did I just spare myself by doing basically like one and a half drugs instead of starting with four or five and doing that indefinitely from that point forward?
Dan Harris: When you’re dealing with your doctors, to what extent do you consult AI? I have found personally that talking to a chatbot has been incredibly helpful. Now, with the caveat that they hallucinate and they fuck things up all the time, and so I’m not taking it as gospel because your chatbot doesn’t get bored of you and doesn’t have an 11-minute window to talk to you. So, you can really spend a lot of time, and then what I found is that I can then run what I’ve learned by my doctors. Is that an experience you’ve had?
Tim Ferriss: For sure, and I do use AI and these LLMs a lot. What I would say is that if you’re going to do something like that, my recommendation would be, and I’ll give a shameless plug just because I’m involved with this company, I think they’re doing great things, but you could use something like a ChatGPT, but there’s some tools that are designed for learning. There’s one called Oboe, O-B-O-E.com. Get some basic literacy, just the ABC’s of basic medical terminology that would be helpful for understanding things like blood tests. It’s like 100 words, maybe 200 words perhaps at the very, very tippity top if you want to be an overachiever, develop an understanding of the basic vocabulary so that you can also discuss these things in shorthand with your doctors. So, once you develop basic medical literacy, you could also use that to learn how to read studies, learn how to read a scientific abstract and study. That would be one of the best investments you could ever make with your time.
Spend an afternoon doing that or two afternoons, holy shit, the ROI, and that is unbelievable. The number of medical problems averted, the number of medical procedures averted. The number of non-obvious solutions found that my basic literacy has helped to solve for is unbelievable. It doesn’t take very long. So, I would use the tools to kind of do that first. So, that’ll help you with prompts. The answers are only going to be as good as your prompts. Once you’ve done that, then I use AI all the time and there’s an expression which has been helpful for me. I can run pretty hot. I think that’s chilled out a lot, but I can run pretty hot. I’m typically very impatient. I have been since I was a toddler, and the expression is don’t attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence, but it goes further than that.
Just because somebody doesn’t reply to you, it doesn’t mean it’s a personal front. Just because someone does something stupid and they answer one of your questions out of the three, you emailed them, you can be like, “Ah.” You can get really wound up. But I would go further than that, which is don’t attribute to malice or incompetence, what can be explained by a busy schedule. People are busy. Everybody’s busy. But what you can do is you can, after developing this basic literacy, you can go in and then you can ask questions that your doctors may not have time for. I am always checking for contraindications between medications and also supplements because doctors will miss these. They will miss them. They might not miss the most obvious, but there are some that are not as obvious.
For instance, there are sleep medications like trazodone, which really affect the serotonergic system. It’s effectively — this is an overstatement, but it’s effectively a failed antidepressant. So, if you don’t know that, and it’s not technically exactly an SSRI, like a Prozac, but there are some similarities, if you don’t know that because you’re taking a sleep medication and then you go out and take something that’s contraindicated for this entire class of serotonin specific antidepressants, you can get yourself into trouble.
So, I will regularly check for contraindications. That’s one thing I do. I have friends who’ve uploaded their whole genome to some of these LLMs and ask for insights, and they’ve identified some remarkable things. The risk in doing all of this is that you may uncover issues that if you are prone to anxiety, for a lot of reasons, I’m kind of inoculated against this with medical stuff because I’ve spent so much time in the medical and scientific world.
But — give you an example, another thing that I do once a year or twice a year is a full body MRI, and there are companies that do this. I think Biograph is the highest level. Prenuvo is also pretty good, but I’ve seen a couple of people have cancers missed, which isn’t great. So, if you get a full body MRI and you are over the age of 40, you’re going to find something, you’re probably going to find some type of internal cysts.
You might find if you had as a friend of mine did like a small brain aneurysm, you’re probably going to find something. And the question is, can you handle that? Can you handle either doing something about it, which is presumably why you’re doing it in the first place, or can you deal with the overwhelming likelihood statistically that the doctor’s going to say, “Yeah, we found X, Y, or Z, you don’t need to do anything about it? We’ll just keep an eye on it.” Are you going to be able to handle that without becoming a stress case who’s combing through LLMs and WebMD all day making yourself crazy? Anyway, I’ll stop there. But yes, I use these tools all the time. If you’re going to use one tool, use another tool to fact check it. So, if you get something from chat GPT, absolutely have that thing cross examined by Claude or another tool. Do not trust these tools with their first answers.
Dan Harris: Just on the pan-scan thing, the full body MRI, the ultimate, this is a bit of an aside, but I have figured out the ultimate health hack, which is marry a doctor because she can’t get out of here, and I ask her a lot of questions, but she is really against these pan-scans for the very reason that you just stated, which is you will find something and it may stress you out, or it may put you in the market for a procedure you don’t need. Yeah, so it’s interesting that there’re different POVs on this.
Tim Ferriss: One of my favorite quotes is “Be suspicious of what you want.” That’s a Rumi quote, going way back. It’s like we think that we want all of the health information we can possibly get, but you should be a little skeptical and suspicious of that if you’ve never dealt with a huge amount of health information at high resolution. So, yeah, it’s very personal thing. In my case, psychologically, this particular type of data overwhelm, I’m pretty good with.
Dan Harris: So I asked before about where you are with optimizing now and you said you’re more surgical now in how you optimizing. You listed a bunch of areas including how you eat. You did put out a podcast in August of 2025 talking about some of your rethinking of optimizing. I’d just be curious, where are you at with that now?
Tim Ferriss: I think that optimizing is the how, broadly speaking, how you do something. Much more important than how you do something is the few some things that you choose in the first place to do. This applies to learning quickly. This applies to making a lot of money. This applies to getting in great shape. What you do in a sense matters a lot more than how you do anything. You can get very, very, very good, very optimized, very efficient at doing something unimportant that does not make it important, just makes you very good at doing something that you probably shouldn’t be doing in the first place. Modern productivity porn is indiscriminate in how it applies, optimizing to everything and everything.
There’s some very funny morning routines that are these YouTube videos that are four or five hours long of people going through their day. There’s a point at which your morning routine just turns into a five-hour warm-up for life each day.
That’s obviously a really extreme example, but for me, if you were to have a nanny cam hidden in a little stuffed bear in my house, my office, this Airbnb where I’m right now, and you watched me on any given day, you’d just be like, “What is this guy doing?” I mean, it’s like a poorly programmed Roomba. Is this Blair Witch Project? It doesn’t seem to be doing much work. What is he doing? And part of the reason I can get away with that is that I think I am very good at measuring twice and cutting once. In this context, what that means is I’m spending a lot of time looking at doing 80/20 analysis, asking myself, what can I do that is not easily replicated by someone else that I find easier to do than other people? Which is kind of a shortcut to finding things that you’re good at that you’ll also have the endurance for because it’s easier for you or you’re obsessed with it.
Okay, what am I obsessed with? What am I doing in my off hours? Okay, let me try to find a Venn diagram of that and then focus on those things. I’ll test it for a very short period of time to see if number one, I can sustain it. If I am actually as good as I thought I would be, I need to be the best in the world, but better than average. Then over time, as I’m throwing a lot against the wall and then I’m looking back and saying, “Okay, I tried these three things, or I made these four investments. I had these assumptions at the time. Did they pan out? Why or why not?” And then course-correcting. They’re actually very, very, very, very few things you have to get right, in my opinion, to have an incredible life. You don’t need to be great at a lot of things is my perspective.
It’s like, look, I remember talking to Jerry Seinfeld and one of his conclusions was if you lift weights and do Transcendental Meditation, that’ll solve pretty much all your problems. And I’m paraphrasing, but it wasn’t too far from that. He’s like, “If you lift weights and do TM, it will solve most of your problems.” I like that because I think there’s a whole hell of a lot of truth to it that distilling down and it makes life seem much more manageable. If people feel like they have to win this super ultra decathlon of life where instead of 10 sports, there are 150 sports you have to be good at, who’s going to actually surmount that and cope with it well? Nobody. So, for me, it’s like, look, if I had to just pull a rabbit out of a hat right now to pick a few, I’d be like, “Read Nonviolent Communication.”
Figure out how to talk to people without sounding overly defensive or aggressive. Life, unless we’re going to be a monk of some type or a nun, and even then probably, there’s some crazy internal politics at the Hamlet in China, if you know the abbot, you’re going to have to deal with that abbot. So, work on your communication. Take that very seriously as the connective tissue for everything. Don’t invest in things you don’t understand. It’s like when in doubt, read a few books on low-cost index funds and the S&P 500. Go look at the graph over the last five, 10, 15, 20 years.
You might have some hard dips here and there, but if you’re trying to get fancy and invest in individual AI stocks, like wow, maybe you’ll pick Amazon and Google out of all the trash there is right now. But most of us, I don’t think I can do it. Lift weights, try to do some zone two training where it’s like you could speak in single sentences, but you don’t really want to do that for 30 to 60 minutes a few times a week and then don’t eat processed crap, Michael Pollan rules. If your grandmother wouldn’t recognize the ingredients, don’t eat it. Try that. I think you’ll do pretty well.
Dan Harris: Hard to argue with any of that. Coming up, Tim talks about why you need to say no more often and the tools you need in order to get better at saying no, doing a digital detox, defanging your careers and a new game he designed.
One of your current projects is called The No Book, and the book, as Tim has pointed out, may come out in 10 years because he’s working on it slowly. But he has released a couple of chapters online and I’ve read at least one of them and it’s really interesting. So, before I say too much, maybe you could describe what is The No Book and why are you writing it if only slowly?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I have an 800-page draft right now, so it’s going to need to get whittled down a little bit. But The No Book started something like, boy, six years ago where I noticed a lot of people in my audience, my listeners, my readers struggling with focus and saying no, because fundamentally the road to where you want to be in life is Wizard of Oz, golden brick road is saying yes to a few things, a few things. There are just a few things you have to get right. That’s the yes road and it’s very few things. The guardrails for that are no. You have to say no the entire way. I was writing this book, I reached out to a bunch of my friends, these are very accomplished friends, in this case, to ask them for their recommendations. I thought they would help me write this thing and they were like, “Oh, my God, are you kidding me? This is the biggest pain in my life. Please send me an early copy when you can.”
So, my friends, there were a few who were actually very helpful, but the vast majority were like, “Oh, my God, I thought that life was going to get easier. It has only gotten harder with respect to saying no.” It just became this massive project. So, I put it on the back burner and then a friend of mine, Neil Strauss, some people might recognize that name, he’s written something like 10 New York Times bestsellers and he’s terrible at saying no, it turns out. And he was busting my balls about not writing this book, and he kept harassing me about finishing it, and he was actually kind of creating a kerfuffle over a group dinner after a few drinks. And I was just like, “Neil, if you want to read this book so badly, why don’t you just help me finish writing it?”
And I thought that put it to bed, and then the next day when we all sobered up, he was like, “If you’re serious, why don’t we talk about it?” At the same time, I was noticing with social media, certainly with AI, it’s going to get a thousand times worse. First of all, the external forces that want to distract you are almost unbeatable. It’s incredible how sophisticated they are. Secondly, the way that enables self interruption and distraction is something that humanity has never seen before. There is this incredible pain in terms of paradox of choice. What should I do? Who should I listen to? What should I watch? What should I pay attention to? That is fracturing the psyches of people. And this, by the way, geographically, does not discriminate. Economically, it’s like up and down the chain, left, right, front, center, everywhere.
