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

by Timothy Ferriss

determining which 20% of activities/tasks produce 80% of the results you want),

Which of these highest-value activities is the easiest for me to do? You can build an entire career on 80/20 analysis and asking this question.

“What are the kinds of key things that might be constraints on a solution, or might be the attributes of a solution, and what are tools or assets I might have? . . . I actually think most of our thinking, of course, is subconscious. Part of what I’m trying to do is allow the fact that we have this kind of relaxation, rejuvenation period in sleeping, to essentially possibly bubble up the thoughts and solutions to it.”

tabula rasa—blank slate—

“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”—Thomas Edison

‘In order to move fast, I expect you’ll make some foot faults. I’m okay with an error rate of 10 to 20%—times when I would have made a different decision in a given situation—if it means you can move fast.’

“Foot fault” literally refers to a penalty in tennis when you serve with improper foot placement, often due to rushing.

“How do you know if you have A-players on your project team? You know it if they don’t just accept the strategy you hand them. They should suggest modifications to the plan based on their closeness to the details.”

‘There needs to be one decisive reason, and then the worthiness of the trip needs to be measured against that one reason. If I go, then we can backfill into the schedule all the other secondary activities. But if I go for a blended reason, I’ll almost surely come back and feel like it was a waste of time.’ ”

“If you go back 20 or 25 years, I wish I would have known that there was no need to wait.

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? Sometimes, you have to actually go through the complex, 10-year trajectory. But it’s at least worth asking whether that’s the story you’re telling yourself, or whether that’s the reality.”

“I think failure is massively overrated. Most businesses fail for more than one reason. So when a business fails, you often don’t learn anything at all because the failure was overdetermined.

“I think people actually do not learn very much from failure. I think it ends up being quite damaging and demoralizing to people in the long run, and my sense is that the death of every business is a tragedy. It’s not some sort of beautiful aesthetic where there’s a lot of carnage, but that’s how progress happens, and it’s not some sort of educational imperative. So I think failure is neither a Darwinian nor an educational imperative. Failure is always simply a tragedy.”

You, generally, never

want to be part of a popular trend.

So I think trends are often things to avoid. What I prefer over trends is a sense of mission. That you are working on a unique problem that people are not solving elsewhere.

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.”

“I don’t like the word ‘education’ because it is such an extraordinary abstraction. I’m very much in favor of learning. I’m much more skeptical of credentialing or the abstraction called ‘education.’ So there are all of these granular questions like: What is it that we’re learning? Why are you learning it? Are you going to college because it’s a 4-year party? Is it a consumption decision? Is it an investment decision where you’re investing in your future? Is it insurance? Or is it a tournament where you’re just beating other people? And are elite universities really like Studio 54 where it’s like an exclusive nightclub? I think if we move beyond the education bubble that we’re living in today, the future will be one in which people can speak about these things more clearly.”

What one thing would you most like to change about yourself or improve on? “It’s always hard to answer this, since it sort of begs the question of why I haven’t already improved on it. But I would say that when I look back on my younger self, I was insanely tracked, insanely competitive. And when you’re very competitive, you get good at the thing you’re competing with people on. But it comes at the expense of losing out on many other things.

“If you’re a competitive chess player, you might get very good at chess but neglect to develop other things because you’re focused on beating your competitors, rather than on doing something that’s important or valuable. So I’ve become, I think, much more self-aware over the years about the problematic nature of a lot of the competition. There have been rivalries that we get caught up in. And I would not pretend to have extricated myself from this altogether. So I think, every day, it’s something to reflect on and think about ‘How do I become less competitive in order that I can become more successful?’ ”

we never want to let a convention be a shortcut for truth.

We always need to ask: Is this true? And this is always what I get at with this indirect question: ‘Tell me something that’s true that very few people agree with you on.’ ”

There are 7 questions that Peter recommends all startup founders ask themselves. Grab Zero to One for all of them, but here are the 3 I revisit often: The Monopoly Question: Are you starting with a big share of a small market? The Secret Question: Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see? The Distribution Question: Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product?

“It’s always the hard part that creates value.”

“You are more powerful than you think you are. Act accordingly.”

“Trust and attention—these are the scarce items in a post-scarcity world.”

“We can’t out-obedience the competition.”

Be a Meaningful Specific Instead of a Wandering Generality

“The phone rings, and lots of people want a thing. If it doesn’t align with the thing that is your mission, and you say ‘yes,’ now [your mission is] their mission. There’s nothing wrong with being a wandering generality instead of a meaningful specific, but don’t expect to make the change you [hope] to make if that’s what you do.”

