Tim Ferriss Rewards Attempts

A story about how Tim Ferriss demonstrated that perceived difficulty stops people from even trying, shared by Shaan Puri.

"Tim Ferriss once told this story - he went to a Harvard Business School class and gave a talk. At the end, he said 'I'm doing this challenge only for you guys. I want to get in touch with either Bill Clinton, Jennifer Lopez, or Michael Jordan. If anybody here can connect me over email with them, I will buy you two round-the-world plane tickets, business class for a year on my dime.'

He told this to one class, gave them 30 days to complete the challenge. Nobody did it. Not a single person completed the challenge. Turns out nobody even tried - the perceived difficulty was so high that nobody attempted it.

So in the next class, he told that story but added a twist: whoever gets the closest to it wins. All of a sudden everybody tries, and someone actually successfully completed the challenge.

He had this principle that everybody wants to fish where everybody else is fishing because they think it's easy to catch fish there. In actuality, it's often easy to just go catch a fish where the fish actually are. You don't have to base it on how many other people have tried something or what the perceived difficulty is."