The problems just seem to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So, wrote this book with Neil basically as the student and what’s fun about it, I think it’s my most entertaining and hilarious book in a way, because I’m giving Neil these assignments and then he’ll try them, but it’ll be passive-aggressive and he’ll screw one up or he’ll actually not do 50% of the assignment and then I’ll follow up and he’ll have all this guilt. But we have real examples of emails he tried to send, text messages he’s trying to send. He’s trying everything in the book and learning as he goes. And I would say there are a few people who have proofread the whole thing and they’d proofread it like a year ago. They’ve come back — and these are fans of my stuff who’ve read my other books and they’re like, “This book has had a huge impact on my life,” and they still give me examples.
So to then answer the question of, well, what exactly is the book talking about? The book is talking about how to say no in a world of compulsive yes, but what’s important to note about this is it’s not enough to just have a couple of index cards or templates for doing exercise for saying no. If that would’ve worked, it would’ve worked already. Sure, I can give examples and I give tons of examples of lines that are helpful for saying no. Like Martha Beck, who was Oprah Winfrey’s life coach and was an amazing woman in her own right for a lot of reasons. She turned me down for something and I include these real nos because I kept my favorite declines and rejections over 10 years. And so, I share a bunch of them and she said to me, “I really wish I could, but I can’t do the life Tetris.” Do the life Tetris.
And I was like, “Wow, that is so good. You’re not explaining, you’re not defending, you’re not giving a bunch of stuff that someone can try to negotiate around.” It’s just like, “Hey, I really wish I could. I just can’t do the life Tetris.” And so, I give examples like that, but that is not enough. Once you start really digging into why people have trouble saying no, it’s not only because they lack templates, it’s because of certain core beliefs, which are thoughts we take to be true, to quote Byron Katie and philosophies they have that they’re not even aware of that make it almost impossible to say no. And that could relate to FOMO. It could be related to a very scarcity minded, limited number of opportunities, a belief that you can’t generate opportunities yourself. You have to wait for things to come as inbound.
And I hit these very early on, and actually I think they’re in the sample chapters that people can get if people go to tim.blog/nobook. So, tim.blog is the actual URL/nobook, one word. I think it’s 30 or 40 pages of the book that will get into this, but a lot of folks will say, “I’m too nice for that.” Okay, we unpack that because there’s a lot there, right? Must be nice for Tim or fill in the blank because they’re already successful. I don’t have that luxury. Right. Okay, well, let’s actually double-click on that and start to interrogate some of these beliefs and on and on and on. So, saying no in a durable way, really developing a toolkit, which as far as I’m concerned is a self-preservation necessity now. When I first started it six years ago, I was like, “If people really want to get 10X results in their life and continue to apply the things from The 4-Hour Workweek, like 80/20, et cetera, they really need to have a reliable toolkit for saying no.”
But now, looking at social media AI, social media enabled AI, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, what it’s going to do to inboxes, messaging, et cetera, like personalization spam, you fill in the blank that are indistinguishable from humans, this is knowing how to breathe as far as I’m concerned. You have to have a toolkit like this. You’re going to be a roadkill, I think. That sounds probably very dramatic, but it’s like I’m sitting at Silicon Valley right now for my first trip here for a few weeks in duration in like eight years, I’m telling you guys the stuff that’s coming is going to be amazing. It’s going to be incredible. It’s also just going to be catastrophic for a lot of minds that are unprepared with the proper toolkits. So, saying no is important.
Dan Harris: Agreed. And it’s a huge struggle for me. You have a beautiful phrase in your book, promiscuous over commitment, and I am really, really guilty of that. There’s another nice phrase you say, “The book will help you build a benevolent phalanx, protective wall of troops to guard your goals.” We don’t have time to talk about all of the tools in there, but is there a tool in particular you think that would be very, very powerful for people?
Tim Ferriss: Yes, absolutely. A lot of folks have perhaps heard the apocryphal story of — and I think I give proper credit in the book, and this is one of the chapters that people can get. So, there’s plenty of value that people get from the free stuff, but, I mean I’m not even selling it yet, so maybe I’ll give away more. One of the culprits, one of the biggest causal factors for why people have trouble saying no is they don’t have big enough yeses to defend.
And for instance, if you had a brand new child, or someone you loved, God forbid, had a serious cancer diagnosis, if you had a tiger by the tail and knew that you were working on a business, I’m using an extreme example on purpose, they could be worth billions of dollars. You would not have trouble saying no to things. So, then we go back to the other end of the spectrum, it’s like, well, if you don’t have really clearly defined big yeses that get you excited, that have the potential for huge payoff, not necessarily financially, and you are kind of searching around your inbox for things to answer when people send you an invite to a dinner or they want to have coffee to pick your brain, or it could be anything, a costume party you don’t want to go to, that’s a real example from Neil actually, and you’re going to say yes because what’s scarier than having lots of little or promiscuous over commitment, it’s a big void.
So, the apocryphal story that I was hinting at is the story of the professor who comes in, and I want to say this was from originally Stephen Covey or maybe Stephen Covey adapted it. The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, I believe was the book. It might’ve been in his teaching and not in the books themselves, but the story is along these lines. The professor goes in and he puts out on the desk in front of the students like a large mason jar, a handful of big rocks, three or four, a bunch of gravel, and then a bunch of sand. And he challenges the students, asks them first how they would fit as much as possible into the mason jar, and they try different approaches. So, if you put in the sand first, then you get a little bit of gravel in, can’t fit the rocks. Well, ditto if you put the gravel in first, then you put in the sand, maybe you fit one rock, and ultimately the lesson is you have to put in the big rocks first, then the gravel fits around that, and then you can fit in the sand.
In the version that I tell, I make a modification to that and I say, “No matter what they do, there’s still sand left over on the table.” And I think the lesson is if you’re looking at this in terms of commitments, the big rocks are those kind of life-changing yeses, the few things you need to protect on that golden road to get really where you want to be. Then the gravel, to me are the smaller, but critical things you need to do. Got to file your taxes, got to do A, B, or C. And then the sand is all that extraneous stuff, mostly distractions. You can fit some of it, but if you schedule all that stuff first, it’s going to crowd out the gravel or it’s certainly at the very least going to crowd out all the big yeses.
So in the sample chapters, I just walk people through how I do this past year review and how I actually pick the big yeses because the book on no is equally a book on — to answer the question, how the hell in a world of infinite options, in a world of temptation around every corner do you pick a few things to focus on that are really high leverage? How do you do it? That seems like a simple question, but it’s actually a very hard question to answer. So, I would say that if you’re having trouble saying no, underneath that probably is the fact that you don’t have a big enough yeses that are worth defending. And then there’s a lot that leads from that. How do you commit to a yes and insure against reneging or something else? This is intended to be, hopefully all of my books, a very practical book.
So what happens when you screw up? There’s an entire chapter on how to renegotiate commitments after you have already overcommitted. Because guess what? If you have that tendency, you’re going to overcommit. You’re going to look at your calendar for the next few weeks or month and say, “Good Lord, I’m screwed.” And then what do you do? You’re going to have to have some very potentially uncomfortable conversations. So, we’re learning to renegotiate commitments is also an art form that is going to be included in it, but fundamentally it’s big yes is worth defending, I would say is another one.
And sure, there are lots of things that you can do that you could do today. You don’t have to look at any of these chapters. I have not had social media on my phone in three years. Why? Because I feel like you are bringing a butter knife to a gunfight if you have these tools on your phone. And if it’s too scary to unplug for three years, you don’t have to commit to that. I didn’t in the beginning. It’s like do a one or two week social media fast, at least on your phone. So, I can still access social media if I need a hit of the heroin, I can still access social media through my laptop, but it adds enough friction that I’m not going to end up looking at Instagram while I’m on the toilet and wondering why I can’t feel my legs 40 minutes later. It’s going to avoid that type of thing. Or the compulsive sort of dopamine scratching. Whenever you have free 30 seconds, jumping into social media, this is not good for your ability to focus. It’s not good for your ability to single task.
It’s not good for your mental health when you always have that escape. I mean, look, I’m telling people things they probably agree with, but perhaps haven’t implemented. So, you could do something like that. You can use an app like Freedom. There’s an app called Freedom that you can use to block certain things for certain periods of time. I mean, there are these technical tools that you can use, but at the very base, you can’t use more window dressing technical tricks to fix fundamental problems with goal selection. Big yes is worth defending. And core beliefs, if I say no to this person or something bad is going to happen and they’re not going to like me, they’ll stop inviting me to things.
If you have these and that is going to what? You have to ask, and then what? And then what? I’m going to end up alone? Okay, well, these are sort of Rubicons you need to get comfortable crossing in the sense that my experience is, this is also Neil’s experience, he had tons of fears as did I in the beginning stages. It’s like when you start to stand up for the things that are important in your life, I think this is a Dr. Seuss quote, but it’s like “The people who mind don’t matter and the people who matter don’t mind.” You actually do a lot of pruning in your life that you should do anyway. And it’s a forcing function for that.
Dan Harris: It’s so interesting. It really is about courage in the end.
Tim Ferriss: It is. And you can train that. You can train that. It’s not something you are born with or without. That is something through actually understanding what your fears represent and what’s underneath them. It could be from childhood, it doesn’t necessarily have to be, but when you start to actually examine them — there’s an exercise people could do today also. They can find a TED Talk on this called fear-setting.
You start to do fear-setting around these fears, you defang them, and guess what? Suddenly you have this thing that others might call courage, but what it is, it’s clarity. It’s clarity around the actual downside, which is limited versus the upside of protecting these big yeses over a year, two or three. And I will say not to continue to beat this dead horse, but with all of the noise that is here, but that is coming with AI, it’s going to be 10, 100, 1,000 times worse within two years. If you can single task on important things for not even four hours a day, two hours a day without interruption, you are going to be from the perspective of let’s just say an attention economy in the top one percent of performers. It’s never been easier and it’s never been harder in a way.
Dan Harris: I’m going to lose you in nine minutes, so I do want to make sure I quickly ask you about Coyote, another of your projects. This is a game that you’ve designed. What is it and why?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, Coyote, it’s a tiny little card game that I designed with some of my friends at Exploding Kittens, which people might recognize. They have a lot of very, very popular games and it’s a fun family game. It’s something like, if you could imagine charades meets hot potato meets brain-teaser, something that I hope at some point I’d actually like to do a clinical study on this, but it makes you just a little bit smarter than the people who play. It is a casual card game. You can learn a few minutes. Each game lasts about 10 minutes. And the reason I created it, I always wanted to make a game, number one, and this is actually a good illustration of some of the stuff that is in the book that’ll come out in 100 years, but people can apply it today, which is I choose projects based on which projects will allow me to win even if they fail.
What does that mean? I assume that any project could fail for reasons totally outside of my control. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again, happens to people every day. So, how am I then choosing things to commit to? Well, generally I’m doing all these two-week experiments on various things like the diet and this, that and the other thing. With projects, it’s like a six-month commitment. I’m looking at a six to 12 month project where I really go all in. By the way, that makes it easier to say no to things when you’re doing a sprint as opposed to a very slow walking marathon. So, I’m committing to something that I think will be six to 12 months and I am optimizing for what I will learn, the density of learning and also the relationships that I’ll deepen or develop.
