Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show! It will showcase some of my favorite advice and profiles from the audiobook of Tools of Titans. Thousands of you have asked for years for the audiobook versions of Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors, and they are now available.

Go to audible.com/ferriss for more details or to download. 

Today’s episode will focus on Tools of Titans and features the introduction of the book, as well as the profiles of Derek Sivers, BJ Miller, and Christopher Sommer.

Just a few notes on the audiobook’s format: I recorded the introduction and selected three fantastic, top-ranked narrators to handle the rest, along with some surprise appearances from friends. 

The short bios, which you will hear at the beginning of each profile, are read by Kaleo Griffith. Ray Porter reads the bulk of each profile including all of my own words. Ray actually narrated my first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, and did an incredible job. Quotations from female guests are read by the wonderful Thérèse Plummer.

The audiobook of Tools of Titans contains the distilled tools and routines I’ve gathered after interviewing hundreds of world-class performers. 

Everything has been vetted and applied to my own life in some fashion. The techniques, strategies, and philosophies in Tools of Titans have made me more effective, saved me years of wasted effort and frustration, and helped me navigate many periods of darkness and uncertainty. The advice has truly made me a happier, healthier person and changed my life. I hope that they help change yours as well. 

Please enjoy this episode, and if you’d like to listen to the other 100-plus profiles and chapters from Tools of Titans, just head to audible.com/ferriss.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform. 

• Listen onApple Podcasts
• Listen onSpotify
• Listen onOvercast

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

• Connect with Derek Sivers:

Website | Twitter | Facebook

• Connect with BJ Miller:

Twitter

• Connect with Coach Christopher Sommer:

GymnasticBodies.com | Instagram | YouTube | Coach Sommer at Facebook | GymnasticBodies at Facebook

• Rue Saint-Jacques: Paris’ Oldest Street | French Moments
• Pain au Chocolat | Wikipedia
• CliffsNotes Study Guides
• Searching for Bobby Fischer | Prime Video
• The Matrix | Prime Video
• How to 10X Your Results, One Tiny Tweak at a Time | The Tim Ferriss Show #144
• The Sixth Sense | Prime Video
• The Usual Suspects | Prime Video
• Red Teaming | Wikipedia
• Tara Brach on Meditation and Overcoming FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) | The Tim Ferriss Show #94
• Peter Attia, M.D. — Fasting, Metformin, Athletic Performance, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #398
• The Magic of Mindfulness: Complain Less, Appreciate More, and Live a Better Life | The Tim Ferriss Show #122
• chiliPAD Cube 2.0
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger by Charles T. Munger
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
• The “Pros” and Cons of Spec Work | JUST Creative
• Place Louis Aragon | No Worries Paris
• Paris American Academy
• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss
• The 4 Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat Loss, Incredible Sex and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss
• The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss
• Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey
• Von Restorff Effect | Laws of UX
• The Primacy/Recency Effect | Dataworks Educational Research
• Siddhartha: A Novel by Hermann Hesse
• CD Baby | Wikipedia
• Derek Sivers | TED
• Wood Egg
• Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur by Derek Sivers
• Books I’ve Read | Derek Sivers
• Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin
• Seeking Wisdom Notes | Derek Sivers
• Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! by Tony Robbins
• Post RE: Dedicating My Next Book to Derek Sivers | Facebook
• Derek Sivers on Developing Confidence, Finding Happiness, and Saying “No” to Millions | The Tim Ferriss Show #125
• Mona Lisa | Louvre Museum
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Berklee College of Music
• Paradox Resolved: Buridan’s Ass by Steve Patterson
• How to Say “No” When It Matters Most (or “Why I’m Taking a Long ‘Startup Vacation'”) | tim.blog
• Marvin Braude Bike Trail | Wikipedia
• The Plight of the Pelican | Los Angeles Times
• PostgreSQL
• Milford Sound | New Zealand
• Worldwide Accent Project: Iceland | Krista Bjork
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World | Prime Video
• Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
• Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Most Successful Email Derek Sivers Ever Wrote | tim.blog
• BJ Miller: What Really Matters at the End of Life | TED Talk
• 7 Tips for City Stargazing from Chicago’s Park Astronomer | The Trust for Public Land
• Joseph Swan Winery
• Scuderia West | San Francisco
• Grizzly Man | Prime Video
• The Secrets of Gymnastic Strength Training | The Tim Ferriss Show #158
• The Secrets of Gymnastic Strength Training Part Two — Home Equipment, Weighted Stretches, and Muscle-Ups | The Tim Ferriss Show #180
• Gymnastic Bodies Illustrated | New Territory Fitness
• AcroYoga International
• Functional Movement Systems
• Functional Movement Screen | FMS
• Jefferson Curls (J-Curls) | GymnasticBodies
• Weighted Pike Stretch | GymnasticBodies
• Straddle Lifts (Pulse) | RoutineFit
• How to do a Maltese on the Rings | Strength Project
• Ring Thing | Power Monkey Fitness
• Making a Dream Machine by Michael Traynor | GymnasticBodies
• Iron Cross Trainers Review/Demonstration | Ringsking
• 3 Exercises to Build Better Shoulder Mobility | GymnasticBodies
• Thoracic Bridge Progression | GymnasticBodies
• Straddle Press to Handstand Tutorial | GMB Fitness
• Stalder Press to Handstand Tutorial | Jack Monx
• Hypertonicity: Insights on Excessive Muscle Tension | Landis Movement Systems
• Hitachi Magic Wand “Massager”

SHOW NOTES

Introduction

• How to use this book (and why I wrote it). [02:19]
• What makes the people featured in this book different? [08:50]
• Performance-enhancing details — why 10x results don’t always require 10x effort. [11:00]
• What do the tools presented here have in common? [12:08]
• Two rules for getting the most out of this book. [14:02]
• What do I hope to convey in this book? Here are two principles to remember. [16:08]
• A few important notes on the way this book has been organized — from structure, included quotations, patterns, humor, spirit animals, non-profile content, and the omission of most URLs. [18:13]
• The three tools that allow all the rest, courtesy of Siddhartha (and Naval Ravikant). [24:40]

Derek Sivers

• Who is Derek Sivers? [27:16]
• Derek’s rank-ordered book reviews and two of his life-changing favorites. [28:27]
• How Derek’s first appearance on this show changed a listener’s life. [29:10]
• It’s not what you know — it’s what you do consistently. [29:45]
• The best plan is the one that lets you change your plans. [29:56]
• Who does Derek think of first when he hears the word “successful” — and why is the third person who comes to mind probably more successful? [30:24]
• Just starting out? Say “yes” to everything — even if it’s playing acoustic guitar at a pig show in Vermont. [32:11]
• The standard pace is for chumps. [33:24]
• Advice Derek would give to his 30-year-old self. [34:11]
• Business models can be simple: you don’t need to constantly pivot. [35:39]
• Once you have some success: if it’s not a “Hell, yes!” it’s a “No.” [37:47]
• Feeling busy? Lack of time is lack of priorities. [39:02]
• What would Derek’s billboard say? [39:47]
• On taking 45 minutes instead of 43. [40:28]
• Why Derek has no morning routines. [43:28]
• Things Derek believes that other people think are crazy. [44:18]
• Treat life as a series of experiments. [45:22]
• The most successful email Derek ever wrote. [46:19]

BJ Miller

• Who is BJ Miller? [49:00]
• What would BJ’s billboard say? [50:20]
• Stargazing as therapy. [50:37]
• What purchase of $100 or less has had the most positive impact on BJ’s life in recent memory? [51:45]
• A good reason to question your “I can’ts.” [52:35]
• The miracle of a snowball in the burn ward. [55:58]
• The power of bearing witness and listening. [58:52]
• How BJ would honor an introverted hospice patient’s request for something to watch, do, or absorb without human interaction. [1:00:31]
• Some people say laughter is the best medicine. But sometimes it’s cookies. Or art. Or anything that allows us to live in the moment “on behalf of nothing” but the enjoyment of that thing. [1:01:26]
• Advice BJ would give to his 30-year-old self. [1:02:24]

Coach Christopher Sommer

• Who is Coach Christopher Sommer? [1:02:54]
• How did gymnastic strength training and AcroYoga remodel my body at age 39? [1:03:56]
• “If you want to be a stud later, you have to be a pud now.” — Coach Sommer [1:04:23]
• Flexibility versus mobility. [1:05:30]
• Consistency over intensity. [1:06:11]
• The difference between “diet and exercise” and “eat and train.” [1:07:02]
• How exactly does someone fail warmup? [1:07:24]
• Why male Olympic gymnasts have gigantic biceps. [1:08:34]
• Three movements everyone should practice. [1:09:32]
• Good goals for adult non-gymnasts. [1:10:14]
• Sometimes you just need a vibrator. [1:10:35]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

• Kurt Vonnegut
• W.H. Auden
• Victor Hugo
• Gertrude Stein
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Josh Waitzkin
• Bobby Fischer
• Pierre-Marc-Gaston
• Peter Thiel
• Tara Brach
• Laird Hamilton
• Malcolm Gladwell
• General Stanley McChrystal
• Robert Rodriguez
• Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Shay Carl
• Robert Moses
• Walt Disney
• Benjamin Franklin
• Mason Currey
• Franz Kafka
• Pablo Picasso
• Jamie Foxx
• Marc Andreessen
• Jane Doe
• Tony Robbins
• Alexis Ohanian
• Scooby-Doo
• Hermann Hesse
• Siddhartha
• Kamala
• Naval Ravikant
• Charlie Munger
• Warren Buffett
• Jason Nemer
• Kevin Kelly
• Albert Einstein
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Daniel Kahneman
• Richard Branson
• Ricardo Semler
• Kimo Williams
• Amber Rubarth
• Daniel Gilbert
• Ed Cooke
• Andy Goldsworthy
• Randy Sloan
• Mert Lawwill
• Mark Rothko
• Ludwig van Beethoven

The post Tools of Titans — Derek Sivers, BJ Miller, and Christopher Sommer (#439) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

***

Top Books (2 or more mentions):

Man’s Search For Meaning (Viktor E. Frankl)

The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Steven Pinker)

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich (Tim Ferriss)

The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Yuval Noah Harari)

Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu)

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (David Deutsch)

Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment (George Leonard)

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (Steven Pressfield)

The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell)

Poor Charlie’s Almanack (Charles T Munger)

Finite and Infinite Games (James Carse)

The Chronicles of Narnia (C.S. Lewis)

The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Shunryu Suzuki)

Tools of Titans (Tim Ferriss)

Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison)

***

Abusulayman, Muna: The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No and Still Get to Yes (William Ury)

Ali, Ayaan Hirsi: The Open Society and Its Enemies (Karl Popper)

Anderson, Chris: The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (David Deutsch), The Chronicles of Narnia (C.S. Lewis)

