Tim pissed some people off

[kamakiri]

http://andywibbels.com/ (http://andywibbels.com)

This sums up Andy's comments pretty well:

I think {Tim's blog post} is really a guide to being a complete douche-lord...

[webgal]

Definitely interesting. That's why I think it's important to read the book and extract what suits you. There were a number of things I thought were way over the top but that's just him. And then there were things I thought offered good advice.

[TimW]

Wow....that's...interesting. I think he may have stepped on his crank with this one. :)

[Marcie]

http://andywibbels.com/ (http://andywibbels.com)

This sums up Andy's comments pretty well:

I think {Tim's blog post} is really a guide to being a complete douche-lord...

Um, are you saying you agree with the douche-lord comment?

[hydroboi]

I dont understand why people are such babies, who cares if you don't like it don't use it, p.s. thank god for the internet and letting people express themselves. either way feel free to contact Andy/michael

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[kamakiri]

Um, are you saying you agree with the douche-lord comment?

Nope. It is a bit unbecoming of a moderator to put words in my mouth though. If you were asking my personal opinion, I do believe that any advice to annoy people is crap, and by no means an accurate way to determine a person's character.

What if it were possible to fast-forward relationships, whether with new friends, business partners, or romances? To get past the honeymoon facade of niceties and see their true tendencies underneath all it all?

This quote in particular is pretty much pure garbage. There are no shortcuts to developing relationships. Trust is the foundation of a relationship, not how they will act when bumped by people from 'lower socio-economic classes.'

1. Meet them for dinner or lunch at an appointed time, and indicate upon their arrival that you made a mistake and set the reservation for 30 min prior..

2. Same as 1, but tell them that the reservation was accidentally made for 30 minutes after their arrival.

Here again. Relationships are based on trust. IT is impossible to build trust by lying to people. Tim has a responsibility here as well NOT to tell his readers to lie to people.

Just check out the related posts on Digg, or any other comments on the net about that blog post. It is poor advice and it was not received well by ANYONE.

[TimW]

As one who sometimes finds the Machiavelli's works to be useful in the business arena, I find it absurd that Ferriss came out with this "advice".

As Kamakiri indicated, relationships are built on trust. If you make an appointment with someone for a specific time, with the intent that you are actually not going to show up until 30 minutes later (for the purpose of "testing" them), then you've lied to that person. Period. There is no sugar-coating it. If you can live with yourself doing that, well, then I have no desire to be your acquaintance.

From the viewpoint of the person who was "tested", why would they trust you in the future? You lied to them. If you didn't tell them why you were late, you lied by omission. Either way, the premise for the meeting was built on a lie.

Hardly positive first steps toward a friendship.

If one is so concerned about how potential "friends" might react in adverse conditions, etc., why not just be upfront and interview them like HR departments do? "Can you tell me about a time you were supposed to meet someone and they were late? How did you react and what did you do?"

That's certainly more honest than setting someone up as suggested. As least I could then judge whether or not I wanted someone like the "interviewer" as a friend.

I think Ferriss really screwed the pooch on this one.

[final_id]

I can't really figure out what all the fuss is about. The link doesn't seem to point to anything about 4HWW ... is there an argument going on somewhere?

[TimW]

No direct link to 4HWW that I can tell. But Ferriss is the 4HWW and the 4HWW is Ferriss. I don't think his voyage into this "friendship testing" mindfield negates what he discusses in 4HWW, but I do think that for those who don't know about it, they could be "turned off" by the whole affair.

That's OK, in my book, since that leaves more muses for us. ;)

However, that said, it still shows a lack of judgement on Ferriss' part, IMO.

[webgal]

Well, I'm not sure that he'll ever get married if the process includes similar hazing techniques for potential mates/brides. :D Any woman with a grain of confidence wouldn't put up with it that's for sure. He might be stirring up a bit 'o controversy Howard Stern style, too. He might just have a marketing focus here we're not privy to.

[Marcie]

http://andywibbels.com/ (http://andywibbels.com)

This sums up Andy's comments pretty well:

I think {Tim's blog post} is really a guide to being a complete douche-lord...

I just wanted to make sure I was clear. Using a sentence like "This sums up Andy's comments pretty well" generally indicates that you agree with the comments. Correct me if I am reading that wrong. I would never "put words in someone's mouth" - your expressions are your own.

