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

by Timothy Ferriss

The Second World War by John Keegan.

“You realize that you will never be the best-looking person in the room. You’ll never be the smartest person in the room. You’ll never be the most educated, the most well-versed. You can never compete on those levels. But what you can always compete on, the true egalitarian aspect to success, is hard work. You can always work harder than the next guy.”

“What is the ultimate quantification of success? For me, it’s not how much time you spend doing what you love. It’s how little time you spend doing what you hate.

“Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts [nebulous worries, jitters, and preoccupations] on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes.”

So if you’re planning to do something with your life, if you have a 10-year plan of how to get there, you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months?

“I don’t like talking in terms of tech ‘trends’ because I think, once you have a trend, you have many people doing it. And once you have many people doing something, you have lots of competition and little differentiation. You, generally, never want to be part of a popular trend. You do not want to be the fourth online pet food company in the late 1990s.

Peter has written elsewhere, “The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”

There is something very odd about a society where the most talented people all get tracked toward the same elite colleges, where they end up studying the same small number of subjects and going into the same small number of careers.

I would ask questions. Why am I doing this? Am I doing this just because I have good grades and test scores and because I think it’s prestigious? Or am I doing this because I’m extremely passionate about practicing law?

“Once you have enough for beans and rice and taking care of your family and a few other things, money is a story. You can tell yourself any story you want about money, and it’s better to tell yourself a story about money that you can happily live with.”

James recommends the habit of writing down 10 ideas each morning in a waiter’s pad

There was a very promising startup that, based on using Alexa ranking correlations to valuations (beware of this approach), was more than 5 times undervalued! Even if it hit a “base hit” like a $25 million exit, I could easily recoup my planned $120K! I got very excited and cut a check for $50K. “That’s a bit aggressive for a first deal, don’t you think?” Mike asked me over coffee. Not a chance. My intuition was loud and clear. I was convinced, based on other investors and all of the excitement surrounding the deal, that this company was on the cusp of exploding. This startup was on life support within 2 years and dead shortly thereafter, so I lost that $50K. Oops.

Following the Rules Lesson #1: If you’ve formulated intelligent rules, follow your own f*cking rules.

it has a single founder, the founder must be technical. Two technical co-founders are ideal. ► I must be eager to use the product myself. This rules out many great companies, but I want a verified market I understand.

Breaking your rules to co-invest with well-known investors is usually a bad idea, but following your rules when others reject a startup can work out extremely well.

Startup investments can be illiquid and locked up for 7 to 10 years. This is why the “fund life” of most venture capital funds is 10 years.

“Losers have goals. Winners have systems.”

Scott believes there are six elements of humor: naughty, clever, cute, bizarre, mean, and recognizable. You have to have at least two dimensions to succeed.

AMPLIFY YOUR STRENGTHS RATHER THAN FIX YOUR WEAKNESSES

Dan Carlin (TW/FB: @HARDCOREHISTORY, DANCARLIN.COM) is the host of my absolute favorite podcast, Hardcore History,

Every few years for the last 20 years, Ramit has read Iacocca: An Autobiography by Lee Iacocca and William Novak.

Ramit and I are both obsessed with checklists and love a book by Atul Gawande titled The Checklist Manifesto. I have this book on a shelf in my living room, cover out, as a constant reminder.

“Success” need not be complicated. Just start with making 1,000 people extremely, extremely happy.

To be a successful creator, you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, clients, or fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only 1,000 true fans.

One of the things he taught me is a simple trick using bit.ly tracking. Bit.ly is a link shortening service used by millions of people … and Kickstarter. If you add a + to the end of any bit.ly URL, you can see stats related to that link. For example: Here are stats for the shortlink Kickstarter generated for our campaign: http://kck.st/VjAFva+ [TF: This will blow your mind. Go to any Kickstarter project, click on Share, and pick a social network, like Twitter. A pre-populated tweet will appear with a shortlink. Copy and paste the link alone into a new tab, add + to the end, and hit Return. Voilà.]

Right-click and save-to-desktop 2 to 3 images. → Drag and drop each image file from your desktop into the Google Images search bar. → Review blogs listed on the results page to see which might be relevant to your project.

Ed Catmull

He is the author of Creativity, Inc., which Forbes has written, “… just might be the best business book ever written.”

