1-Page Summary

In Tools of Titans, Tim Ferriss shares the habits and beliefs of 101 high-performing people, including tech investors, entrepreneurs, athletes, and entertainers. The premise of the book is that if you emulate the habits and beliefs of people who succeed the way you want to succeed, you too can be successful.

For this summary, we’ve restructured the book completely, focusing on the major themes of habits across all 101 people. This lets you see the patterns of what the titans do—how they motivate themselves, how they succeed in work and business, how they stay happy, and how they stay healthy.

Inspiration and Goals

Many titans visualize their long-term goals, so it becomes easier to know what they’re fighting for. Arnold Schwarzenegger believes that having a clear vision of the final goal makes the work in between easier. It helps you stomach all the hard work and pain it takes to reach your goal, since you know why you’re pushing so hard.

Be Courageous. Be Brazen

Do you have a big goal you would love to tackle, but you don’t feel ready? You’ve likely put artificial constraints on yourself. Many titans spoke about pushing past artificial boundaries placed on them by society or by themselves.

Realize that every titan you admire started out where you are today—with formidable obstacles towering in front of you. The difference with the titans is they had the courage to push past these obstacles.

Tim Ferriss’s Fear Exercise

If you ever feel afraid of doing something, try Tim Ferriss’s fear exercise. First, think about the change you want to make.

After this exercise, you likely realize that the worst case is nowhere near permanently crippling. Even if you fail, you’ll be able to recover your old life just fine.

Work Habits and Career

Once you’ve identified your goals, you need to put in the work to reach them. Here are strategies to be more productive and make more progress in the limited time you have.

You Need to Focus

Does life feel busy to you? It doesn’t have to. If you feel like you’re spinning your wheels and moving really fast, but not making any progress in life, you probably have to focus your goals.

The titans in this book have hundreds-fold more opportunities than the typical person, but they don’t have any more time. This means they need to apply a laser-sharp focus to the opportunities that will fulfill their goals.

Deciding What to Work On

In a world of endless options, it can be hard to decide what to focus on and build your career around. Here’s some advice.

Become a double/triple threat. Many people try to become the very best in the world at one specific thing, the equivalent of playing basketball well enough to make the NBA. But this is very competitive and has a low probability of success. Instead, you can easily become above average at two or more things, then combine them to great effect.

Work in an area where you’re not easily replaceable. This is where you can make a unique impact.

Personal Habits

The people profiled in the book tend to be exceptionally disciplined and goal-oriented. Here are themes of advice on personal habits.

Action, Not Information

Are you obsessed with learning new tactics, but have a problem following through?

Realize that success doesn’t come from knowledge, it comes from action.

Start a Habit With a Tiny Push

Want to lose 50 pounds, or meditate for half an hour daily, or read a book a week forever? These are big goals—maybe too big. If you chew off too much at the start, you might falter and feel self-defeated.

Instead, try just one small action. No one ever has too little time or energy for one tiny action. Having one successful small action builds momentum to adopting your habit.

Improving Your Weaknesses

Much of personal development is about identifying your weaknesses, then improving them with deliberate action.

Finding your weak spots can be difficult—by its nature, if you’re not good at something, it’s often hard to realize that you’re not good at it. Step outside yourself.

Once you find your weak spots, get the motivation to fix them. Often, people evade their weaknesses by making excuses: it wasn’t all that bad in the past, or it’ll get better in the future. To confront this, answer these questions about your weaknesses:

Going through this exercise forces you to confront the real costs of your bad behavior.

Creativity and Ideas

No matter what field of work you’re in, you’d likely benefit from being more creative and generating more good ideas. Here’s advice on how to generate more good ideas, how to identify the best ones, and how to put them to action.

Generate a Lot of Bad Ideas to Get Good Ideas

Do you struggle to find that one perfect idea, and hold yourself back from entertaining less-than-perfect ideas?

Your bar is set too high. Spend your energy coming up with LOTS of ideas, even if they’re silly. What matters isn’t your hit rate, but rather the number of good ideas you have at the end.

How to Think of Ideas

Ask the dumb questions. These get you to look at situations in a new way.

Put yourself into an environment that gives you maximum exposure to new ideas, problems, and people.

Question conventional wisdom and think of “dumb ideas.” If what you’re working on sounds reasonable to most people, you may not be thinking creatively or innovatively enough.

Testing Ideas

Once you have a lot of ideas, how do you find the good ones?

Often, you’re not the best judge of your own ideas. By yourself, you’re unlikely to find the very best solution or see the entire picture. You need other people to stress-test your ideas. If an idea survives the trial by fire, then it’s a good idea. If it doesn’t, you’ve just saved yourself a lot of time.

Business Strategies

Many of the titans interviewed are entrepreneurs of some kind—often by building businesses, or by being self-employed as authors, entertainers, or media creators. These are the titans’ tips for how to start a successful business and grow it.

1,000 True Fans

To be successful, you don’t need to be a global superstar or have millions of followers. Instead, you need just 1,000 true fans (a concept popularized by Wired founding executive editor Kevin Kelly). A true fan is defined as “a fan who will buy anything you produce.” True fans become your direct source of income and the major marketing force for ordinary fans.

If you can get true fans, then you’re sure that you’re solving problems for a real group of people. Produce work to excite your 1,000 true fans, not to get a lukewarm reception from 100,000 people.

Be Authentic

Many titans, especially those in entertainment, praised authenticity. People crave realness and connection, and being yourself will find the audience that likes you for you. Don’t be afraid to differ from common sense or society’s expectations to be yourself.

Business Tactics

Don’t think 10% bigger, think 10 times bigger. When you go 10 times bigger, you have to start with a new approach. You’re by yourself in a new space, not competing with everyone else who’s also trying to get 10%.

Don’t head for a hyper-competitive area. Competition is hard and sucks the profit out of companies.

Failure is not good. While this might sound obvious, accepting failure has become a common mindset in tech startups. In contrast, failure is actually painful and should be avoided.

Charge for what you’re selling. The conventional wisdom in startups is to price your product low, or even free, to get mass penetration and volume. However, this causes problems with being unable to fund sales and marketing to rev up the growth engine. People paying for your product is proof that it’s good; if your product is free, you don’t know how much you can later charge for it.

