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Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss

Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss

by Parker · 210 things on NewTwos

The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
The worst thing you can ever do is think that you know enough.
Never stop learning. Ever.
“On the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them first.” - Kurt Vonnegut
“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.” - W.H. Auden
Learn things once and use them forever.
“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” - Pierre-Marc-Gaston
If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: why can’t you do this in 6 months?
You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them.
Humans are imperfect creatures. Everyone struggles.
“Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” - Benjamin Franklin
“What’s on the other side of fear? Nothing.” - Jamie Foxx
If we’re serious all the time, we’ll wear out before we get the truly serious stuff done
Information without emotion isn’t retained
I can think, I can’t wait, I can fast
“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” - Lao Tzu
“In the end, winning is sleeping better.” - Jodie Foster
No one owes you anything
Slow down. Where’s the fire? If you rush, the reward is injuries
It could always be worse
“Play more” - Jason Nemer
Tell people what you want, not what you don’t want, and keep it simple
“The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life.” - Tony Robbins
We’re not an object, we’re a process
There a big difference between understanding something and simply knowing it’s name or labeling it
Magnesium citrate, magnesium chloride, magnesium glycinate, magnesium threonate, magnesium orotate
When you’re a leader, people are going to mimic your behavior
Calm is contagious
Practice going first. Say hello first. Make eye contact first. Smile first
Don’t take anything personally
Don’t hold yourself back
“If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.” - Lao Tzu
Psychedelics usually give you what you need, not what you want
To get pleasure, you often need to claw through pain first
Transcendental experience is the feeling or the awareness that you are connected not only to other people, but to other things and living systems
When you actually experience that you’re part of this larger system, one of the things that you become aware of is that your ego - your personal identity - is not that big a part of you
Be curious
“Kids don’t do what you say. They do what they see. How you live your life is their example” - Paul Levesque
Is that a dream, or a goal? A dream is something you fantasize about that will probably never happen. A goal is something you set a plan for, work toward, and achieve
Worrying about it now isn’t going to change a damn thing. Whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen. You’ve either done everything you can to be ready, or you haven’t.
If you don’t do something well, don’t do it unless you want to spend the time to improve it
“To develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight.” - Jane McGonigal
“Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous” - Jim Dator
“When it comes to the future, it’s far more important to be imaginative than to be right” - Alvin Toffler
What do you think about that really gets you excited?
Have no fear. You’ve got one chance here to do amazing things, and being afraid of being wrong or making a mistake or fumbling is just not how you do something of impact
If you win the morning, you win the day
Make your bed
“We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.” - Archilochus
Meditation simply helps you channel drive toward the few things that matter, rather than every moving target and imaginary opponent that pops up
Secretly wish for people at your work to be happy
Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence
The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home
Quality long term results require quality long term focus
Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process
If you are not encountering defeat on a fairly regular basis, you are not trying hard enough
Absolutely refuse to accept less than your best
“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success.” - James Cameron
“It may be lucky, but it’s not an accident.” - Chris Sacca
Be your unapologetically weird self. Authenticity is lacking
Companies don’t charge enough for their products
Forward. We don’t stop. We don’t slow down. We don’t second guess
Strong views, loosely held
The key to success is to be so good they can’t ignore you
Smart people should make things
Realize the people who made things in the past are not that different from you
“Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same.” - Steve Jobs
If you have a very clear vision of where you want to go, then the rest of it is much easier
In negotiation, he who cares the least wins
It’s not what you know, it’s what you do consistently
Choose the plan with the most options. The best plan is the one that lets you change your plans
The standard pace is for chumps
If it’s not a “Hell, Yes!” It’s a “No”
You can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience
Busy = out of control
Lack of time is lack of priorities
Treat life as a series of experiments
We are whatever we pretend to be
It’s often the tiny details that really thrill someone enough to make them tell all their friends about you
Being busy is a form of laziness
Being busy is most often used as a guide for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions
Everyone is interesting. If you’re ever bored in a conversation, the problems with you, not the other person
Getting upset won’t help things
Life is always happening for us, not to us. It’s our job to find out where the benefit is. If we do, life is magnificent
What you know doesn’t mean shit. What do you do consistently?
Investing in yourself is the most important investment you’ll ever make in your life. There’s no financial investment that’ll ever match it, because if you develop more skill, more ability, more insight, more capacity, that’s what’s going to really provide economic freed. It’s those skill sets that really make that happen
If you let your learning lead to knowledge, you become a fool. If you let your learning lead to action, you become wealthy
The quality of your life is the quality of your questions. Questions determine your focus.
The reason you’re suffering is you are focused on yourself
Prime your state, tell yourself an enabling story, then think strategy
If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing
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-verses. 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
The ultimate quantification of success is not how much time you spend doing what you love, but how little time you spend doing what you hate
“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” - Thomas Edison
There is no need to wait
It’s always the hard part that creates value
You are more powerful than you think you are. Act accordingly
Trust and attention—these are the scarce items in a post-scarcity world
If you generate enough bad ideas, a few good ones tend to show up
What you track determines your lens—choose carefully
Tell ten people who already trust you and already like you. If they don’t tell anyone else, it’s not that good and you should start over. If they do tell other people, you’re on your way
There are no real rules, so make rules that work for you
Taste the food as you go
Salt and olive oil actually are creating and they’re secret weapons and they always work
We cannot out-obedience the competition. We have to out-lead or out-solve the other people