Aoki, Steve:  The Singularity Is Near (Ray Kurzweil), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Malcolm X)

Arnold, John: The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (Matt Ridley), The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Steven Pinker)

Aronofsky, Darren: Last Exit to Brooklyn (Hubert Selby), Requiem for a Dream (Hubert Selby)

Ashley, Maurice:  Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (Gail Sheehy), Sugar Blues (William Dufty), Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment (George Leonard), The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich (Tim Ferriss)

Attia, Peter: The Transformed Cell: Unlocking the Mysteries of Cancer (Stephen A. Rosenberg), Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions (Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson), Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard P. Feynman)

Babauta, Leo: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice (Shunryu Suzuki), What Is Zen?: Plain Talk for a Beginner’s Mind (Norman Fischer)

Bell, Mark: Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on your Passion (Gary Vaynerchuk), The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich (Tim Ferriss), 5/3/1: The Simplest and Most Effective Training System for Raw Strength (Jim Wendler)

Belmont, Veronica:  10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works- True Story (Dan Harris)

Boeree, Liv: The Passion Trap: How to Right an Unbalanced Relationship (Dean C. Delis), Map and Territory & How to Actually Change Your Mind (Eliezer Yudkowsky)

Boone, Amelia: Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand), A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens), Brave Enough (Cheryl Strayed)

Brand, Stewart: Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (James P. Carse), One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Rodney Stark), The Idea of Decline in Western History (Arthur Herman), The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Steven Pinker)

Brown, Brené: The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships & Why Won’t You Apologize?: Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts (Harriet Lerner), Positive Discipline series (Jane Nelsen Ed. D.), Touchpoints series (T. Berry Brazelton)

Call, Jon: Thinking Body, Dancing Mind: Taosports for Extraordinary Performance in Athletics, Business and Life (Chungliang Al Huang)

Cantley, Lewis Clayton: The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Richard Rhodes), The Baroque Cycle (Neal Stephenson), Bernie Gunther Novels (Philip Kerr)

Case, Steve: The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow (Alvin Toffler)

Chadha, Richa: Autobiography of a Yogi (Paramahansa Yogananda), Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll), Shame (Salman Rushdie), No Logo (Naomi Klein)

Chainani, Soman: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (Steven Pressfield), A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara), Peter Pan (J.M. Barrie)

Crews, Terry: The Master Key System (Charles F. Haanel), Man’s Search For Meaning (Viktor E. Frankl), You Are Not So Smart (David McRaney)

Cummings, Whitney: Getting the Love You Want (Harville Hendrix PhD), The Fantasy Bond: Structure of Psychological Defenses (Robert Firestone PhD), The Female Brain (Louann Brizendine M.D.)

Dalio, Ray: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell), The Lessons of History (Will and Ariel Durant), River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (Richard Dawkins)

Davidsdottir, Katrin: Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court (John Wooden), The Champion’s Mind: How Champions Think, Train, and Thrive (Jim Afremow PhD)

Duncan, Graham: Making Sense of People: The Science of Personality Differences (Samuel Barondes), In Over Our Heads (Robert Kegan), Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World (Jennifer Garvey Berger)

Dyson, Esther: The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease (Marc Lewis), Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan), From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (Daniel C. Dennett)

Ek, Daniel: The Minefield Girl (Sofia Ek), Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success (Matthew Syed), The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho), Poor Charlie’s Almanack (Charles T Munger)

Fallon, Jimmy: Man’s Search For Meaning (Viktor E. Frankl), The Monster at the End of This Book (Jon Stone)

Fisher, Adam: The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance (Steven Kotler)

Forleo, Marie: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles  (Steven Pressfield)

Fried, Jason: Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger (Peter Bevelin)

Gable, Dan: The Heart of a Champion: Inspiring True Stories of Challenge and Triumph (Bob Richards)

Gaiman, Neil: Paco and the Orchestra; Paco and Jazz; Paco and Rock; Paco and Vivaldi; Paco and Mozart (Magali Le Huche)

Galef, Julia: Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner), How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business (Douglas W. Hubbard), Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work (Chip and Dan Heath)

Gervais, Michael: Man’s Search For Meaning (Viktor E. Frankl), Tao Te Ching (Lau Tzu), Mind Gym: An Athlete’s Guide to Inner Excellence (Gary Mack), Inch and Miles: The Journey to Success (John Wooden)

Gordon-Levitt, Joseph: Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (Lawrence Lessig)

Gregorek, Aniela: Man’s Search For Meaning (Viktor E. Frankl), Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Oliver Sacks)

Gregorek, Jerzy: The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy (Viktor E. Frankl), The Tao of Power (R.L. Wing), Letters from a Stoic (Seneca)

Grylls, Bear: Rhinoceros Success: The Secret to Charging Full Speed Toward Every Opportunity (Scott Alexander)

Harris, Sam: The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (David Deutsch), Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom), In Cold Blood (Truman Capote)

Holmes, Anna: Miss Rumphius (Barbara Cooney)

Holz, Fedor: Man’s Search For Meaning (Viktor E. Frankl)

Houston, Drew: Poor Charlie’s Almanack (Charles T Munger)

Huffington, Arianna: Meditations (Marcus Aurelius), Memories, Dreams, Reflections (C. G. Jung)

Jarre, Jérôme: Propaganda (Edward Bernays)

Jurvetson, Steve: Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn (Alison Gopnik), Ready Player One (Ernest Cline), Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (Kevin Kelly), The Age of Spiritual Machines (Ray Kurzweil)

Kelly, Kevin: Childhood’s End (Arthur C. Clarke), The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand), Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman), My Experiments with Truth (M.K. Gandhi), Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas R. Hofstadter), The Ultimate Resource (Julian Lincoln Simon), Finite and Infinite Games (James Carse), The Bible.

King, Larry: The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger), Lou Gehrig: A Quiet Hero (Frank Graham)

Koppelman, Brian: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Haruki Murakami), The Artist’s Way  (Julia Cameron), Awaken the Giant Within (Tony Robbins), City of Thieves (David Benioff), Sizzling Chops and Devilish Spins: Ping-Pong and the Art of Staying Alive (Jerome Charyn)

Kutcher, Ashton: The Happiest Baby on the Block (Harvey Karp MD), The Sleepeasy Solution (Jennifer Waldburger and Jill Spivack), Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Yuval Noah Harari)

Laughlin, Terry: Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment (George Leonard)

Levchin, Max: Master and Margarita (translated by Pevear, et al) (Mikhail Bulgakov)

Lewis, Sarah Elizabeth: A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Rebecca Solnit), James Baldwin: Collected Essays (James Baldwin), “The Creative Process” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985 (James Baldwin)

Lynch, David: That Motel Weekend (James Donner), The Srimad Devi Bhagavatam, The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)

Maples, Mike (Jr.): The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by Dearly Departing (Bronnie Ware), Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Richard Bach), Hope for the Flowers (Trina Paulus), Living Forward: A Proven Plan to Stop Drifting and Get the Life You Want (Michael Hyatt and Daniel Harkavy), How Will You Measure Your Life? (Clayton M. Christensen)

Maté, Gabor (Dr.): Winnie-the-Pooh (A.A. Milne), The Scourge of the Swastika (E.F.L. Russell), The Dhammapada (Anonymous), The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self (Alice Miller), Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)

Maynard, Kyle: Dune (Frank Herbert), The Stranger (Albert Camus), The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell)

McHale, Joel: The Road (Cormac McCarthy), The Blade Itself (Joe Abercrombie), The Book of Strange New Things (Michel Faber), How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Invention, Creation, and Discovery (Kevin Ashton), Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why (Laurence Gonzales)

McMahon, Stephanie: Tools of Titans (Tim Ferriss)

Millman, Debbie: The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (Hayden Carruth)

Moskovitz, Dustin: The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership (Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman)

Negreanu, Daniel: The Four Agreements (Don Miquel Ruiz)

Newmark, Craig: Book of Longing (Leonard Cohen)

Noah Harari, Yuval: Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

Norman, Greg: The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (Dan Millman), Tools of Titans (Tim Ferriss), On China (Henry Kissinger), The Way of the Shark (Greg Norman)

Novogratz, Jacqueline: The Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison), Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe), A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)

O’Reilly, Tim: The Meaning of Culture (John Cowper Powys), The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu (translated by Witter Bynner), Rissa Kerguelen Saga (F.M. Busby)

Oswalt, Patton: The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin (Garret Keizer)

Paul, Caroline: The Stars (H.A. Rey)

Peters, Tom: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (Susan Cain), Wait: The Art and Science of Delay (Frank Partnoy), The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World With Kindness (Linda Kaplan Thaler), The Power of Small: Why Little Things Make All the Difference (Linda Kaplan Thaler), Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Cathy O’Neil), Retail Superstars: Inside the 25 Best Independent Stores in America (George Whalin), Small Giants: Companies That Chose to Be Great Instead of Big (Bo Burlingham), Simply Brilliant: How Great Organizations Do Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways (William C. Taylor), Hidden Champions of the Twenty-First Century: The Success Strategies of Unknown World Market Leaders (Hermann Simon)

Pitt, Turia: The Map That Changed the World (Simon Winchester), Born to Run (Christopher McDougall), The Barefoot Investor (Scott Pape), Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor E. Frankl)

Pressfield, Steven: History of The Peloponnesian War (Thucydides)

Ravikant, Naval: Total Freedom (Jiddu Krishnamurti), Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Yuval Noah Harari), The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge (Matt Ridley)

Ridley, Matt: The Double Helix (James D. Watson PhD), The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)

Ripert, Eric: 32 Yolks: From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line (Eric Ripert), The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho), A Plea for Animals (Matthieu Ricard), Cent éléphants sur un brin d’herbe/ One Hundred Elephants on a Blade of Grass (Dalai Lama)

Robinson, Adam: Zen in the Art of Archery (Eugen Herrigel), Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (Betty Edwards), The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (Joseph Chilton Pierce), The Act of Creation (Arthur Koestler), The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Julian Jaynes)

Rubin, Gretchen: A Pattern Language (Christopher Alexander), The Little House books (Laura Ingalls Wilder), The Chronicles of Narnia (C.S. Lewis), His Dark Materials books (Philip Pullman)

Rubin, Rick: Tao Te Ching (Translated by Stephen Mitchell), Wherever You Go, There You Are (Jon Kabat-Zinn), The Paleo Solution (Robb Wolf)

Sacks, Lord Rabbi: Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading (Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky)

Saint John, Bozoma: Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison)

Salzberg, Sharon: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Shunryu Suzuki)

Sharapova, Maria:  The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness: A True Story (Joel Ben Izzy)

Shea, Ryan: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Yuval Noah Harari), The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho), Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson), The Sovereign Individual (James Dale Davidson)

Silbermann, Ben: The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Steven Pinker), Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking (Samin Nosrat)