So, it could be with new people, could be with people I already know, with the belief that those relationships and those skills or knowledge will transcend that project even if the public hates it, even if in my case, for instance, China tariffs for a game that’s sold for $9 or $10 coming from China, that just kills the economics. Not that this was ever a moneymaking thing for me, but it’s like there are things that came up that made this suddenly much harder from a business perspective. And thank God I checked those other boxes because fortunately it’s got 9.7 or 9.8 stars on Amazon and it’s available everywhere. It’s doing really well. But what I really care about is like Elan Lee, who’s the co-founder and CEO of Exploding Kittens has become a super close friend. He was a good friend beforehand, we’re even closer now. This guy’s one of the most amazing polymaths I’ve ever met in my life. Awesome, hilarious guy.
And I have learned so much about mass retail, the Walmarts, Targets and so on. I’ve learned so much about how you have to play the politics and the Game of Thrones with that. I’ve learned about overseas manufacturing, I’ve learned about, you name it, right? I’ve learned so much and those were the reasons for me picking this. And if you look at, for instance, there’s a blog post people can find for free, angel investing, like investing in early stage companies, which is like 90% of my net worth, which I started well before I could “afford it.” There’s a blog post called “Creating a Real World MBA,” which explains kind of how I approached it, which was the same way I approached this, learning and relationships that I think will transcend that project and snowball over time so that it’s very hard to lose long term.
But coming back to the game itself, if you’ve got kids in-between the ages of, let’s say, it says 10 on the box, but really it’s kind of like age eight. If your kids are pretty smart, like age 15, this is kind of a no-brainer. The game works really, really well. Adults also really like it. So, it’s not just for kids, but if you’ve got some kids around or adults who don’t care being a little goofy, then I think it’s a really simple, fun game that hopefully does something cognitive for folks as well. That was kind of the goal. Coyote game. You can find it everywhere.
Dan Harris: It is always an enormous pleasure to talk to you, Tim. And I know you say no to most shit, so thank you for saying yes to this.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I love what you do, man. I love what you do. One of my very close friends who is a professor at a very well-respected university had pains in his body, this just horrible, pervasive pain in joints in his body for years and years. Started using 10% Happier, meditating every day. And it was like boom, within four weeks, pains went away, crazy. I have some theories on that. I think it’s actually might be synchronized breathing and vagus nerve stimulation, but that’s a separate conversation. And I just think you’re very thoughtful and you do a lot of good in the world, and I just enjoy hanging out. So, it’s always a pleasure to connect.
Dan Harris: Thank you. I really appreciate that. Immensely actually.
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2026-02-25 03:12:44
This episode is a bit different, and I am in the hot seat.
Dan Harris (@danharris) interviewed me for his show, the 10% Happier with Dan Harris podcast, and I thought it was worth sharing here.
We cover my most recent brain stimulation protocol, where I’ve landed on optimization, and avoiding traps of self-help.
Dan is a wonderful interviewer, and he is also the bestselling author of 10% Happier and Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book.
Please enjoy!
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Want to hear the last time Dan Harris was on this show? Listen to our conversation here, in which we discussed his nationally televised panic attack on Good Morning America, his father’s motto that “the price of security is insecurity,” meditation as self-help for skeptics, hugging your inner dragons, the science of mindfulness, building the Ten Percent Happier company, introversion and social withdrawal, psychedelics, and much more.
The post Tim Ferriss — How to Quiet the Ruminative Mind, Avoid Traps of Self-Help, and Focus in a World of Promiscuous Overcommitment (#855) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-02-20 15:55:54
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Tish Rabe (@tishrabebooks) the New York Times bestselling author of more than 200 children’s books, with more than 11 million copies sold. She has written for Sesame Street, Disney, PBS Kids, Curious George, Clifford, and many more. In 1991, following the death of Dr. Seuss, she was asked by Random House to write The Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library, a series of science books for early readers that were the brainchild of Dr. Seuss, who died before he could finish the first one. Tish has written more than 50 Cat in the Hat books as well as books for the Grinch and the Lorax. She now heads her own children’s book publishing company, Tish Rabe Books.
Books, music, and people mentioned in the interview
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Tim Ferriss: Tish, it is lovely to finally connect. I’ve really been looking forward to this, and thanks to my old friend and your new friend, Elan Lee, here we are. We made it happen.
Tish Rabe: We made it happen.
Tim Ferriss: So thank you for making the time.
Tish Rabe: I’m really excited to be meeting you.
Tim Ferriss: And I don’t even know where to start. We could start with the 200 children’s books, more than 11 million copies sold. We could start with the 300 children’s songs. But maybe we can, I suppose, start the journey with what you studied in college. Were you always intending to end up where you are now or where did the story start in a sense?
Tish Rabe: Where did the story start? As a matter of fact, I did not start out to be a children’s book author. I started out to be an opera singer. I went to college to be an opera singer. So that was my plan. I had a great plan. In high school, I tell the kids I talk to a lot that I had two things I loved. I love to sing and I love to write. So all through high school, I was, are you going to be a singer or a writer? A writer or singer? And finally, I had to apply to college and I really knew in my heart I wanted to be a singer. So I have a four-year degree in opera with a minor in jazz. And the funny thing, everyone always asks me, “So how did you end up being a singer and ending up being an author?”
And the very short story is I came to New York and I was auditioning everywhere. And my high school music teacher got a job as assistant music director on Sesame Street, season two. And I went to meet him and told him I was auditioning and he asked me if I could type. And I said, “Yes, I can sing and I can type.” So I got a job as music production assistant at Sesame Street and all I wanted to do was sing with Jim Henson’s Muppets. And my first job was hiring the jingle singers in Manhattan to sing with Jim Henson’s Muppets. So I sang all day. I sang when I typed and I sang when I filed and I sang when I answered the phone. “Sesame Street, may I help you?”
Well, after a year, everybody was so tired of listening to me sing all the time that they said, “Would you like to sing on Sesame Street with the Muppets?” And I was, “Yes.” So I sang with the Muppets, I sang on the show, I sang on the albums, and I sang on the specials. So I sang on everything, and it was just so much fun.
And my first big break was I sang with Oscar. “I love trash, everything dirty and dingy and dusty, anything ragged and rotten and rusty. Oh, I love, I love, I love trash.” And I don’t know that my parents ever got over it, to tell you the truth.
Tim Ferriss: The big break.
Tish Rabe: Oh, boy.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let me ask you, when you got the job on Sesame Street, when you first got that job, what did it feel like at that time for season two? And I’ll tell you something that I haven’t told many people, which is I have a season one staff jacket from Sesame Street because a friend of my family who lived nearby when I was growing up worked on Sesame Street in the early days. So I grew up going next door as a little kid, hearing her stories, looking at her Emmys. And my love affair with Sesame Street in a way began before I ever started watching it. So I have a long history.
Tish Rabe: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: What did it feel like to be there in the earliest stages of Sesame Street? What was the vibe like, the environment?
Tish Rabe: First of all, the most creative environment anyone could ever be in. Basically, Jon Stone, who was executive producer and Jim Henson and all the puppeteers and all the muppeteers and everybody were so creative, they just made stuff up all day long. Another interesting thing to share is that they were very worried that this show was going to bomb. A six-foot yellow bird, a monster that only eats cookies, a grouch and a trash can, a multiracial cast. How do we think this is going to go in 1969 or whatever? And Joan Ganz Cooney, who created the whole thing, just let them be creative. Whatever you guys want to do, go ahead. And it was so much fun to be a part of it. And I believe in my heart that my background on Sesame Street is how I can do what I do today because I was enveloped with this every single day.
And one of the interesting things that happened was Sesame Street, they needed books, they needed toys, they needed merchandise. Who knew this was going to be a massive hit? And they literally asked the staff if they had ideas for books. And I, courage, oh, what the heck? I’ve got nothing to lose. I’ll go down and try. And I went down to the book department and I told them about when I was a little girl and I broke my great-grandmother’s teapot and it shattered into a million pieces. And my mother came in and saw the broken glass and she said, “I’m not mad or anything. I love you more than any teapot.” And I went down and I pitched my idea to Sesame Street books and it’s your classic, right? You pour your heart out on this story and there’s dead silence. Nobody moved. So I’m standing there going, okay, that went well. And from the back of the room, the editor for Sesame Street Books said, “Could you make it a story for Bert?” And my very first book, here it is.
Tim Ferriss: Look at that.
Tish Rabe: And The Broken Teapot, it’s out of print, but I have a few. And in this book, Bert breaks David’s favorite teapot, spends the whole book trying to get it fixed. And in the end, David says he’s afraid David’s not going to be his friend anymore because he broke his favorite teapot. And David says, “You’ll always be my friend and can you help me in my restaurant next week?” And at the time it got just great awards and letters because it’s easy to have things be about stuff. And that message obviously was that their friendship meant more than this teapot. But that was book one.
Tim Ferriss: So let me peel back the layers a little bit on what you mentioned, this wellspring of creativity, just being steeped, I suppose, to borrow the tea, steeped in this creativity. What did that look like? Were people just ad libbing all the time like Robin Williams times the number of staff? Were their meetings different? What did that actually look like in practice when you went to work?
Tish Rabe: It was one of the first TV shows that had educational research behind it. So we had topics. We were going to try to teach every single season. There was a notebook like this thick with what are we trying to teach kids? Obviously numbers and letters, but compassion and sorting things by shapes and whatever it was. And then you would watch the writers just come up with stuff and it was absolutely fascinating and they just kind of made stuff up as they went along. But the big thing I learned from the Sesame Street writers, and it has saved me many, many, many times, is that they wrote the endings first. So they used to look at Abbott and Costello movies and Marx Brothers movies and they looked at everything and they used to tell me, “Okay, Abbott and Costello are pushing a piano across a bridge in the jungle with a gorilla coming across the bridge at them. How did they get there?”
So as a children’s book author, I always write my last page first. So in my I Believe Bunny books, my inspirational books, one of them ends with just like the “I believe bunny, you may get a surprise, you can make a difference, even a bunny your size.” Then I wrote the whole book about how he helps his friend who can’t swim and blah, blah, blah, blah, and then end at that page. It’s a very important page in children’s books because it is the last page they hear before the book is shut, go to sleep, take a nap, go out to play, whatever. And I always write the last page first, always.
Tim Ferriss: Did you have much interaction with Jim Henson?
Tish Rabe: Yes. I worked for Jim for years and somebody said once he was a gentle giant with a mind of steel. He’s a great businessman, but so creative and so nice to all of us because we were low in the totem pole. I mean, we were production assistants and he just worked and worked and worked and worked. And he would do a Sesame Street day and then fly to London and do The Muppet Show and then fly back. He just worked all the time, but he was just very, very nice to me, always.
Tim Ferriss: Did you learn anything about him or how he managed, anything that stands out that distinguishes him aside from just being a man possessed with his work, which certainly doesn’t surprise me?
Tish Rabe: I think the thing was you could just watch his creative mind. The creative minds on Sesame Street, when I was there, something would happen and they would just make something else up and the sense of humor and the lightness of what they were doing, it was almost like, oh, and by the way, we’re teaching kids. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah, okay.
