Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
Tim Ferriss
Description
For the last two years, I’ve interviewed more than 200 world-class performers for my podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show. The guests range from super celebs (Jamie Foxx, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc.) and athletes (icons of powerlifting, gymnastics, surfing, etc.) to legendary Special Operations commanders and black-market biochemists.
This book contains the distilled tools and tactics you won’t find anywhere else. It also includes new tips from past guests, and life lessons from new ‘guests’ you haven’t met.
Everything within these pages has been vetted, explored, and applied to my own life in some fashion. I’ve used dozens of the tactics and philosophies in high-stakes negotiations, high-risk environments, or large business dealings. The lessons have made me millions of dollars and saved me years of wasted effort and frustration.
I created this book, my ultimate notebook of high-leverage tools, for myself. It’s changed my life, and I hope the same for you.
Key words: Success, Wealth, Health
To read reviews of this book visit Goodreads
My Notes
Chris Sacca
I wanted to go on offence. I wanted to have the time to focus, to learn the things I wanted to learn, to build what I wanted to build, and to really invest in relationships I wanted to grow, rather than just doing days of coffee after coffee.
Ask yourself; what things am I doing in my life that I assigned myself? Or am I doing things to please other people?
When the going gets tough, I’ll be in my bed tonight.
Marc Andreessen
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people no smarter that you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that people can use. Once you learn that you’ll never be the same again.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
How can I carve out a niche, that only I have?
When deal making, as yourself: can I trade a short-term incremental gain for a potential long-term game changing upside? Is there an element here that might be more valuable in 5-10 years? Might there be the options I can carve out and keep? If you can cap the downside (time, capital) and have the confidence, take uncrowded bets on yourself. You only need one winning lottery ticket.
Derek Sivers
It’s not what you know, it’s what you do consistently.
Tim Ferriss
I realised once again – that manic-depressive symptoms are just part of entrepreneurship.
Matt Mullenweg
Think what if? If we do X today, what does that result in tomorrow, or in a year from now?
Seth Godin
Start extremely small. What’s the smallest possible footprint I can get away with? What’s the smallest group of people I can make a difference to? Smallest is achievable.
Alex Blumberg
In particular use the right questions and prompts in an interview.
Use prompts to elicit stories;
Tell me about a time when…
Tell me about the day (or moment in time) when…
Tell me the story of… (how you came to do xxx, how you met xxx)
Tell me about the day you realised
What were the steps that got you from xxx to xxx?
Describe the conversation when
Then continue with follow up questions
How did that make you feel?
What do you make of that?
Neil Strauss
On the first 10 mins of an interview…Let’s flash forward to a week or month after this interview comes out. What would make it a home run for you? What does successful look like?
Peter Diamandis
How will you disrupt yourself? How could they take down your company?
Maria Popova
Life is a continual process of arrival into who we are.
Jocko Willink
That’s extreme ownership. Own it all.
What makes a good commander? Humility. Stay humble or get humbled.
It sounds horrible, but it’s almost like, sometimes, I’m not a participant in my own life. I’m an observer of the guy that’s doing it. From outside the circle I can see objectively, and openly assess myself. Being able to detach as a leader is critical.
Shay Carl
Think about how old you are right now and think of being a 10-year old version of yourself. Then think, what would I probable tell myself as an older version of myself?
Will MacAskill
Advice to your 20-year-old self – An analogy I use it, if you’re going out for dinner, it’s going to take you two hours. You spend 5 minutes working out where to go for dinner, and 180 minutes actually having dinner. It would seem reasonable to spend 5 per cent of your time on how to spend the remaining 95 per cent. If you did that with your career, that would be 4,000 hours or two working years. That’s a legitimate thing to do – spending that length of time trying to work out how you should spend the rest of your life.
Kevin Costner
Being an entrepreneur is being willing to do a job that nobody else wants to do (in order) to be able to live the rest of your life doing whatever you want to do.
Sam Harris
We are just talking about ourselves non-stop, and until you can begin to break that spell and begin to notice thoughts themselves as objects of consciousness, just arising and passing away, you can’t even pay attention to your breath, or anything else, with any clarity.
Tim Ferriss – Fear setting
What we fear doing is usually what we most need to do. Success in a person’s life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.
Whitney Cummings
The way you do anything, is the way you do everything.
Cal Fussman
Aim for the heart, not the head. When interviewing, always aim for the heart. I.e. What’s the best lesson your father ever taught you? What are some of the choices that have made you who you are?
Top tip: Listen.
Jack Dorsey
We’re born with everything we’ll ever need.
Paulo Coelho
The world is changed by your example, not your opinion.
Tactics for dealing with haters
It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it; what matters is how many people do. Focus on the few that do get it. They are your Archimedes lever.
I regularly and deliberately embarrass myself for superficial reasons. This is an example of fear rehearsing.
Glenn Beck
So, the best advice I learned by mistake, and this is: Be willing to fail or succeed on who you really are. Don’t ever try to be anything else. What you are is good enough for whatever it is your doing.
Sam Kass
I think passion comes from a combination of being open and curious, and of really going all-in when you find something you’re interested in.
Mike Birbiglia
The best thing to do is to give people questions they’re not expecting.
At the gate of any business or endeavour, don’t bow to the gatekeepers because I think, in essence, there are no gatekeepers. You are the gatekeeper…
Don’t waste your time on marketing (getting noticed) just try to get better.
It’s not about being good, it’s about being great.
A lot of people are smart, a lot of people are good, a lot of people are clever, but not a lot of people give you their soul when they perform.
Josh Waitzkin
Cultivate empty space as a way of life for the creative process.
Tim Ferriss – Deloading phase
On taking time out. I feel that the big ideas come from these periods. It’s the silence between the notes that makes the music.
Inbox is the land of the lost.
Create large, uninterrupted blocks of time, during which you can wander, ponder and find the signal amidst the noise. If you’re lucky you might even create a signal or connect two signals (core ideas) that have never shaken hands before.
Brené Brown
He or she who is willing to be the most uncomfortable is not only the bravest but rises the fastest.
If I’m not a little bit nauseous when I’m done, I probably didn’t show up like I should have shown up.
Be clear that the ladder is leaning against the right building.
Tim Ferriss
People don’t like being sold products, but we all like being told stories.
Did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?
What would this look like if it were easy?
Once you hit your stride in any capacity you should spend money to earn time.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Luxury to be is feeling unrushed.
Be sure to look for simple solutions. If the answer isn’t simple, it’s probably not the right answer.
Jamie Foxx
You’re either great or you don’t exist
The notes are right beneath your fingers, baby. You just gotta take the time out to play the right notes. That’s life.
Bryan Johnson
Perhaps the biggest tragedy in our lives, is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.
Robert Rodriguez
Even if I didn’t know, I just began.
Even the pros don’t know – Oh the director’s chair Robert Zemeckis said he thought he was making the worst moving ever in ‘Forest Gump’…or that he was so punchy in “Back to the Future”, that he almost cut the Johnny B Goode sequence because he thought, well, it doesn’t really fit. I’m going to cut it before we preview it.
TIM: The editor was like “just leave it in for the screening”.
ROBERT: Let’s just preview it…He said: “we couldn’t peep people off the ceiling”. You never know. It shows that you don’t know. I want people to hear these stories because when you feel like, Oh I don’t know if I’m doing it right. These other guys seem to know. No, they don’t know. None of them know. That’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to know. You just have to keep moving forward.