Slater, Kelly: The Tao of Health Sex and Longevity (Daniel Reid), The Prophet (Khalil Gibran)

Stiller, Ben: The Second Tree From the Corner (E. B. White), Nine Stories (J.D. Salinger), The Jaws Log (Carl Gottlieb)

Strauss, Neil: Ulysses (James Joyce), Under Saturn’s Shadow (James Hollis)

Szabo, Nick: The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)

Thorisdottir, Annie Mist: Iceland Small World (Sigurgeir Sigurjonsson), Iceland In All Its Splendour (Unnur Jökulsdóttir)

Ulmer, Kristen: The Wisdom of the Enneagram (Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson), The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle)

Urban, Tim: The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)

Vietor, Tommy: The Nightingale’s Song (Robert Timberg)

Von Teese, Dita: On Sex, Health, and E.S.P. (Mae West), It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken (Greg Behrendt and Amiira Ruotola-Behrendt), Your Beauty Mark (Dita Von Teese)

Waitzkin, Josh: On the Road (Jack Kerouac), Tao Te Ching (translated by Gia Fu Feng and Jane English), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert M. Pirsig), Ernest Hemingway On Writing (Larry W. Phillips)

Walker, Laura R.: Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Siddhartha Mukherjee), How to Cook Everything (Mark Bittman), Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (Rebecca Solnit), Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy), The Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir), The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich (Tim Ferriss)

Wilcox, Zooko: Good Calories, Bad Calories (Gary Taubes)

Williams, Jesse: Guns, Germs and Steel (Jared Diamond), The Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole), Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison), The Souls of Black Folk (W.E.B. DuBois), The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)

Wilink, Jocko: About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (Colonel David H. Hackworth)

Zamfir, Vlad: Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (Bertrand Russell), Complexity and Chaos (Dr. Roger White), The Lily: Evolution, Play, and the Power of a Free Society (Daniel Cloud)

Zelnick, Strauss: How to Win Friends and Influence People (Dale Carnegie)

###

Top 17 from Tools of Titans (with three or more mentions in the book):

1. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
2. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
3. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
4. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
5. The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
6. The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
7. Dune by Frank Herbert
8. Influence by Robert Cialdini
9. Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
10. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom
11. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman
12. The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss
13. The Bible
14. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
15. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
16. Watchmen by Alan Moore
17. Zero to One by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

The post Tribe of Mentors — Recommended Books from Mentors and Top Books from Tools of Titans appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

This post contains a few things that didn’t make it into Tools of Titans (#1 NYT), pulled from more than 300 cuts.

Please excuse casual grammar. This is how all people sound in-person, even uber-smart ones.  The below quotes weren’t copyedited for the book, as they didn’t make it in (though every person did), so any typos are mine. Bolding is also mine.

Hope you enjoy!

NAVAL RAVIKANT

*What are the things that you look for in founders, or the red flags that disqualify an investment or a founder.

“Number one, intelligence; you’ve got to be smart, which means you have to know what you’re doing, to some level. That’s a fuzzy thing but you talk to people and you kind of get a sense of do they know what they’re doing or not. Do they have insight, do they have specific knowledge? Have they thought about the problem deeply? It’s not about the age. It’s not how many years they’ve spent but just how deep is their understanding of what they’re about to do.”

“So intelligence is key. Energy, because being a founder is brutally difficult. It takes a long time and in the long run, the people who succeed are just the ones who persevere. So if someone runs out of energy or if they’re doing this in some hesitating, preliminary way where they’re looking for constant positive feedback, or if they’re easily thrown off course, then they’re not going to make it to the end, especially in the highly competitive startup context.”

“And finally is integrity. Because if you have someone who is high intelligence and high energy but they’re low integrity, what you’ve got is a hard working, smart crook. Especially in the startup world, things are very dynamic, they’re very fast moving. People are very independent. So if somebody wants to screw you over, they will find a way to do it. Fundamentally, ethics and integrity are what you do despite the money. If being ethical were profitable, everybody would do it. So what you’re looking for is a core sense of values that rises above and beyond the pure financial incentives.”

Here are the full episodes with Naval:

The Person I Call Most for Startup Advice (this episode was voted by ProductHunt as the #2 podcast episode of 2015, beaten out only by my episode with Jamie Foxx)

Naval Ravikant on Happiness Hacks and the 5 Chimps Theory

WHITNEY CUMMINGS

*Who are some of the most underrated comedians?

“Sebastian Maniscalco”

“Jerrod Carmichael is great.”

“Natasha Leggero is very funny. Tig Notaro, I’m sure you guys all know her by now. Chris D’Elia, I’m a fan. You probably already know him.”

“Neil Brennan, co-creator of the Chappelle Show with Dave Chappelle, has now started doing standup and is super incisive and funny.”

Here are the full episodes with Whitney:

Whitney Cummings on Turning Pain Into Creativity

The Return of the Money Shot

AMANDA PALMER

*Edit down & simplify

“And the true beauty of making a good TED talk or a good book is that you edit down, and you distill…”

“And then the goal was: how do we take this story that took a minute and a half to tell, which I thought I had got it as far down as possible, and condense it into 20 seconds?  Literally, what words, what single words could we use to convey that whole sentence?”

“With a single anecdote or a single detail, they emotionally take you right there, and they don’t need to say anymore, and they can get on to the next thing.”

“The best art is about economy. [..] the artist who’s just trying to do everything winds up unable to express whatever it is that’s of importance.”

“It was the ability to pare down to the impactful detail.  And that’s just true in art, as in life, for sure.”

Here is the full episode with Amanda:

Amanda Palmer on How to Fight, Meditate, and Make Good Art

MATT MULLENWEG

*Don’t B.S. — tell the truth

“I find the smartest guys in the world, and when you get to the very top echelon, they have perfect B.S. detectors.  It’s much better to say ‘I don’t know’ than to try to make up an answer to something you don’t actually know. It’s kind of refreshing, actually, that just honesty and transparency are – even when you’re raising north of a billion dollars – the best policy.”

Here are the full episodes with Matt:

Matt Mullenweg on Polyphasic Sleep, Tequila, and Building Billion-Dollar Companies

Matt Mullenweg: Characteristics and Practices of Successful Entrepreneurs

The Random Show Threesome — Tim Ferriss, Kevin Rose, and Matt Mullenweg

JOSH WAITZKIN

*Keystone habits recommended by Josh

“First of all, meditation, when we’re speaking about this theme of cognitive biases or basically observing your mental directions the moment that they set in. Meditation is as deep and as powerful a tool as I could possibly describe. Maybe six or seven years ago, when I was first talking about meditation with guys in the finance world [Editor: he coaches some of the best-performing hedge hedge fund managers of all time], it seemed like some woo-woo strange thing for them to take on. But as more and more people are integrating it into their process, you wouldn’t believe how many of the most powerful players in the world are meditating very deeply.”

Related:

“It’s one thing to learn skills, but the higher artist has to learn themes or meta-themes that will ultimately, spontaneously tap into the internalization of hundreds of what I would call ‘local habits.’ If you’re practicing quality, you’re deepening the muscle of quality and you’re also focusing the unconscious on that complexity, which we then tap first thing in the mornings [by journaling upon waking].”

[Editor’s note — But to make journaling work, you need to let problems go earlier in the day.] From later in that conversation:

“The very core idea is: when you go home, as best you can, unless you’re red-hot inspired, release your mind from the work. It’s very important to give your stress a recovery. [As a] core habit, you want to be turning it on and turning it off.”

“And you can teach people that turning it off is a huge part of teaching them to turn it on much more intensely. [Editor: Josh works with some of the top athletes in the world, like Marcelo Garcia in jiu-jitsu] Stress and recovery workouts, interval training, and meditation together are beautiful habits to develop to cultivate the art of turning it on and turning it off.”

“And then, thematically, this ties back into this internal proactive orientation, building a daily architecture which is around understanding your creative process as opposed to reacting to things, feeling guilty that you’re not working, really teaching people to tap into their internal compass.”

Here are the full episodes with Josh:

Episode #2 — Josh Waitzkin

Josh Waitzkin, The Prodigy Returns

Becoming the Best Version of You

RAMIT SETHI

“Well, one of my general life philosophies is do not try to be 40 before you are 40. It is funny how many of us we want to jump ahead and do all of these really sophisticated things, and I am no exception. Every time I start something new, I want to jump to what all the best people in the world are doing and try to copy them. But, of course, you have to go through the pain and the fire to be able to get there…”

Here are the full episodes with Ramit:

Ramit Sethi on Persuasion and Turning a Blog Into a Multi-Million-Dollar Business

How Creatives Should Negotiate

Becoming the Best Version of You

The post Tools of Titans — A Few Goodies from the Cutting Room Floor appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

You asked for it, so here it is…

A comprehensive index for the #1 New York Times bestseller, Tools of Titans!

We didn’t have room when it was first published, but I went back to the publisher and they burned the midnight oil to get it done (thanks, HMH!).

Give it a quick glance. I found it oddly fun to read by itself, and it can help you find nearly any type of advice imaginable, all by theme, category, and name. This index will be added to the ebook and print editions soon.

In the meantime, anyone who would like a PDF (and printable) version of the index can view it below or download it by clicking the Scribd link.

Hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading!

Tools of Titans Index — Tim Ferriss by tferriss on Scribd

The post Tools of Titans — Full, Comprehensive Index! appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

― Archilochus

Mental toughness can take many forms: resilience against attack, calmness in the face of uncertainty, persistence through pain, or focus amidst chaos.

Below are eight lessons from eight of the toughest human beings I know.

All are taken from the hundreds of tips and tactics in Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers.

#1 – IF YOU WANT TO BE TOUGHER, BE TOUGHER.

(Jocko Willink, former Navy SEAL Commander)

“If you want to be tougher mentally, it is simple: Be tougher. Don’t meditate on it.”

TIM: These words of Jocko’s helped one listener—a drug addict—get sober after many failed attempts. The simple logic struck a chord: “Being tougher” was, more than anything, a decision to be tougher. It’s possible to immediately “be tougher,” starting with your next decision. Have trouble saying “no” to dessert? Be tougher. Make that your starting decision. Feeling winded? Take the stairs anyway. Ditto. It doesn’t matter how small or big you start. If you want to be tougher, be tougher.

#2. I WASN’T THERE TO COMPETE. I WAS THERE TO WIN.

(Arnold Schwarzenegger)  

TIM: In my interview with Arnold, I brought up a photo of him at age 19, just before he won his first big competition, Junior Mr. Europe. I asked, “Your face was so confident compared to every other competitor. Where did that confidence come from?” He replied:

“My confidence came from my vision. . . . I am a big believer that if you have a very clear vision of where you want to go, then the rest of it is much easier. Because you always know why you are training 5 hours a day, you always know why you are pushing and going through the pain barrier, and why you have to eat more, and why you have to struggle more, and why you have to be more disciplined… I felt that I could win it, and that was what I was there for. I wasn’t there to compete. I was there to win.”