Execute quickly. Peter Thiel asks, “If you have a 10-year plan, why can’t you do this in 6 months?”

Happiness and Mindset

Being productive and reaching your goals obviously aren’t the only important things in life. Being happy and in control of your emotions is another form of success important to titans.

Be Grateful for Things

Far from being the cutthroat, take-no-prisoners stereotype of success, the titans tended to reflect on their lives and be thankful for where they are.

Dealing With Negative Emotions

Anxiety:

Stress:

Anger:

Cynicism:

More Useful Questions to Ask

If I had $10 million, what would I be doing differently? Do I really need $10 million to get this lifestyle today?

Are you enduring a crushing career, hoping to one day escape into the nirvana of retirement? Life is short—try to design the life you want today, rather than put it off 20-40 years into the future (when, heaven forbid, a tragic accident or illness might cut it short). Your ideal life might be deceptively easy to achieve.

While building BrainQUICKEN, Tim Ferriss was stretched to his energy limit and felt trapped in his caffeinated, overworked mental state. He stopped and asked himself what kind of lifestyle he really wanted.

After quick calculations, Tim realized his target lifestyle cost far less than he anticipated. The resource he lacked was time and flexibility, not cash. This motivated him to start redesigning his life immediately, before he even had $10 million.

What if I do the opposite of what I normally do, for 48 hours?

If you’re stuck and not getting the performance you want, maybe you need to invert what you’re doing. If you try the opposite for just 48 hours, the damage is limited—at worst, you fail and go back to your normal routine. At best, you find a totally new successful way to do things.

As a salesman for a tech product early in his career, Tim wasn’t meeting his sales numbers. At a loss for what to do, he looked at what the other salespeople were doing, and he decided to do the opposite. Other people worked 9 to 5; Tim decided to call outside of 9 to 5. He found that he was able to reach executives, who were still working outside normal business hours, and bypass their assistants, who were not.

If I lost something, do I need to make it back the same way?

Have you lost something like an investment or opportunity? Your natural instinct is to make it back the same way you lost it. But this ignores the value of your time and could be inefficient.

In 2008, Tim Ferriss owned a house in San Jose and lost money in the recession. Selling then would mean a $150,000 loss. His friends counseled him to rent the house until the value could rebound. Tim followed the advice and was miserable from all the property management headaches that followed.

Instead, he realized the valuable asset here was his time, not cash. By babysitting his house, he might be able to recoup the $150,000 over 5 years. But using the same time and energy, he might be able to grow his brand and business by $500,000. Tim decided to sell the house.

Introduction

In the 707-page Tools of Titans, Tim Ferriss shares the habits and beliefs of 101 high-performing people, including tech investors, entrepreneurs, athletes, and entertainers. The premise of the book is that if you emulate the habits and beliefs of people who succeed the way you want to succeed, you too can be successful.

The book is very broad, covering a wide range of aspects on how to become healthy, wealthy, and wise. The point of the book is not to absorb everything covered, but rather to identify the points that most resonate with you. The author notes that different readers highlight very different points from the book as their most important lessons.

To get more out of the book, spend time engaging with the questions that provoke you. One major theme in the book is an emphasis on action, not information. As Derek Sivers says, “If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” Take time to reflect on what you’ve learned. Think on the meta-level—how do you learn to think like the people in the book?

At the same time, be aware of when you skip an area or dismiss it as irrelevant. Does this signal a deep problem you’re afraid to examine?

Shortform Introduction

The book is organized into 140 short chapters, each devoted to one person or a set of ideas from Tim Ferriss. While this organization suits the author’s purpose—to pay homage to the titan and make it easier to find people you care about—it makes finding the main themes difficult.

Therefore, we’ve restructured the book completely, focusing on the major themes of habits across all 101 people. This lets you see the patterns of what the titans do—how they motivate themselves, how they succeed in work and business, how they stay happy, and how they stay healthy.

As the author notes, there are so many ideas that you’re not supposed to emulate them all. Instead, choose just a handful of your favorite ideas and implement them methodically.

Inspiration and Goals

We’ll start with the foundation of success—how to set goals and adopt a courageous mindset.

Visualize Your Goals

If you don’t know where you’re going, why are you pedaling so hard?

Many titans visualize their long-term goals, so it becomes easier to know what they’re fighting for. It also becomes easier to focus, since you know what won’t drive you closer to your goals and thus can say no to.

Specific tips from titans:

People often confuse dreams and goals. A dream is something you fantasize about that will never happen. A goal is something you set a plan for, work toward, and achieve.

Be Courageous. Be Brazen

Do you have a big goal you would love to tackle, but you don’t feel ready? You’ve likely put artificial constraints on yourself.

Many titans spoke about pushing past artificial boundaries placed on them by society or by themselves.

Realize that every titan you admire started out where you are today—with formidable obstacles towering in front of you. The difference with the titans is they had the courage to push past these obstacles.

Here are selected quotes and stories on having courage:

What you’re most afraid of doing is often what you most need to do.

Tim Ferriss’s Fear Exercise

If you ever feel afraid of doing something, try Tim Ferriss’s fear exercise.

First, think about the change you want to make.

Now think about what life would be like if you didn’t make the change:

After this exercise, you likely realize that the worst case is nowhere near permanently crippling. Even if you fail, you’ll be able to recover your old life just fine.

Ultimately, you may realize that you lack great reasons not to make the change, other than your own fear.

You Don’t Need Much to Start

Don’t be afraid of doing what you want because you believe you lack something critical—the perfect set of personal connections, ideas, funding, or what have you. These are excuses. You likely already have enough to get started.

Even if you feel you’re in a lowly position, don’t be afraid to punch above your weight class. Talk to people above your current level; find opportunities you’re not qualified for. Just try to be helpful, and listen and learn.

If your ego gets in the way and you don’t want to do grunt work, realize that your lower position is simply temporary, and you might as well get the most out of it and prepare yourself for more success later.

 

Being Tough

Getting through rough patches requires grit and willpower. If you’re not tough, how can you be tougher?

It’s simple: If you want to be tough, be tough. Make the tough call on your very next decision.