The other thing they did, which was really something is they were one of the first to double level humor. So they wrote stuff that was funny for kids, but had all kinds of stuff in it for adults because all these studies had done if parents watched the show with their children, the kids learned more because the parents were there to help them and that kind of thing. And some of the early children’s shows, no parent would be caught dead sitting in front of, but Sesame Street was so nuts that everybody loved it and that really, really made a difference, big difference.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The double-level humor.
Tish Rabe: Double level humor. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I remember first being struck by that, not to make my side of the story all about Robin Williams, but was Robin Williams and the songs in the first Disney animated feature of Aladdin and just how many levels there were to that and how effective it was because parents would go back, take their kids to the theater multiple times in this case, obviously watch the television show. How did your music training, if it did, help what you ended up doing not only at Sesame Street, but afterwards? And I suppose I’m just asking if some of the tools or sensitivities that you developed actually ended up being assets as you moved forward with these other supposedly separate art forms.
Tish Rabe: Well, one thing that I used to do, the songs were all prerecorded and so the muppeteers, puppeteers would go and record their songs in advance. So now you’re Big Bird and you’re going to sing a song on Sesame Street, but they are doing their dialogue. So how are they going to know when the song starts? So I would stand next to one of the cameras and count them off. So measure one, two, three, four, and then they would sing.
So Caroll Spinney could see me enough to know that when I pointed to him, he had to sing the song, the prerecorded song, move the costume, move the puppet so he was singing the song. And the first few times I did it, I was scared to death. I was only 21. I think this is going to be the one. I’m going to go one, two, three and start him and it’s going to be the wrong place. Oh, no. But that’s really where my musical training came in. And also, the jingle singers in New York in the ’70s, literally you’d come into a session, to this day I’ll never forget it, and literally they would sing it through once. We are the sound of the sound of the count, count, count, counts down. Four part harmony, and they’d look at each other, say, “You take the root, I’ll take the third, you take the fifth, and then somebody do the octave. One, two, three, go.”
And I remember holding on with a thread to this thing, but it was just — and the other thing that I love about those early days, back then we had orchestras. I’ll never forget this, the Christmas special, full orchestra and Caroll Spinney was trying to sing “I Hate Christmas.” So he’s behind this microphone and he’s going, “I hate, I hate” — finally, they said “Let’s take a break. The whole orchestra, let’s take 10 minutes.” Everybody just give him a minute. And I was standing next to him when he moved over and opened the case and took Oscar out of the case. I was standing right next to him. I had the music and everything. So everybody comes back, all these violins and cellos and clarinets, and they started it again and Caroll moved over and Oscar sang “I Hate Christmas.” Perfect. I never got over it. I was like, whoa. But this kind of stuff went on every single day, all day.
Tim Ferriss: And when you were working on Sesame Street, what was the reaction from people at the time when they would ask you, “What do you do?” I don’t know the magnitude of the success when you joined versus later on in your time there, but just to paint a picture for people, because there are, I’m sure, some older folks who listen to this podcast who maybe even had really, really early exposure or maybe are much older and had really young kids who were exposed to Sesame Street. Then there are some in the middle who certainly remember watching it, and then there are some who have probably never seen it.
Tish Rabe: Right, right.
Tim Ferriss: But what was the reaction that you would get from people when you told them what you did for a living?
Tish Rabe: Well, it’s funny. When I tell the story that I got to New York and I was auditioning and it was going okay, I would get a jingle here, a jingle there, but I couldn’t support myself. And I am convinced, I went home one Thanksgiving to my hometown. I’m from Needham, Massachusetts outside of Boston, and I literally got out of the car and my mother told me that she had read that my high school music teacher had gotten this job. And she said, “You’ve got to get all dressed up and you’ve got to go see him and he hasn’t seen you since you left high school four years ago, you’ve been in college.” And I have to say, it took a lot of guts for me to go and come see him again. And he’d buy me lunch once a week because I wasn’t eating, the whole thing.
And I think when I look back, it was timing and luck to a lot of extent because would I ever have walked into Sesame Workshop and said, “Do you have a job for me?” No. I was convinced I was going to be a star, it was just a matter of time singing. And back then, I’m sure they still do this, you would audition and they would literally let you sing nine notes. So you go, “Oklahoma, where the wind goes…” Thank you.
Tim Ferriss: Really?
Tish Rabe: I am dead serious. Anyone who auditioned, that was it. And you were there and you had your music and everything. So the fact that I actually was able to get a job in music on a television series was just magic stuff.
Tim Ferriss: And was the public’s reception at the time, so you have this sort of confluence of factors and synchronicities that get you in the door. You still have to prove your mettle so you get the job. And was it just the belle of the ball at that point, Sesame Street, or was it still in kind of growth mode? So some people knew it, but not all people. Where was the public awareness of Sesame Street when you joined?
Tish Rabe: Well, I think when I started, it was just really taking off, literally. And I don’t think anyone recognized that it was — as I said, they weren’t sure how it was going to go. And something a lot of people don’t know about Sesame Street is it was originally created to help every child learn their alphabet and their numbers because there was a disparity between kids who had came into kindergarten knowing their letters and their alphabet and the kids who came in not knowing and started behind before they even got started. And I don’t think anyone really realized that this was going to have such a huge impact because kids now then were going into school and singing the numbers song, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, alligators went to the alligator picnic.” This went on all day long. So the kids now, there was more of an even playing field when the kids all hit kindergarten and people just didn’t see it coming and it was true.
Tim Ferriss: What happened that led you from Sesame Street to —
Tish Rabe: All that followed?
Tim Ferriss: All that followed. Yes, exactly.
Tish Rabe: Well, among my other things that happened is I was at Sesame Street and as soon as I started writing my Bert and the Broken Teapot book, I just kept writing and writing and writing and writing.
Tim Ferriss: And this is just on your own time or was it —
Tish Rabe: Well, people started hiring me. I wrote for Scholastic and I wrote for Houghton Mifflin and Random House and everybody.
Tim Ferriss: How did you make those contacts?
Tish Rabe: I was working on Sesame Street and then I produced Big Bird in China. I was part of the crew that went to China with Big Bird in China and then —
Tim Ferriss: 1982, something like that?
Tish Rabe: 1982, correct. And then I was senior producer for 3-2-1 Contact, which was another whole story. And then I just kept writing and writing and writing and writing. And I ended up at Random House as their director of video. This was back in the VHS days. And once I was in there directing all the videos, back in the day, they used to just take the artwork for the book and move the camera around. It’s called animatics. And I produced all the music and all the voiceovers and everything for that, but now I’m in Random House. So I’m an author, proven author, and I happen to work there. So in the hallway, they’d say, “Could you write a book about butterflies?” And, “Sure, when do you need it?”
So it was kind of a two-way thing. I was working as a producer, a television producer, also, with 3-2-1 Contact, that’s when I started writing songs because 3-2-1 Contact was a science series and it took more time for us to explain to other composers what we needed than just to write it in house. So I wrote songs about electricity and mammals and anything you needed. My favorite was the producers would come into my office and they’d say, “We need a song.” I said, “Okay, okay, what’s it about?” Never forget this. And the producer looks at me and says, “The gestation period of different animals.” I said, “It’s singing for me already, the gestation…” So I wrote a song called “I’m Waiting For My Baby” << I’m waiting for my baby, feels like a long, long time >> And we just took stock footage of chimpanzee and an elephant and chyroned, that was back in the day we called it chyroning, the amount of time, elephant two years, whatever it was to have a baby. And then at the end it was << And baby, you are worth the wait >> So we made stuff up, and of course, happily for me, I sang a lot of it. So that was fun too.
Tim Ferriss: If we open the hood and look at the workings of making a song, what does that look like for you? When they are successful, do they have common patterns where you start with something?
Tish Rabe: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: And then there’s second, there’s something else, and third, there’s something else. What did that process end up looking like for you?
Tish Rabe: Mm-hmm. Well, the first thing I did back and have done a lot of is, perfect example, what’s the science, what are we trying to teach a child in this song, right? And then I always make sure that I have a verse and then what we call a B section. So the song goes somewhere and then comes back. That’s always very, very key, and it’s interesting —
Tim Ferriss: So you decide on those two pieces first, the first thing?
Tish Rabe: Yes, what are we trying — “Cord of Wood.” That’s a perfect example. I wrote a whole song about it, a “Cord of Wood.”
Tim Ferriss: I would love an example, that would be good.
Tish Rabe: I can only remember how it goes, but a “Cord of Wood.” Well, you could find out how many toothpicks are there in a cord of wood, how many picnic tables can you make out of one cord of wood. So you’ve got to figure out what you’re putting in for the science and how you’re going to make it rhyme and that kind of stuff. It certainly helped me that I had been a singer so long that I was so used to singing rhyming lyrics.
One quick thing to share, because very few people know this. While I was at Sesame Street, the executive producer asked Joe Raposo, Joe Raposo wrote the theme and he wrote all the big songs, and he said, “I wonder how Kermit feels. Have you ever thought of how Kermit feels living on this crazy street with all these nutty people?” And Joe Raposo went home and wrote “Bein’ Green.” But the big thing about “Bein’ Green” is all of us who write songs for kids have end rhyme.
MUSIC: Sunny day.
Sweepin’ the clouds away.
On my way to where the air is sweet.
Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?
Tish Rabe: Everything rhymes at the end, right?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Tish Rabe: “Bein’ Green,” there’s not one rhyme.
MUSIC: It’s not easy bein’ green.
Having to spend each day.
The color of the leaves.
When it would be nicer to be red or yellow or gold or something much more colorful like that.
Tish Rabe: It’s totally talking. There’s not a rhyme in it. And he came into the office and sang it for the first time, and people were thunderstruck, and of course it became a mega hit. So yeah, I just started writing songs about everything.
Tim Ferriss: What possessed him to break the mold? Had that been done before or was that something that struck him? I’m wondering if you know the backstory of why.
Tish Rabe: It’s funny. I always felt that, this is a longtime memories of these things, but I sort of felt like maybe one of the writers kind of challenged him. There’s only one other song any of us could find, and it’s “Moonlight in Vermont,” also doesn’t rhyme at all. But I don’t know if someone said, “Yeah, why don’t you write about how Kermit feels about living on this street and not have end rhymes?” I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone challenged him or he just went home and said — I mean, the man was a genius. Whether he went home and just said, “I have an idea. I’ve got nothing else to do this afternoon. I’ll try to write a song that doesn’t rhyme.” I don’t know. But I’ll say one thing that was really amazing is basically Joan Ganz Cooney told them all, she had faith in them, “Just do it, just go.” So it was so free-flowing that people just made stuff up. I have a favorite song, people always ask me my favorite song that I did not write. It’s called “I Just Adore Four.”
MUSIC: I just adore four.
The number for me.
I just adore four.
It’s, let’s see, less than five, more than three.
Tish Rabe: And the other thing is the lyrics were so grown up, right? I mean, that’s hilarious, but the kids just ate it up. They just understood it. They understood what that meant. So it was wonderful because every day you went into work, you had no idea who’s going to come up with what today, but it’s funny.
Tim Ferriss: How many drafts or versions made the cut? I’m wondering in such a free-flowing creative environment where you’re allowed to throw anything against the wall and you’re given permission, people say they believe in you, my assumption would be that you come up with a lot of ideas and not all of them work.
Tish Rabe: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m wondering how many versions you might come up with before you end up with one that makes it to air.
