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

by Timothy Ferriss

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.”