“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.”

So the goal isn’t to get good ideas; the goal is to get bad ideas. Because once you get enough bad ideas, then some good ones have to show up.”

What You Track Determines Your Lens—Choose Carefully

It took me a bunch of cycles to figure out that the narrative was up to me.

“If a narrative isn’t working, well then, really, why are you using it? The narrative isn’t done to you; the narrative is something that you choose. Once we can dig deep and find a different narrative, then we ought to be able to change the game.”

“Stories Let Us Lie to Ourselves and Those Lies Sat...

“Don’t retreat into story.”

“If you think hard about one’s life, most people spend most of their time on defense, in reactive mode, in playing with the cards they got instead of moving to a different table with different cards. Instead of seeking to change other people, they are willing to be changed. Part of the arc of what I’m trying to teach is: Everyone who can hear this has more power than they think they do. The question is, what are you going to do with that power?”

“If you think about how hard it is to push a business uphill, particularly when you’re just getting started, one answer is to say: ‘Why don’t you just start a different business, a business you can push downhill?’

“The blog post I point people to the most is called ‘First, Ten,’ and it is a simple theory of marketing that says: tell ten people, show ten people, share it with ten people; ten people who already trust you and already like you. If they don’t tell anybody else, it’s not that good and you should start over. If they do tell other people, you’re on your way.”

“My suggestion is, whenever possible, ask yourself: What’s the smallest possible footprint I can get away with? What is the smallest possible project that is worth my time? What is the smallest group of people who I could make a difference for, or to? Because smallest is achievable. Smallest feels risky. Because if you pick smallest and you fail, now you’ve really screwed up. “We want to pick big. Infinity is our friend. Infinity is safe. Infinity gives us a place to hide. So, I want to encourage people instead to look for the small. To be on one medium in a place where people can find you. To have one sort of interaction

with one tribe, with one group where you don’t have a lot of lifeboats.”

“No One Gets a Suzuki Tattoo. You Can Decide That You Want to Be Tattoo-Worthy.” Seth on Suzuki versus Harley-Davidson, the latter of which has deliberately created an aspirational brand.

There are no real rules, so make rules that work for you.

“My wife got me a Chris Schlesinger cooking class, and it was the only cooking class I’d ever taken. In 20 minutes, I learned more about cooking than I think I’ve learned before or since. Because Chris basically taught me how to think about what you were trying to do and basically said, A) You should taste the food as you go, which a surprisingly small number of people do; and B) salt and olive oil actually are cheating and they’re secret weapons and they always work.”

That’s one of the reasons why I cook dinner every night. Because what a wonderful, semi-distracted environment in which the kid can tell you the truth. For you to have low-stakes but superimportant conversations with someone who’s important to you.”

“Sooner or later, parents have to take responsibility for putting their kids into a system that is indebting them and teaching them to be cogs in an economy that doesn’t want cogs anymore. Parents get to decide . . . [and] from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m., those kids are getting homeschooled. And they’re either getting home-schooled and watching The Flintstones, or they’re getting homeschooled and learning something useful.

“I think we need to teach kids two things: 1) how to lead, and 2) how to solve interesting problems. Because the fact is, there are plenty of countries on Earth where there are people who are willing to be obedient and work harder for less money than us. So we cannot out-obedience the competition. Therefore, we have to out-lead or out-solve the other people. . . . “The way you teach your kids to solve interesting problems is to give them interesting problems to solve. And then, don’t criticize them when they fail. Because kids aren’t stupid. If they get in trouble every time they try to solve an interesting problem, they’ll just go back to getting an A by memorizing what’s in the textbook. I spend an enormous amount of time with kids . . . I think that it’s a privilege to be able to look a trusting, energetic, smart 11-year-old in the eye and tell him the truth. And what we can say to that 11-year-old is: ‘I really don’t care how you did on your vocabulary test. I care about whether you have something to say.’”

* What’s something you believe that other people think is crazy? “Deep down, I am certain that people are plastic in the positive sense: flexible and able to grow. I think almost everything is made, not born, and that makes people uncomfor...

You need to be clear with yourself about what you are afraid of, why you are afraid, and whether you care enough to dance with that fear because it will never go away.”

There are two chocolate companies I want to highlight: Rogue [from western Massachusetts] and Askinosie. And I’m actually an advisor to a new acumen company called Cacao Hunters in Colombia.”