#3 – PUSH BEYOND, SHARE PRIVATION, TACKLE FEAR.

(4-Star General Stanley McChrystal)

TIM: The following from Gen. McChyrstal was in response to “What are three tests or practices from the military that civilians could use to help develop mental toughness?”:

“The first is to push yourself harder than you believe you’re capable of. You’ll find new depth inside yourself. The second is to put yourself in groups who share difficulties, discomfort. We used to call it ‘shared privation.’ [Definition of privation: a state in which things essential for human well-being such as food and warmth are scarce or lacking.] You’ll find that when you have been through that kind of difficult environment, you feel more strongly about that which you’re committed to. And finally, create some fear and make individuals overcome it.”

#4 – PUT FEAR IN LINE.

(Caroline Paul, luger, firefighter, and more)

TIM: In the 1990s, Caroline illegally climbed the Golden Gate Bridge, rising to ~760 feet on thin cables. She’d mentioned “putting fear in line” to me, and I asked her to dig into the specifics.

“I am not against fear. I think fear is definitely important. It’s there to keep us safe. But I do feel like some people give it too much priority. It’s one of the many things that we use to assess a situation. I am pro-bravery. That’s my paradigm.

Fear is just one of many things that are going on. For instance, when we climbed the bridge, which was five of us deciding we wanted to walk up that cable in the middle of the night. Please don’t do that, but we did. Talk about fear—you’re walking on a cable where you have to put one foot in front of the other until you’re basically as high as a 70-story building with nothing below you and . . . two thin wires on either side.

It’s just a walk, technically. Really, nothing’s going to happen unless some earthquake or catastrophic gust of wind hits. You’re going to be fine as long as you keep your mental state intact. In those situations, I look at all the emotions I’m feeling, which are anticipation, exhilaration, focus, confidence, fun, and fear. Then I take fear and say, ‘Well, how much priority am I going to give this? I really want to do this.’ I put it where it belongs. It’s like brick laying or making a stone wall. You fit the pieces together.”

#5 – IS THAT A DREAM OR A GOAL?

(Paul Levesque/Triple H, WWE superstar and executive)

“[Evander Holyfield] said that his coach at one point told him, something like his very first day, ‘You could be the next Muhammad Ali. Do you wanna do that?’ Evander said he had to ask his mom. He went home, he came back and said, ‘I wanna do that.’ The coach said, ‘Okay. Is that a dream or a goal? Because there’s a difference.’ “I’d never heard it said that way, but it stuck with me. So much so that I’ve said it to my kid now: ‘Is that a dream, or a goal? Because 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. I always looked at my stuff that way. The people who were successful models to me were people who had structured goals and then put a plan in place to get to those things. I think that’s what impressed me about Arnold [Schwarzenegger]. It’s what impressed me about my father-in-law [Vince McMahon].”

#6 – PAIN TOLERANCE CAN BE THE FORCE MULTIPLIER

(Amelia Boone, 3x World’s Toughest Mudder champion)

“I’m not the strongest. I’m not the fastest. But I’m really good at suffering.”

#7 – WHO DO YOU SURROUND YOURSELF WITH WHEN YOUR EGO FEELS THREATENED?

(Josh Waitzkin, chess prodigy, push hands world champion, first black belt under BJJ phenom Marcelo Garcia)

Back in the world of combat sports and Brazilian jiu-jitsu:

“It’s very interesting to observe who the top competitors pick out when they’re five rounds into the sparring sessions and they’re completely gassed. The ones who are on the steepest growth curve look for the hardest guy there—the one who might beat them up—while others look for someone they can take a break on.”

#8 – THE MAGIC OF THE SINGLE DECISION

(Christopher Sommer, former men’s gymnastics national team coach)

TIM: We all get frustrated. I am particularly prone to frustration when I see little or no progress after several weeks of practicing something new. Despite Coach Sommer’s regular reminders about connective-tissue adaptations taking 200 to 210 days, after a few weeks of flailing with “straddle L extensions,” I was at my wits’ end. Even after the third workout, I had renamed them “frog spaz” in my workout journal because that’s what I resembled while doing them: a frog being electrocuted.

Each week, I sent Coach Sommer videos of my workouts via Dropbox. In my accompanying notes at one point, I expressed how discouraging it was to make zero tangible progress with this exercise. Below is his email response, which I immediately saved to Evernote to review often.

It’s all great, but I’ve bolded my favorite part.

“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 time-wise, resulting in unnecessary frustration, due to a perceived feeling of failure. Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process.

The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home.

A blue collar work ethic married to indomitable will. It is literally that simple. Nothing interferes. Nothing can sway you from your purpose. Once the decision is made, simply refuse to budge.

Refuse to compromise.

And accept that quality long-term results require quality long-term focus. No emotion. No drama. No beating yourself up over small bumps in the road. Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process. This is especially important because you are going to spend far more time on the actual journey than with those all too brief moments of triumph at the end.

Certainly celebrate the moments of triumph when they occur. More importantly, learn from defeats when they happen. In fact, if you are not encountering defeat on a fairly regular basis, you are not trying hard enough. And absolutely refuse to accept less than your best.

Throw out a timeline. It will take what it takes.

If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not to a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made and adhered to. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift from your chosen goal. The single decision is one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.”

###

The above is a small sample of hundreds of tips in Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers.  Check it out!

Tools of Titans is available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Books-A-Million, iBooks, Indiebound, Indigo, and more.

The post How to Develop Mental Toughness: Lessons From 8 Titans appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

One of the questions I ask the most successful people I interview or meet is:

“What book have you gifted most to others, and why?”  

Below is a mega-list of the most-gifted and favorite books of 50-60 people like billionaire investor Peter Thiel, Tony Robbins, Arnold Schwarzenegger, elite athlete Amelia Boone, Malcolm Gladwell, legendary Navy SEAL Commander Jocko Willink, Dr. Brené Brown, music producer Rick Rubin, chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin, Glenn Beck, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, and many more.

Several books appear more than once, which might be where you start your own collection.

Important notes on the list:

• Bolded books are “most-gifted book” answers.
• Unbolded books were recommended or mentioned by the guest, but not specifically “most-gifted.”
• Many of these answers were updated or added by guests AFTER their interviews, or the “guests” haven’t been on my podcast, so they are only found in Tools of Titans.

For the answers from 120+ world-class performers, and much more, please check this out.

Enjoy!

***

Adams, Scott: Influence (Robert B. Cialdini)

Altucher, James: Jesus’ Son: Stories (Denis Johnson), The Kite Runner; A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini), Antifragile; The Black Swan; Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb), Brain Rules (John Medina), Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell), Freakonomics (Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner)

Andreessen, Marc: High Output Management; Only the Paranoid Survive (Andrew S. Grove), Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (Peter Thiel with Blake Masters), Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Neal Gabler), Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (David Michaelis), The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World (Randall E. Stross), Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life (Steve Martin), The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz)

Attia, Peter: Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson), Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard P. Feynman), 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works — A True Story (Dan Harris)

Beck, Glenn: The Book of Virtues (William J. Bennett), Winners Never Cheat (Jon Huntsman)

Bell, Mark: COAN: The Man, The Myth, The Method: The Life, Times & Training of the Greatest Powerlifter of All-Time (Marty Gallagher)

Belsky, Scott: Life’s Little Instruction Book (H. Jackson Brown, Jr.)

Betts, Richard: A Fan’s Notes (Frederick Exley), The Crossroads of Should and Must (Elle Luna)

Birbiglia, Mike: The Promise of Sleep (William C. Dement)

Boone, Amelia: House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski)

Boreta, Justin: Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Oliver Sacks), Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris), This Is Your Brain on Music (Daniel J. Levitin), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)

Brown, Brené: The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)

Callen, Bryan: Excellent Sheep (William Deresiewicz), Atlas Shrugged; The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand), The Power of Myth; The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell), The Genealogy of Morals (Friedrich Nietzsche), The Art of Learning (Josh Waitzkin), The 4-Hour Body; The 4-Hour Workweek (Tim Ferriss), Bad Science, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients (Ben Goldacre), Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005 (Thomas Ricks), The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11; Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Lawrence Wright), Symposium (Plato)

Chin, Jimmy: Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era (Eiji Yoshikawa and Charles Terry), A Guide to the I Ching (Carol K. Anthony), Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (Jon Krakauer)

Cho, Margaret: How to Be a Movie Star (William J. Mann)

Cummings, Whitney: Super Sad True Love Story (Gary Shteyngart), The Drama of the Gifted Child (Alice Miller), The Fantasy Bond (Robert W. Firestone), The Continuum Concept (Jean Liedloff)

D’Agostino, Dominic: Personal Power (Tony Robbins), Tripping Over the Truth (Travis Christofferson), The Language of God (Francis Collins), The Screwtape Letters (C.S. Lewis), Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer (Thomas Seyfried), Ketogenic Diabetes Diet: Type 2 Diabetes (Ellen Davis, MS and Keith Runyan, MD), Fight Cancer with a Ketogenic Diet (Ellen Davis, MS)

de Botton, Alain: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera), The Complete Essays (Michel de Montaigne), In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust)

De Sena, Joe: A Message to Garcia (Elbert Hubbard), Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand), Shōgun (James Clavell), The One Minute Manager (Kenneth H. Blanchard)

Dubner, Stephen: For adults: Levels of the Game (John McPhee); for kids: The Empty Pot (Demi)

Eisen, Jonathan: National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America (Jon L. Dunn and Jonathan Alderfer)

Fadiman, James: Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story; Tihkal: The Continuation (Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin)

Favreau, Jon: The Writer’s Journey (Christopher Vogler and Michele Montez), It Would Be So Nice If You Weren’t Here (Charles Grodin), The 4-Hour Body (Tim Ferriss), The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien), Kitchen Confidential (Anthony Bourdain)

Foxx, Jamie: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (James Allen)

Fussman, Cal: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez), Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates), Speak Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln: 21 Powerful Secrets of History’s Greatest Speakers (James C. Humes), A Feast of Snakes; Car (Harry Crews)

Ganju, Nick: Don’t Make Me Think (Steve Krug), How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business (Douglas W. Hubbard), How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking (Jordan Ellenberg), Getting to Yes (Roger Fisher and William Ury)

Gazzaley, Adam: Foundation (Isaac Asimov), The Reality Dysfunction (The Night’s Dawn Trilogy) (Peter F. Hamilton), Mountain Light (Galen Rowell)

Gladwell, Malcolm: Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Timothy D. Wilson), Merchant Princes: An Intimate History of Jewish Families Who Built Great Department Stores (Leon A. Harris), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Little Drummer’s Girl; The Russia House; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (John le Carré), The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (Michael Lewis), The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande), all of Lee Child’s books

Hamilton, Laird: The Bible, Natural Born Heroes (Christopher McDougall), Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien), Deep Survival (Laurence Gonzales), Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Richard Bach and Russell Munson), Dune (Frank Herbert)

Hoffman, Reid: Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values (Fred Kofman), Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari)

Holiday, Ryan: Meditations (Marcus Aurelius), The War of Art (Steven Pressfield), What Makes Sammy Run? (Budd Schulberg), Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow), How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Sarah Bakewell), The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King; Tough Jews (Rich Cohen), Edison: A Biography (Matthew Josephson), Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity (Brooks Simpson), Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)

Junger, Sebastian: At Play in the Fields of the Lord (Peter Matthiessen), Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari)

Kamkar, Samy: Influence (Robert Cialdini)

Kaskade: Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath (Ted Koppel)

Koppelman, Brian: What Makes Sammy Run? (Budd Schulberg), The Artist’s Way Morning Pages Journal (Julia Cameron), The War of Art (Steven Pressfield)

McChrystal, Stanley: Once an Eagle (Anton Myrer), The Road to Character (David Brooks)

Miller, BJ: Any picture book of Mark Rothko art.

