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

by Timothy Ferriss

House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski: “This is a book that you have to hold, because

repeated sets

The Checklist Manifesto.

Fans” to literally millions of people. Many guests in this book have

If you added one new true fan per day, it’d only take a few years to gain 1,000.

Wedding Crashers, and Legally Blonde Matt

* Do you have a team, or researchers, who help you? “I don’t have researchers, no. No, no . . . If you overload your book with a lot of research, you’re going to be very boring to yourself and to your readers. Books are not here to show how intelligent and cultivated you are. Books are out there to show your heart, to show your soul, and to tell your fans, readers: You are not alone.”

EXPLAINING HER EARLY SUCCESS AS A STREET PERFORMER: “I treated every single patron like a ten-second love affair.”

DEFINING A “HIGH-AGENCY” PERSON Eric said “high-agency person” in passing, and I asked him to elaborate: “When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something? So,

how am I going to get past this bouncer who told me that I can’t come into this nightclub? How am I going to start a business when my credit is terrible and I have no experience?” TF: Eric describes The Martian as “The ultimate high-agency film.”

“Jack Herer”

During a tough period several years ago, Nassim Taleb of The Black Swan fame sent me the following aphorism, which was perfect timing and perfectly put: “Robustness is when you care more about the few who like your work than the multitude who hates it (artists); fragility is when you care more about the few who hate your work than the multitude who loves it (politicians).” Choose to be robust.

and hid,

What would you put on a billboard? “I don’t know if I have messages to send to the world, but there are messages I like to send to myself at all times. One message that really stuck with me when I figured this out is: “Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.” I don’t think most of us realize that’s what it is. I think we go about desiring things all day long, and then wondering why we’re unhappy. So, I like to stay aware of that because then I can choose my desires very carefully. I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time, and I also recognize that as the axis of my suffering. I realize that that’s where I’ve chosen to be unhappy. I think that is an important one.”

Be present above all else. Desire is suffering (Buddha). Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else (Buddhist saying). If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day. Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else. All the real benefits in life come from compound interest. Earn with your mind, not your time. 99% of all effort is wasted. Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. Praise specifically, criticize generally (Warren Buffett). Truth is that which has predictive power. Watch every thought. (Always ask, “Why am I having this thought?”) All greatness comes from suffering. Love is given, not received. Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts (Eckhart Tolle). Mathematics is the language of nature. Every moment has to be complete in and of itself.

“What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.” “Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.” “If you eat, invest, and think according to what the ‘news’ advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.” “We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.” “The guns aren’t new. The violence isn’t new. The connected cameras are new, and that changes everything.” “You get paid for being right first, and to be first, you can’t wait for consensus.” “My one repeated learning in life: ‘There are no adults.’ Everyone’s making it up as they go along. Figure it out yourself, and do it.” “A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time.”

* Three favorite recent films? “Of late, I’m a huge fan of the French filmmaker Jacques Audiard. I think, in the last few years, he put up a hat trick of films”: The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet, and Rust and Bone. TF: A Prophet is now one of my favorite films. If you like gangster movies, it is violently gorgeous and teaches a lot of leadership lessons.

Scriptnotes: This has come up with at least a half dozen guests. Legit advice from legit doers.

There is a mason jar on my kitchen counter with jar of awesome in glitter letters on the side. Anytime something really cool happens in a day, something that made me excited or joyful, doctor’s orders are to write it down on a slip of paper and put it in this mason jar. When something great happens, you think you’ll remember it 3 months later, but you won’t. The Jar of Awesome creates a record of great things that actually happened, all of which are easy to forget if you’re depressed or seeing the world through gray-colored glasses. I tend to celebrate very briefly, if at all, so this pays dividends for weeks, months, or years. The Jar of Awesome has had a tremendous impact on my quality of life. It sounds ridiculous to admit and my 20-year-old self would probably vomit, but—man—it works. I keep the jar where I will see it constantly. Each time the name catches my eye, a little voice in my head says, “Things aren’t so bad, Eeyore. Perk the fuck up!” I came to realize that A) If you’re serious all the time, you’ll wear out before the truly serious stuff gets done; and B) if you don’t regularly appreciate the small wins, you will never appreciate the big wins. They’ll all fall through your fingers like sand as you obsess on the next week, the next to-do, the next thing to fix. This makes “success” a Pyrrhic victory at best.

* How do you decide how to start a chapter or book? “It’s not a math question where there’s only one answer. So, as long as you understand there is not just one good answer, it takes the pressure off. Typically, I might try out several openings. It’s made easier by the fact that I don’t start at the beginning. Once you don’t start at the beginning, your life just gets so much simpler.” TF: Search “5 great examples of in medias res” for more on this approach.

In medias res literally means “into the middle things” in Latin and refers to beginning a story (chapter, novel, movie, video game, whatever) in the middle or at the end of the narrative. I’ve done this with all of my previous books.

When to Put Away Your Moral Compass “If you want to solve a problem—any problem that you care enough about to want to solve—you almost certainly come to it with a whole lot of ideas about it. Ideas about why it’s an important problem, what is it that bothers you exactly, who the villains are in the problem, etc. “So if you’re an environmentalist, and you believe that one of the biggest tragedies of the last 100 years is people despoiling the environment, the minute you hear about an issue that kind of abuts the environment, whether it’s honeybee collapse or something having to do with air quality, your immediate moral position is, ‘Well, I know exactly what the cause of that is. It’s caused by people being stupid and careless and greedy’ and so on. “Now that may be true, but it also may not be true. Our point is, if you try to approach every problem with your moral compass, first and foremost, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes. You’re going to exclude a lot of possible good solutions. You’re going to assume you know a lot of things, when in fact you don’t, and you’re not going to be a good partner in reaching a solution with other people who don’t happen to see the world the way you do.”

Three sources you’ve learned from or followed closely in the last year? Online: Marginal Revolution, Kottke.org, and Cool Tools (by Kevin Kelly, page 470).