Reading Notes For:
My reading notes for Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss. Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss distills insights from hundreds of interviews with top performers in business, sports, and thought leadership.
The book is divided into three sections, healthy, wealthy, and wise, each offering practical tips and life lessons. Ferriss presents actionable advice on morning routines, productivity hacks, and philosophical reflections in a conversational and accessible style. Whether you’re looking to improve your health, increase productivity, or find inspiration, Tools of Titans provides a wealth of valuable knowledge.
I talk to CEOs all the time and I say, Listen, the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. If it wasn’t a crazy idea, it’s not a breakthrough. It’s an incremental improvement. So where inside of your companies are you trying crazy ideas? The best way to become a billionaire is to help a billion people.
For One of the books he recommends for cultivating deal making ability is actually a children’s book and a 10 minute read, Stone Soup. It’s a children’s story that is the best MBA degree you can read. Between the concept of super credibility and Stone Soup, you have a great foundation. If you’re an entrepreneur in college or 60 years old and building your 20th company, Stone Soup is so critically important.
Morning routines Peter stretches during his morning shower. It’s mostly my lower body, and then I’ll go through a breathing exercise as well, and an affirmational mantra. The breathing exercise is an accelerated deep breathing just to oxygenate and stretch my lungs. There are two elements that tie very much to human longevity.
It’s strange. One is those people who floss, and second, those people who have a higher VO2 max. Singularity University. TF. Still struggling with a sense of purpose or mission. Roughly half a dozen people in this book, e. g., Robert Rodriguez, have suggested the book Start With Why by Simon Sinek. Find the smartest twenty somethings in your company.
I don’t care if they’re in the mail room or where they are. Give them permission to figure out how they would take down your company. Peter’s Laws, his 28 Peter’s Laws, have been collected over decades. Here are some of my favorites. Law 2, when given a choice, take both. Law 3, multiple projects lead to multiple successes.
Law 6, when forced to compromise, ask for more. Law 7, if you can’t win, change the rules. Law 8, if you can’t change the rules, then ignore them. Law 11, no simply means begin again at one level higher. When in doubt, think. The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live. The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.
Adopted from Alan Kay. You get what you incentivize. The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. BJ’s playlist for working morning becomes Eclectic Radio Program, which has commercial free new music from 9am to 12 noon every weekday. Sirius XM35, indie music.
Daily Rituals by Mason Curry for anyone who would enjoy seeing the daily routines of Legendslike. Steve Jobs, Charles Darwin, and Charles Dickens. It is so reassuring to see that everyone has their own system, and how dysfunctional a lot of them are. Small world. I actually produced the audiobook. Version of Daily Rituals.
In excess, most things take on the characteristics of their opposite. Thus, pacifists become militants. Freedom fighters become tyrants. Blessings become curses. Help becomes hindrance. More becomes less. My step two is doing a fear setting exercise on paper, page 463, in which I ask an answer. I am an old man, and I have known a great many troubles, But most of them never happened.
Mark Twain. He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary. Seneca. Don’t believe everything that you think. If you’re looking for a formula for greatness, the closest we’ll ever get, I think, is this. Consistency driven by a deep love of the work. All those artists and writers who bemoan how hard the work is.
And oh, how tedious the creative process, and oh, what a tortured genius they are. Don’t buy into it, as if difficulty and struggle and torture somehow confer seriousness upon your chosen work. Doing great work simply because you love it sounds, in our culture, somehow flimsy, and that’s a failing of our culture, not of the choice of work that artists make.
Out of more than 4, 600 articles on brain pickings, what are Maria’s starting recommendations? The shortness of life. Seneca on busyness and the art of living wide rather than living long. How to find your purpose and do what you love. Nine learnings from nine years of brain pickings. Anything about Alan Watts.
Alan Watts has changed my life. I’ve written about him quite a bit. You can’t blame your boss for not giving you the support you need. Plenty of people will say, It’s my boss’s fault. No, it’s actually your fault. Because you haven’t educated him, you haven’t influenced him, you haven’t explained to him in a manner he understands why you need this support that you need.
That’s extreme ownership. Own it all. If you don’t give young men a good and useful group to belong to, they will create a bad group to belong to. But one way or another, they’re gonna create a group, and they’re gonna find something, an adversary, where they can demonstrate their prowess and their unity.
