Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss

Ref: Tim Ferriss (2016). Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World Class Performers. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  

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Summary­

  • The superheroes you have in your mind (idols, icons, titans, billionaires, etc.) are nearly all walking flaws who’ve maximized 1 or 2 strengths.

  • Successful people have structured goals and then put a plan in place to reach those goals.  

  • Ask yourself; what am I continuing to do myself that I’m not good at? Improve it, eliminate it, or delegate it.

  • Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence. In fact, it is essential and something that every single elite athlete has had to learn to deal with. If the pursuit of excellence was easy, everyone would do it. In fact, this impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals. Unreasonable expectations timewise, resulting in unnecessary frustration, due to a perceived feeling of failure.

  • Write down the 3 to 5 things—and no more—that are making you the most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually equals most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict. For each item, ask yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” “Will moving this forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?”

  • If I have 10 important things to do in a day, it’s 100% certain nothing important will get done that day. On the other hand, I can usually handle one must-do item.

  • The #1 thing you need to do: Find out what you need to be doing on this planet, why you were put here, and what wakes you up in the mornings.

  • Haven’t Found Your Overarching, Single Purpose? Maybe You Don’t Have To. “Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.”

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Exercise

  • QL Walk: Get into pike position (sitting on mat with back straight, legs extended out, and ankles touching). Hold a kettlebell at chest level. Keeping your legs straight (no bend at the knee), walk your butt cheeks—left, right, left, right—across the floor; typically 10-15’. Reverse direction and go backward 10-15’.

  • Dips with Rings Turn Out: Self Explanatory.

  • Hinge Rows: Set up a pair of rings to hang about a foot above your head when you’re sitting on the floor. While sitting on the floor, grab the rings. Keeping your heels on the floor, lie back, and—arms straight—lift your hips off the ground. Focus on making your body (head to heel) ramrod straight. Sit up (pike) until your head is between the rings and hit that double-bicep pose. The bends at your waist and elbows should be about 90 degrees. Slowly lower yourself back down. Repeat 5-15x.  

  • Heel Core: Sit in pike position in the middle of the floor. Point your toes and keep your knees locked. Walk your hands out on the floor, as far toward (or past) your feet as you can. Now, try to lift your heels 1 to 4 inches, which is 1 repetition or “pulse.”

  • Cast Wall Walk: Get into front leaning rest with your feet next to a wall. Slowly walk yourself up the wall into a handstand staying in front leaning rest position. Slowly walk back down to front leaning rest and repeat.

  • Contracted Plank: Hold a plank for 10 seconds under max contraction. Hold it like you’re about to be kicked and breathe ‘behind the shield’ of your tensed midsection. For a challenge, consider putting your feet on the wall, a few inches from the floor.”

 

Post Workout

  • ~20min Sauna Sessions 4x/wk at 160-170F substantially improves endurance and dramatically decreases Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS).

  • One study has demonstrated that a 30min sauna session 2x/wk for 3 weeks post-workout increased the time it took for study participants to run until exhaustion by 32% compared to baseline. The 32% increase in running endurance found in this particular study was accompanied by a 7.1% increase in plasma volume and 3.5% increase in RBC.-Dr. Patrick.

  • 2x 20min sauna sessions at 80°C separated by a 30min cooling period elevated growth hormone levels 2x over baseline. Whereas, 2x 15min dry-heat sessions at 100°C separated by a 30min cooling period resulted in a 5x increase in growth hormone. The growth hormone effects generally persist for a couple of hours post-sauna.

  • Hot baths can also significantly increase GH over baseline, and both sauna and hot baths have been shown to cause a massive release in prolactin, which plays a role in wound healing.

  • Assess your biggest weaknesses using a functional Movement Screening (FMS).

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Sleep

  • Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.-Ben Franklin.

  • On waking up, go outside into the sun ASAP. 

  • Jetlag: “When I landed, I would check into the hotel. The second we checked in, I’d ask them: ‘Is the gym open? Can I go train?’ Even if it was to get on a bike and ride for 15 minutes to reset things. I learned early that it seemed any time I did that, I didn’t get jet lag.”