Neistat, Casey: It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be (Paul Arden), The Second World War (John Keegan), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Malcolm X and Alex Haley)

Nemer, Jason: The Prophet (Kahlil Gibran), Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu)

Norton, Edward: Wind, Sand and Stars (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), Buddhism Without Beliefs (Stephen Batchelor), Shōgun (James Clavell), The Search for Modern China; The Death of Woman Wang (Jonathan Spence), “The Catastrophe of Success” (essay by Tennessee Williams), The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

Ohanian, Alexis: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (Jessica Livingston), Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (David Kushner)

Popova, Maria: Still Writing (Dani Shapiro), On the Shortness of Life (Seneca), The Republic (Plato), On the Move: A Life (Oliver Sacks), The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837–1861 (Henry David Thoreau), A Rap on Race (Margaret Mead and James Baldwin), On Science, Necessity and the Love of God: Essays (Simone Weil), Stumbling on Happiness (Daniel Gilbert), Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (Edward Abbey), Gathering Moss (Robin Wall Kimmerer)

Randall, Lisa: I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)

Reece, Gabby: Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand), The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)

Richman, Jessica: The Complete Short Stories (Ernest Hemingway)

Robbins, Tony: As a Man Thinketh (James Allen), Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor E. Frankl), The Fourth Turning; Generations (William Strauss), Slow Sex (Nicole Daedone), Mindset (Carol Dweck)

Rodriguez, Robert: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Simon Sinek)

Rose, Kevin: The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation (Thich Nhat Hanh), The Wisdom of Crowds (James Surowiecki)

Rubin, Rick: Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu, translation by Stephen Mitchell), Wherever You Go, There You Are (Jon Kabat-Zinn)

Schwarzenegger, Arnold: The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (Boris Johnson), Free to Choose (Milton Friedman), California (Kevin Starr)

Sethi, Ramit: Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson), The Social Animal (Elliot Aronson), Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got (Jay Abraham), Mindless Eating (Brian Wansink), The Robert Collier Letter Book (Robert Collier), Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time (Keith Ferrazzi), What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School (Mark H. McCormack), Iacocca: An Autobiography (Lee Iacocca), The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande)

Silva, Jason: TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Erik Davis), The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance (Steven Kotler), The 4-Hour Workweek (Tim Ferriss)

Skenes, Joshua: Cocktail Techniques (Kazuo Uyeda)

Sommer, Christopher: The Obstacle Is the Way (Ryan Holiday), the works of Robert Heinlein

Tan, Chade-Meng: What the Buddha Taught (Walpola Rahula), In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon (Bhikkhu Bodhi)

Thiel, Peter: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (René Girard)

von Ahn, Luis: Zero to One (Peter Thiel), The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz)

Waitzkin, Josh: On the Road; The Dharma Bums (Jack Kerouac), Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig), Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts), For Whom the Bell Tolls; The Old Man and the Sea; The Green Hills of Africa (Ernest Hemingway), Ernest Hemingway on Writing (Larry W. Phillips), Mindset (Carol Dweck), Dreaming Yourself Awake: Lucid Dreaming and Tibetan Dream Yoga for Insight and Transformation (B. Alan Wallace and Brian Hodel), The Drama of the Gifted Child (Alice Miller), Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (Sebastian Junger), Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (Angela Duckworth), Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool)

Willink, Jocko: About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (Colonel David H. Hackworth), Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Cormac McCarthy)

###

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

For more answers, tactics, habits, and routines from 120+ world-class performers, please check out my labor of love Tools of Titans.

Tools of Titans is available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Books-A-Million, iBooks, Indiebound, Indigo, and others. If you found the above interesting, I guarantee you’ll enjoy the whole thing.

Thanks for reading!

The post The Unusual Books That Shaped 50+ Billionaires, Mega-Bestselling Authors, and Other Prodigies appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The following is a sample chapter from my new book, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers. Any page numbers are from the print edition.

Audio version is first, then the full text is below that.

Enjoy!

• Listen onApple Podcasts
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• Listen to it on iTunes.
• Stream by clicking here.
• Download as an MP3 by right-clicking here and choosing “save as.”

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
— Mark Twain

Reality is largely negotiable.

If you stress-test the boundaries and experiment with the “impossibles,” you’ll quickly discover that most limitations are a fragile collection of socially reinforced rules you can choose to break at any time.

What follows are 17 questions that have dramatically changed my life. Each one is time-stamped, as they entered the picture at precise moments.

#1 — What if I did the opposite for 48 hours?

In 2000, I was selling mass data storage to CEOs and CTOs in my first job out of college. When I wasn’t driving my mom’s hand-me-down minivan to and from the office in San Jose, California, I was cold calling and cold emailing. “Smiling and dialing” was brutal. For the first few months, I flailed and failed (it didn’t help that my desk was wedged in a fire exit). Then, one day, I realized something: All of the sales guys made their sales calls between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Obvious, right? But that’s part one. Part two: I realized that all of the gatekeepers who kept me from the decision makers—CEOs and CTOs—also worked from 9 to 5. What if I did the opposite of all the other sales guys, just for 48 hours? I decided to take a Thursday and Friday and make sales calls only from 7 to 8:30 a.m. and 6 to 7:30 p.m. For the rest of the day, I focused on cold emails. It worked like gangbusters. The big boss often picked up the phone directly, and I began doing more experiments with “What if I did the opposite?”: What if I only asked questions instead of pitching? What if I studied technical material, so I sounded like an engineer instead of a sales guy? What if I ended my emails with “I totally understand if you’re too busy to reply, and thank you for reading this far,” instead of the usual “I look forward to your reply and speaking soon” presumptive BS? The experiments paid off. My last quarter in that job, I outsold the entire L.A. office of our biggest competitor, EMC.

#2 — What do I spend a silly amount of money on? How might I scratch my own itch?

In late 2000 and early 2001, I saw the writing on the wall: The startup I worked for was going to implode. Rounds of layoffs started and weren’t going to end. I wasn’t sure what to do, but I’d been bitten by the startup bug and intoxicated by Silicon Valley. To explore business opportunities, I didn’t do in-depth market research. I started with my credit card statement and asked myself, “What do I spend a silly amount of money on?” Where did I spend a disproportionate amount of my income? Where was I price insensitive? The answer was sports supplements. At the time, I was making less than $40K a year and spending $500 or more per month on supplements. It was insane, but dozens of my male friends were equally overboard. I already knew which ads got me to buy, which stores and websites I used to purchase goods, which bulletin boards I frequented, and all the rest. Could I create a product that would scratch my own itch? What was I currently cobbling together (I had enough science background to be dangerous) that I couldn’t conveniently find at retail? The result was a cognitive enhancer called BrainQUICKEN. Before everyone got fired, I begged my coworkers to each prepay for a bottle, which gave me enough money to hire chemists, a regulatory consultant, and do a tiny manufacturing run. I was off to the races.

#3 — What would I do/have/be if I had $10 million? What’s my real TMI?

In 2004, I was doing better than ever financially, and BrainQUICKEN was distributed in perhaps a dozen countries. The problem? I was running on caffeine, working 15-hour days, and constantly on the verge of meltdown. My girlfriend, who I expected to marry, left me due to the workaholism. Over the next 6 months of treading water and feeling trapped, I realized I had to restructure the business or shut it down—it was literally killing me. This is when I began journaling on a few questions, including “What would I want to do, have, and be if I had $10 million in the bank?” and “What’s my real target monthly income (TMI)?” For the latter, in other words: How much does my dream life—the stuff I’m deferring for “retirement”—really cost if I pay on a monthly basis? (See fourhourworkweek.com/tmi) After running the numbers, most of my fantasies were far more affordable than I’d expected. Perhaps I didn’t need to keep grinding and building? Perhaps I needed more time and mobility, not more income? This made me think that maybe, just maybe, I could afford to be happy and not just “successful.” I decided to take a long overseas trip.

#4 — What are the worst things that could happen? Could I get back here?

These questions, also from 2004, are perhaps the most important of all, so they get their own chapter. (See “fear-setting” on page 463 in Tools of Titans.)

#5 — If I could only work 2 hours per week on my business, what would I do?

After removing anxieties about the trip with fear-setting, the next practical step was removing myself as the bottleneck in my business. Alas, “how can I not be a bottleneck in my own business?” isn’t a good question. After reading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber and The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch, I decided that extreme questions were the forcing function I needed. The question I found most helpful was, “If I could only work 2 hours per week on my business, what would I do?” Honestly speaking, it was more like, “Yes, I know it’s impossible, but if you had a gun to your head or contracted some horrible disease, and you had to limit work to 2 hours per week, what would you do to keep things afloat?” The 80/20 principle, also known as Pareto’s law, is the primary tool in this case. It dictates that 80% (or more) of your desired outcomes are the result of 20% (or less) of your activities and inputs. Here are two related questions I personally used: “What 20% of customers/products/regions are producing 80% of the profit? What factors or shared characteristics might account for this?” Many such questions later, I began making changes: “firing” my highest-maintenance customers; putting more than 90% of my retail customers on autopilot with simple terms and standardized order processes; and deepening relationships (and increasing order sizes) with my 3 to 5 highest-profit, lowest-headache customers. That all led to . . .

#6 — What if I let them make decisions up to $100? $500? $1,000?