The calming effect of acting instead of waiting, what would your 70 year old self advise your current self? The world is this continually unfolding set of possibilities and opportunities, and the tricky thing about life is, on the one hand, having the courage to enter into things that are unfamiliar, but also having the wisdom to stop exploring when you’ve found something worth sticking around for.
That is true of a place, of a person, of a vocation. Balancing those two things, the courage of exploring and the commitment to staying, and getting the ratio right is very hard. I think my 70 year old self would say, Be careful that you don’t err on one side or the other, because you have an ill conceived idea of who you are, which is that you should have a running list of three people that you’re always watching.
Someone senior to you that you want to emulate, a peer who you think is better at the job than you are and who you respect, and someone subordinate who’s doing the job you did, one, two, or three years ago, better than you did it. Three practices for mental toughness. Stan, the first is to push yourself harder than you believe you’re capable of.
You’ll find new depth inside yourself. The second is to put yourself in groups who share difficulties, discomfort. We used to call it shared privation. You’ll find that difficult environment, that you feel more strongly about that which you’re committed to. And finally, create some fear and make individuals overcome it.
What kind of first of a kind group could you gather if you had a gun to your head? Rereading the Law of Category, page 276, and 1000 True Fans, page 292, might help. Givewell. org, a site that conducts in depth research to determine how much non profits and foundations actually accomplish, in terms of lives saved, lives improved, etc.
Per Dollar Spent. Follow your passion is terrible advice. I think it misconstrues the nature of finding a satisfying career and satisfying job. where the biggest predictor of job satisfaction is mentally engaging work. It’s the nature of the job itself. It’s not got that much to do with you. It’s whether the job provides a lot of variety, gives you good feedback, allows you to exercise autonomy, contributes to the wider world.
Is it actually meaningful? Is it making the world better? And also, is it meaningful? Whether it allows you to exercise a skill that you’ve developed. Mindfulness by Mark Williams and Danny Penman. This book is a friendly and accessible introduction to mindfulness meditation and includes an eight week guided meditation course.
Will completed this course and it had a significant impact on his life. The Power of Persuasion by Robert Levine. The ability to be convincing, sell ideas and persuade other people is a meta skill that transfers to many areas of your life. This book didn’t become that popular, but it’s the best book on persuasion that Will has found.
It’s much more in depth than other options in the genre. The Dickens Process, sometimes called the Dickens Pattern, is related to A Christmas Carol, written by Charles Dickens. It is one of the exercises I completed over several days at Tony Robbins Unleash the Power within a PW event. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future.
In the Dickens process, you’re forced to examine limiting beliefs, say, your top two or three handicapping beliefs, across each tense. Tony guides you through each in depth, and I recall answering and visualizing variations of Oh, what has each belief cost you in the past, and what has it cost people you’ve loved in the past?
What have you lost because of this belief? See it, hear it, feel it. Oh, what is each costing you and people you care about in the present? See it, hear it, feel it. What will each cost you and people you care about 1, years from now? See it. Hear it. Feel it. They find the exception to the rule because no one knows what the future is.
We can make it up. We can convince ourselves it’s going to be okay. Or we can remember a past time in which it was okay. That’s how people get out of it. When we feel pain in one time zone, meaning past, present, or future, we just switch to another time zone rather than change, because change brings so much uncertainty and so much instability and so much fear to people.
The Dickens process doesn’t allow you to dodge any time zones. Perhaps it’s time for you to take a temporary break from pursuing goals to find the knots in the garden hose that, once removed, will make everything else better and easier? It’s incredible what can happen when you stop driving with the emergency brake on.
On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice. It’s actually very easy to give people good advice. It’s very hard to follow the advice that you know is good. If someone came to me with my list of problems, I would be able to sort that person out very easily. Many of the guests in this book listen to Sam’s guided meditations on SoundCloud or his site.
Just search Sam Harris guided meditations. From Anais Nin, it says, Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. I literally have this on my coffee table so I see it every single day. Two of my favorite lines from Caroline’s writing are from her New York Times op ed piece titled, Why do we teach girls that it’s cute to be scared?
By cautioning girls away from these experiences, we are not protecting them. We are woefully under preparing them for life. Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss. Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss distills insights from hundreds of interviews with top performers in business, sports and thought leadership. The book is divided into three sections.
