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

by Timothy Ferriss

“I find that being in a good mood for creative work is worth the hours it takes to get in a good mood.”

when you get started each day seems to matter less than learning how to get started consistently, however your crazy ass can manage it.

B.J.’s playlist for working “Morning Becomes Eclectic” radio program, which has commercial-free new music from 9 a.m. to 12 noon every weekday. Sirius XM #35—Indie music “Early Blues” Pandora station

“And you know what I also tell people all the time? If Will Smith isn’t in a movie for 3 years, you’re not walking around

saying, ‘Where’s Will Smith?’ Nobody’s paying attention to anyone else at all. You think everyone is, but they’re not. So take as long as you want if you’re talented. You’ll get their attention again if you have a reason to.”

“The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.” —Lin Yutang

“Discipline equals freedom.” —Jocko Willink

Are You Doing What You’re Uniquely Capable of, What You Feel Placed Here on Earth to Do? Can You Be Replaced?

He thought very carefully in silence and then said: “I’ve been at events where people come up to you crying because they’ve lost 100-plus pounds on the Slow-Carb Diet. You will never have that impact as a VC. If you don’t invest in a company, they’ll just find another VC. You’re totally replaceable.” He paused again and ended with, “Please don’t stop writing.”

I was tired of being interchangeable, no matter how lucrative the game. Even if I end up wrong about the writing, I’d curse myself if I didn’t give it a shot. Are you squandering your unique abilities? Or the chance to find them in the first place?

Those of you who often over-commit or feel too scattered may appreciate a new philosophy I’m trying: If I’m not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, then I say no. Meaning: When deciding whether to commit to something, if I feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!”—then my answer is no. When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say, “HELL YEAH!” We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.

To become “successful,” you have to say “yes” to a lot of experiments. To learn what you’re best at, or what you’re most passionate about, you have to throw a lot against the wall.

Once your life shifts from pitching outbound to defending against inbound, however, you have to ruthlessly say “no” as your default. Instead of th...

Saying yes to too much “cool” will bury you alive and render you a B-player, even if you have A-player skills. To develop your edge initially, you learn to set priorities; to maintain your edge, you need to defend against the priorities of others.

Once you reach a decent level of professional success, lack of opportunity won’t kill you. It’s drowning in “kinda cool” commitments that will sink the ship.

Large, uninterrupted blocks of time—3 to 5 hours minimum—create the space needed to find and connect the dots. And one block per week isn’t enough. There has to be enough slack in the system for multi-day, CPU-intensive synthesis. For me, this means at least 3 to 4 mornings per week where I am in “maker” mode until at least 1 p.m.

In excess, most things take on the characteristics of their opposite. Thus: Pacifists become militants. Freedom fighters become tyrants. Blessings become curses. Help becomes hindrance. More becomes less.

Life favors the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.

An investment that produces a massive financial ROI but makes me a complete nervous mess, or causes insomnia and temper tantrums for a long period of time, is NOT a good investment.

All of my biggest wins have come from leveraging strengths instead of fixing weaknesses.

the marginal minute now matters more to me than the marginal dollar (a lesson learned from Naval Ravikant).

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

Where in your life are you good at moderation? Where are you an all-or-nothing type? Where do you lack a shut-off switch? It pays to know thyself.

Know where you can moderate and where you can’t.

In practice, strictly making health #1 has real social and business ramifications. That’s a price I’ve realized I MUST be fine with paying, or I will lose weeks or months to sickness and fatigue. Making health #1 50% of the time doesn’t work. It’s absolutely all-or-nothing. If it’s #1 50% of the time, you’ll compromise precisely when it’s most important not to.

I’m tired of unwarranted last-minute “hurry up and sign” emergencies and related fire drills. It’s a culture of cortisol.

“Make your peace with the fact that saying ‘no’ often requires trading popularity for respect.” —Greg McKeown, Essentialism

In the midst of overwhelm, is life not showing me exactly what I should subtract? Am I having a breakdown or a breakthrough?

As Marcus Aurelius and Ryan Holiday (page 334) would say, “The obstacle is the way.” This doesn’t mean seeing problems, accepting them, and leaving them to fester. Nor does it mean rationalizing problems into good things. To me, it means using pain to find clarity. If pain is examined and not ignored, it can show you what to excise from your life.

For me, step one is always the same: Write down the 20% of activities and people causing 80% or mo...

My step two is doing a “fear-setting” exercise on paper (page 463), in which I ask and answer, “What is really the worst that could happen if I stopped doing what I’m conside...

“I am an old man and I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” —Mark Twain

“He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary.” —Seneca

So start by writing them down. Dig into your fears, and you’ll often find that the mental monsters are harmless scarecrows. Sometimes, it just takes a piece of paper and a few questions to create a breakthrough. What do you have to lose? Chances are, next to nothing.

“The struggle ends when the gratitude begins.” —Neale Donald Walsch

“There is no way to happiness—happiness is the way.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

“What you seek is seeking ...

“[At the end of life,] you can let a lot of the rules that govern our daily lives fly out the window. Because you realize that we’re walking around in systems in society, and much of what consumes most of our days is not some natural order. We’re all navigating some superstructure that we humans created.”

“When you are struggling with just about anything, look up. Just ponder the night sky for a minute and realize that we’re all on the same planet at the same time.

The charm in a bottle of wine, the craft, all the work that goes into it . . . actually delighting in the fact that it’s perishable and goes away I find really helpful. I’ve gotten a lot of miles out of a beautiful bottle of wine, not just for the taste and the buzz, but the symbolism of delighting in something that goes away.”

What bullshit excuses do you have for not going after whatever it is that you want?

Advice to your 30-year-old self? “Let it go. I do mean to take life very seriously, but I need to take things like playfulness and purposelessness very seriously. . . . This is not meant to be light, but I think I would have somehow encouraged myself to let go a little bit more and hang in there and not pretend to know where this is all going. You don’t need to know where it’s all going.”

“If you’re looking for a formula for greatness, the closest we’ll ever get, I think, is this: Consistency driven by a deep love of the work.”

“Life is a continual process of arrival into who we are.”

“Why put in the effort to explain why it isn’t a fit, if they haven’t done the homework to determine if it is a fit?”

For a hilarious example of how to spot-check attention to detail, Google “David Lee Roth Ferriss.” Neil Strauss (page 347) will often put at the very bottom of his job postings on Craigslist “Do not email a response, call [a phone number] and leave a voicemail with A, B, and C.” Anyone who responds via email is disqualified.

“Guilt [is] interesting because guilt is the flip side of prestige, and they’re both horrible reasons to do things.”

“Maybe appearing on CNN for two minutes will make your grandmother proud, but if the travel and the preparation and the logistics eat up 20 hours of your time so that your writing suffers [and] you will ultimately not be proud of the result, then maybe it’s not worth it. Often I think the paradox is that accepting the requests you receive is at the expense of the quality of the very work—the reason for those requests in the first place—and that’s what you always have to protect.”

Maria shared how famed neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks (RIP) used to put a “piece of paper on the wall by his desk that simply said, in all caps, ‘NO!’ with an exclamation point. It was to remind himself to decline invitations that took away from his writing time.”

‘Sitting is the new smoking.’”