SmartBrief is partnering with Big Think to create a weekly video spotlight in SmartBrief on Leadership called “VIP Corner: Video Insights Powered by Big Think.” This week, we’re featuring Tim Ferriss, entrepreneur and bestselling author.
In his book “The 4-Hour Chef,” Tim Ferriss uses cooking as a way to help people with accelerated learning. He says that just writing about learning would have been a boring path, so he chose to disguise his writing about learning as writing about cooking because it engages people’s senses. “And cooking, because I feared it for so long, ended up being the perfect starting point, because I could take people from ground zero being really insecure, really fearful to really feeling completely self-reliant in the kitchen and all of the bumps in the road, all the lessons learned throughout,” he says.
Ferriss says that through teaching people how to cook, his book reveals the step-by-step process through which people can learn to do things they may have decided long ago wasn’t possible or never tried. And he says he wants people to use that process to take things they gave up on off the shelf and really become good at them.
More specifically, the goal of “The 4-Hour Chef” is to start a “super trend” that changes the way people approach food, Ferriss says. He says he wants people to look at meals differently in a way that leads them to smaller food suppliers, making a healthy and sustainable future a possibility. “And I’ve just found that food is a great way to explore all of that because even if you never make a single recipe, if you learn to engage with food, your experience of every meal you have goes from black and white, good-bad, hot-cold, to HD in a million colors,” Ferriss says. “And that is a really, really fun experience at the end.”
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