US Army general Stanley McChrystal has a few tips:

Ancient Stoic thinker Seneca suggests that, for 3 days, you throw away your comforts and endure a period of simplicity—like sleeping in a sleeping bag or eating only oatmeal. This will reset your setpoint for comfort, and afterward even the smallest morsels of food will be delicious.

Exercise: Confront Your Fear

If you feel afraid of doing something, try this fear exercise.

Work Habits and Career

Once you’ve identified your goals, you need to put in the work to reach them. Here are strategies to be more productive and make more progress in the limited time you have.

You Need to Focus

Does life feel busy to you? It doesn’t have to. If you feel like you’re spinning your wheels and moving really fast, but not making any progress in life, you probably have to focus your goals.

The titans in this book have hundreds-fold more opportunities than the typical person, but they don’t have any more time. This means they need to apply a laser-sharp focus to the opportunities that will fulfill their goals.

First, let’s examine why people tend to stay “busy,” at the expense of focus:

Next, here’s guidance on how to define your goals.

When defining goals, deliberately choose only a few of them, and make them clear. Avoid these pitfalls that erode focus:

Deciding What to Work On

In a world of endless options, it can be hard to decide what to focus on and build your career around. Here are themes of advice from the titans.

Become a double/triple threat. Many people try to become the very best in the world at one specific thing, the equivalent of playing basketball well enough to make the NBA. But this is very competitive and has a low probability of success. Instead, you can easily become above average at two or more things, then combine them to great effect.

Work in an area where you’re not easily replaceable. This is where you can make a unique impact.

Question the value of formal education. Think about taking the tuition you would have spent on school, then using it on something that would move you along faster.

It’s OK to Be Away From Hotspots

Are you outside of the hotspot for your industry or career? People often use this as an excuse for failure or not starting: “I’m not in the city where all the action’s happening, so I can’t do what I want to do.”

Don’t worry about being outside the epicenter. This can actually give you advantages to compensate.

Design Your Work So You Learn From Failures

Some people worry that if they try something and fail, they’ll have wasted time and gained nothing.

But it doesn’t have to work out this way. Organize your work so that even if you fail, you still grow tremendously along the way.

Even when you fail, take some joy in it—it’s an opportunity to learn and get better

Simplify Your Problem

Does reaching your goal seem like an insurmountably high effort? You might be overthinking it. Instead, take some time to think about how you can simplify your problem.

(Shortform note: The book isn’t exactly clear about how to apply this, but here are some ideas:

Work Tactics

Here are more tactics for work and career recommended by the titans.

If you’re overwhelmed by unread emails, consider declaring email bankruptcy. You tell your contacts that you won’t be reading any email before today, and if it’s important enough they should send it again. This can relieve a lot of guilt and stress, though be sure to do it only when you’ve set up good habits to reduce your email load into the future, or you’ll just need to declare bankruptcy again.

Surround yourself with people who are more successful than you. This isn’t as gentle on your ego as being around people less successful than you, but it’ll make you more successful. Here are 3 specific people to keep watching:

Exercise: Sharpen Your Focus

If you feel like you have too many things going on, narrow down on the few things that matter.

Personal Habits

The people profiled in the book tend to be exceptionally disciplined and goal-oriented. Here are themes of advice on personal habits.

Action, Not Information

Are you obsessed with learning new tactics, but have a problem following through? Realize that success doesn’t come from knowledge, it comes from action.

(Shortform note: This especially applies when reading nonfiction material like this book summary. Don’t just absorb the platitudes—think hard about what actionables you want to apply to your life.)

Here are quotes and stories around taking action:

Everyone starts somewhere. If you need a dose of courage, look at the earliest blogs of Tim Ferriss or Ramit Sethi, the earliest podcasts of the Joe Rogan show, or watch the pilot of hit TV shows. The titans you see today started out no better than their rough drafts, and you don’t have to do any better than that to get started.

Defeating Procrastination

Have a problem with procrastination? It might be caused by anxiety about the task. To combat this, Tim Ferriss forces himself to write down 3-5 things that are making him the most anxious. Then he asks himself,

If so, he blocks out 2 to 3 hours to focus on one of them.

(Shortform note: For more on the idea that what is often most important is what scares you the most, read our summary of Eat That Frog.)

Focus on the Process, Not the Goal

When you set ambitious goals for yourself, it’s frustrating to put in time but not make visible progress. Then it’s easy to lose motivation and stop doing the work. To get through rough patches, you need to simply do the work.

If you commit to a long-term goal, then only one decision needs to be made and adhered to—put in the work. This is easier than having to make lots of little decisions on what to do each day, which can be fatiguing and cause you to go astray.

US gymnastics coach Christopher Sommer: “Show up, do the work, and go home.”

Start a Habit With a Tiny Push

Want to lose 50 pounds, or meditate for half an hour daily, or read a book a week forever? These are big goals—maybe too big. If you chew off too much at the start, you might falter and feel self-defeated.

Instead, try just one small action. No one ever has too little time or energy for one tiny action. Having one successful small action builds momentum to adopting your habit.

(Shortform note: The point of this tactic is that if you visualize a giant goal, the barrier to action is very high. If you falter, you’ll be disappointed with yourself, setting off a vicious cycle and cutting off your progress. Instead, distill your behavior change into the tiniest possible unit. Commit to doing just that one little thing. You’ll find it’s not as bad as you thought. For more on this idea, read our summary of Atomic Habits.)

 

Daily Routines

Several titans discussed their daily practices at the beginning and end of each day.

Morning Routines

Getting the start of your day right prepares you for success the rest of the day.

Tony Robbins changes his body physiology to prime himself into the right mental state. He starts with a cold-water plunge, then follows with rapid breathing exercises or a short walk. He then ends with a meditation on what he’s grateful for and what his goals for the day are.

Tim Ferriss has 5 morning rituals:

  1. Make your bed.
  2. Meditate.
  3. Do 5 to 10 reps of a physical exercise, like pushups or squats.
  4. Make titanium tea, a combination of:
    • Pu-erh aged black tea
    • Dragon well green tea
    • Turmeric and ginger shavings
    • 1-2 tablespoons coconut oil
  5. Write in his 5-minute journal
    • Answer the below questions with 3 answers each
    • I am grateful for…
    • What would make today great?
    • Daily affirmations. I am…

In her book The Artist’s Way, writer Julia Cameron notes that journaling daily acts like “spiritual windshield wipers”—once you get your confusing thoughts on paper, you can see the world through clearer eyes.

