Let’s see. I like The Big Short. I’d read the book already. That was a good one. ... I find more than documentaries – I get a little impatient with documentaries because I find the point they’re trying to make could be made in ten minutes and we’re stretching it to an hour and 45 with pictures and unless those pictures are amazing, there’s a lot of other things I’d rather do.
What is your favourite documentary, and what did it change for you?
Question
What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Daily life
Question
What are you unwilling to optimise?
Values & belief
My favorite documentary is one called Up. ... For your listeners, it’s a guy, Michael Apted who in 1964 decided to follow about a dozen or actually more kids from very different backgrounds and from the UK and some in orphanages, and some very well off to try and establish how much people are stuck to their context, to their social context. ... It’s quite an extraordinary way to look at humanity and see can people really escape their social constraints and their initial lay of life?
Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 5 June 2018 source ↗
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David Heinemeier Hansson
Creator of Ruby on Rails; chief technology officer of 37signals
Michael Gervais
Performance psychologist; host of the Finding Mastery podcast
I love documentaries. I really do. I think documentaries – I’m much more interested in non-fiction than fiction; just the way that I think about things. I can’t remember a documentary that I said, “That’s a bad documentary.” ... But as far as titles of documentaries? You know what was good was Amy. ... It was really good. The beauty and tragedy of an artistic genius.
Pete Adeney
Writer of the early-retirement blog Mr. Money Mustache
I’ve actually got a huge, huge list of documentaries that I’ve been meaning to watch, many of them collected from the guests in your Tools of Titans book. The one I did watch and enjoy is actually a series rather than a documentary; the remake of Cosmos. ... The topics he covered in those episodes was so stunning, and it was a great education for my son who is very, very into science himself. So that’s the documentary that stands out in my mind, probably the most interesting thing in the last five years, anyway.
Dan Harris
Broadcast journalist; author of 10% Happier
I love—I’m a sucker for a rock doc. So I will watch pretty much any rockumentary that comes out. So I’ve—obviously, the king of them is The Last Waltz, which is a Martin Scorsese movie about the final concert put on by The Band. There actually is a new documentary called Once Were Brothers, I believe, and it’s also about The Band, Robbie Robertson.
More from Ricardo Semler
View profile →What we've done all of these years is very simple, is use the little tool, which is ask three whys in a row. Because the first why you always have a good answer for. The second why, it starts getting difficult. By the third why, you don't really know why you're doing what you're doing.
So we'd say things like, let's agree that you're going to sell 57 widgets per week. If you sell them by Wednesday, please go to the beach. Don't create a problem for us, for manufacturing, for application, then we have to buy new companies, we have to buy our competitors, we have to do all kinds of things because you sold too many widgets. So go to the beach and start again on Monday.
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Pete Adeney, Dan Harris, David Heinemeier Hansson, Brian Koppelman, Michael Gervais, Jim Loehr
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