Reasons Not to Become Famous (2020)

If you’re not familiar with Tim Ferriss, you should know that there is always more to the story than the narrative he shares. He’s one of the most charismatic and charming writers and podcasters out there and has a strong ability to build trust through his writing. However, he also has a long history of stretching the truth and spinning history in his favor, often by omitting important facts.

One example: His 4 Hour Work Week book really was on the New York Times Best Seller list for a long time like he brags about in this post, but he has also bragged in other contexts about all of the manipulation and engineering (including mass purchasing books to artificially inflate sales numbers) that goes into gaming the New York Times Best Seller List.

On the topic of being famous, he’s not typically famous like a celebrity. He built his career around being a self-help guru who will bring you the secrets to success in business, life, relationships, and even cooking. He’s talked about how he selects his writing topics based on how to present solutions for people’s inner desires, like financial freedom or impressing people for dating success. He puts himself at the center of these writings, presenting himself as the conduit for these revelations. He was even early in social media and blogging and experimented with social media engagements and paid events where you get to come hang out with Tim Ferriss and learn his secrets, encouraging his fans to idolize him and his wisdom dispensing abilities.

So his relationship with his fans isn’t typical fame in the style of a celebrity or actor. He’s more of an early self-help guru who embraced social media and blogging early on. His experience with uncomfortable fan obsessions is therefore probably on the next level, but not exactly typical fame.

EDIT to add why I know this: Tim Ferriss literally wrote the book on how to abuse remote work. His Four Hour Work Week book encourages readers to talk their boss into working remote then to outsource their work to low paid overseas assistants so they have more time to travel the world. It encourages things like setting up an e-mail auto responder and only responding to your coworkers once a week whine you’re “working remote” and setting up your own side job while traveling the world. If you’ve ever had a remote work job get ruined by people abusing it, chances are good that those people had read a Tim Ferriss book somewhere along the way.

I've had my 15 minutes of fame, twice. 30 minutes I guess. Each time I met people that freaked me out.

In 2018, after the news picked up my story, I met the "true" inventor uber. This guy emailed 100s of documents as proof, newspaper clippings, a bunch of pictures with people circled in red, after all that I said "I'm not entirely sure which part you invented." This man "randomly" bumped into me in a cafe to explain it to me. He had driven hundreds of miles to be there.

On my second stint a few years later, I went to a Dan Lyons' book signing with my wife. Dan spotted me in the audience and asked me to come up on stage and tell my story to the audience. I was completely unprepared.

Later a lady accosted me to get my address and phone number so she can send me stuff. She was persistent, so I said I can give her my email so we can communicate further. It didn't sit well with her. A few days later I got an email from her. It was a few thousand words of threats, and I was going to be reported for violating Australia's laws. She had contacted ABC Australia to get my story retracted. I'm in California...

Most of his reasons are related to “you have to deal with crazy people who focus their crazy on you”.

Tim Ferris is known for somewhat hyperbolic self-help content. He talks about the millions of people who follow him or consume his content regularly.

I’d suggest that the audience for people who obsessively consume this kind of self-help content is probably self-selected for a high proportion of crazy people.

So, his experience is probably well outside the norm.

I met a top-tier actor once in 2014 because he was working on something non-Hollywood-related with a friend of mine. Out of curiosity, I looked at his Twitter feed to see if he had anything to say publicly about that project.

It was insane. It was full of people randomly asking to meet up with him in tons of different cities, people asking him to review their movie scripts/theatrical projects, people asking him for money, and women either offering to have sex with him or asking him to marry them. All in public, and just day after day like that.

This is actually one of my all time favorite blog posts, and his concept of the tribe, the village, and the city, is a mental model I often come back to when thinking about the dysfunction in large communities.

Interesting read. In modern life almost everyone experiences at least a brief if perhaps isolated/niche version of fame. We are just so heavily connected in so many different networks, it just statistically is likely to happen at some point.

It is a mixed bag for sure, but in terms of risk/reward it is best to have an accurate understanding of both sides so you can make damn sure you are optimizing for the right thing.

He didn't mention one of the biggest reasons for not becoming famous: you'll have less room for mistakes. Take Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, as an example. He made some racist remarks, a mistake he could’ve recovered from if he wasn’t famous. But because he is, he’s now marked for life, and there's no do-over.

"You cannot be important and independent at the same time."

(Think whatever you want about the author; the observation is correct.)

I’m actively involved in two communities. The first is the NetHack roguelike community, and the second is the fan community of a German internet broadcaster that has existed, in one form or another, for about 25 years.

On average, I’d say both communities are equally kind and welcoming. I’d also argue that both contain roughly the same proportion of people who are unhinged and tend to go way over the top. The difference lies in how they go over the top.

In the NetHack community, you have people who start and immediately abandon 200,000 games during a tournament because they’re trying to roll the ideal starting conditions for a very specific playstyle. Then there are the Bobby Fischer types who create their own ultra-hard forks of the game because vanilla NetHack is too easy for them. There’s also plenty of criticism. Not everyone is happy with everything, but it’s mostly civil. The worst you usually get is something like, “The dev team sucks; they ruined the game with their latest changes.”

By contrast, in the internet broadcaster’s community there’s a very toxic minority that claims to have stopped watching years ago, yet continues to hate on the creators because the channel took a direction they didn’t like. Employees get mobbed and bullied, everything is torn down, and there’s a concerted effort to ruin the fun for everyone else.

I mean, I can understand that if you spent your formative teenage years “with” these people, it really hurts when that influence disappears. But can a parasocial relationship really go that far, that you drift into this kind of behavior?

How can someone be so hurt that they hold a grudge for years, keep hate-watching the creators, and invest so much time and energy into such a destructive hobby?

Very interesting blog post, but...

At the age of 29 he wrote a self-help book. The most fascinating part is that the general public took it so enthusiastically and so seriously.

Really? Wisdom dispensed by a 29 years old? This aspect of general public keeps me amazed over and over again.

I always found Zenhabits.net muuuuch more inspiring than Tim Ferriss

Yes, I even hvae his 4h-work-week-book on the shelf

What an unbearably tedious fellow he is. What was worse? The boasting, the pathetic pleading for understanding, or the sanctimonious preaching? Too rich, too famous, too hurt; how bad? It's 2025. Did he become less tedious since he wrote this piece?

Wow, I thought his first book was insufferable, but I've never read his blog: after reading the first half, that's just who this guy is. The structure he outlines seems so alien to me, and out of touch. People get lucky then think their luck really isn't luck, and then the just swallow their own tail. He's created lifestyle porn for impressionable young men who will never have his luck. I think he's got a good grift. Good for him, he won.

It's raining downvotes!

I get so much scam bait and phishing emails that I don’t bother reading I can’t imagine even bothering to read threats and similar crazy person emails.

The four hour workweek was inspirational for me starting my own business in 2009. My business now employs 250 full time people and helps thousands of clients. I remember HN back then was all entrepreneurs like me and everyone was excited about the free market. I feel like now a lot of people in countries with too much government regulations are here and are downers to people who want to build their own thing.

This post is on the money. Being wealthy has almost all of the benefits of being famous.

Having been briefly regionally known when I was a kid, I can tell you that it gets fucking annoying having to deal with your adoring public after the novelty of it wears off. Sometimes you're just in line for the toilet and really need to piss.