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman finds the morning is when his mind is the freshest, and he spends 60 minutes working on the problem he set for himself the day before.

Navy SEAL and author Jocko Willink wakes up by 4:45 AM. While he was a warfighter, he felt this gave him a psychological advantage over his enemy—while his enemy was still sleeping, Jocko would be readying himself for their encounter.

End of Day Routines

Thomas Edison said, “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” Accordingly, Reid Hoffman gives his mind an overnight task, like a product design conundrum or a business strategy problem. He lets his subconscious mind get to work.

Like his start-of-day journal, Tim Ferriss has an end-of-day journal, where he answers two questions:

  1. What are 3 amazing things that happened today?
  2. How could I have made today better?

End the work day with high-quality work—don’t develop a bad habit of producing poor work at the end of the day. Ernest Hemingway ended his writing sessions mid-flow and mid-sentence so he could start with momentum the next day.

Communication

Here are tips on how to communicate with other people.

Tell people what you want, not what you don’t want. Instead of “stop slouching,” say “stand up straight.”

Practice going first. People are ready for interaction, but you have to initiate. Make eye contact first, say hello first, smile first. You’ll be surprised by the response.

Be vulnerable to get vulnerability. Share some personal info about how you relate to a problem they have, or how you’re struggling with pressures. This will open up the conversation and help them reciprocate the pain.

Help people by just listening. Sometimes, instead of giving advice, just be there and listen.

Improving On Your Weaknesses

Much of personal development is about identifying your weaknesses, then improving them with deliberate action.

Find Your Weak Spots

Finding your weak spots can be difficult—by its nature, if you’re not good at something, it’s often hard to realize that you’re not good at it. The general theme of the advice is to get some distance from yourself and examine yourself more objectively.

First, imagine you’re below average. Derek Sivers reminds himself of this to compensate for our tendency to think we’re above average in most things we do.

Step outside yourself. If someone else came to you with your exact problem, you’d likely be able to fix that problem. But when you have the problem yourself, it’s hard to see it and fix it.

Deal With Your Weak Spots

Once you find your weak spots, get the motivation to fix them.

Often, people evade their weaknesses by making excuses: it wasn’t all that bad in the past, or it’ll get better in the future. To confront this, Tony Robbins developed the Dickens Process. Named after Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol, it prompts you to visualize a bad future to motivate you to avoid it.

Going through this exercise forces you to confront the real costs of your bad behavior.

Then, you have only three options to address your weakness: improve on your weakness, eliminate work that relies on your weakness, or delegate that work to someone else who’s better at it than you.

(Shortform note: For more on coming to terms with your weaknesses and setting a plan to fix them, read our summary of Principles by Ray Dalio.)

Creativity and Ideas

No matter what field of work you’re in, you’d likely benefit from being more creative and generating more good ideas. Here’s a spread of advice on how to generate more good ideas, how to identify the best ones, and how to put them to action.

Generate a Lot of Bad Ideas to Get Good Ideas

Do you struggle to find that one perfect idea, and hold yourself back from entertaining less-than-perfect ideas?

Your bar is set too high. Spend your energy coming up with LOTS of ideas, even if they’re silly. What matters isn’t your hit rate, but rather the number of good ideas you have at the end. The more ideas you generate, the more you exercise your “idea muscle.”

Multiple people reinforce this idea:

How to Think of Ideas

Now that you know you should be generating lots of ideas, how do you actually do it? Here are suggestions.

Ask the dumb questions. These get you to look at situations in a new way.

Put yourself into an environment that gives you maximum exposure to new ideas, problems, and people.

Look back to history. Consume the greatest works of all time, rather than what’s popular today.

How to Imagine the Future

If you work in innovation of any kind, then you likely want to build for the future. How can you push the boundaries of your thinking to arrive at big ideas?

Titans who speak about imagining the future have a consistent theme of contradicting consensus. The biggest changes to the future may be things we don’t currently expect. If what you’re working sounds reasonable to most people, you may not be thinking creatively or innovatively enough.

Here are the best quotes on innovation and boundary pushing from Tools of Titans:

Stress-Testing Ideas

Once you have a lot of ideas, how do you find the good ones?

Comedy writers Scott Adams and BJ Novak use their bodily reactions to gauge a good idea. If they feel adrenaline or endorphins, they know they have some good material.

But often, you’re often not the best judge of your own ideas. By yourself, you’re unlikely to find the very best solution or see the entire picture. You need other people to stress-test your ideas. If it survives the trial by fire, then it’s a good idea. If it doesn’t, you’ve just saved yourself a lot of time.

Titans discuss how they develop their ideas with other people:

 

Give Your Ideas Away

If you generate a lot of ideas, you’ll probably have far more than you have time to pursue yourself.

Instead of hoarding your ideas, give them away. Give people great ideas and encourage them to work on it. Most people probably won’t do anything with them, but some will; and all people will be grateful to you.

How to Build a Business

Many of the titans interviewed are entrepreneurs of some kind—often by building businesses, or by being self-employed as authors, entertainers, or media creators. These are the titans’ tips for how to start a successful business and grow it.

1,000 True Fans

To be successful, you don’t need to be a global superstar or have millions of followers.

Instead, you need just 1,000 true fans (a concept popularized by Wired founding executive editor Kevin Kelly). A true fan is defined as “a fan who will buy anything you produce.” True fans become your direct source of income and the major marketing force for ordinary fans.

If you can get true fans, then you’re sure that you’re solving problems for a real group of people. Produce work to excite your 1,000 true fans, not to get a lukewarm reception from 100,000 people.

Be Unquestionably Authentic

Many titans, especially those in entertainment, praised authenticity. People crave realness and connection, and being yourself will find the audience that likes you for you. Don’t be afraid to differ from common sense or society’s expectations to be yourself.

Quotes and stories on being authentic:

 

Small Details Can Make a Big Difference

Small actions can have a large impact, especially if you’re building a product or providing a service. People notice the details.

Business Tactics

Here is a broad range of business tactics recommended by the titans.

