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

by Timothy Ferriss

If you’ve ever laid down in bed exhausted, then felt wired and been unable to sleep, cortisol might be a factor. To mitigate this “tired and wired” phenomenon—as well as reduce glucose levels—before bed, I take phosphatidylserine and N-acetyl cysteine (NAC). For me, this also has a noticeable impact on lowering anxiety the following day.

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller

Winston Churchill. “This guy had balls. He stood up to Hitler, he rallied the United Kingdom, he refused to surrender. He’s a Nobel Prize winner in literature. Very few people know that.”

Rule #1: Avoid “white” starchy carbohydrates (or those that can be white). This means all bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, and grains (yes, including quinoa). If you have to ask, don’t eat it.

Rule #2: Eat the same few meals over and over again, especially for breakfast and lunch. Good news: You already do this. You’re just picking new default meals. If you want to keep it simple, split your plate into thirds: protein, veggies, and beans/legumes.

Rule #3: Don’t drink calories. Exception: 1 to 2 glasses of dry red wine per night is allowed, although this can cause some peri-/post-menopausal women to plateau.

Rule #4: Don’t eat fruit. (Fructose → glycerol phosphate → more body fat, more or less.) Avocado and tomatoes are allowed.

Rule #5: Whenever possible, measure your progress in body fat percentage, NOT total pounds. The

Halos

Cossack Squat

BASIC TENETS FOR STRENGTH ► “Strength is the mother quality of all physical qualities.” ► “Strength is a skill, and, as such, it must be practiced.” ► “Lift heavy, not hard.” ► “Anything more than 5 reps is bodybuilding…. If you want to be strong, you want to keep your reps at 5 and under.”

“If you are training for strength, you want to try and avoid the burn altogether. The burn is your enemy.” ► “Training is something that should be enjoyed.”

“Sparta, Rome, the knights of Europe, the samurai … worshipped strength. Because it is strength that makes all other values possible.”

“Most people exist between the on and off switch. They are unable to turn on and put out high power, and they are unable to turn off completely and enjoy true rest. To learn how to control your on and off switch, read the book Psych by Dr. Judd Biasiotto. He is one of the most successful power lifters in history, having squatted over 600 pounds at a bodyweight of 132 … drug free, at the age of 44, after back surgery.”

“If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”

“As a parent, you have to learn to say sorry because you blew it….

‘Hey, you know what? I am extra tired today and my fuse is short. I am being unfair to you, and I’m sorry.’

“I tell my kids to learn how to say, ‘I’m sorry, that doesn’t work for me.’

So it’s a great thing to just say, ‘Hey, I’m going to pick a partner when I feel like our value systems are similar, and we may get there very differently, but … how we wind up on some of the big items is the same.’”

flotation therapy.

sensory-deprivation tank.

When possible, I now try to float twice per week—Monday and Friday. After 2 weeks, I feel like I normally would after a month of daily meditating, even if I’m not meditating.

BONER OR NO BONER? “Men, if you wake up and you don’t have a boner, there’s a problem. Yes or no? One or zero? Boner, no boner?” TF: “Quantified self” tracking doesn’t need to be complicated. It’s easy to miss the flashing red signal in front of your face while chasing the cutting edge of blood testing, genomics, etc. For men, the “boner or no boner” test is a simple but excellent indicator of sleep quality, hormonal health (GH, FSH, testosterone), circadian rhythm timing, and more. THE CAMPFIRE SQUAT TEST “If you can’t squat all the way down to the ground with your feet and knees together, then you are missing full hip and ankle range of motion. This is the mechanism causing your hip impingement, plantar fasciitis, torn Achilles, pulled calf, etc. That is the fucking problem, and you should be obsessing about [fixing] this.”

“The most dangerous sport to middle-aged men is a track workout [because the body is working with high force production at unfamiliar (end) ranges of motion].”

‘Why would I be wound up? I’m either ready or I’m not. Worrying about it right now ain’t gonna change a damn thing. Right? Whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen. I’ve either done everything I can to be ready for this, or I haven’t.’” TF: Whitney Cummings (here) told me something similar, on big standup specials: “My work isn’t done tonight. My work was done 3 months ago, and I just have to show up.”

Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous’ by Jim Dator. Also, ‘When it comes to the future, it’s far more important to be imaginative than to be right’ by Alvin Toffler.

“That you should never publicly criticize anyone or anything unless it is a matter of morals or ethics. Anything negative you say could at the very least ruin someone’s day, or worse, break someone’s heart, or simply change someone from being a future ally of yours to someone who will never forget that you were unkind or unfairly critical. It’s so common today to complain or criticize others’ work on social media, or dogpile on someone for a perceived offense. I won’t do it. It’s not my job to be the world’s critic, and I’d rather not rule out any future allies.”

“We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.”

More than 80% of the world-class performers I’ve interviewed have some form of daily meditation or mindfulness practice. Both can be thought of as “cultivating a present-state awareness that helps you to be nonreactive.”

Use an app like Headspace or Calm. Headspace’s free “Take10” will guide you for 10 minutes a day for 10 days. A number of my guests also use Headspace to help them get to sleep. Some of my listeners in the media, like Rich Feloni of Business Insider, have written entire feature-length pieces on how this app has changed their lives. Amelia Boone uses both Headspace and Calm, depending on the circumstances.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe.” —Abraham Lincoln

“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” —James Cameron

Jobs was still at NeXT: “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 that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

“Every billionaire suffers from the same problem. Nobody around them ever says, ‘Hey, that stupid idea you just had is really stupid.’” “‘Far more money has been lost by investors trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost in corrections themselves.’—Peter Lynch”

Arnold is a huge chess fan and plays daily. He rotates through different partners and keeps annual score cards. By the end of a year, some of them have tallies in the thousands of games. One of his favorite documentaries is Brooklyn Castle, a film about chess in inner-city schools.