This question allowed me to take my customer service workload from 40 to 60 hours per week to less than 2 hours per week. Until mid-2004, I was the sole decision maker. For instance, if a professional athlete overseas needed our product overnighted with special customs forms, I would get an email or phone call from one of my fulfillment centers: “How should we handle this? What would you like to charge?” These unusual “edge cases” might seem like rare exceptions, but they were a daily occurrence. Dozens per week hit me, on top of everything else. The fix: I sent an email to all of my direct reports along the lines of “From this point forward, please don’t contact for me with questions about A, B, or C. I trust you. If it involves less than $100, please make the decision yourself and take a note (the situation, how you handled it, what it cost) in one document, so we can review and adjust each week. Just focus on making our customers happy.” I expected the worst, and guess what? Everything worked, minus a few expected hiccups here and there. I later increased the threshold to $500, then $1,000, and the “reviews” of decisions went from weekly, to monthly, to quarterly, to—once people were polished—effectively never. This experience underscored two things for me: 1) To get huge, good things done, you need to be okay with letting the small, bad things happen. 2) People’s IQs seem to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.

#7 — What’s the least crowded channel?

Fast-forward to December 26, 2006. I’ve finished writing The 4-Hour Workweek, and I sit down after a lovely Christmas to think about the upcoming April launch. What to do? I had no idea, so I tracked down roughly a dozen best-selling authors. I asked each questions like, “What were the biggest wastes of time and money for your last book launch? What would you never do again? What would you do more of? If you had to choose one place to focus $10,000, where would you focus?”

I heard one word repeatedly: blogs. They were apparently both very powerful and under-appreciated. My first question was, “What the hell is a blog?” My next questions were “How are people currently trying to reach bloggers?” and “What’s the least crowded channel?” The people pitching bloggers were generally using email first and phone second. Even though those were my strengths, I decided to experiment with in-person meetings at conferences. Why? Because I felt my odds would be better as one out of five people in a lounge, rather than one email out of 500 emails in an overflowing inbox. I packed my bags and headed to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show in January, which had more than 150,000 attendees in 2005. It’s like the Super Bowl of technology releases, where all the geeks get to play with new toys. I never even walked in the front door. I parked myself at the offsite Seagate-sponsored BlogHaus lounge, where bloggers were invited to relax, recharge their laptops, and drink free booze. I sipped alcohol, asked a lot of dumb questions, and never overtly pitched. I only mentioned the book if someone asked me why I was there (answer: “I just finished my first book, and I’m really nervous about the launch. I’m here to learn more about blogs and technology”). Famous tech blogger Robert Scoble later described my intricate marketing plan as “get drunk with bloggers.” It worked surprisingly well.

#8 — What if I couldn’t pitch my product directly?

During the 2007 book launch, I quickly found that most media rightly don’t give a rat’s ass about book launches. They care about stories, not announcements, so I asked myself, “What if I couldn’t pitch my product directly? What if I had to sell around the product?” Well, I could showcase people from the book who’ve completely redesigned their lives (human interest); I could write about unrelated crazy experiments, but drive people to my book-focused website (Google “Geek to Freak” to see the result. It was my first-ever viral blog post); I could popularize a new term and aim for pop culture (see “lifestyle design” on page 278 in Tools of Titans); I could go meta and make the launch itself a news item (I also did this with my video “book trailer” for The 4-Hour Body, as well as the BitTorrent partnership for The 4-Hour Chef). People don’t like being sold products, but we all like being told stories. Work on the latter.

#9 — What if I created my own real-world MBA?

This kicked off in 2007 to 2008. See page 250 in Tools of Titans for full details.

#10 — Do I need to make it back the way I lost it?

In 2008, I owned a home in San Jose, California, and its value cratered. More accurately, the bank owned the home and I had an ill-conceived adjustable-rate mortgage. On top of that, I was on the cusp of moving to San Francisco. To sell would have meant a $150,000 loss. Ultimately, I picked up and moved to San Francisco, regardless, leaving my San Jose home empty.

For months, friends pressured me to rent it, emphasizing how I was flushing money down the toilet otherwise. I eventually buckled and followed their advice. Even with a property management company, regular headaches and paperwork ensued. Regret followed. One introspective night, I had some wine and asked myself: “Do I really need to make money back the same way I’m losing it?” If you lose $1,000 at the blackjack table, should you try and recoup it there? Probably not. If I’m “losing” money via the mortgage payments on an empty house, do I really need to cover it by renting the house itself? No, I decided. I could much more easily create income elsewhere (e.g., speaking gigs, consulting, etc.) to put me in the black. Humans are very vulnerable to a cognitive bias called “anchoring,” whether in real estate, stocks, or otherwise. I am no exception. I made a study of this (a lot of good investors like Think Twice by Michael Mauboussin), and shortly thereafter sold my San Jose house at a large loss. Once my attention and mind space was freed up, I quickly made it back elsewhere.

#11 — What if I could only subtract to solve problems?

From 2008 to 2009, I began to ask myself, “What if I could only subtract to solve problems?” when advising startups. Instead of answering, “What should we do?” I tried first to hone in on answering, “What should we simplify?” For instance, I always wanted to tighten the conversion fishing net (the percentage of visitors who sign up or buy) before driving a ton of traffic to one of my portfolio companies. One of the first dozen startups I worked with was named Gyminee. It was rebranded Daily Burn, and at the time, they didn’t have enough manpower to do a complete redesign of the site. Adding new elements would’ve been time-consuming, but removing them wasn’t. As a test, we eliminated roughly 70% of the “above the fold” clickable elements on their homepage, focusing on the single most valuable click. Conversions immediately improved 21.1%. That quick-and-dirty test informed later decisions for much more expensive development. The founders, Andy Smith and Stephen Blankenship, made a lot of great decisions, and the company was acquired by IAC in 2010. I’ve since applied this “What if I could only subtract . . . ?” to my life in many areas, and I sometimes rephrase it as “What should I put on my not-to-do list?”

#12 — What might I put in place to allow me to go off the grid for 4 to 8 weeks, with no phone or email?

Though wordy, I have asked variations of this question many times since 2004. It used to end with, “. . . allow me to go on vacation for 4 to 8 weeks,” but that’s no longer enough. Given the spread of broadband, it’s extremely easy to take a “vacation” to Brazil or Japan and still work nonstop on your business via laptop. This kind of subtle self-deception is a time bomb.

For the last 5 years, I’ve asked myself, in effect, “What can I put in place so that I can go completely off the grid for 4 to 8 weeks?” To entrepreneurs who are feeling burned out, this is also the question I pose most often. Two weeks isn’t enough, as you can let fires erupt and then attempt to repair things when you return. Four to eight weeks (or more) doesn’t allow you to be a firefighter. It forces you to put systems and policies in place, ditch ad-hoc email-based triage, empower other people with rules and tools, separate the critical few from the trivial many, and otherwise create a machine that doesn’t require you behind the driver’s wheel 24/7.

Here’s the most important point: The systems far outlive the vacation, and when you come home, you’ll realize that you’ve taken your business (and life) to the next level. This is only possible if you work on your business instead of in your business, as Michael Gerber might say.

#13 — Am I hunting antelope or field mice?

I lifted this question around 2012 from former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich. I read about it in Buck Up, Suck Up . . . and Come Back When You Foul Up: 12 Winning Secrets from the War Room, written by James Carville and Paul Begala, the political strategists behind Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign “war room.” Here’s the excerpt that stuck with me:

Newt Gingrich is one of the most successful political leaders of our time. Yes, we disagreed with virtually everything he did, but this is a book about strategy, not ideology. And we’ve got to give Newt his due. His strategic ability—his relentless focus on capturing the House of Representatives for the Republicans—led to one of the biggest political landslides in American history.

Now that he’s in the private sector, Newt uses a brilliant illustration to explain the need to focus on the big things and let the little stuff slide: the analogy of the field mice and the antelope. A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope. The distinction is important. Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice? In the short term it might give you a nice, rewarding feeling. But in the long run you’re going to die. So ask yourself at the end of the day, “Did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?”

Another way I often approach this is to look at my to-do list and ask: “Which one of these, if done, would render all the rest either easier or completely irrelevant?”

#14 — Could it be that everything is fine and complete as is?

Since starting deep work with “plant medicines” in 2013 (see James Fadiman, page 100), I’ve doubled and tripled down on cultivating more daily appreciation and present-state awareness. The above is one of the questions I ask myself. It’s accompanied by complementary tools and rituals like the 5-Minute Journal (page 146), the Jar of Awesome (page 570), and thinking of “daily wins” before bed à la Peter Diamandis (page 373). To reiterate what I’ve said elsewhere in this book, type-A personalities have goal pursuit as default hardwiring. This is excellent for producing achievement, but also anxiety, as you’re constantly future-focused. I’ve personally decided that achievement is no more than a passing grade in life. It’s a C+ that gets you limping along to the next grade. For anything more, and certainly for anything approaching happiness, you have to want what you already have.

#15 — What would this look like if it were easy?

This question and the next both came about in 2015. These days, more than any other question, I’m asking “What would this look like if it were easy?” If I feel stressed, stretched thin, or overwhelmed, it’s usually because I’m overcomplicating something or failing to take the simple/easy path because I feel I should be trying “harder” (old habits die hard).

#16 — How can I throw money at this problem? How can I “waste” money to improve the quality of my life?

This is somewhat self-explanatory. Dan Sullivan is the founder and president of a company called Strategic Coach that has saved the sanity of many serial entrepreneurs I know. One of Dan’s sayings is: “If you’ve got enough money to solve the problem, you don’t have the problem.” In the beginning of your career, you spend time to earn money. Once you hit your stride in any capacity, you should spend money to earn time, as the latter is nonrenewable. It can be hard to make and maintain this gear shift, so the above question is in my regular journaling rotation.

#17 — No hurry, no pause.

This isn’t a question—it’s a fundamental reset. “No hurry, no pause” was introduced to me by Jenny Sauer-Klein (jennysauerklein.com), who, along with Jason Nemer (page 46), co-created AcroYoga. The expression is one of the “9 Principles of Harmony” from Breema, a form of bodywork she studied for many years. I routinely write “No hurry, no pause” at the top of my notebooks as a daily reminder. In effect, it’s shorthand for Derek Sivers’s story of the 45-minute versus 43-minute bike ride (page 190)—you don’t need to go through life huffing and puffing, straining and red-faced. You can get 95% of the results you want by calmly putting one foot in front of the other. One former Navy SEAL friend recently texted me a principle used in their training: “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.”

Perhaps I’m just getting old, but my definition of luxury has changed over time. Now, it’s not about owning a lot of stuff. Luxury, to me, is feeling unrushed. No hurry, no pause.

***

So, kids, those are my questions. May you find and create many of your own.

Be sure to look for simple solutions.

If the answer isn’t simple, it’s probably not the right answer.

###

Tools of Titans is available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Books-A-Million, iBooks, Indiebound, Indigo, and more. If you enjoyed the above, I guarantee you’ll enjoy the whole thing. Thanks for reading!