Starting a Business

The Law of Category: With a new product, don’t ask yourself, “How is this new product better than the competition?” but rather, “What new category is this product the first in?” People are defensive about a new entrant encroaching on their favorite brands, but they’re more open with whole new categories.

Don’t think 10% bigger, think 10 times bigger. When you go 10 times bigger, you have to start with a new approach. You’re by yourself in a new space, not competing with everyone else who’s also trying to get 10%.

Don’t head for a hyper-competitive area. Competition is hard and sucks the profit out of companies.

You don’t need as much as you think. Use what you have.

Create new ideas by connecting existing ideas that have never been connected before. Something that is a commonplace solution in one area connected to another.

Mindsets

Failure is not good. While this might sound obvious, accepting failure has become a common mindset in tech startups. (Shortform note: Aspects of these ideas were popularized by The Lean Startup.) In contrast, failure is actually painful and should be avoided.

Understand fundamental principles, not just tactics. Tactics become outdated. Learn the principles of business (like behavioral psychology) and you will create new tactics that adapt to the times.

Take a short-term loss for a long-term advantage. Be patient for the big reward.

Business Operations

Charge for what you’re selling. The conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is to price your product low, or even free, to get mass penetration and volume. However, this causes problems with being unable to fund sales and marketing to rev up the growth engine. People paying for your product is proof that it’s good; if your product is free, you don’t know how much you can later charge for it.

Execute quickly. Peter Thiel asks, “If you have a 10-year plan, why can’t you do this in 6 months?”

Let your subordinates execute quickly and make decisions themselves.

Rule of 3 and 10: Everything in the company breaks when you grow by 3 times and when you grow by 10 times. Startups should expect to reinvent their company at these breakpoints.

Recruit by starting with why. Tell people what the purpose of what they’re doing is, before telling them what to do.

The person who cares less, wins. This is especially true in negotiation. Build yourself to a position where you can afford to care less.

Here’s a smattering of marketing ideas:

Investment Principles

Several titans who are investors in businesses share the principles that guide their decisions.

Tony Robbins has friends who work in hedge funds, who give this advice:

Tim Ferriss invests in companies himself:

Digg founder Kevin Rose, who was also an investor at Google Ventures, asks himself these questions:

Behance founder and investor Scott Belsky suggests learning from the past, without being beholden to it. What little details made it work? What conventional wisdom did they violate?

Happiness and Mindset

Being productive and reaching your goals obviously aren’t the only important things in life. Being happy and in control of your emotions is another form of success important to titans.

Founder and investor Naval Ravikant asserts that happiness is 1) an active choice you make, and 2) a skill you develop, like exercising a muscle.

 

Be Grateful for Things

One of the most common themes from titans through the entire book was being grateful for life and what it’s given so far. Far from being the cutthroat, take-no-prisoners stereotype of success, the titans tended to reflect on their lives and be thankful for where they are.

Here’s a summary of how people feel gratitude:

(Shortform note: The book doesn’t elaborate on why being grateful helps you better accomplish your goals, but here are some possibilities:

Getting Perspective

When you’re in the thick of it, your problems can be all-consuming. Take some time to get perspective—in the grand scheme of things, your problems today probably aren’t a big deal.

Physician BJ Miller gets perspective by looking at the sky. He contemplates how the light from stars that reaches him is ancient, and that by the time he sees the star it may no longer exist. This puts all his little mundane worries into perspective.

Memento mori: multiple titans use a calendar to count down the number of days they have left to live. The number is frighteningly small—someone at age 30 has somewhere around 20,000 days remaining.

Knowing that all things, good and bad, are temporary can help you overcome difficulties. The book offers a few phrases to remember this:

Connecting with others can also put your challenges into perspective: Author Sebastian Junger notes that a feeling of belonging seems to improve mental health. Disasters like 9/11 decrease suicide, violent crime, and symptoms of mental illness. The reason could be that feeling a sense of collective belonging weakens people’s normal psychological terrors.

Meditation and Mindfulness

Tim Ferriss says most of his interviewees practice some sort of meditation or mindfulness practice. This reduces anxiety, increases happiness, and makes you more aware of your life.

You don’t have to do it every day. Arnold Schwarzenegger meditated regularly for a year in his early life, and, even though he’s stopped, he continues to see benefits. When presented with problems, he can focus, calm down, disconnect his mind, and tackle each problem one at a time.

A similar behavior is working while listening to a single musical track or album on repeat. This puts your mind into a trance-like state of focus and is similar to mindfulness practice.

 

Empathy

A common emotional irritant is other people. We nurse our grievances with other people and keep reliving how they’ve wronged us.

This is often a biased, inaccurate view. Once you empathize with the other person, you’ll likely stop hating them so much.

Empathy has practical benefits. Tech investor Chris Sacca argues that empathy helps you develop better products and solutions for people, since you can see the world through their eyes.

Dealing With Negative Emotions

Anxiety

Tim Ferriss poses a question in many of his interviews: “What would you tell your younger self?” The most common response was “relax, don’t get anxious—everything will work out.”

Your ego invites suffering. Tony Robbins suggests that suffering comes from focusing on yourself and your own feelings. If you’re worried about your kids, it’s because you feel you’ve failed your kids, not because you’re genuinely worried about them.

For anything in life, you have three options: change it, accept it, or leave it. It’s not good to want one option but not act on it—like wishing you would change it but not doing anything to change it, or wishing you would leave it but not leaving it.

Dealing With Stressful Situations

Multiple titans have tremendous pressure to perform under the moment—in a sports match, with a critical business problem, or in warfare. They’ve developed thought patterns to keep them calm in high-intensity situations:

Dealing With Haters

When you try to reach your goals, people will try to drag you down. 10% of people will take anything personally. Expect it and treat it like math—the more presence you have, the more people who will appear to criticize you.

To disarm your critics, pre-empt their criticism. Address counterarguments in your work, or be self-deprecating.

For the thoughtful critics, take time to address them to show you don’t take yourself too seriously. This will decrease the number of real haters.

Anger

A Buddhist saying: “Holding onto anger is like holding a hot coal while waiting to throw it at someone else.”

When feeling anger, don’t suppress it or swat it away. Acknowledge it explicitly. This helps to dissolve the issue.

Choose not to indulge in conflict. Don’t be around people who are constantly in conflict—people who fight with others regularly will eventually fight with you.

