PDF Summary:Tools of Titans, by Timothy Ferriss

In his epic 707-page Tools of Titans, Tim Ferriss shares the habits and beliefs of 101 people at the top of their game, including tech investors like Chris Sacca and Peter Thiel, entrepreneurs like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Evernote’s Phil Libin, superhuman athletes like Amelia Boone and Wim Hof, media figures like Edward Norton and Whitney Cummings, and more.

These are the principles that successful people use to achieve audacious goals, improve themselves, and be happier. The premise: if you can apply the lessons from this book, you can be more effective.

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• Think about the limiting beliefs you have that are handicapping you.
• What has the belief cost you in the past? What has it cost other people you care about in the past? Visualize this and feel it viscerally. Hear the sounds, see the sights, feel the emotions.
• What will the belief cost you and people you care about in the future? Imagine what happens 1 year from now, 5 years from now, and 10 years from now. Hear the sounds, see the sights, feel the emotions.

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.

• Author James Altucher challenges himself to come up with 10 ideas a day. These aren’t necessarily business ideas, but also around themes like “10 ways I can save time,” “10 ridiculous inventions,” or “10 ways to solve a problem I have.”
• Author Malcolm Gladwell comes up with as many ideas as possible, scrutinizes them, and kills them off. The unkillable ideas are worth going forward with.
• Many writers don’t believe that writer’s block exists. Author Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist) says that even if he doesn’t feel inspired, he enforces the discipline of writing his way out.

How to Think of Ideas

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

• Founder of Gimlet Media Alex Blumberg: Important stories often have a very basic question no one’s asking. Like leading up to the 2008 Great Recession, “why are banks loaning money to people who can’t pay it back?”

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.

• Futurist Jim Dator: “Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.”
• Futurist Alvin Toffler: “It’s far more important to be imaginative than to be right.”
• Entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen: To do innovative work, you don’t have to know a secret no one else knows. You do have to believe something few other people believe.

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.

• Investor Marc Andreessen develops his ideas with his co-founder Ben Horowitz. Whenever each person brings in a deal, they just “beat the shit out of it.” Even if the idea is good, they force themselves to rip the idea apart. Then, at the end, if they still feel it’s a good idea, it’s survived the torture test.
• LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman tests the mettle of his staff by whether they push back on the strategy given them. Instead of just taking it fully as is, the best people suggest improvements to the plan based on their expertise.
• To challenge their plans, the military creates “red teams” of people whose mission is to sabotage the plan.

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.

• Comedian Whitney Cummings found her greatest comedic success in revealing her embarrassing moments, which allowed her audience to connect and feel a catharsis.
• TV host Glenn Beck: Early in his radio show, a caller accused Glenn Beck of being Mr. Perfect. For 15 minutes, Beck shared his biggest mistakes and his past as an alcoholic. He first thought his career was over, but he then realized people are starving for something authentic.

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.

• Founder and investor Marc Andreessen feels that pivoting from a company that isn’t working is too easy of an option and overvalued. Instead, put the time into figuring it out and getting it right.

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.

• Tony Robbins believes gratitude prevents you from feeling anger or fear. He starts off his morning by meditating on what he’s grateful for.
• Tim Ferriss recommends naming 3 new things you’re grateful for in an end-of-day 5-minute journal. Instead of repeating the same things like your health, consider small things, like an old relationship that really helped you, something great that you saw happen, or something simple that you can see.
• Author Seth Godin: Why fixate on all the times someone betrayed or rejected you? It makes more sense to keep track of all the times it worked, all the times you took a risk and it worked out. You can control your own narrative.

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.”
• 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.

Stress:

• Navy SEALs have a saying about leadership: “Calm is contagious.” People mimic your behavior. If you stay calm, they’ll be calm too. If you panic, they’ll panic too.
• In his response to crises, Matt Mullenweg exemplifies “getting upset won’t help things.”
• A titan told a story about meeting boxer Evander Holyfield before one of his big fights. The titan was worried that he was imposing on his pre-fight prep, but Holyfield waved it off. He knew he had done everything he could before the fight to be ready for the fight, and the minutes before a fight wouldn’t change anything.

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.

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.

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.