How you feelin’, dude? Pumped up? Ready to show the world who’s boss? Gotta be in it to win it, right? Carpe that diem! You hear that? That’s the sound of a winner. Winning.
Photo: Getty
If you’re wondering how you, too, can seize the spirit of success, look to Pinterest president Tim Kendall. In a Recode mini-profile of Kendall, who “lots of people” reportedly take “very seriously”, one detail more than any reveals how committed to knocking it out of the goddamn park he is:
Each morning, Tim Kendall wakes at 5:30 and draws himself a bath.
Then the 40-year-old president of Pinterest dumps in a tray full of ice, uses a rubber duck thermometer to get the water temperature down to precisely 55 degrees [12.8C], and slides in for a five-minute soak.
Kendall says the baths — popular among Silicon Valley health-hacking types like Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose — are meant to help your immune system. But they also have another purpose.
“It’s kind of like drinking coffee,” he said. “I get out and I just feel super focused, really energised.”
Kendall carries on the same way at the office. He wears the same T-shirt with the word “Focus” across the chest every day. During meetings, Kendall won’t use a laptop or phone, and forbids others from using theirs. Instead he likes paper printouts detailing the meeting’s agenda.
That’s right: If you want to win, you have to focus, and if you want to focus, you gotta write it on your chest.
Internet sleuthing of the most advanced variety reveals Kendall has been photographed wearing a Focus shirt at least three separate times, including during the TechCrunch event pictured above, in the image used for Recode’s article, and in a photo on Pinterest’s own site:
Photo: Pinterest.
But I have some questions about how this works. I will charitably assume that it isn’t the exact same T-shirt every day — that would be gross, even by my basement-dwelling blogger standards. That raises an important question: How many Focus T-shirts does Kendall own?
Does he own five, one for each day of the work week? Does he need to Focus on weekends as well, and therefore need seven? Presumably, the president of an $US11 billion ($14.5 billion) company has the funds necessary to buy as many Focus T-shirts as he likes, so maybe he has 14, or 21, or 365. Does he have a whole walk-in closet of Focus T-shirts?
If you know anything about how many Focus T-shirts Tim Kendall owns, please let us know in the comments below.
[Recode via Noah Kulwin]