  • If you’ve ever laid down in bed exhausted, then felt wired and been unable to sleep, cortisol might be a factor. To mitigate this “tired and wired” phenomenon—as well as reduce glucose levels—before bed, I take phosphatidylserine and N-acetyl cysteine (NAC). For me, this also has a noticeable impact on lowering anxiety the following day.  

  • Still Tired after sleeping long? The likely culprit is Low Blood Sugar.

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Aging

  • If you are over 40 and don’t smoke, there’s ~70-80% chance you’ll die from one of four diseases: heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, cancer, or neurodegenerative disease.

    • Cerebrovascular Disease (stroke): There are two ways you can have a stroke. One is through an occlusion; the other one is through bleeding, usually due to elevated blood pressure.

    • Neurodegenerative Disease: The most common cause is Alzheimer’s dementia, and Alzheimer’s is one of the top ten causes of death in the USA.  

  • Studies suggest that people age at the rate they produce insulin. One of the fastest ways to reduce this level is to consume supplemental Mg.

    • Mg-Glycinate has a preference for liver and muscle tissue.

    • Mg-Orotate tends to work more in the vascular system.

    • Mg-Threonate is more of a GABA inducer, therefore it improves sleep.

  • Metformin: A promising anti-aging drug.

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Drugs

  • Transcendental Experience: The feeling or the awareness that you are connected not only to other people, but to other things and living systems and to the air you breathe. We tend to think we’re kind of encapsulated. . . . Obviously, the air I am breathing comes from all over the world, and some of it’s a billion years old. Every 8 years, I get almost all new cells from something. Everything I eat is connected to me. Everyone I meet is connected to me. Right now, you and I are sitting outside, and our feet are touching the ground. We’re connected to the ground. Now, that’s all easy to say intellectually and even poetically. But when you actually experience that you are part of this larger system, one of the things that you become aware of is that your ego—your personal identity—is not that big a part of you.

  • Drug Schedules

    • I: Most Potential for abuse; no accepted medical treatment.

    • II: High potential for abuse and dependence.

    • III: Moderate potential for abuse and dependence.

    • IV: Low potential for abuse and dependence.

    • V: Lowest potential for abuse and dependence.

  • Psychedelics (‘Mind Revealing’- Greek)

    • Psilocybin: For me, moderate to high dose of psilocybin with supervision serves as a hard reboot. It closes all the windows, “force quits” all the applications, flushes the cache, installs upgrades, and—when I’m back to “normal”—restores my 30,000-foot view. It removes the noise, giving me a crystal-clear view of the most critical priorities and decisions.

    • LSD: Invented by Albert Hoffman.

      • Microdose (10-15 mcg): Everything is just a little better. You know at the end of a day when you say, ‘Wow, that was a really good day’? That’s what most people report on microdosing.

      • 50 mcg: Concert Dose

      • 100 mcg: Creative problem solving with non-personal matters.

      • 200 mcg: Used for psychotherapy, self-exploration, deep inner work and healing. 

      • 400 mcg: Where Transcendental or mystical experiences occur. At this dose or higher, it is critical to have qualified supervision in the form of a guide. “Transcendental” here roughly means “the feeling or the awareness that you are connected not only to other people but to other things and to living systems.”

    • Ibogaine/Iboga

    • DMT (aka Sprit Molecule): Found in Ayahuasca

      • 5-MeO-DMT (aka God Molecule): A DMT variant found in the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad and is vaporized and inhaled (not taken orally; it's toxic if ingested).

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Meditation

  • Recommend 10-20 min of meditation daily; whenever all or part of a sensory experience suddenly disappears, note that. By note I mean clearly acknowledge when you detect the transition point between all of it being present and at least some of it no longer being present.

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Business

  • Create a sense of mission; work on a unique problem that people are not solving elsewhere.

  • Business Planning

    • 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 do not see?

    • The Distribution Question: Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product?

  • Kickstarter & Indiegogo: Allows you to introduce (test) a new product before you start manufacturing, removing a huge amount of risk.

  • When you’re a growing startup, you get into huge trouble because you blow right through a few of tripling’s without really realizing it. And then, you turn around, and you realize . . . we’re at 400 people now, but some of our processes and systems we set in place when we were 30. . . . You should constantly, perpetually be thinking about how to reinvent yourself and how to treat the culture.

  • Aim to optimize upstream items that have cascading results downstream. For instance, look for technical bottlenecks (choke points) that affect nearly everything you do on a computer. What are the things that, if defunct or slow, render your to-do list useless?

