#460: Maria Popova on Writing, Workflow, and Workarounds (Repost)
The Tim Ferriss Show
Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
4.6 • 17.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 September 2020
⏱️ 107 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This interview originally aired in 2014. You can find the show notes here: https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/
Maria Popova (@brainpicker) is a reader and a writer who writes about what she reads on Brain Pickings, which is included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials. She is the author of Figuring, the editor of A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, and the creator and host of The Universe in Verse, an annual charitable celebration of science through poetry at the interdisciplinary cultural center Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.
Brain Pickings is Maria’s one-woman labor of love — an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life. From Mark Twain to Oscar Wilde and everyone in between, Maria finds the hidden gems. She is also PROLIFIC and makes me look like a sloth.
In this in-depth conversation, we cover just about everything: how it happened, her workflow, how she writes (and workarounds to problems), how her site generates revenue, her workouts, and many more details. If you want to know the habits of a hyper-productive person, this episode is for you.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | optimal minimal |
| 0:02.0 | at this altitude i can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking |
| 0:06.3 | can i also request a question? |
| 0:08.3 | now i just see a notebook and time |
| 0:10.6 | what it might be? |
| 0:12.3 | i'm a cyber nanny organism living this show on metal impulse gore |
| 0:15.5 | lead to ferris show |
| 0:24.0 | this episode is brought to you by five bullet friday |
| 0:27.0 | my very own email newsletter |
| 0:29.2 | it's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of |
| 0:32.6 | subscribers and it's super super simple it does not clog up your inbox every friday i sent out |
| 0:38.2 | five bullet points super short of the coolest things i found that week which sometimes includes |
| 0:43.6 | apps books documentaries supplements gadgets new self experiments hacks tricks |
| 0:48.7 | and all sorts of weird stuff that i dig up from around the world |
| 0:52.4 | you guys podcast listeners and book readers have asked me for something short |
| 0:56.2 | an action packed for a very long time because after all the podcast the books they can be quite long |
| 1:01.5 | and that's why i created five bullet friday it's become one of my favorite things i do every week |
| 1:07.6 | it's free it's always going to be free and you can learn more at tim.blog forward slash friday |
| 1:13.2 | that's tim.blog forward slash friday i get asked a lot how i meet guests for the podcast some of |
| 1:19.4 | the most amazing people i've ever interacted with and little in fact i've met probably 25% of them |
| 1:25.6 | because they first subscribed to five bullet friday so you'll be in good company it's a lot of fun |
| 1:31.2 | five bullet friday is only available if you subscribe via email i do not publish the content on the |
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