The post Testing The "Impossible": 17 Questions That Changed My Life (#206) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Arnold Schwarzenegger–the freaking Terminator–was kind enough to write the Foreword for Tools of Titans. Whaaat?! Seriously, I have to pinch myself.

The more time I spend with Arnold and his team, the more impressed I am.  The more I study his life, the more I want to think bigger, stretch my limits, and smile at the naysayers of life. His habits, decisions, philosophies, and routines are endlessly fascinating, which I explore in ToT.

Arnold, thank you. Danke sehr!

Now, without further ado, here is the Foreword for Tools of Titans by Arnold, which could also be titled “I Am Not A Self-Made Man.”

Enter Arnold

I am not a self-made man.

Every time I give a speech at a business conference, or speak to college students, or do a Reddit AMA, someone says it.

“Governor/Governator/Arnold/Arnie/Schwarzie/Schnitzel (depending on where I am), as a self-made man, what’s your blueprint for success?”

They’re always shocked when I thank them for the compliment but say, “I am not a self-made man. I got a lot of help.”

It is true that I grew up in Austria without plumbing. It is true that I moved to America alone with just a gym bag. And it is true that I worked as a bricklayer and invested in real estate to become a millionaire before I ever swung the sword in Conan the Barbarian.

But it is not true that I am self-made. Like everyone, to get to where I am, I stood on the shoulders of giants. My life was built on a foundation of parents, coaches, and teachers; of kind souls who lent couches or gym back rooms where I could sleep; of mentors who shared wisdom and advice; of idols who motivated me from the pages of magazines (and, as my life grew, from personal interaction).

I had a big vision, and I had fire in my belly. But I would never have gotten anywhere without my mother helping me with my homework (and smacking me when I wasn’t ready to study), without my father telling me to “be useful,” without teachers who explained how to sell, or without coaches who taught me the fundamentals of weight lifting.

If I had never seen a magazine with Reg Park on the cover and read about his transition from Mr. Universe to playing Hercules on the big screen, I might still be yodeling in the Austrian Alps. I knew I wanted to leave Austria, and I knew that America was exactly where I belonged, but Reg put fuel on the fire and gave me my blueprint.

Joe Weider brought me to America and took me under his wing, promoting my bodybuilding career and teaching me about business. Lucille Ball took a huge chance and called me to guest star in a special that was my first big break in Hollywood. And in 2003, without the help of 4,206,284 Californians, I would never have been elected Governor of the great state of California.

So how can I ever claim to be self-made? To accept that mantle discounts every person and every piece of advice that got me here. And it gives the wrong impression — that you can do it alone.

I couldn’t. And odds are, you can’t either.

We all need fuel. Without the assistance, advice, and inspiration of others, the gears of our mind grind to a halt, and we’re stuck with nowhere to go. I have been blessed to find mentors and idols at every step of my life, and I’ve been lucky to meet many of them.

From Joe Weider to Nelson Mandela, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Muhammad Ali, from Andy Warhol to George H.W. Bush, I have never been shy about seeking wisdom from others to pour fuel on my fire.

You have probably listened to Tim’s podcasts. (I particularly recommend the one with the charming bodybuilder with the Austrian accent.) He has used his platform to bring you the wisdom of a diverse cast of characters in business, entertainment, and sports. I bet you’ve learned something from them — and oftentimes, I bet you picked up something you didn’t expect.

Whether it’s a morning routine, or a philosophy or training tip, or just motivation to get through your day, there isn’t a person on this planet who doesn’t benefit from a little outside help. I’ve always treated the world as my classroom, soaking up lessons and stories to fuel my path forward. I hope you do the same.

The worst thing you can ever do is think that you know enough.

Never stop learning. Ever.

That’s why you bought this book. You know that wherever you are in life, there will be moments when you need outside motivation and insight. There will be times when you don’t have the answer, or the drive, and you’re forced to look beyond yourself.

You can admit that you can’t do it alone. I certainly can’t. No one can.

Now, turn the page and learn something.

— Arnold Schwarzenegger

###

Tools of Titans is available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Books-A-Million, iBooks, Indiebound, Indigo, and more.

The post Tools of Titans Foreword — Arnold Schwarzenegger!!! "I Am Not A Self-Made Man" appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

This blog post will share the first chapter in my new book, Tools of Titans. It’s been nearly five years since my last book.

But before we get to that, a short story…

Three weeks before my book deadline, I was burning the midnight oil on rural Long Island. I’d set up a treadmill desk and purchased endless supplies of yerba mate tea, powdered MCT oil, and other assorted goodies to keep me sharp at 3am.

Joining me in the insanity was Kamal Ravikant, a close friend. He’d just finished his first novel and volunteered to help proofread chapters with fresh eyes. During our first day together, we rotated between reading, editing, and sauna breaks.

Kamal was uncharacteristically quiet, which made me nervous.

Had I screwed up the structure? Were the profiles hard to read? He kept his eyes on the screen, and I kept my insecurities to myself. We continued into dusk and, soon, it was dark outside. Eventually, we popped a bottle of wine in the living room to relax for 30 minutes before diving back in. It was at this point that I couldn’t help myself — I asked Kamal how his proofing was going. He paused, smiled, and looked at me:

“You know, Tim, I’ve given The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body to specific friends. One might want to start a business, another might want to lose a few pounds. But my God… This book applies to everyone.”

I smiled and he took a swig of wine:

“I mean, look,” he pointed at his phone, “I’ve been taking notes on new things to do and try, starting tomorrow. I’ve ordered 11 things on Amazon Prime so I can start using them as soon as I get home. There is so much gold here. The truth is that I feel like I’ve already improved. I’d buy it for anyone, even my mom.”

Flash forward to today — I couldn’t be happier with how Tools of Titans has turned out.

Just three notes before the sample chapter:

– Even if you’ve heard every podcast episode, there is a ton of new content in this book. New recommendations and details from past guests, new “guests” you haven’t heard, new content from me, and much more.

– I rarely make direct “asks,” but I will here. If you’ve benefited from any of my work in the past, including the blog (700+ free posts) or podcast (~200 free episodes), please grab Tools of Titans for yourself and consider it for your family, friends, or employees. It’s one hell of a holiday gift. I can promise you that. It delivers.

– I am NOT planning on doing an audiobook version anytime soon. More to come on this, as I have some crazy ideas, but suffice to say: don’t wait for audio. Please grab the print and/or ebook version, and don’t miss the illustrations.

Now, please enjoy this little sample to whet your appetite…

READ THIS FIRST—HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

“Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them first.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.”

— W.H. Auden

I’m a compulsive note-taker.

To wit, I have recorded nearly every workout since age 18 or so. Roughly 8 feet of shelf space in my home is occupied by spine upon spine of notebook upon notebook. That, mind you, is one subject. It extends to dozens. Some people would call this OCD, and many would consider it a manic wild goose chase. I view it simply: It is the collection of my life’s recipes.

My goal is to learn things once and use them forever.

For instance, let’s say I stumble upon a picture of myself from June 5, 2007, and I think, “I really wish I looked like that again.” No problem. I’ll crack open a dusty volume from 2007, review the 8 weeks of training and food logs preceding June 5, repeat them, and—voilà—end up looking nearly the same as my younger self (minus the hair). It’s not always that easy, but it often is.

This book, like my others, is a compendium of recipes for high performance that I gathered for my own use. There’s one big difference, though—I never planned on publishing this one.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a café in Paris overlooking the Luxembourg Garden, just off of Rue Saint-Jacques. Rue Saint-Jacques is likely the oldest road in Paris, and it has a rich literary history. Victor Hugo lived a few blocks from where I’m sitting. Gertrude Stein drank coffee and F. Scott Fitzgerald socialized within a stone’s throw. Hemingway wandered up and down the sidewalks, his books percolating in his mind, wine no doubt percolating in his blood.

I came to France to take a break from everything. No social media, no email, no social commitments, no set plans . . . except for one project. The month had been set aside to review all of the lessons I’d learned from nearly 200 world-class performers I’d interviewed on The Tim Ferriss Show, which has more than 90,000,000 downloads. The guests included chess prodigies, movie stars, four-star generals, pro athletes, and hedge fund managers. It was a motley crew.

More than a handful of them had since become collaborators in business and creative projects, spanning from investments to indie film. As a result, I’d absorbed a lot of their wisdom outside of our recordings, whether over workouts, wine-infused jam sessions, text message exchanges, dinners, or late-night phone calls. In every case, I’d gotten to know them well beyond the superficial headlines in the media.

My life had already improved in every area as a result of the lessons I could remember. But that was the tip of the iceberg. The majority of the gems were still lodged in thousands of pages of transcripts and hand-scribbled notes. More than anything, I longed for the chance to distill everything into a playbook.

So, I’d set aside an entire month for review (and, if I’m being honest, pain au chocolat), to put together the ultimate CliffsNotes for myself. It would be the notebook to end all notebooks. Something that could help me in minutes but be read for a lifetime.

That was the lofty goal, at least, and I wasn’t sure what the result would be.

Within weeks of starting, the experience exceeded all expectations. No matter the situation I found myself in, something in this book was able to help. Now, when I’m feeling stuck, trapped, desperate, angry, conflicted, or simply unclear, the first thing I do is flip through these pages with a strong cup of coffee in hand. So far, the needed medicine has popped out within 20 minutes of revisiting these friends, who will now become your friends. Need a reassuring pat on the back? There’s someone for that. An unapologetic slap in the face? Plenty of people for that, too. Someone to explain why your fears are unfounded… or why your excuses are bullshit? Done.

There are a lot of powerful quotes, but this book is much more than a compilation of quotes. It is a toolkit for changing your life.

There are many books full of interviews. This is different because I don’t view myself as an interviewer. I view myself as an experimenter. If I can’t test something or replicate results in the messy reality of everyday life, I’m not interested. Everything in these pages has been vetted, explored, and applied to my own life in some fashion. I’ve used dozens of these tactics and philosophies in high-stakes negotiations, high-risk environments, or large business dealings. The lessons have made me millions of dollars and saved me years of wasted effort and frustration. They work when you need them most.

Some applications are obvious at first glance, while others are subtle and will provoke a “Holy shit, now I get it!” realization weeks later, while you’re daydreaming in the shower or about to fall asleep.

Many of the one-liners teach volumes. Some summarize excellence in an entire field in one sentence. As Josh Waitzkin (page 577), chess prodigy and the inspiration behind Searching for Bobby Fischer, might put it, these bite-sized learnings are a way to “learn the macro from the micro.” The process of piecing them together was revelatory. If I thought I saw “the Matrix” before, I was mistaken, or I was only seeing 10% of it. Still, even that 10%—“islands” of notes on individual mentors—had already changed my life and helped me 10x my results. But after revisiting more than a hundred minds as part of the same fabric, things got very interesting very quickly. For the movie nerds among you, it was like the end of The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects: “The red door knob! The fucking Kobayashi coffee cup! How did I not notice that?! It was right in front of me the whole time!”