I wasn’t there to compete. I was there to win.”

In 1971, Arnold started a brick laying company with his best friend, Franco Columbu, an Italian powerlifting, boxing, and bodybuilding champion who’d lived in Germany.

felt if I was smart with real estate and took my little money that I made in bodybuilding and in seminars and selling my courses through the mail, I could save up enough to put down money for an apartment building. I realized in the 1970s that the inflation rate was very high and therefore an investment like that is unbeatable. Buildings that I would buy for $500K within the year were $800K and I put only maybe $100K down, so you made 300% on your money…. I quickly developed and traded up my buildings and bought more apartment buildings and office buildings on Main Street down in Santa Monica and so on…. I benefited from [a magic decade] and I became a millionaire from my real estate investments. That was before my career took off in show business and acting, which was after Conan the Barbarian.”

“In negotiation, he who cares the least wins.”

When Arnold’s movie career first began to gel, he was inundated with new opportunities and options. For the first time, he felt overly worried and anxious, due to pressures he’d never felt before. By sheer coincidence, he met a Transcendental Meditation teacher at the beach. “He says, ‘Oh, Arnold, it is not uncommon. It is very common. A lot of people go through this. This is why people use Transcendental Meditation as one way of dealing with the problem.’ He was very good in selling it, because he didn’t say that it was the only answer. He said it’s just one of many.” The man encouraged Arnold to go to Westwood, in L.A., to take a class the following Thursday. “I went up there, took a class, and I went home after that and tried it. I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to give it a shot.’ I did 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes at night, and I would say within 14 days, 3 weeks, I got to the point where I could really disconnect my mind and stay and find a few seconds of this connection and rejuvenate the mind and learn how to focus more and to calm down. I saw the effect right away. I was much more calm about all of the challenges that were facing me. I continued doing that for a year. By that time, I felt that, ‘I think I have mastered this. I think that now I don’t feel overwhelmed anymore.’ “Even today, I still benefit from that because I don’t merge and bring things together and see everything as one big problem. I take them one challenge at a time. When I go and I study...

“Cincinnatus. He was an emperor in the Roman Empire. Cincinnati, the city, by the way, is named after him because he was a big idol of George Washington’s. He is a great example of success because he was asked to reluctantly step into power and become the emperor and to help, because Rome was about to get annihilated by all the wars and battles. He was a farmer. Powerful guy. He went and took on the challenge, took over Rome, took over the army, and won the war. After they won the war, he felt he’d done his mission and was asked to go and be the emperor, and he gave the ring back and went back to farming. He didn’t only do this once. He did it twice. When they tried to overthrow the empire from within, they asked him back and he came back. He cleaned up the mess through great, great leadership. He had tremendous leadership quality in bringing people together. And again, he gave the ring back and went back to farming.”

$75 to play at a pig show in Vermont.’ He rolls his eyes, and he says, ‘I’m not gonna do it, do you want the gig?’ I’m like, ‘Fuck yeah, a paying gig?! Oh, my God! Yes!’ So, I took the gig to go up to Burlington, Vermont. “And, I think it was a $58 round-trip bus ticket. I get to this pig show, I strap my acoustic guitar on, and I walked around a pig show playing music. I did that for about 3 hours, and took the bus home, and the next day, the booking agent called me up, and said, ‘Hey, yeah, so you did a really good job at the pig show….’ “So many opportunities, and 10 years of stage experience, came from that one piddly little pig show…. When you’re earlier in your career, I think the best strategy is to just say ‘yes’ to everything. Every little gig. You just never know what are the lottery tickets.”

“So, my advice to my 30-year-old self is, don’t be a donkey. You can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience.”

“EVEN WHEN EVERYTHING IS GOING TERRIBLY, AND I HAVE NO REASON TO BE CONFIDENT, I JUST DECIDE TO BE.” “There’s this beautiful Kurt Vonnegut quote that’s just a throwaway line in the middle of one of his books, that says, ‘We are whatever we pretend to be.’”

“Everyone is interesting. If you’re ever bored in a conversation, the problem’s with you, not the other person.”

THE TAIL END On a hike in San Francisco, Matt recommended I read “The Tail End” by Tim Urban on the Wait But Why blog—if you only read one article this month, make it that one. It uses diagrams to underscore how short life really is. Here’s just one gem: “It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.” Might be time for you (and me) to rethink our personal priorities. On a related and sad note, Matt’s father passed away unexpectedly weeks after he recommended this article to me. Matt was at his bedside.

The normal QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to slow down human operators to avoid jams. That time has passed, so try the Dvorak layout instead, which is easier on your tendons and helps prevent carpal tunnel syndrome. Read The Dvorak Zine (dvzine.org). Colemak is even more efficient, if you dare. Within Automattic, Matt has held speed-typing challenges, where the loser has to switch to the winner’s layout. So far, Dvorak has always beaten QWERTY.

“I DIDN’T SURVIVE, I PREPARED.” Nelson Mandela’s answer when Tony asked him, “Sir, how did you survive all those years in prison?”

Most-gifted or recommended books Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl The Fourth Turning by William Strauss (Also, Generations by William Strauss, which was gifted to Tony by Bill Clinton) Mindset by Carol Dweck (for parenting) As a Man Thinketh by James Allen (see Shay Carl, here

“I always say I got all my understanding of how business and life works from studying the Second World War.”