Tish Rabe: Well, the real challenge on that show was the curriculum was king. So yeah, you could go off and write a story about your lamp, but if it didn’t — whatever the curriculum of the day was, today it’s seasons or cooperation, or I don’t know, whatever they were, that was true. They had to get that by that team and it was a whole team. The other thing they did a lot of is focus groups. They played stuff for kids, and this was groundbreaking at the time. I mean, and they tell stories about how Oscar was originally orange and the kids didn’t really like it. Whatever it is, they changed stuff, and that was really — so although it looked easy, there was a lot of background on what they could do and not do and that kind of stuff.
Tim Ferriss: So the focus groups, I mean, that does sound really innovative for the day, especially with kids. But I imagine if you’re trying to sell shampoo and you’ve got Bob the adult in your focus group, you’d be like, “Bob, how much would you spend to buy Hartz shampoo?” or whatever it would be, and Bob can give you an answer. What types of reactions or feedback were they looking for when they —
Tish Rabe: Well, it was great. They wanted to know things like, did the kids walk away understanding that ABC-DEF-GHI is ABCDHEHI — because they always wanted to pay attention to the fact that if they made it too sophisticated, the kids would be lost. So that’s a very fine line because by doing the double-level humor, like “I Just Adore Four,” genius, Joe Bailey wrote that one, that they didn’t leave the kids lost because that was not the point. The point was to teach them and get them ready for school.
Tim Ferriss: Curriculum.
Tish Rabe: Curriculum. Oh, boy.
Tim Ferriss: Curriculum. Number one. There’s a question that I could ask about songwriting, but I could also ask it about book writing. So could you explain how Dr. Seuss enters the picture?
Tish Rabe: Yes. So as the years went by, I kept, as I said, writing for everybody, never turned down a book offer. We’d be scholastic, we need a book on butterflies in a week, and I’ll go, “Okay, a week. How long is that going to take me? How much am I going to earn an hour?” Whatever it was. But I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, and in 1991, I always go by how old my kids were, I guess they were like three and four, I submitted a rhyming book to Random House. I was there. I was the senior producer for home video. I was singing on all their TV stuff and I was singing on VHSes for them. Anyway, I was right there and I sent in a manuscript for a book.
“Maurus O’Raurus was a Brachiosaurus who had the best voice in the dinosaur chorus. He liked to play tennis and swim in the sea, but mostly he liked to eat fresh broccoli.” Okey dokey. And the end of that one was, so his friends tried to get him to eat something else and he said — his friends go, “Broccoli’s fine. It’s got color and crunch, but you eat it for breakfast and dinner and lunch.” They talk them into eating something else and the last line is, “So one thing is true and you cannot deny it, like it or not, you won’t know until you try it.” Fine. Type it up, walk down to the book department at Random House, hand it to the book department, and hear nothing. And I tell the kids, this is before texting, voicemail, we’re used to using payphones at this point, and I didn’t hear a thing. So I go, “Well, that didn’t really work, but okay.”
So I finally get my courage up and I call and I finally get somebody on the phone in that division and I say, “Tell them who I am.” “Oh, oh,” she said, “we were supposed to call you.” I said, “Well, nobody called me.” I said, “I was sitting right here, but nobody called me.” And she said, “Okay.” I’ll never forget it. She said, “I have bad news and I have good news. What would you like to hear first?” And I said, “Well, I’ll take the bad news.” And she said, “We cannot publish Maurus O’Raurus Brachiosaurus because we are the rhyming home of Dr. Seuss.” Okay, all right. “However,” she said, “how would you like to write a new series for Dr. Seuss?” And it took me — sure, you never say no, never turned down a freelance job, and they literally handed me Dr. Seuss, not me. Dr. Seuss wanted to write a series of books for kids about science in rhyme for early readers, four- to seven-year-olds, and died before he could finish the first one.
So they handed me a stack of research on mammals, a huge stack of research on birds. They said, “We are so far behind with this because we’ve been trying to find someone who can write in his rhythm and his rhyme scheme.” And Maurus O’Raurus Brachiosaurus was both, thank goodness. And they said, “Can you have two books ready in four months?” And I carried all this stuff, I carried all this stuff home and I went, “Well, okay.” And I just started writing Is a Camel a Mammal and Fine Feathered Friends and I never stopped after that.
Tim Ferriss: What an incredible opportunity. I mean, talk about just the right ingredients at the right time. My brain will not let it go unless I ask. So the Maurus O’Raurus, still think — I mean, this sounds like a great book, but that couldn’t fly because Dr. Seuss basically had exclusivity on that nature of rhyming book. Is that —
Tish Rabe: For Random House, yes.
Tim Ferriss: For Random House, for Random House.
Tish Rabe: Yes, and not only did he write exclusively for Random House, but he created the Beginner Book series which other authors also wrote. So he was head of the whole thing. And one thing to share about him which is, and there are many authors that do this, but he was an author illustrator, and I’m clear to tell everybody I write the words, but I do not draw the pictures. I had heard, I missed meeting him by one year, but they used to tell me that he would come in with a brand new book, let’s say Horton Hears a Who, whatever, and literally art directors and the editors at Random House did not have to do anything. They didn’t have to fix it. They didn’t have to tell him to fix the elephant. They didn’t have to do anything. They were so perfect when he showed up with them, and so that is always amazing that he could do both.
I actually never spoke to him, but I spoke to his widow, Audrey Geisel, and she called me because — to this day, I could never forget it. She called me, I felt like on the phone, I couldn’t believe I was actually talking to her. And she said, “Do you remember when years ago in the ’50s, they did this study where they had pregnant moms talk to their babies and sing to their babies?” When the babies were born, they recognized, and the dads too, they recognized their voices and they waved their little hands and their eyes linked and stuff, and what they used on the study was they all read The Cat in the Hat, the original Cat in the Hat book. So here we are. It’s 2008, I think. Audrey Geisel called me and said, could I read all 41 of Ted, Ted Geisel’s Dr. Seuss books and write a book with references to all of them?
Tim Ferriss: That’s hard.
Tish Rabe: And she wanted it called Oh, Baby, the Places You’ll Go! to be read in utero. I’m sitting there going, “Okay, sure.” So I went and read all of them. Horton Hears A Who, If I Ran The Zoo, If I Ran The Circus, Yertle the Turtle, Thidwick the Moose, I read them all and I wrote Oh, Baby, the Places You’ll Go! and turned it in. And I love this story because by then my kids were in middle school, I think, and I was going to pick them up from school and I had my car keys in my hand. My phone rang, it’s Random House. They said, “We are sending the files to the printer for Oh, Baby, the Places You’ll Go! We need a bio from you, really short, and it has to be funny and we need it right now.”
Well, I’m going at the — so I just said, “You’ve got to give me two minutes.” And I hung up the phone, never forget it, and all of a sudden I thought, “Oh, wow.” And I called them right back and I said, “Tish Rabe’s a mom who thinks that it’s cool to be home rhyming rhymes while her kids are at school.” And they went bananas. They’re like, “Done.” I said, “Okay” I just make this stuff up. It’s what I do all day. And Oh, Baby, the Places You’ll Go! is a bestseller, flies off the shelf. So Oh, Baby, the Places You’ll Go! Very sweet.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, Baby, the Places You’ll Go!
Tish Rabe: And the other thing, just real quick about that, I am very careful to say to everyone, you do not have to have kids to write for kids. Many, many, many fabulous authors did not. However, the last page of Oh, Baby, the Places You’ll Go! I don’t even know who drew it because I don’t think Ted drew it, but there’s a little pregnant mom, Seussian little pregnant mom sitting there, and I had two kids. I have a son and a daughter, and at the end I wrote, “It’s a scrumptious world and it’s ready to greet you. And as for myself, well, I can’t wait to meet you.” And I really have to say, I think if I’d never had kids, I don’t know that I would have come up with that. That’s the last page in this bestselling book, but it just flew off the shelves. It still does.
Tim Ferriss: So when you got that first assignment, here you go, pile of research on birds, pile of research on fill in the blank. Couple of questions related to that. So you can tackle whichever one you’d like to tackle.
Tish Rabe: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: So one question is, how on Earth do you pick what to include out of these many, many stacks? Because you have to be really selective. The other question is, what guardrails/rules do they give you to keep you within the universe and tone and feel of Dr. Seuss?
Tish Rabe: Well, a couple of things. The first thing about what to put in the book, they did the research for me for the first two books, but for all the many, many books I wrote after that I did my own research. What I did that really saved me and surprises a lot of people is I went to the children’s department in the local library and pulled everything they had on the topic because already it’s not in rhyme, fine, but it’s already been simplified, right? So I would get a spiral notebook for every book and write and write and write and write the facts about space, the facts about insects which I knew nothing, and get them all written down and then figure out if anything popped as a rhyming potential word. One of my very proudest was, “When birds want to go on a winter vacation, they all take a trip and they call it migration.” Because at one point I was writing down the birds migrate and migration, I thought, “Oh, vacation in a way.” So that was one thing.
As far as guardrails, there are two kinds of rhyming in children’s books and migration and vacation is perfect Seussian rhyme. Farm and barn is what they call a slant rhyme. It’s close, but it’s not a pure rhyme. Dr. Seuss insisted on two things. The rhythm had to be perfect. “On the 15th of May in the jungle of Nool, Horton the elephant sat in the pool.” Doesn’t vary, it never varies, and the end rhymes are pure, right? Nool — something Ted did, and I did as well, is if he was in trouble for a rhyme, he made up a word. So in the sleep book, one of my favorites is, “Have you met the Van Vlecks?” Or something like that. “When they sleep, they yawn so wide, you can see down their necks.” So he made up the Vlecks to — so in my book, Oh, the Pets You Can Get, “Oh, the Pets You Can Get takes place in Gerplets where they know quite a bit about caring for pets.” So I made up Gerplets to homage to Ted because when you’re in trouble, make something, that’s what he did.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a clever fix and that became his trademark, or was his trademark.
Tish Rabe: It was. I mean, it was genius. I mean, he just made this stuff up all the time. So those were the two things. I had to get what the facts were for the books, keep it simple, make stuff that rhymes to the kids, and what really works well about rhyme is there are kids that would not have ever known what the word migration meant, but they loved the rhyme and they remembered the rhyme. So it’s a very, very successful — I mean, after that, every single one of my books rhymes because of that. It works.
Tim Ferriss: It is their first exposure to a mnemonic device, right?
Tish Rabe: Mm-hmm. Always, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I’ve done — I mean, I think you would blow me out of the water. I have so many questions about how your mind works, but I did a bunch of cognitive testing recently with a pretty well-vetted, studied battery of different tests, and I’m 48, but I aged 20. Now the only reason I aged 20 is because I have these mnemonic devices. I’ve trained myself to be able to do it, and rhyme is a fantastic, in some ways, instinctive example of that. Have you always had a mind for rhyming, or is that a trained muscle? And also your recall. I mean, good Lord, you have just incredible recall. Have you always been that way? Are there people in your family like that? Could you speak to that?
Tish Rabe: I had a phenomenal English teacher in high school. So in high school, for me, Needham High School, Needham, Massachusetts, not only did my music director end up getting me my first job in New York, but Mr. Allen, my English teacher, was phenomenal. And what he used to have us do is write poems, sonnets, we wrote plays, and it helped me understand the format and also how to figure out end rhyme and limericks. I have a book that is still not published. I think I’m going to end up publishing it myself, but I sort of built on the Maurus O’Raurus book and I wrote a whole book for him, three, actually for Nickelodeon, that are in limerick rhyme.