Avoiding Suicide

Tim Ferriss dealt with suicidal thoughts at the end of college, so he has a dedicated chapter on this. His tips:

Cynicism

Media host Jason Silva notes that being cynical or jaded is like being dead. Nothing impresses you, you feel like you’ve seen everything before, and you see the world through dark lenses.

Building Positive Emotions

These are practices to build positive emotions.

Joy of loving-kindness: Think about someone and sincerely think, “I wish for this person to be happy.” This increases your own happiness and takes the focus off of your own ego. You can do this with people you know, as well as total strangers.

 

Working energy: Eric Weinstein yells a 7-second string of curse words to get into his aggressive creative mode. Try making your own, and read it loudly like you’re casting a spell.

Fake it till you make it: Your physiology influences your mind and emotions. Youtuber Shay Carl finds vlogging is daily therapy. Even if he doesn’t feel happy, he smiles and eventually feels better. Sometimes he just looks in the mirror and laughs at himself.

Exercise: Practice Gratitude

Be thankful for small things in life and put things into perspective.

Interesting Short Ideas

Here is a wide variety of less commonly-repeated ideas from Tools of Titans. There are many more ideas in the original book than we have space to cover here, so as always, read the original book to get all the useful tips.

How to Raise Your Kids

Titans mentioned various childhood influences that made them who they are today, or practices they use with their kids:

Miscellaneous Interesting Ideas

Here is a hodgepodge of interesting ideas with no particular organization.

When asked a question, don’t take it directly. Answer the question you wanted to be asked, and direct the answer to what you want to focus on (this is a standard PR technique).

Catching cheaters in school: As a professor, Luis von Ahn made a puzzle and called it something fictional, like Giramacristo’s Puzzle. He then put the solution on his own website where he could track the IP’s of people who Googled the answer. After a few times of doing things like this, his students were afraid there was always a trick, and people stopped cheating.

Tim Ferriss’s writing tip: When writing a draft, use ‘TK’ as a placeholder for things you need to research later. Few or no words in the English language have these two letters together. You can then search for ‘TK’ later to find everything you need to fix.

When getting interviewed by a journalist, record the audio on your side as well, so you can use the tape for your own purposes. Check that they’re OK with repurposing the audio.

Personal security: as Tim Ferriss became more famous, he had to worry more about his safety. He picked up a few tips:

Learning the macro from the micro: chess player Josh Waitzkin learned chess not from starting with the opening moves, but from the end game—just two kings and a pawn. This simple situation taught larger principles, like empty space and opposition.

Cooking as a bonding exercise: You might start as strangers, but when you’re cooking, everyone’s united in the same goal of creating a project together and not losing their fingers. Everyone can contribute a different skill set to the project.

How to get strangers to invite you home to eat and sleep: while traveling in Europe, journalist Cal Fussman would ask people, “how do you make the perfect goulash?” He’d ask a grandma, and translators would help translate, then each person would want to show him their local speciality.

Picking the best recipe online: Andrew Zimmern suggests finding the recipe that is most specific. If someone describes the process in a deep level of detail, like the size of the pan to the quarter inch, you know they’ve gone through it and worked out all the kinks. If they just say “grease the pan,” you know something is wrong.

Don’t obsess about taking notes about everything. The good stuff will stick.

Getting feedback over the phone: comedian Mike Birbiglia likes getting feedback about bits and jokes over the phone. In person, the listener feels the pressure of laughing or responding. On the phone, the listener is more comfortable staying silent, which tells you enough about how funny the joke is.

Keep the house lights on when performing on stage. When speaking, Brené Brown wants to see people’s faces, so it’s a connection, not a performance.

The uncaged tiger: A tiger named Mohini was held in a 10-by-10-foot cage for 5 or 10 years. Eventually it was released into a big pasture, but it spent the rest of its life in a corner 10-by-10-foot area. The message: even when you have freedom, you might put artificial barriers for yourself. 

Getting Healthy

The titans give a broad set of advice for health, but unlike the major themes above, the health advice tends to be more varied. We’ve catalogued the breadth of ideas here.

Good General Health Principles

Change the phrase “diet and exercise” to “eat and train.” The former is aesthetic and doesn’t have a clear goal; the other is functional and has a clear goal.

Work on the deficiencies you’re most embarrassed by. This is true in athletics and beyond. All the flexible yoga practitioners should lift some weights, and all the huge weightlifters should do yoga.

Flexibility is a passive trait. Mobility is an active trait, requiring strength through the entire range of motion.

How to find a good doctor:

Be around people who can push you.

Here are exercises mentioned throughout the book:

Interesting Health Practices to Consider

Many of the titans experiment with medical and health practices outside the mainstream. Here’s a collection of them.

Medicine

Health

General Wellness

Psychedelics

Many titans suggested psychedelics had a profound effect on their approach to life.

Specific psychedelics:

Tips on doing psychedelics:

Tim Ferriss's 17 Questions

Tim Ferriss has a set of 17 questions he uses to challenge his thinking.

1. What if I do the opposite of what I normally do, for 48 hours?

If you’re stuck and not getting the performance you want, maybe you need to invert what you’re doing. If you try the opposite for just 48 hours, the damage is limited—at worst, you fail and go back to your normal routine. At best, you find a totally new successful way to do things.

As a salesman for a tech product early in his career, Tim wasn’t meeting his sales numbers. At a loss for what to do, he looked at what the other salespeople were doing, and decided to do the opposite. Other people worked 9 to 5; Tim decided to call outside of 9 to 5. He found that he was able to reach executives, who were still working outside normal business hours, and bypass their assistants, who were not.

2. For business ideas: what do I personally spend a lot of money on?

This is a perfect question if you want to start a business but you don’t know what problem to solve. Chances are, you’ve been solving that problem for yourself.

When the dotcom crash happened, Tim Ferriss wanted to start his own company. Instead of doing deep market research, he looked at his credit card statements – he was spending $500 per month on sports supplements on an annual income of $40k. This validated a personal need that he could turn into a business. Even better, as an avid consumer, he knew how the industry worked – which ads worked best, which vendors had the highest reputation. He created a supplement he couldn’t find on the market called BrainQUICKEN, launched a business, and paved the way to the 4-Hour Workweek and beyond.