[final_id]

I dug further and found what all the fuss is about.

Seems Tim suggested some pretty unconventional tactics in one of his blog posts. Seems someone else responded in one of his own blog posts with a big no-no. Seems people got up in arms and started arguing.

My interpretation of Tim's original post on that subject wasn't so literal as many seem to be. I thought he was just suggesting, "Hey, here's a way to short-cut a few questions you might have about an acquaintance, if you want to think about it." I didn't really get the impression he was mandating that exactly these steps be taken all the time, but rather that it was a useful thought experiment, and PERHAPS a real experiment in the rare instance when it could be pulled off, to figure out the real character of people you know. His rubric, that mentions how people are often very good actors in familiar situations but that a little stress might help show their true colors, is really the point of his post.

In other words, I read Tim's initial post mostly as speculation rather than as true control-freak manipulation.

I therefore believe that the stridently negative responses kind of missed the boat, and show two typical misinterpretations of most of Tim's work. They are also much more extreme than necessary, taking him to task in terms of his character and the overall worth of his entire oeuvre, rather than rationally addressing the weaknesses of the single tactics suggested.

1. The belief that there are "ought to" and "should" and "have to" rules out there (generally unspoken) which, when broken, mark a person not just as mildly cantankerous but as evil evil evil. This comes up a lot in my own life with people who object to 4HWW -- "You don't want to work! You're lazy!" is a common response. I never said I didn't WANT to do something productive; I said I wanted more money for my time. They evidently can't understand that idea, because it doesn't fit their neat Protestant Work Ethic box of much-effort-for-little-reward rather than effectiveness-for-reward. They value the effort itself (W4W), not the end product or the lifestyle you can fund with the income. Tim's blog post about hassling your acquaintances similarly stands outside the traditional box. I value it for that reason, though I am unlikely to undertake most of the suggestions in it. Many people dislike it for that same reason, though it might actually have more value and proof of value than do the more culturally accepted behaviors which they assume to be correct.

2. The mistaken inability to read "with charity." This goes on across the internet every day. I once posted that what I like about smoking a pipe is, that it has all sorts of erudite concepts behind it, learning the different tobaccos, how to pack a pipe, maintain it, proper manufacturer's marks, ageing the casing, jars, etc. etc.. I liked that stuff. Immediately I received a hundred responses about how pipe smoking isn't complicated, how I make it too difficult, how I'm running off people by insisting that you have to read books in order to do it properly, how all you have to do is cram some weed into a knot of wood and you're a better man, so on and so forth. Few respondents read me WITH CHARITY, recognizing that what I meant to do was discuss something I valued, the depth of knowledge to be gained. Rather, anti-intellectual Americans that they are, they twigged to a single concept which somehow annoyed them -- perhaps the word "erudite," which they had to go look up in a dictionary -- and then took THE REST OF my post to task for some tangential implication which existed more because they invented it than because I intended it. Well, the same has happened with Tim's post. Give him some charity, read it in the spirit it was intended, and you won't show yourself to be a pain in the butt who's out to pick a fight. He was just suggesting some interesting ideas ... geez ...

[Marcie]

Thanks, Cliff. I think you are reflecting on what happended well, especially in light of Tim's most recent blog post (the second part) found here: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/19/dont-like-meditation-try-gratitude-training-plus-follow-up-to-testing-friends-firestorm/

:)
Marcie

[kamakiri]

In other words, I read Tim's initial post mostly as speculation rather than as true control-freak manipulation.

Final - You are the only one missing the boat here. Your post was interesting to read, but really had nothing to do at all with Tim's blog post about aggravating friends. Here is a short summary of the things he recommends:

1 & 2. Lie to your friends.
3. Take your friends to a place with crappy service
4. Leave your money at home when you are expected to pay your own way.
5. Check their 'elitist level' by associating with 'lower socio-economic classes'
6. Talk about controversial topics.

The fact of the matter here is that basing relationships on some sort of fast forward mechanism is just not possible.

Rather than hoping for the best and getting trapped in relationships you are unwilling to end due to guilt and inertia

Here is another beauty. What would you do if you were in a relationship and you were lied to? Badgered about controversial subjects? Had a bad time at poor service restaurants on a regular basis? Were forced to pay the whole bill?... There wouldn't be a relationship. Most rational people wouldn't give it the time of day.

