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

by Timothy Ferriss

“When we feel pain in one time zone—meaning past, present, or future—we just switch to another time zone rather than change, because change brings so much uncertainty and so much instability and so much fear to people.”

Perhaps it’s time for you to take a temporary break from pursuing goals to find the knots in the garden hose that, once removed, will make everything else better and easier? It’s incredible what can happen when you stop driving with the emergency brake on.

“Being an entrepreneur is being willing to do a job that nobody else wants to do, [in order] to be able to live the rest of your life doing whatever you want to do.”

“I usually know when I’m on to something when I’m a little bit afraid of it. I go: ‘Wow, I could mess this up.’ ”

“When I articulated that I didn’t care anymore about what anybody thought about what I did except me, all the weight of the world came off my shoulders, and everything became possible. It shifted to everybody else [being] worried. Now they’re worried. But everything for me, it shifted to a place where I felt free.”

“On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice. It’s actually very easy to give people good advice. It’s very hard to follow the advice that you know is good. . . . If someone came to me with my list of problems, I would be able to sort that person out very easily.”

“‘Mindfulness’ is just that quality of mind which allows you to pay attention to sights and sounds and sensations, and even thoughts themselves, without being lost in thought and without grasping at what is pleasant and pushing what is unpleasant away. . . . “We’re so deeply conditioned to be lost in thought and to have this conversation with ourselves from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep. It’s just chatter in the mind, and it’s so captivating that we’re not even aware of it. We are essentially in a dream state, and it’s through this veil of thought that we go about our day and perceive our environment. But we are just talking to ourselves nonstop, and until you can break that spell and begin to notice thoughts themselves as objects of consciousness, just arising and passing away, you can’t even pay attention to your breath, or to anything else, with any clarity.”

Many of the guests in this book listen to Sam’s guided meditations on SoundCloud or his site. Just search “Sam Harris guided meditations.”

Secrets are a buffer to intimacy.’

“I actually want someone to partition each emotion as if it’s a little separate block and then put it in a line. Once you assess your own skill and the situation, often things change. As long as you stop and really look, I think people’s lives will change kind of radically, especially for women.

Women are very, very quick to say they’re scared. That’s something I really want to change.”

“This really underscores something important. Courage takes practice. It’s a skill you have to develop. I feel like a coward sometimes. We’re sitting here in my house and doing this interview, and on my coffee table is a quote on a piece of driftwood [from Anaïs Nin]. It says, ‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.’ I literally have this on my coffee table so I see it every single day.”

“Many a false step was made by standing still.” —Fortune cookie

“Named must your fear be before banish it you can.” —Yoda, from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

He had realized something while arcing in slow circles toward the earth—risks weren’t that scary once you took them. His colleagues told him what he expected to hear: He was throwing it all away. He was an attorney on his way to the top—what the hell did he want?

It’s not giving up to put your current path on indefinite pause. He could pick up his law career exactly where he left off if he wanted to, but that is the furthest thing from his mind.

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.” —Benjamin Disraeli, former British Prime Minister

Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.

“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’” —Seneca

The options were many. I realized it wouldn’t be that hard to get back to where I was, let alone survive. None of these things would be fatal—not even close. Mere panty pinches on the journey of life.

I realized that on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being nothing and 10 being permanently life-changing, my so-called worst-case scenario might have a temporary impact of 3 or 4. I believe this is true of most people and most would-be “holy sh*t, my life is over” disasters. Keep in mind that this is the one-in-a-million disaster nightmare. On the other hand, if I realized my best-case scenario, or even a probable-case scenario, it would easily have a permanent 9 or 10 positive life-changing effect.

This all equated to a significant realization: There was practically no risk, only huge life-changing upside potential, and I could resume my previous course without any more effort than I was already putting forth.

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

—Mark Twain

and 10 years? How will you feel having allowed circumstance to impose itself upon you and having allowed 10 more years of your finite life to pass doing what you know will not fulfill you? If you telescope out 10 years and know with 100% certainty that it is a path of disappointment and regret, and if we define risk as “the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome,” inaction is the greatest risk of all. What are you waiting for? If you cannot answer this without resorting to the BS concept of “good timing,” the answer is simple: You’re afraid, just like the rest of the world. Measure the cost of inaction, realize the unlikelihood and repairability of most missteps, and develop the most important habit of those who excel and enjoy doing so: action.