To help you see the same, I’ve done my best to weave patterns together throughout the book, noting where guests have complementary habits, beliefs, and recommendations.

The completed jigsaw puzzle is much greater than the sum of its parts.

WHAT MAKES THESE PEOPLE DIFFERENT?

“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”

— Pierre-Marc-Gaston de Lévis

These world-class performers don’t have superpowers.

The rules they’ve crafted for themselves allow the bending of reality to such an extent that it may seem that way, but they’ve learned how to do this, and so can you. These “rules” are often uncommon habits and bigger questions.

In a surprising number of cases, the power is in the absurd. The more absurd, the more “impossible” the question, the more profound the answers. Take, for instance, a question that serial billionaire Peter Thiel likes to ask himself and others:

“If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months?”

For purposes of illustration here, I might reword that to:

“What might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next 6 months, if you had a gun against your head?”

Now, let’s pause. Do I expect you to take 10 seconds to ponder this and then magically accomplish 10 years’ worth of dreams in the next few months? No, I don’t. But I do expect that the question will productively break your mind, like a butterfly shattering a chrysalis to emerge with new capabilities. The “normal” systems you have in place, the social rules you’ve forced upon yourself, the standard frameworks—they don’t work when answering a question like this. You are forced to shed artificial constraints, like shedding a skin, to realize that you had the ability to renegotiate your reality all along. It just takes practice.

My suggestion is that you spend real time with the questions you find most ridiculous in this book. Thirty minutes of stream-of-consciousness journaling (page 224) could change your life.

On top of that, while the world is a gold mine, you need to go digging in other people’s heads to unearth riches. Questions are your pickaxes and competitive advantage. This book will give you an arsenal to choose from.

PERFORMANCE-ENHANCING DETAILS

When organizing all of the material for myself, I didn’t want an onerous 37-step program.

I wanted low-hanging fruit with immediate returns. Think of the bite-sized rules within these pages as PEDs—performance-enhancing details. They can be added to any training regimen (read here: different careers, personal preferences, unique responsibilities, etc.) to pour gasoline on the fire of progress.

Fortunately, 10x results don’t always require 10x effort. Big changes can come in small packages. To dramatically change your life, you don’t need to run a 100-mile race, get a PhD, or completely reinvent yourself. It’s the small things, done consistently, that are the big things (e.g., “red teaming” once per quarter, Tara Brach’s guided meditations, strategic fasting or exogenous ketones, etc.).

“Tool” is defined broadly in this book. It includes routines, books, common self-talk, supplements, favorite questions, and much more.

WHAT DO THEY HAVE IN COMMON?

In this book, you’ll naturally look for common habits and recommendations, and you should. Here are a few patterns, some odder than others:

• More than 80% of the interviewees have some form of daily mindfulness or meditation practice
• A surprising number of males (not females) over 45 never eat breakfast, or eat only the scantiest of fare (e.g., Laird Hamilton, page 92; General Stanley McChrystal, page 435)
• Many use the ChiliPad device for cooling at bedtime
• Rave reviews of the books Sapiens, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Influence, and Man’s Search for Meaning, among others
• The habit of listening to single songs on repeat for focus (page 507)
• Nearly everyone has done some form of “spec” work (completing projects on their own time and dime, then submitting them to prospective buyers)
• The belief that “failure is not durable” (see Robert Rodriguez, page 628) or variants thereof
• Almost every guest has been able to take obvious “weaknesses” and turn them into huge competitive advantages (see Arnold Schwarzenegger, page 176)

Of course, I will help you connect these dots, but that’s less than half of the value of this book. Some of the most encouraging workarounds are found in the outliers. I want you to look for the black sheep who fit your unique idiosyncrasies. Keep an eye out for the non-traditional paths, like Shay Carl’s journey from manual laborer to YouTube star to co-founder of a startup sold for nearly $1 billion (page 441). The variation is the consistency. As a software engineer might say, “That’s not a bug. It’s a feature!”

Borrow liberally, combine uniquely, and create your own bespoke blueprint.

THIS BOOK IS A BUFFET—HERE’S HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF IT

RULE #1: SKIP LIBERALLY. 

I want you to skip anything that doesn’t grab you. This book should be fun to read, and it’s a buffet to choose from. Don’t suffer through anything. If you hate shrimp, don’t eat the goddamn shrimp. Treat it as a choose-your-own-adventure guide, as that’s how I’ve written it. My goal is for each reader to like 50%, love 25%, and never forget 10%. Here’s why: For the millions who’ve heard the podcast, and the dozens who proofread this book, the 50/25/10 highlights are completely different for every person. It’s blown my mind.

I’ve even had multiple guests in this book—people who are the best at what they do—proofread the same profile, answering my question of “Which 10% would you absolutely keep, and which 10% would you absolutely cut?” Oftentimes, the 10% “must keep” of one person was the exact “must cut” of someone else! This is not one-size-fits-all. I expect you to discard plenty. Read what you enjoy.

RULE #2: SKIP, BUT DO SO INTELLIGENTLY.

All that said, take a brief mental note of anything you skip. Perhaps put a little dot in the corner of the page or highlight the headline.

Could it be that skipping and glossing over precisely these topics or questions has created blind spots, bottlenecks, and unresolved issues in your life? That was certainly true for me.

If you decide to flip past something, note it, return to it later at some point, and ask yourself, “Why did I skip this?” Did it offend you? Seem beneath you? Seem too difficult? And did you arrive at that by thinking it through, or is it a reflection of biases inherited from your parents, family, friends, and others? Very often, “our” beliefs are not our own.

This type of practice is how you create yourself, instead of seeking to discover yourself. There is value in the latter, but it’s mostly past-tense: It’s a rearview mirror. Looking out the windshield is how you get where you want to go.

JUST REMEMBER TWO PRINCIPLES

I was recently standing in Place Louis Aragon, a shaded outdoor nook on the River Seine, having a picnic with writing students from the Paris American Academy. One woman pulled me aside and asked what I hoped to convey in this book, at the core. Seconds later, we were pulled back into the fray, as the attendees were taking turns talking about the circuitous paths that brought them there that day. Nearly everyone had a story of wanting to come to Paris for years—in some cases, 30 to 40 years—but assuming it was impossible.

Listening to their stories, I pulled out a scrap of paper and jotted down my answer to her question. In this book, at its core, I want to convey the following:

1. Success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits. Someone else has done your version of “success” before, and often, many have done something similar. “But,” you might ask, “what about a first, like colonizing Mars?” There are still recipes. Look at empire building of other types, look at the biggest decisions in the life of Robert Moses (read The Power Broker), or simply find someone who stepped up to do great things that were deemed impossible at the time (e.g., Walt Disney). There is shared DNA you can borrow.

2. The superheroes you have in your mind (idols, icons, titans, billionaires, etc.) are nearly all walking flaws who’ve maximized 1 or 2 strengths. Humans are imperfect creatures. You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them. To make this crystal-clear, I’ve deliberately included two sections in this book (pages 197 and 616) that will make you think: “Wow, Tim Ferriss is a mess. How the hell does he ever get anything done?” Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. The heroes in this book are no different. Everyone struggles. Take solace in that.

A FEW IMPORTANT NOTES ON FORMAT

STRUCTURE

This book is comprised of three sections: Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise. Of course, there is tremendous overlap across the sections, as the pieces are interdependent. In fact, you could think of the three as a tripod upon which life is balanced. One needs all three to have any sustainable success or happiness. “Wealthy,” in the context of this book, also means much more than money. It extends to abundance in time, relationships, and more.

My original intention with The 4-Hour Workweek (4HWW), The 4-Hour Body (4HB), and The 4-Hour Chef (4HC) was to create a trilogy themed after Ben Franklin’s famous quote: “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

People constantly ask me, “What would you put in The 4-Hour Workweek if you were to write it again? How would you update it?” Ditto for 4HB and 4HC. Tools of Titans contains most of the answers for all three.

PATTERNS

Where guests have related recommendations or philosophies, I’ve noted them in parentheses. For instance, if Jane Doe tells a story about the value of testing higher prices, I might add “(see Chase Jarvis, page 170),” since he explains in depth how and why he chose to “go premium” with his pricing as a photographer from day one.

HUMOR!

I’ve included ample doses of the ridiculous. First of all, if we’re serious all the time, we’ll wear out before we get the truly serious stuff done. Second, if this book were all stern looks and no winks, all productivity and no grab-assing, you’d remember very little. I agree with Tony Robbins (page 210) that information without emotion isn’t retained.

NON-PROFILE CONTENT AND TIM FERRISS CHAPTERS

In all sections, there are multiple non-profile pieces by guests and yours truly. These are typically intended to expand upon key principles and tools mentioned by multiple people.

YOUR SEND-OFF — THE 3 TOOLS THAT ALLOW ALL THE REST

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse is recommended by many guests in this book. There is one takeaway that Naval Ravikant (page 546) has reinforced with me several times on our long walks. The protagonist, Siddhartha, a monk who looks like a beggar, has come to the city and falls in love with a famous courtesan named Kamala. He attempts to court her, and she asks, “What do you have?” A well-known merchant similarly asks, “What can you give that you have learned?” His answer is the same in both cases, so I’ve included the latter story here. Siddhartha ultimately acquires all that he wants. Bolding is mine:

Merchant: “. . . If you are without possessions, how can you give?”

Siddhartha: “Everyone gives what he has. The soldier gives strength, the merchant goods, the teacher instruction, the farmer rice, the fisherman fish.”

Merchant: “Very well, and what can you give? What have you learned that you can give?”

Siddhartha: “I can think, I can wait, I can fast.”

Merchant: “Is that all?”

Siddhartha: “I think that is all.”

Merchant: “And of what use are they? For example, fasting, what good is that?”

Siddhartha: “It is of great value, sir. If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do. If, for instance, Siddhartha had not learned to fast, he would have had to seek some kind of work today, either with you, or elsewhere, for hunger would have driven him. But, as it is, Siddhartha can wait calmly. He is not impatient, he is not in need, he can ward off hunger for a long time and laugh at it. ”

I think of Siddhartha’s answers often and in the following terms:

“I can think” → Having good rules for decision-making, and having good questions you can ask yourself and others.

“I can wait” → Being able to plan long-term, play the long game, and not misallocate your resources.

“I can fast” → Being able to withstand difficulties and disaster. Training yourself to be uncommonly resilient and have a high pain tolerance.

This book will help you to develop all three.

I created Tools of Titans because it’s the book that I’ve wanted my entire life. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Pura vida,

Tim Ferriss

Paris, France

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Tools of Titans is available at Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Amazon, iBooks, Indiebound, Indigo, and more.

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