My Highlights on Tools Of Titans book
Long story short — Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss is at the moment my FAVOURITE BOOK EVER. I can’t describe enough how cool, it is. Because of my occupation, I always try to cut the informational noise as much as possible and get to the edge ASAP. I do believe that 80/20 rule always helps. So, when I am considering which is the next book to read — I make my choise very carefully. For now, any new book cannot compete with this one (my personal opinion).
Tim is doing a tremendous job in each podcast. He invites extremely interesting guests from all life spheres. He is a master of interviews. That is why his podcasts themselves are very interesting. From my understanding, the book — is a derivative of the podcasts. When you are reading the book, you are going to miss some bits of wisdom that you can find in podcasts.
This book, like my others, is a compendium of recipes for high performance that I gathered for my own use. Tim Ferris
I’ve read this book twice. I’m afraid to make a poor impression by this article. I’m writting it mostly for myself to easily return to most usefull information.
Book consists of 3 parts: Healthy, Wealthy, Wise. This article covers only Wealthy part. “Wealthy,” in the context of this book, means much more than money. It extends to abundance in time, relationships, and more.
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 inminutes but be read for a lifetime. (TF)
I have structured my highlights in Workflowy.
Part I: Mindset
I do believe what changes everything is not a lifehack and not even a strategy. Which may be wrong. Mindset is a king. If you have ‘correct’ mindset, you will answer hundreds of questions automatically.
A lot of great quotes you may find in the interview with Peter Diamandis:
- When 99% of people doubt you, you’re either gravely wrong or about to make history.
- I think of problems as gold mines. The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.
- I think we need to be training people on how to change the world.
What’s your moonshot?
- If somebody gave you $1 billion, how would you spend it besides the parties and the Ferraris and so forth? Think about it. It took me 30 mins to get at least one reasonable answer.
- Where can you put yourself into an environment that gives maximum exposure to new ideas, problems, and people?
- When you’re going 10% bigger, you’re competing against everybody. Everybody’s trying to go 10% bigger. When you’re trying to go 10 times bigger, you’re there by yourself.
- How will you disrupt yourself, and how are you trying to disrupt yourself?
Some bits of wisdom from Scott Belsky:
- The danger of maps, capable assistants, and planning is that you may end up living your life as planned. If you do, your potential cannot possibly exceed your expectations.
- Sometimes you need to stop doing things you love in order to nurture the one thing that matters most.
- I try to learn from the past without being inspired by it.
- In the wrong environment, your creativity is compromised.
- Billboard: ‘It’s not about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen.’
- Every success was almost a failure.
Young creative minds don’t need more ideas, they need to take more responsibility with the ideas they’ve already got.
Neil Strauss
The biggest mistake you can make is to accept the norms of your time.
- Don’t be afraid to do something you’re not qualified to do. Dan Carlin
- ... job I was going to do hadn’t even been invented yet… The interesting jobs are the ones that you make up. Chris Young
Money can always be regenerated. Time and reputation cannot.
Scott Adams
Loosers have goals. Winners have systems.
This involves choosing projects and habits that, even if they result in “failures” in the eyes of the outside world, give you transferable skills or relationships. In other words, you choose options that allow you to inevitably“succeed” over time, as you build assets that carry over to subsequent projects.
On diversification for stress management. I’m not going to worry about losing one friend if I have a hundred, but if I have two friends I’m really going to be worried. I’m not going to worry about losing my job because my one boss is going to fire me, because I have thousands of bosses at newspapers everywhere.
If you want an average, successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1)Become the best at one specific thing. 2) Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.[…] Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. … At least one of the skills in your mixture should involve communication, either written or verbal. And it could be as simple as learning how to sell more effectively than 75% of the world. That’s one. Now add to that whatever your passion is, and you have two because that’s the thing you’ll easily put enough energy into to reach the top 25%.
You are more powerful than you think you are. Act accordingly.
“Trust and attention — these are the scarce items in a post-scarcity world.”
We can’t out-obedience the competition.
What you track determines your lens — choose carefully
There’s nothing wrong with being a wandering generalityinstead of a meaningful specific, but don’t expect to make the change you [hope] to make if that’s what you do.
So if you’re planning to do something with your life, if you have a 10-year plan of how to get there, you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months?
“Sir, how did you survive all those years in prison?” — “I DIDN’T SURVIVE, I PREPARED.” Nelson Mandela’s answer when Tony Robbin's question.
Life is always happening for us, not to us.
Stressed’ is the achiever word for ‘fear
Losers react, leaders anticipate.
What do you do consistently?
If you let your learning lead to knowledge, you become a fool. If you let your learning lead to action, you become wealthy. Jim Rohn
The quality of your life is the quality of your questions.
The reason you’re suffering is you’re focused on yourself. People tell me, ‘I’m not suffering that way. I’m worrying about my kids. My kids are not what they need to be.’ No, the reason [these people are] upset is they feel they failed their kids. It’s still about them…. Suffering comes from three thought patterns: loss, less, never.”