“Productivity is for robots. What humans are going to be really good at is asking questions, being creative, and experiences.”

“The Zen mantra is ‘Sit, sit. Walk, walk. Don’t wobble.’ . . . It’s this idea that when I’m with a person, that’s total priority. Anything else is multitasking. No, no, no, no. The people-to-people, person-to-person trumps anything else. I have given my dedication to this. If I go to a play or a movie, I am at the movie. I am not anywhere else. It’s 100%—I am going to listen. If I go to a conference, I am going to go to the conference.”

Write to Get Ideas, Not to Express Them “What I discovered, which is what many writers discover, is that I write in order to think. I’d say, ‘I think I have an idea,’ but when I begin to write it, I realize, ‘I have no idea,’ and I don’t actually know what I think until I try and write it. . . . That was the revelation.”

“You Don’t Want ‘Premature Optimization’” “I really recommend slack. ‘Productive’ is for your middle ages. When you’re young, you want to be prolific and make and do things, but you don’t want to measure them in terms of productivity. You want to measure them in terms of extreme performance, you want to measure them in extreme satisfaction.”

“The great temptation that people have is they want to be someone else, they want to be in someone else’s movie. They want to be the best rock star, and there are so many of those already that you can only wind up imitating somebody in that slot. To me, success is you make your own slot. You have a new slot that didn’t exist before. That’s, of course, what Jesus and many others were doing. That’s really hard to do, but I think that’s what I chalk up as success.”

“One of the many life skills that you want to learn at a fairly young age is the skill of being an ultra-thrifty, minimal kind of little wisp that’s traveling through time . . . in the sense of learning how little you actually need to live, not just in a survival mode, but in a contented mode. . . . That gives you the confidence to take a risk, because you say, ‘What’s the worst that can happen? Well, the worst that can happen is that I’d have a backpack and a sleeping bag, and I’d be eating oatmeal. And I’d be fine.’”

“Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplify, simplify. . . . A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Half of the time, you will realize that the “horrible” isn’t so horrible, and when it is, you can make it less so with repeated exposure.

Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?” It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence. In days of peace the soldier performs maneuvers, throws up earthworks with no enemy in sight, and wearies himself by gratuitous toil, in order that he may be equal to unavoidable toil. If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes. Such is the course which those men have followed who, in their imitation of poverty, have every month come almost to want, that they might never recoil from what they had so often rehearsed.

Then, I assure you, my dear Lucilius, you will leap for joy when filled with a pennyworth of food, and you will understand

that a man’s peace of mind does not depend upon Fortune; for, even when angry, she grants enough for our needs.

There is more freedom to be gained from practicing poverty than chasing wealth. Suffer a little regularly and you often cease to suffer.

“If something offends you, look inward. . . . That’s a sign that there’s something there.”

Perfectionism leads to procrastination, which leads to paralysis.

And in order for art to imitate life, you have to have a life.”

‘People-pleasing is a form of assholery,’ which I just loved, because you’re not pleasing anybody. You’re just making them resentful because you’re being disingenuous, and you’re also not giving them the dignity of their own experience and [assuming] they can’t handle the truth. It’s patronizing.”

“Codependence is often used incorrectly. It’s when you look to other people to decide how you are feeling.”

And I think ultimately, sometimes when we judge other people, it’s just a way to not look at ourselves; a way to feel superior or sanctimonious or whatever. My trauma therapist said every time you meet someone, just in your head say, ‘I love you’ before you have a conversation with them, and that conversation is going to go a lot better.

When you tell the truth about your embarrassing moments and show your shadow, a catharsis happens, which is what laughter is. I promise, if you just tell the truth and get your heart broken as a comedian, you will have a house.”

The material is like 10% of it. Being comfortable on stage is all of it. So I would say, just get on stage.

“My definition of ‘love’ is being willing to die for someone who you yourself want to kill. That, in my experience, is kind of the deal.”

Equine therapy is so fascinating because of what comes up, the way that we relate to horses says so much about the how we try to run businesses, marriages, relationships. It’s a metaphor for everything, because the way you do anything is the way you do everything.”

Neil Gaiman’s “Make Good Art” commencement speech,

“The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the

street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.”