“This is the big misconception that people have, that [in the beginning] a new film is the baby version of the final film, when in fact the final film bears no relationship to what you started off with. What we’ve found is that the first version always sucks. I don’t mean this because I’m self-effacing or that we’re modest about it. I mean it in the sense that they really do suck.”

“My brain works differently. It turns out I am unable to read poetry…. Reading poetry, within a few seconds, shuts my brain down. “All of this came about because there was a new translation of The Iliad, by Robert Fagles, and it was in verse form. The thing is, I couldn’t read it. So this woman at a dinner said: ‘Don’t read it, listen to it.’ I bought the tape and I listened to it, and I found I was completely enthralled. I was surprised by the fact that the story was orally transmitted 2,800 years ago in a different language to a different culture. It was meant for oral transmission, of course, because it had that rhythm to it.”

“If anybody is going to go out and pitch investors, my advice is to make your first 10 meetings with investors that you don’t really want funding from, because you’re probably going to suck in the beginning. I sucked for a really long time.”

Must-watch documentary The Gatekeepers (2012) features interviews with all of the living heads of the Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency, who talk frankly about life, war, and peace. The motto of the Shin Bet is “Magen veLo Yera’e,” literally “the unseen shield,” or “defender who shall not be seen.”

I gave you $100 million, what would you guys go build? That by building it, there’s no value for anyone copying?’

One of the top 10 venture capitalists I know uses a variant of this litmus test as his measurement of “disruptive”:

“Five days a week, I read my goals before I go to sleep and when I wake up. There are 10 goals around health, family, business, etc., with expiration dates, and I update them every 6 months.”

“My parents always taught me that my day job would never make me rich. It’d be my homework.”

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.

the Gmail “+” trick all the time. Let’s say your email address is bob@bobsmith.com. After signing up for services or newsletters, how can you tell who’s sharing your email, or contain the damage if someone discovers your login email? Companies get hacked all the time. Just use + as cheap insurance. If you append + and a word to the beginning, messages will still get delivered to your inbox. Signing up for Instacart, for instance? You could use bob+insta@bobsmith.com. I use this, or benefit from it, on a daily basis.

This week, try experimenting with saying “I don’t understand. Can you explain that to me?” more often.

“Great men have almost always shown themselves as ready to obey as they afterwards proved able to command.” —Lord Mahon

up inside instead. It’s a common attitude that transcends generations and societies. The angry, unappreciated genius is forced to do stuff she doesn’t like, for people she doesn’t respect, as she makes her way in the world. How dare they force me to grovel like this! The injustice! The waste!

Let’s flip it around so it doesn’t seem so demeaning: It’s not about kissing ass. It’s not about making someone look good. It’s about providing the support so that others can be good. The better wording for the advice is this: Find canvases for other people to paint on. Be an anteambulo. Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself. When you are just starting out, we can be sure of a few fundamental realities: 1) You’re not nearly as good or as important as you think you are; 2) you have an attitude that needs to be readjusted; 3) most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong.

When you are just starting out, we can be sure of a few fundamental realities: 1) You’re not nearly as good or as important as you think you are; 2) you have an attitude that needs to be readjusted; 3) most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong.

“Do people you respect or care about leave hateful comments on the Internet?” (No.) “Do you really want to engage with people who have infinite time on their hands?” (No.)

So, as of right now, I’ve avoided VR investments. At some point (years out), the right mixture of power, size, price, and reality technology will combine into a device that will likely see mass adoption. But as of right now, I’m a pass. ___________ [TF: Kevin did call the explosion of augmented reality (AR) months before Pokémon Go exploded, emphasizing that AR and VR are not the same thing. He was bullish on AR and very bearish on VR.]

‘The biggest mistake you can make is to accept the norms of your time.’ Not accepting norms is where you innovate, whether it’s with technology, with books, with anything. So, not accepting the norm is the secret to really big success and changing the world.”

Neil edits his writing in three phases. Paraphrased: First, I edit for me. (What do I like?) Second, I edit for my fans. (What would be most enjoyable and helpful to my fans?) Third, I edit for my haters. (What would my detractors try and pick apart, discredit, or make fun of?)

SOPHIA: “A day that ends well is one that started with exercise. That’s for sure.”

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” —Richard P. Feynman

Beware of anchoring to former high prices (e.g., “I’ll sell when it gets back to X price per share …”).