Healthy, Wealthy and Wise, each offering practical tips and life lessons. Ferriss presents actionable advice on morning routines, productivity hacks and philosophical reflections in a conversational and accessible style. Whether you’re looking to improve your health, increase productivity, or find inspiration, Tools of Titans provides a wealth of valuable knowledge, fear setting, and escaping paralysis.
Many a false step was made by standing still, Fortune Cookie. Named must your fear be before banished it you can. Yoda, from Star Wars. The Empire Strikes Back. He had realized something while arcing in slow circles toward the Earth. Risks weren’t that scary once you took them. Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
Benjamin Disraeli, former British Prime Minister. Uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noises in the shadows. Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty. Conder questions and actions. I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. Mark Twain Write and do not edit.
Aim for volume. Spend a few minutes on each answer. 1. Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering. What doubt, fears, and what ifs pop up as you consider the big changes you can, or need to, make? Envision them in painstaking detail. Would it be the end of your life?
What would be the permanent impact, if any, on a scale of 1 to 10? Are these things really permanent? How likely do you think it is that they would actually happen? 2. What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if temporarily? Chances are, it’s easier than you imagine.
How could you get things back under control? 3. What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probable scenarios? Now that you’ve defined the nightmare, what are the more probable or definite positive outcomes, whether internal, confidence, self esteem, etc., or external? What would the impact of these more likely outcomes be on a scale of 1 to 10?
How likely is it that you could produce at least a moderately good outcome? Have less intelligent people done this before and pulled it off? 4. If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control? Imagine this scenario and run through questions 1 to 3 above. If you quit your job to test other options, how could you later get back on the same career track if you absolutely had to?
5. What are you putting off out of fear? Usually what we most fear doing is what we most need to do. That phone call, that conversation. 5. Whatever the action might be, it is fear of unknown outcomes that prevents us from doing what we need to do. Define the worst case, accept it, and do it. I’ll repeat something you might consider tattooing on your forehead.
What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. As I’ve heard said, a person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear. I got into this habit by attempting to contact celebrities and famous business people for advice.
6. What is it costing you, financially, emotionally and physically, to postpone action? Don’t only. Evaluate the potential downside of action. It is equally important to measure the atrocious cost of inaction. If you don’t pursue those things that excite you, where will you be in one year, five years, and ten years?
How will you feel having allowed circumstance to impose itself upon you and having allowed ten more years of your finite life to pass doing what you know will not fulfill you? If you telescope out ten years and know with 100 percent certainty, That it is a path of disappointment and regret. And if we define risk as the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome, inaction is the greatest risk of all.
7. What are you waiting for? If you cannot answer this without resorting to the BS concept of good, timing the answer is simple. You’re afraid, just like the rest of the world. Measure the cost of inaction. Realize the unlikelihood and repairability of most missteps. And develop the most important habit of those who excel and enjoy doing so.
Action. The Zen mantra is sit, sit. Walk, walk. Don’t wobble. It’s this idea that when I’m with a person, that’s total priority. Anything else is multitasking. No, no, no, no. The people to people, person to person trumps anything else. I have given my dedication to this. If I go to a play or a movie, I am at the movie.
I am not anywhere else. It’s a hundred percent. I am going to listen. If I go to a conference, I am going to go to the conference. I actually have a countdown clock that Matt Groening at Futurama was inspired by, and they did a little episode of Futurama about it. I took the actuarial tables for the estimated age of my death, for someone born when I was born, and I worked back the number of days.
I have that showing on my computer how many days. I tell you, nothing concentrates your time like knowing how many days you have left. Now, of course, I’m likely to live longer than that. I’m in good health, etc. But nonetheless, I have 6, 000 something days. It’s not very many days to do all the things I want to do.
Truefilms. com. Kevin has reviewed the best documentaries he’s seen over decades. Three docs we both love are The King of Kong, Man on Wire, and The State of Mind. Our life is fritted away by detail. Simplify, simplify. A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
Henry David Thoreau Walden. Perfectionism leads to procrastination, which leads to paralysis. I think ultimately sometimes when we judge other people. It’s just a way to not look at ourselves. A way to feel superior or sanctimonious or whatever. My trauma therapist said every time you meet someone, just in your head say, I love you before you have a conversation with them, and that conversation is going to go a lot better.
I would just assume everybody is doing the best they can with what they have, which is really hard for a lot of us to accept.