3. If I had $10 million, what would I be doing differently? Do I really need $10 million to get this lifestyle today?

Are you enduring a crushing career, hoping to one day escape into the nirvana of retirement? Life is short—try to design the life you want today, rather than put it off 20-40 years into the future (when, heaven forbid, a tragic accident or illness might cut it short). Your ideal life might be deceptively easy to achieve.

While building BrainQUICKEN, Tim Ferriss was stretched to his energy limit and felt trapped in his caffeinated, overworked mental state. He stopped and asked himself what kind of lifestyle he really wanted.

After quick calculations, Tim realized his target lifestyle cost far less than he anticipated. The resource he lacked was time and flexibility, not cash. This motivated him to start redesigning his life immediately, before he even had $10 million.

4. What’s the worst that could happen? If it did happen, could I recover?

Anxiety has its roots in the uncertain. You don’t get anxious about turning on your faucet, because you know what’s going to happen. But you get anxious about asking someone on a date, or quitting your job to start a business, because you don’t know what’s going to happen.

This question pushes you to make your fear concrete. By defining your demons, they become easier to fight.

When Tim Ferriss was stressed about BrainQUICKEN, he dreamed of taking a year-long travel sabbatical. The business was running on all cylinders and he was intimately tied to its operations. So his dream remained a dream for 6 months.

Finally, he forced himself to question his assumptions. What was the worst that could possibly happen? Well, his business could grind to a halt and possibly go bankrupt. A quality issue could occur, and he’d get sued. His bank account would plummet, and his belongings would be stolen. Then he might contract malaria on his travels.

So…was that it?

After picturing the worst case scenario, Tim realized it really wasn’t that bad. Even in this worst case, he could recover. Even better, by defining the problems, he could tackle them today. If his business operations would fail in his absence, how could he make them more robust? How could he protect himself from malaria? These problems were easier than he realized.

5. If I capped my working time to 2 hours per week, what would I do?

How do you get the most out of your time? If someone pointed a gun at your head and forced you to work for only 2 hours a week, how could you maximize your chances of not getting fired? Use the 80/20 rule to find the best outputs of your time.

This question is especially good for managers. But even if you’re not a manager, it can also yield insights into your own work.

Tim Ferriss used this question to make his year-long sabbatical from BrainQUICKEN a reality. He focused on the concentrated products and customers that provided the most profits, and fired his highest-maintenance customers. He automated order handling to streamline operations.

6. Delegation: What if I give complete freedom for decisions up to $100? $500?

If you tend to micromanage, you’re limiting your output. You’re clearly proud of your work and you want to limit the number of mistakes, but you’re probably also overestimating the error rate of other people. This dramatically shortens your leverage, since you’re working on low-impact items other people should be taking care of.

When managing BrainQUICKEN, Ferriss spent 40 hours a week on customer service, fighting fires and answering questions. He’d get interrupted with special product requests or customs forms. He felt responsible for making the calls.

So (as per Question 1), he did the opposite—he gave power to his customer service agents. “If it involves less than $100, please make the decision yourself,” he emailed. To combat abuse, he reviewed these scenarios once a week with his staff.

Surprisingly, few catastrophes happened, and he gradually raised the threshold to $500 and then $1,000. Reviews went from weekly to monthly to never. Consequently, he reduced his personal customer service time spend from 40 hours/week to 2 hours/week.

7. What’s an underrated channel for marketing or promotion?

If you’re selling a product or service, this question more literally applies to you. How can you reach people in a way most competitors are ignoring?

When launching his first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss asked best-selling authors, “When promoting your book, what absolutely didn’t work? What would you do more of?”

Consistently, he heard about blogging. Without knowing much about blogging, he went to a trade show and hung around bloggers, eavesdropping on conversations and asking questions. This prompted him to start his 4-Hour Workweek blog, which led to his first viral posts.

(Shortform note: Even if you’re not selling a product, you may find ways to create value that go outside standard practice.

For example, if you’re an attorney, your competition is trying to make partner by billing a ton of hours. What if you looked the other direction, and you focused on getting new clients in?

If you’re trying to create a new Youtube channel (Youtube being an established, very crowded network), what new, up-and-coming channel could you establish yourself on first?)

8. Marketing: What if I don’t pitch my product directly?

People don’t like announcements or being sold products. They like hearing narratives.

When promoting his book The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss couldn’t persuade journalists to introduce his book. But he fashioned engaging stories around concepts in the book. He showcased success stories from the book, people who redesigned their lifestyles. He wrote about his own personal body transformations, like in Geek to Freak. He released The 4-Hour Chef on audiobook for free on BitTorrent. These were stories worth spreading, and by extension his books got more publicity.

9. Education: Instead of a formal degree, what if I made my own degree?

Any graduate program or trained course costs a lot of cash and opportunity cost. Instead of attending the program, could you take all that money and get equivalent or better training?

Early in his career, Tim Ferriss thought an MBA might be useful for developing new skills, developing a better network, or having it look good on his resume.

Eventually he realized he could tie all three goals together in startup investing. Estimating the cost of an MBA at $120k over 2 years, he set aside $120k to make small $10k-20k investments in companies.

Importantly, Tim was prepared to lose it all—much as he would have lost the tuition to business school. This prompted him to actually take action rather than being scared. Even if his investments failed, he saw the experience and the added network as well worth the $120k. By learning from dozens of founders and investors, he created his own investment rules and made a few investments. His investments eventually panned out, making back double what he invested.

(Shortform note: Tim’s viewpoint can be applied to all graduate degrees, training programs, or even college. The actual monetary cost is often huge—MBAs can total $160k, including all expenses. Insidiously, the opportunity cost is huge, because when you’re in school, you’re not earning a salary.

For instance, if you want to get an MFA in Writing, this can cost $30k. You might also be giving up income of $50k. That $80k can go a huge way. You could sign up for master classes with the best writer in your area, paying $500/hr for custom feedback and mentorship. You could fund group dinners with aspiring writers as a way to network—even $500 per dinner can help you make 10 valuable connections.)

10. If I lost something, do I need to make it back the same way?

Have you lost something like an investment or opportunity? Your natural instinct is to make it back the same way you lost it. But this ignores the value of your time and could be inefficient.