State -> Story -> Strategy
The World Doesn’t Need Your Explanation on Saying “No”. Tim Ferriss generalizing James Altucher: “I don’t give explanations anymore, and I’ll catch myself when I start giving explanations like ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t make it. I have a doctor’s appointment that day… I just say, ‘I can’t do it. I hope everything is well.”
I don’t feel like the people are necessarily being deceitful. It’s just realizing that everybody’s got their own agenda. Even a music magazine is not interviewing you because they love music, right? Their day to day is ‘Weneed ad dollars, we need click-through…. Mike Shinoda
Frustration is a matter of expectation. Luis von Ahn
“You realize that you will never be the best-looking person in the room. You’ll never be the smartest person in the room. You’ll never be the most educated, the most well-versed. You can never compete on those levels. But what you can always compete on, the true egalitarian aspect to success is hard work. You can always work harder than the next guy.” Casey Neistat
If you go out there and start making noise and making sales, people will find you. Sales cure all. You can talk about how great your business plan is and how well you are going to do. You can make up your own opinions, but you cannot make up your own facts. Sales cure all. Daymond John
Travel isn’t just for changing what’s outside, it’s for reinventing what’s inside.
Are You Doing What You’re Uniquely Capable of, What You Feel Placed Here on Earth to Do? Can You Be Replaced?
A long life is far from guaranteed. Nearly everyone dies before they’re ready.
If I’m not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, then I say no.
I am willing to accept a mild and temporary 10% decrease in current quality of life for a high-probability 10x return, whether the ROI comes in the form of cash, time, energy, or otherwise.
All of my biggest wins have come from leveraging strengths instead of fixing weaknesses.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom.
Part II: Strategy
Strategies are what you probably use when planning week or month. They have direct connections with reality and are changing after getting feedback.
- If you had $100 million, what would you build that would have no value to others in copying? Valve’s co-founder
- “Where can you put yourself into an environment that gives maximum exposure to new ideas, problems, and people? Exposure to things that capture your ‘shower time’ Peter Diamandis
- I shut down a number of projects including our popular task-management application and disappointed thousands of customers. But doing so allowed our team to focus on building a product that ultimately reached many millions of creative people around the world. Scott Belsky
- If you spend your time focusing on the things that are wrong, and that’s what you express and project to people you know, you don’t become a source of growth for people, you become a source of destruction for people. Tracy Rose DiNunzio
- Amplify your strengths rather than fix your weaknesses. TF
- Different, not just better: I took a lot of cues from Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat … because they were hackers…. [Some of them] were making art about making art. They were reinventing the game while they were playing it. Chase Jarvis
- “I was told my whole career: You have to specialize, specialize. I ‘specialized’ in pursuing the things that interested me. I talked a lot about action sports, but then I also talked about fashion, break dancing, and all kinds of different cultural stuff. I’ve made TV shows, shot commercials, done ad campaigns, created startups, and [made] the first iPhone app that shared images to social networks. I historically would have been called a dilettante, but to be able to touch all of these things [is to] find out that they ultimately inform one another.” Chase Jarvis
- It’s always the hard part that creates value Seth Godin
- If you generate enough bad ideas, a few good ones tend to show up Seth Godin
- “The blog post I point people to the most is called ‘First, Ten,’ and it is a simple theory of marketing that says: tell ten people, show ten people, share it with ten people; ten people who already trust you and already like you. If they don’t tell anybody else, it’s not that good and you should start over. If they do tell other people, you’re on your way.” Seth Godin
How to create something great
- My suggestion is, whenever possible, ask yourself: What’s the smallest possible footprint I can get away with? What is the smallest possible project that is worth my time? What is the smallest group of people who I could make a difference for, or to? Because the smallest is achievable. Smallest feels risky. Because if you pick smallest and you fail, now you’ve really screwed up.
- We want to pick big. Infinity is our friend. Infinity is safe. Infinity gives us a place to hide. So, I want to encourage people instead to look for the small. To be on one medium in a place where people can find you. To have one sort of interaction with one tribe, with one group where you don’t have a lot of lifeboats.”
I quantify almost nothing in my life
I think almost everything is made, not born, and that makes people uncomfortable…
- “The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.” Peter Thiel
- So I think, every day, it’s something to reflect on and think about ‘How do I become less competitive in order that I can become more successful?’” Peter Thiel
Reid Hoffman’s interview
- Reid responding to an insult with “I’m perfectly willing to accept that” and moving on. About
- “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” (Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.)
- I have come to learn that part of the business strategy is to solve the simplest, easiest, and most valuable problem. And actually, in fact, part of doing strategy is to solve the easiest problem. Which of these highest-value activities is the easiest for me to do?
- Reid’s first principle is speed: ‘In order to move fast, I expect you’ll make some foot faults. I’m okay with an error rate of 10 to 20% — times when I would have made a different decision in a given situation — if it means you can move fast.’
- “How do you know if you have A-players on your project team? You know it if they don’t just accept the strategy you hand them. They should suggest modifications to the plan based on their closeness to the details.”