“Have you met Maurus?” And I changed him to an oopsisaurus because he’s kind of clumsy with a 12-foot tail. But anyway, “Have you met Maurus? He’s an oopsisaurus, a dinosaur if you can’t guess, but sometimes he bumps things and sometimes he thumps things and sometimes he makes a big mess.” So the entire book’s in limerick rhyme. But yes, that background, and I mean, I am sincere saying that I was really torn between majoring in English in college and being a writer or a singer. I’m very happy I decided to be a singer because now I can do both. But yeah, amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Do you think the ability to construct rhyme came from that education and the practice in the English class, or do you just have the equivalent of some type of perfect pitch for —
Tish Rabe: For rhyming?
Tim Ferriss: — rhyming out of the box? What do you think?
Tish Rabe: Well, I will tell you, this is funny, because when I first started, my husband bought me a computer program that was called A Million Gazillion Rhymes, seriously. And I would sit there all day long and type the word in, “What rhymes with antenna? Anything? Hello?” Then over the years, I have gotten to the point where now I just know what they rhyme.
But speaking of mnemonics, I think you’ll get a kick out of this, this is a page in my bestselling solar system book, Dr. Seuss, right?
Tim Ferriss: All About Our Solar System.
Tish Rabe: All About Our Solar System. So things are going fine and I write this mnemonic, “You’ve seen all the planets, now here is a trick to remember their names and remember them quick.” And I write the whole thing, “Mallory, Valerie, Emily, Mizas just served up 999 pizzas.” So far so good. Except pizza stood for Pluto. So I get a call from Random House. Pluto has been demoted. And I’m like, “What?” I’m on the phone. And they said, “Can you fix this? But we can’t get the illustrator to change the art.” So Emily here, Valerie — what are their names? Mallory, Valerie, Emily, Mizas was holding pizzas. So I’m like, “Okay.” So I changed it to “Mallory, Valerie, Emily, Mickels just showed us 999 nickels.” And all the art guy had to do was change the pizza boxes to nickels, saved. But I’m like, “What? What do you mean Pluto? Give me a break. Seriously?”
Tim Ferriss: Pluto’s been demoted. Come on, guys.
Tish Rabe: We went from nine planets to eight? I’m not prepared for this. So this kind of stuff goes on all day. This is what I do for a living, but it is fun. You have to keep your sense of humor.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to move on to asking you more about the craft, but if you don’t mind me asking, what is your age at present?
Tish Rabe: At the moment, I am 74. I’ll be 75 in July. And I started my own company when I turned 71.
Tim Ferriss: 71. And we are definitely going to talk all about that. Do you have siblings?
Tish Rabe: I do.
Tim Ferriss: Is everyone in your family as razor sharp as you are? That’s a hard question. I don’t want to throw your siblings under the bus, but I’m so curious to what you attribute being — you’re sharper than 99 percent of my friends —
Tish Rabe: I appreciate that.
Tim Ferriss: — who are my age or younger.
Tish Rabe: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m wondering to what you attribute that.
Tish Rabe: My parents got married as World War II was starting. And when my father came home, he was a prisoner of war, they wanted to start a family. And they had two little boys and a little girl, and the little girl was me. And my father used to come home and play piano for about a half hour after work, but I do not come from a musical family at all. My mom was an English major, so she loved to write, so she was a writer, but music was not a thing in our family. My brothers didn’t play much and it was fine. They played sports.
Well, supposedly, when I was seven, I was in first grade, my father was playing the song he played every single night. It was my mother’s favorite. And I just stood up and started singing with him. And they still talk about it. It was a song called “Tammy,” from Tammy and the Bachelor movie. My mother loved it. “I hear the cottonwoods whispering above, ‘Tammy, Tammy, Tammy’s my love.'” My brothers were doing their homework, they stopped. My mother was doing something in the kitchen, she stopped. My father stopped. I was like, “I don’t even know what just happened.” And I was just encouraged from day one to pursue music and writing. So it was very receptive. And I’ll be honest, when I went to college, I told my mother, “I’m going to get a degree in singing.”
Well, now you’d say, “Well, what are you going to do to eat? That’s nice, but if you don’t make it on Broadway, what are you going to do?” I was the only one in my class, Ithaca College, class of ’72, that did not take an education backup. I didn’t want to teach music. I didn’t want to teach kids do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. I wanted to be a star on Broadway. It’s just like, “Are people missing this? What part of this are you guys missing?” So I literally was convinced I would leave college and come to New York and within a year, name and lights, piece of cake. Only anybody as nuts as I am would think that, but hey. And my parents never blinked. They said, “Sure, if you think this is going to work, good luck.” Anyway, so it just has always been a part of my life.
Tim Ferriss: I wanted to be a neuroscientist way back in the day and was a major in the department and the whole nine yards. Things ended up taking a turn and I ended up where I am now, but I’m still very involved with science. And the more I look at music, the more I talk to musicologists who are in dialogue with neuroscientists, the more important and/or therapeutic life-giving music seems to be.
Tish Rabe: It is.
Tim Ferriss: And it’s impossible to say you pull this one lever and you get X, Y, or Z result. But it seems to be a commonality that musicians or people who engage with music regularly just retain their faculties and hone their faculties a lot longer than people who don’t.
Tish Rabe: That’s true.
Tim Ferriss: That’s just my impression.
Tish Rabe: Well, the other thing that’s huge is that music is unbelievably helpful to teach kids and the sound of it and the rhythm of it and the rhymes. Every single one of the books I’ve created myself has a song in it. And what I do is I write them to public domain melodies because people know these songs, most of them. And the first book I created was a little book about going to sleep. So I wrote a lullaby, “Night is here, today is done, it’s time to sleep, my little one,” to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”
Tim Ferriss: So smart.
Tish Rabe: And it really works. And I really encourage everybody. I get this all the time. Everybody’s always, “Yeah, but you’ve got this beautiful voice and you sing all the time and I can’t sing.” And I just try to say to everybody, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, you can sing. It doesn’t matter if it’s croaky, it doesn’t matter what it sounds like, the only voice your child wants to hear is yours.
They want to hear you sing to them. And yes, I have me singing them on my website and I try to help everybody learn to sing them, but at the end of the day, it’s your voice resonating in their ear. I forget how I said it in here, but it’s like, “That is the voice that every little kid wants to hear. The sound of your voice when you read and sing is what your child loves more than anything.” It’s in Sweet Dreams here, but —
Tim Ferriss: What made Sweet Dreams work? What makes it work? And maybe even more broadly, what makes lullabies work? What are the other ingredients? You mentioned the mapping to a public domain melody is really smart. That makes so much sense at a lot of levels. What else makes that book work?
Tish Rabe: I started my own company right during COVID, 2020, right? COVID’s flying around and what am I going to do? And I turned 70, now what? And I was introduced to a program. A friend of mine said, “You have to meet the people at Pajama Program.” It’s now called Beyond Bedtime, but then it was called Pajama Program. So I went in and I found out that they give free pajamas and storybooks to kids facing adversity. Many kids are not having any pajamas, any storybooks. So I kind of went in to meet with them thinking, “Well, maybe I could do a fundraiser or get my girlfriends to send in some pajamas or something.” And they said, “What we really need is to help parents learn how to get their kids to go to sleep.”
And I said, “The best thing that works for this is to write a storybook they’ll read to their kids and then put the tips in the back and they’ll read them too.” And then I put them all in rhyme. So 30 to 60 minutes before you tuck them in is the perfect time for their bedtime routine to begin. And what’s happening is parents read the book and they read the tips out loud to the kids. So the kids are going, “Oh, 30 to 60 minutes. Mom, we’re supposed to be in bed now.” And then, of course, you sing a lullaby because singing is so restful. And now it’s been out for a couple of years, everybody knows the songs. The kids know it. The kids at school, they sing it in school, daycare. So yeah, it’s very, very powerful.
Tim Ferriss: I want to come to starting your company and the reasons behind that.
Tim Ferriss: Why did you start a company at 70?
Tish Rabe: At 70, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And there’s nothing wrong with that —
Tish Rabe: I know. What are you? Nuts?
Tim Ferriss: — I’m just curious what the reasons were behind that.
Tish Rabe: Well, it’s funny. I ended up marrying a guy I met in high school. That high school, it shaped my whole life.
Tim Ferriss: It produced so many —
Tish Rabe: It produced everything.
Tim Ferriss: — crown jewels.
Tish Rabe: So many jewels. My husband and I live in Mystic, Connecticut, and he’s an avid fisherman. So during the fishing season, he fishes three to four days a week. So I’m sitting there going, “Well, what am I going to do? Let’s think.” And I really felt that I had some ideas for books that the other publishers weren’t doing. One book I’m very proud of is called Love You, Hug You, Read to You. It was my very first book, and it’s a board book. And I had begged all these publishers I work with to do a book with what they call dialogic reading. And dialogic reading has little questions. So you’ve got the adorable mommy cat reading to her little kittens, and the little thing below says, “What do you think the little kittens are thinking?”
And that helps the child go, “I think they just love that their mom’s reading to them.” And it sets up a dialogue. That’s why dialogic reading — I couldn’t get anyone to let me write a book for them, so I finally said, “Well, then I’ll just do it myself.” What I’m doing now with my books is I have the ability to do what I want to do and the messages I feel never got out there. It has been a huge learning curve or spike because I always just turned the words in and somebody magically, a year and a half later, sent me 10 copies of the book. Now I’ve got to find an illustrator and a printer and a shipment thing and be on Amazon and sell books on my website, but I absolutely love every minute of it. It is so much fun. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Well, this is going to be, I suppose, maybe off-topic, my listeners are going to be like, “Why are you asking about fishing?” What does your husband love so much about fishing?
Tish Rabe: Oh, well, first of all —
Tim Ferriss: I went on my first wilderness outdoor survival training trip in Montana specifically, and the guide brought along something called Tenkara rods, which are these very simple rods with a Japanese design. They are simplicity itself. And we would just stop at random holes and give it a shot. And I found it so therapeutic that it was my first real enjoyment of fishing. I’m just wondering what your husband gets out of it.
Tish Rabe: We have four children and two live in Boston and two were living in Manhattan. So we picked Mystic, Connecticut because it’s kind of in the middle and it is the best fishing in New England because we are right on the ocean and next to Rhode Island and Block Island and all of that stuff right around.
And he goes out and they have the best time and they catch sea bass and all these different kind of fish and it’s out in the water, beautiful ocean. He’s got a 24-foot boat, the whole thing. And he brings back fish and we give it away and he cooks it and it’s just really fun.
Tim Ferriss: I love it.
Tish Rabe: But he literally leaves at seven o’clock in the morning and gets home at 4:00.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a full day.
Tish Rabe: I was like, “Well, I better do something or I’m going to go nuts.” And I tell you, there is nothing like giving a book to a child who doesn’t have a book. I am on this lifetime mission of trying to get free books to kids who don’t have any. And I have to say, having started at Sesame Street, when that idea was to lift everybody up and help everybody and teach everybody how to read, it’s amazing to me we’re here at 2026, but I’m doing what I can to make sure kids get books, as many as possible. Read, read, read.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s talk about Alaska and Sometimes Apart, Always in My Heart. What is the context on what I just mentioned? Can you tell the story?