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Leadership

  • Create some fear and make individuals overcome it.

  • People’s IQs seem to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.

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Writing

  • There are only four stories: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power, and the journey.

  • Write about a time when you realized you were mistaken.  

  • Write about a lesson you learned the hard way.

  • Write about a time you were inappropriately dressed for the occasion.

  • Write about something you lost that you’ll never get back.

  • Write about a time when you knew you’d done the right thing.

  • Write about something you don’t remember.

  • Write about your darkest teacher.

  • Write about a memory of a physical injury.

  • Write about when you knew it was over. Write about being loved. Write about what you were really thinking. Write about how you found your way back. Write about the kindness of strangers.

  • Write about why you could not do it. Write about why you did.

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Misc Quotes

Information without emotion isn’t retained.-Tony Robbins.

Travel teaches independence, flexibility, negotiation, planning, boldness, self-sufficiency, improvisation.

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.

If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.

If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.”-Lao Tzu.

A dream is something you fantasize about that will probably never happen. A goal is something you set a plan for, work toward, and achieve.

We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.-Archilochus.

All other things being equal, to increase your happiness, all you have to do is randomly wish for somebody else to be happy. That is all. It basically takes no time and no effort.

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.”-Benjamin Franklin,

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?

The World Doesn’t Need Your Explanation. On Saying “No”: “I don’t give explanations anymore, and I’ll catch myself when I start giving explanations like ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t make it. I have a doctor’s appointment that day. I’m really sick. I broke my leg over the weekend’ or something. I just say, ‘I can’t do it. I hope everything is well.’”

Amplify your strengths rather than fix your weaknesses.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.-Time Enough for Love.

The first thing is, on a good day, I will try to step back and say, ‘What context does this person even have, and have I provided appropriate context?’ . . . Given all the context they had, maybe I would’ve made the same decision, or I could imagine somebody else making the same decision. So increasingly, I try to think about: ‘What context and visibility do I have and what do they have? Am I basically being unfair because I’m operating from a greater set of information?’”-Bill Clinton.

The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom. With this kind of mindset, it’s no wonder so many Americans think extended overseas travel is the exclusive realm of students, counterculture dropouts, and the idle rich.

Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month, the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this—or the boy who had . . . received a Rodgers’ penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?-Walden.

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

Life favors the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.

When trying to solve complex issues, accept default human behaviors versus trying to fix them.

Domino triggers aren’t limited to food. For some people, if they play 15 minutes of World of Warcraft, they’ll play 15 hours. It’s 0 or 15 hours.

Make your peace with the fact that saying ‘no’ often requires trading popularity for respect.-Greg McKeown.

The fact that girls are told and treated as if they’re more fragile doesn’t make sense at all. It primes them to be very over-cautious.

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.”

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.

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.

Perfectionism leads to procrastination, which leads to paralysis.

The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.-Paulo Coelho.

In any situation in life, you always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting

All greatness comes from suffering.

My mentor’s life advice to me: when I’m going into a conflict or a difficult situation with my parents or an argument is, ‘Say less.’ That’s it. Just say less.”

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.”

Hemingway, had a practice of ending his writing sessions mid-flow and mid-sentence. This way, he knew exactly where to start the next day, and he could reliably both end and start his sessions with confidence.

He or she who is willing to be the most uncomfortable is not only the bravest, but rises the fastest.”

The big question I ask is, ‘When I had the opportunity, did I choose courage over comfort?’” 

You can’t really earn trust over time with people without being somewhat vulnerable [first].”

A lack of resources is often one of the critical ingredients for greatness.

“Flexibility” can be passive, whereas “mobility” requires that you can demonstrate strength throughout the entire range of motion, including the end ranges.

When forced to choose, choose both. When forced to compromise, ask for more.

Make commitments in a high-energy state so that you can’t back out when you’re in a low-energy state.

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Terminology

  • Planshopping: Deferring committing to any one plan for an evening until you know what all your options are, and then picking the one that’s most likely to be fun/advance your career/have the most girls at it—in other words, treating people like menu options or products in a catalog.

  • Spotlight Effect: (In Psychology) The idea that everybody must be caring about what I do (when in fact, nobody cares).

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