Four commonalities across the best investors (interview with Tony Robbins)
- Capping the downside: “Every single one of those [people] is obsessed with not losing money. I mean, a level of obsession that’s mind-boggling.” On Richard Branson: “His first question to every business is, ‘What’s the downside? And how do I protect against it?’ Like when he did his piece with Virgin — that’s a big risk to start an airline — he went to Boeing and negotiated a deal that [he]
- Asymmetrical risks and rewards: “Every single one of them is obsessed with asymmetrical risk and reward…. It simply means they’re looking to use the least amount of risk to get the max amount of upside, and that what they live for…. [They don’t believe they] have to take huge risks for huge rewards. Say, ‘How do I get no risk and get huge rewards?’ and because you ask a question continuously and you believe [there’s an]answer, you get it.”
- “When people think they’ve got a balanced portfolio, stocks are three times more volatile than bonds. So when you’re 50/50, you’re really 90/10. You really are massively at risk, and that’s why when the markets go down, you get eaten alive…. Whatever asset class you invest in, I promise you, in your lifetime, it will drop no less than 50% and more likely 70% at some point. That is why you absolutely must diversify.”
- “And the last one that I found: almost all of them were real givers, not just givers on the surface … but really passionate about giving…. It was really real.”
Don’t be a dog — think ‘What if’?
“From the early days of WordPress, we would always think: ‘Okay, if we do X today, what does that result in tomorrow, a year from now, ten years from now?’ The metaphor I think of the most — because it’s simple — is the dog chasing the car. What does the dog do if he catches the car? He doesn’t have a plan for it. So I find it just as often on the entrepreneurial side. People don’t plan for success.”
Don’t try and find the time. schedule time. noah kagan
For hiring well — “who?” is often more important than “what?” noah kagan
Every single thing in your company breaks every time you roughly triple in size. Phil Libin
Asking the right dumb question is often the smartest thing you can do. Alex Blumberg
Be the silence that listens. Tara Brach
Tactics are great, but tactics become commoditized. Ramit Sethi
- TO GO BIG, AIM SMALL (AND FOR TECH, IF YOU CAN) — 1000 true fans.
- It’s always smart, before starting any collaboration, to ask yourself, “What are their incentives and the timelines of their incentives? How do they measure ‘success’? Are we aligned?” Don’t make short-term all-or-nothing bets on gimmicks, if you’re playing the long game. There will often be pressure from people who are thinking about a promotion next quarter, not your career in 1 to 10 years.
- I was turned down 27 times when pitching The 4-Hour Workweek to New York City publishers. Fortunately, you often only need one publisher, one lead investor, one X.
- If you understand principles, you can create tactics. If you are dependent on perishable tactics, you are always at a disadvantage.
Haste makes waste.
- Option A: You can waste 30 to 50% of your time persuading a few small sponsors to commit early, then stall at 30K downloads per episode because you’re neglecting the creative. Things are even worse if you get mired in the world of sketchy affiliate deals.
- Option B: You can play the long game, wait 6 to 12 months until you have a critical mass, then get to 300K downloads per episode and make more than 10 times per episode with much larger brands who can afford to scale with you as you grow. Haste makes waste. In this case, it can easily make the difference between $50K per year and more than $1 million per year.
Part III: Routines
- Peter Diamandis always reviews his three “wins of the day.” This is analogous to the 5-Minute Journal p.m. review that I do. TF
- On a daily basis, Reid Hoffman jots down problems in a notebook that he wants his mind to work on overnight. Bolding below is mine, as I think the wording is important. Note “might have” instead of “have,” etc.: “What are the kinds of key things that might be constraints on a solution, or might be the attributes of a solution, and what are tools or assets I might have?
- “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” — Thomas Edison
- Five days a week, I read my goals before I go to sleep and when I wake up. There are 10 goals around health, family, business, etc., with expiration dates, and I update them every 6 months. Daymond John
To find more info about routines listen whole episode of Tim Ferris Show. Also Tony Robbins is a big beliver in routins value. You may find more about it on his site.
Part IV: Lifehacks
Get the long-term goal on the calendar before the short-term pain hits schedule (and, if possible, pay for) things in advance to prevent yourself from backing out. make commitments in a high-energy state so that you can’t back out when you’re in a low-energy state. TF
When possible, always give the money to charity, as it allows you to interact with people well above your pay grade. TF
On getting out of funcs. It’s going back to ‘Why do I believe this is important?’ It’s, ‘Look how far I’ve taken it so far. Peter Diamandis
When you complain, nobody wants to help you. Tracy Rose DiNunzio
If someone ever says ‘yes’ that quickly, you didn’t ask for enough. Chase Jarvis
IF YOU CAN’T GENERATE 10 IDEAS, GENERATE 20 James Altucher
“What if [you] just can’t come up with 10 ideas? Here’s the magic trick: If you can’t come up with 10 ideas, come up with 20 ideas…. You are putting too much pressure on yourself. Perfectionism is the ENEMY of the idea muscle … it’s your brain trying to protect you from harm, from coming up with an idea that is embarrassing and stupid and could cause you to suffer pain.
P.S. I recommend to read book original. Because the quotes above are just my own interpretation and highlights. An article may not be useful for you, but book will definitely be.
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