Tish Rabe: The aegis of this book is interesting. As I think I told you, I am the child of a World War II hero. My dad was in college when he enlisted and he was in engineering. He’s an engineer. They made him a navigator and a navigator in a B-17 sits in the front with the pilot and shows them the maps and stuff like that. And his plane was hit by enemy fire. He burst into flames and he jumped out and was arrested and spent a little under two years in a German prison camp. That’s when he came home and they had my brothers and they had me, two boys and a little girl, the little girl was me. And all through the years writing children’s books, I had wanted to write a book for military kids and military families in honor of my father, but also because I felt no one understands this life. No one understands the sacrifices they go through.
And I’m the grandmother of two little girls who are five and three. And I got thinking about what it means to my granddaughter when my son is away on business for two days, and the military kids see their parents, their moms and their dads, go for a year. And I tried everything. I tried Department of Defense, Department of Education, the Naval bases. I’m like, “Can somebody help me do this?” Fast-forward, I’m starting my own company and I got clearance to go on the base at the Groton Naval Base, which is right next to Mystic, Connecticut. I went into their library, I got permission to go into their library. I read every single book for military children in the library and didn’t see anything that was helpful for this topic.
And I was literally leaving and the librarian said, “What are you here for?” And I said, “I want to write a book for military kids.” And she said, “Oh.” And she smiled at me and she said, “You just need to reach out to United Through Reading.” And I looked at her and I said, “United Through Reading? Okay.” United Through Reading records deployed service members reading books to their kids, hold it up, read the book. Then they send the video recording home to the child with a free copy of the book so that they can all read together. And when I heard this story, I said, “It’s lovely that they’re reading Cat in the Hat and There’s No Place Like Space, that’s all nice, but I want them to have a book that reflects their story. ‘This is where I am, I miss you, but I’m fine. You’re fine. I’m fine. It’s fine.'”
And the first thing I did was I interviewed service members, spouses, partners, and kids. It took me months. I have notebooks full of this stuff about what it’s like to walk away from your three-year-old and hope you’ll be back to see her someday, to serve our country and keep us safe. And I got inspired to write the book. And the people I interviewed gave me tips to put in the book for young families facing this for the first time. And one of my favorites was an early interview, she said, it’s in here. “When my husband leaves, he traces his hand on paper and I put it up next to the door so the kids can give him a high five every time they leave.” Really.
So Sometimes Apart, Always in My Heart, helping military families send love from far away. I was honored to write it. I’ve received a lot of big awards for it and it’s really a passion project for me because I cannot imagine my son walking away from my granddaughters for a year, but it happens every day.
And then the funny thing about Alaska, this is really funny, here’s Alaska. I actually was going to —
Tim Ferriss: Alaska is a little stuffed dog.
Tish Rabe: He’s a little stuffed dog. I went to buy my granddaughter a little present and he literally fell in my bag and I’m looking at him and going, “Well, he’s awful cute.” And then I thought, “Wow.” I was right in the middle of writing Sometimes Apart, Always in My Heart. A lot of service members have to leave their pets. It’s horrible. Because they get relocated, and sometimes can’t take them with them.
I said to myself, “Okay, I’m going to have the Bear Family have a dog.” There he is, right there, and have him adopted from a shelter. Then I thought, “Well, there’s a lot of training in Alaska.” I Googled. One thing, all of you, if you ever want to create a character, first thing you do is Google the name. Because, for me, if I find out that I was going to name him Tony, I’ve put in Tony the dog, and there already is one, I would name him something else. It’s just not worth the hassle. I put in Alaska, and the only thing that came up was Alaskan Huskies, but not the name Alaska. I named him Alaska.
But the cool thing was, I sent one of these little dogs to my art director and my illustrator. From the first minute, she was able to put him in the book the way he really looks. That’s him getting adopted from the shelter. One of the things that happens to service members is they all said to me that the hardest thing is missing their families, and missing the day-to-day little stuff. In the Bear Family, Daddy Bear is on a location, and they adopt Alaska while he’s gone. In the last page of the book is Alaska jumping on him because they just met. This is like —
I also wanted to have this little dog, so the kids are reading the book, and they also have a little soft guy to go with it. He’s on my website. Right, Alaska? “Yes.” Anyway, yes, really inspired to write that one.
Tim Ferriss: Is the best place for people to find the book and Alaska at tishrabebooks.com? Where would you suggest they find the book?
Tish Rabe: Yes. The book and Alaska are on tishrabebooks.com. We have e-commerce all set up. You’re just ready to go home, right, with anybody?
Yes, that was another fun thing. Who’d ever made a plush dog before? The nice thing was the only thing they had to do was put his little bandana on because this is the real dog I found, but he says Alaska, and the name of the book. They didn’t have to build a whole new dog to adopt.
Tim Ferriss: The spelling, folks, I’ll just remind you. Rabe is R-A-B-E, so T-I-S-H-R-A-B-E, books.com. What else can people find on your website? What else will people find there?
Tish Rabe: There’s a lot going on in my website. I have a lot of books in development. I just started my company. This always makes me laugh. This one is called Days Can Be Sunny for Bunnies and Money. I got a call from a bank in Ohio. They wanted something for kids, because financial literacy is a huge thing. You’ve got to start young. I came up with these three bunnies. They’re triplets. Honey Fern likes to earn, Sunny Dave likes to save, and Funny Ben likes to spend.
Anyway, the thing goes on. At the end, they also give some of their eggs to the library. This is them giving them eggs to the library. I love doing content-based books, something that’s going to teach somebody about something. I’ve got a big new book coming out in a month. That’s actually all about Central Park, New York.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, no kidding?
Tish Rabe: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: Fun.
Tish Rabe: It’s a rhyming storybook. Central Park You Can See is the Best Place to Be, that’s coming out.
Tim Ferriss: How did that come about?
Tish Rabe: It was funny. We moved here to Mystic. I’ve never had this exactly happen before, but I joined the small business, The Greater Mystic Chamber of Commerce, right?
Tim Ferriss: Uh-hmm.
Tish Rabe: Because I thought, “Well, I’m running this tiny company by myself. Maybe there are other people who are running small companies who could help me with advice or something.” I go to this coffee shop to meet their head of membership, the Mystic Chamber of Commerce head of membership. Honestly, I think she’s going to want me to put something about me on her website or something.
She literally looks at me and says, “We have a huge anniversary coming up. Would you write a children’s book about our town?” I remember looking at her. It was February 8th. I’ll never forget it. I said, “Well, sure.” I said, “When do you need it by?” She looks at me, and she goes, “July?” I remember looking at her going, “Ah, sure, when you need it.”
Anyway, here it is. Mystic by the Sea is the Best Place to Be. But the thing that was amazing, and this has never happened to me before, we’re at Mystic Seaport, in a coffee shop. I’m looking right at her, beautiful, beautiful young woman. She says, “Can you get it done that fast?” I thought, “Aye.”
All of a sudden, I saw four seagulls fly over her head, right in the middle of a coffee shop. Obviously, they weren’t real seagulls. But in my head, I saw four seagulls. I got to my car. I said, “I’ve got it.” It’s a family of seagulls who fly all over Mystic looking at the seaport, the aquarium, the boats, blah, blah, blah, blah. I wrote the whole thing in two days. This is downtown Mystic.
Who knows where these ideas come from? I don’t know. But that was the first time I ever had a complete hallucination in a coffee shop.
Tim Ferriss: Then, was Central Park something that you wanted to do or did that come to you a different way?
Tish Rabe: I work with a friend of mine whose name is Jennifer Perry. She was this vice president and publisher of Sesame Street Books for a long time. As soon as I started Tish Rabe Books, she came on as my executive editor. But interesting thing about her, she is a trained greeter, G-R-E-E-T-E-R, greeter, at Central Park in New York.
She came to me, and she said, “Every single family comes in with the kids in the stroller,” and blah, blah, blah.” The first thing they ask is, “What should I show my kids? Where should I take my children?” She said, “They need a book. They need a rhyming children’s book.” I was kind of like, “Okay.”
Literally, Central Park is 843 acres of open land, lakes, and waterfalls. How to get that into 24 pages? I was like, “Sure, I got it.” It’s taken a bit for us to get that done, but it’s coming out in a month, and a half.
Tim Ferriss: Exciting. Very exciting.
Tish Rabe: I’m working on a big campaign, which is going very well, to get people to help me fund free copies of the Central Park book to kids in underserved neighborhoods in the five boroughs: Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island, Queens, and Brooklyn.
Again, when I met your friend, Elan, from this group in New York, this influencer’s group, I met a young woman who said, “I’ll help you do this.” It’s on the landing page of my website. We are absolutely crowdfunding enough money to give a book to every first-grader in the underserved communities —
Tim Ferriss: Wow, I’m kind of excited.
Tish Rabe: — of the five boroughs in New York. Very exciting.
Tim Ferriss: I love that. I may have a group that could be also maybe of interest or could be interested in the book itself.
Tish Rabe: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: DonorsChoose.org, which I was involved with. I suppose, I still am, but was involved with for ages, in any case.
Tish Rabe: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Certainly, we’ll link to the website, and link the crowdfunding separately for people who would like to contribute to that.
You mentioned 24 pages. Is that the canonical length?
Tish Rabe: Uh-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: That’s probably not the right modifier, but is that the default length of most children’s books?
Tish Rabe: They’re all kind of all over the place. The Dr. Seuss books, these books are 42 pages. What’s happening is hopefully, we hope, hope, hope, is that parents read to their kids when they’re going to sleep or when they’re home from school. It’s kind of tricky because if they’re too long, it gets too much.
Starting my own company, I thought, “Well, let me start with 24 pages.” The interesting thing also to share, we do other languages, here’s Sweet Dreams in Spanish, and also pace of not a million words on a page, kids love to turn pages. There’s a whole kind of part of this that’s just how it works.
Tim Ferriss: Adults like to turn pages too.
Tish Rabe: Exactly. Exactly. They go, “Are we going to see more artwork here or what?”
The other thing I urge people who want to write a children’s book is to really think about the illustrator. I had worked with Gill Guile in London on a number of books. We did the Huff and Puff train books. I knew for this book, which is all about reading, snuggling, and going to sleep, that she was the perfect illustrator.
A book like Bunnies and Money, it’s supposed to be funny. It’s this wacky group of kids. This is another kind of artwork. It really depends on what your message is, and what your style is, of who you pick.
Tim Ferriss: If you’re stuck on a book, if that ever happens, but let’s just say something’s not working, what’s your go to move? Do you change the idea, the meter, the sentence? How do you start to get unstuck, if something doesn’t work?
Tish Rabe: I did a presentation to a group of writers called Girls Write, W-R-I-T-E, Now. I had young women in the room with me, and then we had Zoom calls across the country. It was the first time anyone has asked me if I get writer’s block. No one has ever asked me that. This was a couple months ago.
I remember thinking, “Yes, I do.” What I do is if I get hired to write a book, and I still write for other people, I just finished another book for Harper Collins. If they say, “We have to have your first draft by April 1st,” I write in, “It’s due February 15th.” Because I know there’s going to be a day when I cannot do this. I can’t figure it out. It’s not going anywhere. I’m stuck. When that happens, I stop.
If I just say, “I cannot think one more minute about what Funny Ben spends his money on,” just a for instance, I will let it go, work on something else, work on another book, do something. Because it is true. You get circled in, like a self dissolve in. You’re just so, so consumed by it.
This is a great example of that. This is interesting. This is the one that I wrote, Oh, the Things You Can Do That Are Good for You! This was the only time that I got this assignment. Honestly, Tim, I thought that is the most boring idea I have ever heard.
The American Academy of Pediatrics wanted a book about go to sleep, eat healthy, exercise. I thought, “Oh, I can’t.” Oh, my God. First of all, you cannot write this stuff without sounding preachy. “Do this, do that, do this, do that.”
I got my courage up, and I called Random House. I said, “How would you feel if I created my own Dr. Seuss’ characters like Zing singing Zans who loves washing her hands?” My editor at Random House said, “We cannot call Mrs. Geisel, and say that you, mother of two, living in Connecticut, are going to start writing Dr. Seuss characters. All you can do is write the whole book, 42 pages, all rhyming, and we’ll submit it to her. If she turns it down, you’ve got to start over.” I go, “Oh, great. Okay.”
I write the whole book. Here’s one. Here’s the Zing singing Zans who loves washing her hands. “Wishly, washy, washly, wish, squishily, squashily, squashily, squish. Wash your hands carefully. It’s up to you. You soap in warm water. It’s easy to do. Rinse them, and while we all sing this refrain, germs from your hands will slide right down the drain.”
For sure, fine. Okay. I turn this in. I go, “Oh, boy.” I told my husband, “Plan B does not exist.” I had the Sneeze Snicker Sneeze who loves brushing her teeth. Anyway, they loved it. Thank you, Mrs. Geisel. They put it out.
Michelle Obama funded 16 additional pages with exercises and all kinds of stuff she loves. But that was a perfect example of, “What am I going to do?” I said, “This is so boring.” It turned out to be a huge bestseller, but it is funny.
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to land the plane in just a few minutes. This has been so fun, but I wanted to also ask you, 1982, Big Bird in China, what was that like?
Tish Rabe: That was really an extraordinary situation. We were the first crew allowed into China, the first film crew. A couple news guys had been in, but it was the first time anybody walked into China with a six-foot yellow bird, among other things.
Somehow, we got permission to shoot this thing. I don’t know how. We walked in, and they shipped one Big Bird costume. I was, I wonder what I was, associate producer at that point, I guess. They literally said to us, “You cannot shoot this bird in the rain. They’re hand painted. They’re hand-dyed feathers. If it starts to rain, you’ve got to pull Caroll Spinney out of it. You’ve got to put it somewhere dry.”
I thought I really knew what I was doing. I scheduled 13 rain days. We were there a month in China. It poured the first 13 days. I mean, poured, not just a little rain. We would literally push him out, and have him do one line.
“I don’t know. Should we go this way or that way?” Move! Pull him back in, and change him. It was nuts.
Okay. But it did win the Emmy for best special for NBC. It was a 90-minute special. That was another thing that was crazy. We got all the way back —
Tim Ferriss: That’s long.
Tish Rabe: Oh, my God. We got back with all this footage. First thing NBC said, “You know, maybe it should just be an hour.” We’re all looking at each other because it had had a really complicated plot. He’s looking to find the Phoenix; at the end, he finds the Phoenix. How do you cut the middle out?
Anyway, we did air as 90 minutes. But for us, it was just crazy. I mean, absolutely everything that possibly could have gone wrong went wrong. But we came home with it somehow, but it was really something.
Tim Ferriss: How long were you there until?
Tish Rabe: We were there a month. There’s no coffee. You guys, you can’t have a film crew with no coffee. You just can’t. The first day, everyone’s looking at me and going, “Where’s the coffee?” I’m like, “Coffee? We’re in China. No, tea is tea. Have a cup of tea.” They didn’t want tea. They wanted coffee. I said, “Well, you guys are going to have to get it together because it’s not going to happen.” Oh, man.
Tim Ferriss: 1982.
Tish Rabe: It was crazy, 1982.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Tish Rabe: I sing a song on that one. I sang the Monkey King song on that show. But anyway, it was crazy, crazy.
Tim Ferriss: How fun. What an experience. What an experience.
Tish Rabe: The only thing I would say real quick is there was a five-year-old little girl from China, and she has the lead. She and Big Bird travel all around. She spoke no English, zero. She didn’t even know how to say “Hello.” They taught this to this little girl by rote. She finally understood what “I love you” meant, finally, by the last day of the shoot, whatever.
But we would send them scripts, and then we would change the scripts. But then we met her, and she’d memorize the original ones. You’d be out in this shooting outdoors, and all of a sudden she’d say, “I don’t know, Big Bird. Let’s find out.” We’d go, “We cut that. Didn’t we cut that a year ago? Wait a minute.” It was crazy. We shot at the Great Wall of China at 4:00 in the morning. Anyway, that’s another whole story.
Tim Ferriss: What a wild experience.
Tish Rabe: Wild.
Tim Ferriss: I was in China at two universities in 1996, I guess it was. It is just a different experience entirely now. I can only imagine 1982.
Tish Rabe: The interesting thing for us was, yes, there’s a billion people. But back then, they were all walking everywhere and bicycles. Now, of course, it’s cars. But just the sheer volume of people was just amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Mind-boggling. Yeah.
Tish Rabe: Mind-boggling.
Tim Ferriss: I got there at the tail end of the bicycles. I got to see people in big green jackets. It gets cold depending on where you are. It can get really chilly. But what a wild experience.
Tish Rabe: I know.
Tim Ferriss: Tish, let me ask you a question. This is a metaphorical question, but it’s a question I like to ask guests. That is, if you could put a message, could be lyrics, could be a line, a quote, a mantra, anything at all on a huge billboard for lots of people or lots of kids to see, does anything come to mind that you might put on that billboard?
Tish Rabe: Wow. I would say right now, I would say, remember the children are our most precious gift. I get concerned about the way the world is going. I just want everybody to remember that they are the most precious part of our world. Because they are the future, they are the dreams of the future, and we must take good care of them. And read, read, read.
Tim Ferriss: Read, read, read. Read, read, read. I hope you keep writing, writing, writing as well.
Tish Rabe: That is the plan, I have to say.
Tim Ferriss: That is the plan.
Tish, is there anything else you’d like to mention? Any closing comments, anything at all you’d like to cover or point people to before we —
Tish Rabe: One thing I would like to say, I have another big book coming out. It’s called Kindness is Caring, Friendship is Sharing. It is written with International Rotary Clubs. Rotary clubs are all across the country, all around the world. It comes out in three weeks. It’s a gentle story. It takes place in Africa, a little zebra. It’s about just that. Friendship, caring, sharing, and making the world a kinder place.
I think the world has never needed it more. I’m very proud of it. It’ll be out in three weeks. I just think we all have to be kind to each other, and I’m doing the best I can to make that happen.
Tim Ferriss: We do. Rotary Club, amazing, amazing organization also.
Tish Rabe: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: We have some very, very old friends who I met who came through Rotary Club.
Tish Rabe: The other thing, too, that’s fun about it is it’s a book for kids. But when young parents read it, we’re hoping that they see it, learn about Rotary and say, “Well, let me find a Rotary in my community.” We can get some new members, and keep going. We’ll see.
Tim Ferriss: I love it. I love it. Tish, you’re such a joy to spend time with.
Tish Rabe: Thank you.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you.
Tish Rabe: You too. It was fun.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you so much. Everybody listening, we will link to all things in the show notes, but do not miss going to Tish Rabe Books. It’s T-I-S-H-R-A-B-E, books.com. Contribute to the crowdfunding, and buy a few books while you’re at it. We’ll link to all of your social media, and so on. But people, definitely check out TishRabebooks.com. We’ll link to other things that have come up in this conversation at tim.blog/podcast. You’ll be easy to find. You’re the only Tish.
Tish Rabe: I know. I know. There’s only a few of us out there, which is a beautiful thing.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, beautiful. It makes it very easy to find you.
To everybody listening, as always, this is how I close my shows. Be just a bit kinder than is necessary when you stop listening and go on with your day, not just to others, but also to yourself.
Tish Rabe: That’s lovely.
Tim Ferriss: Tish, what a wonderful, wonderful time. I really appreciate you making the time to have this conversation.
Tish Rabe: You’re welcome then.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I hope we cross paths again.
Tish Rabe: Yeah. I’ll end with what I say to the kids. Reading and writing, books are so exciting. Read a book or write a story, start right now.
Tim Ferriss: That’s how we close. Perfect!
Tish Rabe: Thank you so much.Tim Ferriss: Thank you.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Tish Rabe — 200+ Children’s Books, Getting Picked for Dr. Seuss, Lessons from Early Sesame Street, How to Write 300+ Songs, and More (#854) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-02-19 04:50:43
Tish Rabe (@tishrabebooks) is the New York Times bestselling author of more than 200 children’s books, with more than 11 million copies sold. She has written for Sesame Street, Disney, PBS Kids, Curious George, Clifford, and many more. In 1991, following the death of Dr. Seuss, she was asked by Random House to write The Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library, a series of science books for early readers that were the brainchild of Dr. Seuss, who died before he could finish the first one. Tish has written more than 50 Cat in the Hat books as well as books for the Grinch and the Lorax.
Trained as a professional singer, she began her career as the music production assistant for Sesame Street in its first seasons and was hired by Jim Henson to sing for the Muppets. She has written more than 300 children’s songs for broadcast television, is an animation head writer and scriptwriter, was a creative consultant for the Cartoon Network, Scholastic, and HBO Family and now heads her own children’s book publishing company, Tish Rabe Books.
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“Tish Rabe’s a mom who thinks that it’s cool to be home rhyming rhymes while her kids are at school.” — Tish Rabe
“You do not have to have kids to write for kids.” — Tish Rabe
“My first job was hiring the jingle singers in Manhattan to sing with Jim Henson’s Muppets. So I sang all day. I sang when I typed, and I sang when I filed, and I sang when I answered the phone. ‘Sesame Street, may I help you?’ Well, after a year, everybody was so tired of listening to me sing all the time that they said, ‘Would you like to sing on Sesame Street with the Muppets?'” — Tish Rabe
“There is nothing like giving a book to a child who doesn’t have a book. I am on this lifetime mission of trying to get free books to kids who don’t have any.” — Tish Rabe
“Remember: the children are our most precious gift. I get concerned about the way the world is going. I just want everybody to remember that they are the most precious part of our world. Because they are the future, they are the dreams of the future, and we must take good care of them. And read, read, read.” — Tish Rabe
“I really encourage everybody. Everybody’s always, ‘Yeah, but you’ve got this beautiful voice, and you sing all the time, and I can’t sing.’ And I just try to say to everybody—and I mean this from the bottom of my heart—you can sing. It doesn’t matter if it’s croaky, it doesn’t matter what it sounds like, the only voice your child wants to hear is yours.” — Tish Rabe
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Want to hear another episode with someone who knows how to make people of all ages light up? Listen to my first conversation with Elan Lee, co-creator of Exploding Kittens and the mutual friend who introduced me to Tish, in which we discussed how to raise millions on Kickstarter, deconstructing mega-successes, secrets of game design, the power of positive constraints, the delights of craftsmanship, turning fans into superfans, and much more.
The post Tish Rabe — 200+ Children’s Books, Getting Picked for Dr. Seuss, Lessons from Early Sesame Street, How to Write 300+ Songs, and More (#854) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
