Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

by Timothy Ferriss

The reason their cortisol levels dropped was because it was stressful for them to wait for the unknown,

unifying disasters and crisis, like 9/11 or the World War II Blitz bombings on London, often results in dramatic decreases in suicide, violent crime, mental illness symptoms, etc.

“The point of journalism is the truth. The point of journalism is not to improve society. There are things, there are facts, there are truths that actually feel regressive, but it doesn’t matter, because the point of journalism isn’t to make everything better. It’s to give people accurate information about how things are.”

HIS MESSAGE AT A HIGH SCHOOL COMMENCEMENT “You guys are programmed to succeed. The hardest thing you’re ever going to do in your life is fail at something, and if you don’t start failing at things, you will not live a full life. You’ll be living a cautious life on a path that you know is pretty much guaranteed to more or less work. That’s not getting the most out of this amazing world we live in. You have to do the hardest thing that you have not been prepared for in this school or any school: You have to be prepared to fail. That’s how you’re going to expand yourself and grow. As you work through that process of failure and learning, you will really deepen into the human being you’re capable of being.”

Balancing those two things—the courage of exploring and the commitment to staying—and getting the ratio right is very hard.

WILL MACASKILL

Mindfulness by Mark Williams and Danny Penman.

The Power of Persuasion by Robert Levine.

THE DICKENS PROCESS—WHAT ARE YOUR BELIEFS COSTING YOU?

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.

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. ► 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, 3, 5, and 10 years from now? See it, hear it, feel it.

“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.”

Mindfulness’ is just that quality of mind which allows you to pay attention to sights and sounds and sensations, and even thoughts themselves, without being lost in thought and without grasping at what is pleasant and pushing what is unpleasant away….

“SECRETS ARE A BUFFER TO INTIMACY”

“The Zen mantra is ‘Sit, sit. Walk, walk. Don’t wobble.’

In a world of distraction, single-tasking is a superpower.

Stewart Brand [founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, president of the Long Now Foundation], who organized his remaining days around 5-year increments.

WRITE TO GET IDEAS, NOT TO EXPRESS THEM “What I discovered, which is what many writers discover, is that I write in order to think. I’d say, ‘I think I have an idea,’ but when I begin to write it, I realize, ‘I have no idea,’ and I don’t actually know what I think until I try and write it….

One of his tools for coming up with unbelievable (yet ultimately accurate) predictions is making a list of what everyone thinks is true or will be true, and asking “What if that weren’t true?” for each, brainstorming the ramifications.

True Films 3.0, contains the 200 documentaries he feels you should see before you die, and it is available as a PDF on kk.org.

“Our life is frittered 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

Enter Seneca I am so firmly determined to test the constancy of your mind [Lucilius] that, drawing from the teachings of great men, I shall give you also a lesson: Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?” It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence. In days of peace the soldier performs maneuvers, throws up earthworks with no enemy in sight, and wearies himself by gratuitous toil, in order that he may be equal to unavoidable toil. If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes. Such is the course which those men have followed who, in their imitation of poverty, have every month come almost to want, that they might never recoil from what they had so often rehearsed. You need not suppose that I mean meals like Timon’s, or “paupers’ huts,” or any other device which luxurious millionaires use to beguile the tedium of their lives. Let the pallet be a real one, and the cloak coarse; let the bread be hard and grimy. Endure all this for three or four days at a time, sometimes for more, so that it may be a test of yourself instead of a mere hobby. Then, I assure you, my dear Lucilius, you will leap for joy when filled wi...

Once you’ve realized—and it requires a monthly or quarterly reminder—how independent your well-being is from having an excess of money, it becomes easier to take “risks” and say “no” to things that seem too lucrative to pass up.

There is more freedom to be gained from practicing poverty than chasing wealth. Suffer a little regularly and you often cease to suffer.

“The more you know what you really want, and where you’re really going, the more what everybody else is doing starts to diminish.

The Up series: This ongoing series is filmed in the UK, and revisits the same group of people every 7 years.

LAZY: A MANIFESTO

Tim Kreider (TIMKREIDER.COM) is an essayist and cartoonist. His most recent book is We Learn Nothing,

CAL FUSSMAN

“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.”

AMANDA PALMER

Her surprise hit TED presentation, “The Art of Asking,” has

The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help.

Just take on the pain, and wear it as a shirt.”

Dropping Ashes on the Buddha. It’s by Zen Master Seung Sahn,

“CONSENSUS” SHOULD SET OFF YOUR SPIDEY SENSE

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.”—Mark Twain.

TELEDULTERY (n.)—When a significant other secretly watches a TV series solo that you’ve agreed to watch together.”

“The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles.”

NAVAL RAVIKANT

HANDLING CONFLICT “The first rule of handling conflict is don’t hang around people who are constantly engaging in conflict…. All of the value in life, including in relationships, comes from compound interest. People who regularly fight with others will eventually fight with you. I’m not interested in anything that’s unsustainable or even hard to sustain, including difficult relationships.”

THE THREE OPTIONS YOU ALWAYS HAVE IN LIFE “In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase that I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: accept.”

Richard Feynman.

He said: ‘You must never, ever fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.’

the physics grounding is very important because in physics, you have to speak truth. You don’t compromise, you don’t negotiate with people, you don’t try and make them feel better. If your equation is wrong, it just won’t work. Truth is not deter...

NAVAL’S LAWS

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (5 mentions) Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (4) Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (4) Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (4) The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (4) The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande (4) Dune by Frank Herbert (3) Influence by Robert Cialdini (3) Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert (3) Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (3) Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman (3) The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss (3) The Bible (3) The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz (3) The War of Art by Steven Pressfield (3) Watchmen by Alan Moore (3) Zero to One by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters (3)