In 2008, Tim Ferriss owned a house in San Jose and lost money in the recession. Selling then would mean a $150,000 loss. His friends counseled him to rent the house until the value could rebound. Tim followed the advice and was miserable from all the property management headaches that followed.

Instead, he realized the valuable asset here was his time, not cash. By babysitting his house, he might be able to recoup the $150,000 over 5 years. But using the same time and energy, he might be able to grow his brand and business by $500,000.

Tim decided to sell the house.

(Shortform note: When you’re stressed about a loss, you tend to obsess about it over and over, thinking about how to regain what you lost. But you have to poke your head above the weeds and find other routes.

Do you feel like you’ve lost ground in an argument? Maybe you don’t have to regain footing in that very argument. Cut your losses, admit your fault, and think about how to do better next time.

Have you lost the favor of your boss? Maybe you don’t regain it by repeating what got you there in the first place. Use your strengths and carve out another path to demonstrate your value. Hell, maybe even regaining stature in the current company isn’t the right approach, and it’s now time to join a new company.)

11. How could I solve this problem by simplifying and subtracting?

Removing things is often easier than adding things. What can you simplify to achieve growth?

This is counterintuitive, because it seems like more motion in more areas should lead to more progress. But your different activities have different ROI. And you should focus your energy on those.

Tim already showed subtraction when running BrainQUICKEN – how could he reduce his customer support time? How could he reduce the number of decisions he had to make? This prompted automation of order fulfillment and giving his employees more autonomy.

This applies to small tactical items too, like your product design or website. Removing the number of distracting items can improve conversion rate.

On a grander scheme, we’ve talked earlier about the importance of focus. By subtracting the number of things on your plate, you might simplify your life and achieve greater results.

12. How can I disappear for 4 to 8 weeks without having my business or work crash?

If you’re feeling burned out, some time away will help you regain clarity. Making sure your business or work runs smoothly while you’re gone will reveal optimizations you can implement today.

But this question is useful even if you don’t plan on taking any time off.

Tim Ferriss poses the question with two specific wordings:

Answering this question will reveal the ways in which you’re being a firefighter and not spending your time on the big picture. If you’re going away for 8 weeks, you have to entrust people with authority, clarify their goals, implement automated systems that streamline processes, and more.

This will allow operation of your business or work without your continuous presence, which in turn will reduce stress and help you focus on the big picture.

13. Am I hunting big game or small game?

Political strategist James Carville has an analogy of a lion hunting game. Hunting and killing a field mouse is relatively easy, but the energy required to do this exceeds the caloric energy of the mouse itself. Thus, a lion that hunted field mice would slowly starve and die.

Instead, lions need to hunt antelope. Antelope take more strength and energy to kill, but, once killed, they provide a lot more food for the lion.

The analogy for your life: focus on the big things that matter. Don’t chase all the small details, the field mice that are easy to kill but don’t move you closer to your goals. Many of us are addicted to the feeling of being busy. Having lots of obligations makes us feel needed by society. Importantly, it also signals to your friends that you’re so busy and important.

Instead, focus on the few big things that really matter. They’ll require more effort to accomplish, but they will make you thrive.

14. Might I actually be completely content?

You may be hard-wired to seek achievement, to be perpetually unhappy.

What if you can be happy with what you currently have?

Tim Ferriss found that expressing gratitude for his past and present has made him substantially happier. In his daily morning journal, he thanks 3 things that make him happy—like a good cup of tea or a friend he saw a year ago.

15. What would this look like if it were easy?

People tend to overcomplicate routes to success. Again, the feeling of struggle and being perpetually stressed makes what you’re working on seem so important.

What if it didn’t have to be this way? What if there was a way to apply your skills to a much bigger problem, where growth was easier to find?

Instead of improving things by 5%, where can you get a 5x improvement?

Don’t overcomplicate things or feel like you need to struggle. Like above, simplify for the greatest efficiency. Look for a way to roll a rock downhill.

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

16. How can I use money to solve this problem? How can I use money to improve my quality of life?

The motivation here: the one limited resource affecting every person on Earth is time. If you can buy more time with money, this is often well worth it.

Tim Ferriss suggests that in your early career, you use your time to earn money. Once you’re further along, you should use your money to gain time.

If you have enough money to solve the problem, you don’t have the problem.

(Shortform note: Here are common examples that come to mind.

In doing all this, you might spend $200-300 per month to buy back dozens of hours of time. And these are just small everyday examples. If your hourly rate is high enough, you start opening avenues like hiring an accountant or a personal assistant.

You can then use this time to make yourself happier. This can be time spent on hobbies or pure relaxation. Or you can use the time in higher-leverage ways, like reading books to make you more personally effective.)

17. Can I take it easy and achieve nearly as much?

When you’re constantly stressed, you risk burnout and lower productivity. Having to take breaks then lowers your overall output. A train can travel faster than a car, but the train has to make stops at multiple stations while the car can keep coasting at a lower speed.

Derek Sivers gives the story of a 25-mile bike ride near his house. He’d push as hard as he could, sweating and huffing, and it’d take 43 minutes. This was stressful, so he decided to take it easy one day. He’ll go at less than his normal pace and enjoy the ride, admiring the blue sky and the birds. When he finished the ride, he found the ride took 45 minutes.

He endured extreme stress for just an extra 2 minutes.

The point being: You don’t need to go through life huffing and puffing. You’ll get nearly all the way there by putting one foot in front of the other, continuously..”

The US military has a saying: “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.”

Exercise: Ask Yourself Hard Questions

Try some of Tim Ferriss’s favorite questions.

Checklists of Questions

Here’s a compilation of items for hiring, asking good questions, and solving your life problems.

Good Hiring Questions

Here are questions that titans love asking in their hiring interviews:

Questions to Elicit Stories

These are questions and prompts to get good conversations with people:

 

Tips for Conducting an Interview

Tim Ferriss has interviewed hundreds of world-class people for his podcast. Here are his tips on how to get good stories out of people:

 

Questions to Find a Great Teacher

If you want to find a teacher for a sport or activity, don’t focus on finding a person who was good at the sport. You need to find someone who is good at training other people.

Here are Tim’s favorite questions to ask: