(Photo: djsosumi)
I’ve always been very jealous of people who can listen to music and concentrate on their work at the same time.
My brain refuses to operate like that. I’ve tried, but it won’t budge on this one.
I find it too difficult to compute the three-way between the words on the screen, the words coming from the music and the words in my head. It’s chaos. It hurts.
Continue reading “The Best Music to Listen to When You Need to Get Shit Done”
“Surfing recreates you. I went into the water literally ready to blow my brains out and came back out of the water a warrior.” ~ Doc Paskowitz (Click to tweet)
How long should it take to learn to surf? It’s difficult to know. It is, it seems, a monstrous task for anyone who’s not twelve.
From Cornwall to Santander to Biarritz, I have snatched and grabbed at surfing for years: a day here, a stag-do there, the occasional long weekend flash-flooding my sinuses and wishing something that looks so cool would be so much easier for the rest of us. Until recently, it had been a frustrating journey.
Then, I had one of those perfect days where everything that I had to remember to remember was right where I needed it to be. As the waves rolled in along Engenhoca beach in Brazil, I felt everything that surfing had ever promised.
I grinned like a loon.
(Photo: All Rights Reserved, Tim Ferriss)
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” ~ Archimedes
I have spent much of the last six weeks of the UK’s bitterly cold November in a hammock.
I have been able to do this almost exclusively thanks to what I learned from Tim Ferriss in his disruptive debut publication, The 4-Hour Workweek. Thanks to Tim, I was able to quit my job and travel while an automated source of income feeds my bank account. The hammock, from which I’m typing right now, is strung up in the exterior courtyard of a rented beach house in the Brazilian surf town of Itacaré.
Continue reading “Is Tim Ferriss the World’s Greatest Journalist?”
So here’s a story.
In 2010, I sat a supremely talented performer called James Brown (seen here on ITV’s Penn & Teller: Fool Us) in front of a dictaphone for three straight days, asked him simply to talk and only let him leave the room for occasional toilet breaks and food.
Then, I enlisted the help of a transcription service. They came back a week later with a monstrous 135,000 word document which I had painfully failed to specify should not have been verbatim.
It was a horrible sight; as long as a dozen university dissertations strung back-to-back and flecked with stuff like ‘Where’s the bog?’ Not a good start. But, a year and a half later, we have a book.
A book that has SOLD OUT.
There is no English translation for the first gift I received at Burning Man. It was not a necklace or a bracelet or other trinkety item of raiment. Instead, it left me exposed, across a stretch of seven extraordinary days on the playa, to both brutal sadness and the gates of personal freedom. It was gifted to me by Mitch, from Chicago, when I told him of my plans to travel to the Northern shores of Brazil.
It was a feeling.
A single word.
Saudade.