This is not some brave new world where we gauge our time on the year of our Ferris. My goal is not to attack Tim here, and I am not. All I am saying is that the advice in his post is inaccurate, pithy, and just wrong, and instead of recanting that, he digs the hole deeper by not even acknowledging it in his next post and trying to draw attention away from the issue.

One thing noticeably absent from my blog is personal attacks. It’s too bad that people who are otherwise civil sometimes use the informal nature of their blogs as an excuse to attack people instead of ideas

The main points brought up by most of the blogosphere were the same or very close to the ones I have detailed here. A holier than thou attitude is really not what I was looking for here. What would have really been refreshing was for Tim to actually take some responsibility, and come out and say, "Ya, maybe I did post without thinking and gave some crappy advice."

[TimW]

Kamakiri

Pretty much what I started to post around 2pm this afternoon (Arizona time), but decided not to. Yours came out better than mine was. :)

[final_id]

I'm sorry that what some people were looking for, was not what was given. Perhaps in the future the internet will fulfill the requirements more assiduously and we can all stop saying "Bad! Bad! Bad internet! Down boy!"

Heh ... just a little joke there.

Seems to me, some people are really up in arms about this thing. It's true, that Tim's blog post can be taken in an offensive light. I think that this would be an uncharitable reading (according to the rather specialized definition of that term which I've described earlier). You CAN take it all that way; and then go all angry about, "He shouldn't say that! WHAT A JERK!" and think that your own holy grown is superior and morally higher. If you want. That is indeed a possible manner of reading what Tim wrote.

But I think that this sort of interpretation says more about the reader than about the writer.

For me, I took it as "deliberately provocative." I took it as, "Here's some weird ideas you might want to try out some day if all other things are equal." I took it as, "Well, you might not like this, but it IS a possibility, and even CONSIDERING it might give you a good idea about where some of your assumptions currently lie."

If the post really offends certain readers as much as it does, then maybe the readers who take such offense might note that the subject matter is perhaps a hot-button issue for them. If I were to talk about hanging nooses up in a black man's office, I think I OUGHT to know that such a gesture would have wider repercussions than merely to suggest a rope is hanging from the ceiling. I should know that, in the CONTEXT of the black man working there, some other forms of racial content might be implied, and therefore I should understand that my rude gesture would be taken as much more offensive than it might in a different context.

Well, what's the CONTEXT into which Tim posted his message (the one in question)? What CONTEXT is coloring certain people's reading of it? Could it be, those people have had difficulty with "controlling" people who push them into uncomfortable situations when starting out relationships? Or that those readers who take most umbrage, feel of themselves that they have least defense against those types of described manipulations?

I personally wouldn't mind any of those manipulations being performed against me. If someone pushed me into a crowd of people who have a variety of social and ethnic backgrounds, and finagled it so that I'd have to bump into strangers who were of a "foreign" type to me, I think I'd just feel like, whatever, I'm in the market in Florence, I'm at public school in New Orleans. Afterwards, I might question my supposed friend. "Hey, what the heck are you putting me up to, getting me in a crowd of strangers?" And he'd have to explain himself, and I might distrust him a little. "Hmm. Weird little game you're playing there. Rather presumptuous of you, to judge me like that. Glad I 'passed the test.' Am I allowed to test you now?" It would be mildly uncomfortable, but the variety of racial types I'd have to encounter would definitely not be particularly offensive. Nor would the late-early game. I don't care; so he missed an appointment time; whatever. Plenty of people get schedules wrong all the time, I'm rescheduling everything at the last minute on my cell phone anyway. It wouldn't phase me.

If that type of manipulation is genuinely threatening to you, maybe you need to realize that you've got some assumptions which are pretty hide-bound. If you don't like it when normal changes of schedule happen (presuming you didn't know it was a Tim-style manipulation; but instead you genuinely believed that the person had gotten the half-hour wrong on the appointment time) and you get offended when a friend makes a mistake, maybe you aren't actually a very forgiving person in the first place. And if you don't want to spend time in a crowd of people whose only recommendation against them is that they're socially or economically or racially different from yourself, then you really have some problems with prejudice. If those are the case, then it's no surprise that Tim's recommendations offend you, whether read "with charity" or not -- they're offensive because they threaten to find out your flaws and make clear you aren't really a valuable friend.

If on the other hand the offense is taken, not because the suggested trials might be unsurpassable, but rather because the mistrust inherent in them makes you worry about your friend Tim, then I guess I can sympathize a little. It doesn't make me feel like it's the end of the world, the way some of the postings are going on here. If Tim did that to me, I'd just wonder. "Heh, funny little guy. A bit eccentric. Wuddever." Seems to me, if he did that to YOU, you'd be bawling, crying, screaming foul, demanding to meet his mother with a big ol' "Let me tell you what your supposedly darling boy DID TO ME." Why does it make you so angry? It's just an appointment. It's just a crowd. It's just one friend. He isn't the source of your emotional wellbeing. Move on or accept it, but don't get in a snit-fit. The mere fact of having a snit-fit, is, to me, clear indication that too much value and expectation has been placed on something that in itself can't be guaranteed in the first place.

[TimW]

I've done business throughout Latin America, and with Latin Americans within the U.S., and worked for a Mexican company. Late (or even missed) appointments don't bother me. Nor do friends who've forgotten their wallet if we're out to eat or something....I've forgotten my wallet. Nor does "mixing" with people of different colors/class/etc. I have friends and have had girlfriends from "both sides of the tracks" and of so many colors we could be a Benetton ad. I've had all that happen to me, and more.

It's the deliberate lie behind the manipulation. That's it for me. Nothing more.

If someone pulled one of these stunts on me, as a way to "test my mettle", and I found out about it, I would end the friendship right then. It's pretty simple...friends don't need to lie to friends.

There's a great line in the movie "Thief". James Caan's character is visiting someone who is a father-figure like person in his life, and this person is in prison. Caan tells him of his new-found love in his life but wonders what he should do, since he's a career thief and she doesn't know it.

"Lie to noone. If they're close to you, you'll only hurt them. If they're not, who the f**k are they that you have to lie to them."

Pretty straghtforward and a philosophy I try to adhere to.

Ferriss' thought experiments were interesting right up to the point where you were lying to your supposed friend.

[kamakiri]

... read "with charity"...

Final - Quit being mizaru here. You might be the only one who is blinded by the 'radience of Tim'.

I have no idea where your concept of 'reading with charity' comes from. Tim Ferris has a best selling book that has been translated into 25 foreign languages. NOTHING HE WRITES NEEDS TO BE READ WITH CHARITY!! Your 4th grade cousin's report about the Balled Eagle needs to be read with charity, not an international best selling author's blog post.

Tim has a responsibility to you, me, and the rest of his readers to not write crap, and like Timw and I have been trying to point out, telling lies is crap. There is no higher moral ground that I am talking from here at all. It is a pretty clear cut moral rule. Don't tell lies.

But I think that this sort of interpretation says more about the reader than about the writer.

This is true of most people, but again, not someone who is selling books by the truck load. You don't see Robin Sharma, Napoleon Hill, or Dale Carnegie giving out this kind of bad advice. That is because it is impossible to get ahead and build relationships on a foundation of mistrust, manipulation, and lies.

If Tim wasn't a famous author and he blogged that post, then all the better to him, but now what? How would you feel if you were going to meet up with him?

In his next post he had a great opportunity to right things, but yet again he dug his own hole deeper and gave a poor excuse and a lame attempt at misdirecting the issue back on the people who pointed it out in the first place.

Instead of expecting better things from Tim, should I just lower my expectations? After all the first rating on Amazon.com of this book begins with :"Get-rich-quick guide for the shallow." (http://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-work-Week-Escape-Anywhere/dp/0786158964)

[final_id]

Wasn't about supporting Tim. That's the type of ad-hominem that colors this whole discussion. I think the IDEAS and the CONTENT of his post are what I've described them as. You think HE is a "sort of person who ..." type of thing. THAT'S precisely the problem.

Sorry I got into this. It's just not that big a deal. If someone reads it as, "Heh, what a weird little gimmick. Hmm, says something odd about that Tim guy," then yeah, I agree with 'em. If on the other hand someone reads it as, "Wow, HE'S EVIL EVIL EVIL you can't EVER have a GOOD RELATIONSHIP with someone who CAN'T BE TRUSTED" then I figure she just went through a bad breakup.