Send someone a thank you note
Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rate by combing two or more pretty goods until no one else has your mix
If you want to be extraordinary, you have two paths: 1) become the best at one specific thing. 2) become very good (top 25%) at two or more things
At the end of the day, who cares? What’s the big deal?
Find a new category you can be first in
Creativity is an infinite resource. The more you spend, the more you have
If someone says “yes” quickly, you didn’t ask for enough
Good content is the best seo
What is the unique mojo you bring, and how can you try and amplify that?
Don’t be afraid to do something you’re not qualified to do
Don’t stress about it, it’s all going to work out in the end
When you complain, nobody wants to help you
Your day job will never make you rich. It’ll be your homework
Hold the standard. Ask for help. Fix it. Do whatever’s necessary. But don’t cheat
What context does this person have, and have I provided appropriate context?
Sales cure all
You don’t have to be extreme, but you have to ask for things, and you have to put yourself out there
Frustration is a matter of expectation
If you want to lead, you have to first learn to follow
Make other people look good and you will do well
Say little, do much
Don’t accept the norms of your time
Are you going to fulfill your potential? Or, are you just going to give into the peer pressure of the moment and become nothing?
Writers block does not actually exist. It’s performance pressure you put on yourself that keeps you from doing something you naturally should be able to do
Be open to whatever comes next
No matter what the situation may be, the right course of action is always compassion and love
Don’t force it
Inspiration is for amateurs - the rest of us just show up and get to work
Things will grow out of the activity itself. You will - through work - hump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great idea
In the wrong environment, your creativity is compromised. Your environment matters
It’s not about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen. Young creative minds don’t need more ideas, they need to take more responsibility with the ideas they’ve already got
Find out what you need to be doing on this planet, why you were put here, and what wakes you up in the morning
“The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials.” - Lin Yutang
“Discipline equals freedom.” - Jocko Willink
Are you doing what you’re uniquely capable of, what you feel placed here on Earth to do?
A long life is far from guaranteed. Nearly everyone dies before they’re ready
Life favors the specific ask and punished the vague wish
“The struggle ends when the gratitude begins.” - Neale Donald Walsch
“There is no way to happiness—happiness is the way.” - Thich Nhat Hanh
“What you seek is seeking you.” - Rumi
“At the end of life, you can let a lot of the rules that govern our daily lives fly out the window. Because you realize that we’re walking around in systems in society, and much of what comes most of our days is not some natural order. We’re all navigating some superstructure that we humans created.” BJ Miller
Don’t believe everything you think
Human beings are feeling machines. If we’re cut off from our senses, we are cut off
To fix someone’s problem, you very often just need to empathically listen to them
One way for all of us to live until we’re actually dead is to prize the little moments
Let go a little bit more and hang in there. Don’t pretend to know where this is all going. You don’t need to know where it’s all going
Formula for greatness: consistency driven by a deep love of the work
Life is a continual process of arrival into who we are
The paradox of accepting requests you receive is at the expense of the quality of the very work—the reason for those requests in the first place
Sitting is the new smoking
Those who work much, do not work hard
Ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or some other virtue—but really, it’s a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect
If you don’t have the patience to read something, don’t have the hubris to comment on it
Write to please just one person, yourself
The second you start doing it for an audience, you’ve lost the long game because creating something that is rewarding and sustainable over the long run requires, most of all, keeping yourself excited about it
It always shows in the work when you resent it
You discover your purpose in the very act of walking the path, which is guided by equal parts choice and chance
Discipline equals freedom
Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have
If you want to be tougher, be tougher
You can’t blame your boss for not giving you the support you need. You haven’t educated him, you haven’t influenced him, you haven’t explained to him in a manner he understands why you need this support that you need
Listen, open your mind, try to see another way of doing things, be humble
Step outside of yourself and observe yourself. You aren’t reading anything correctly if you are seeing it through your own emotion and ego
The hardest thing you’re ever going to do in your life is fail at something, and if you don’t start failing at things, you will not live a full life. You’ll be living a cautious life on a path that you know is pretty much guaranteed to more or less work. That’s not getting the most out of this amazing world we live in. You have to do the hardest thing that you have not been prepared for: you have to be prepared to fail. That’s how you’re going to expand yourself and grow. As you work through that process of failure and learning, you will really deepen into the human being you’re capable of being
The public is not a threat. We all need each other, and can learn from each other. No need for stage fright
Balance the courage of exploring with the commitment to staying
Wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice
Mindfulness is just that quality of mind which allows you to pay attention to sights and sounds and sensations, even thoughts themselves, without being lost in thought and without grasping at what is pleasant and pushing what is unpleasant away
We are talking to ourselves nonstop, and until you can break that spell and begin to notice thoughts themselves as objects of consciousness, just arising and passing away, you can’t even pay attention to your breath, or to anything else, with any clarity
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to ones courage
To not do something because you might get injured is a terrible reason not to do something
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action
The way you do anything is the way you do everything
Happiness is wanting what you have
The more you know what you really want, and where you’re really going, the more what everybody else is doing starts to diminish. The moments when your own path is at its most ambiguous, the voices of others, the distracting chaos in which we live, the social media static starts to loom large and become very threatening
Appreciate what’s good about this moment
Listening is about being present, not just being quiet
The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion
Honor those who seek the truth, beware of those who’ve found it
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world
Life is too short to be petty and defensive and cruel to other people who are seeking to innovate alongside you
It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it. What matters is how many people do
Living well is the best revenge
Robustness is when you care more about the few who like your work than the multitude who hates it; fragility is when you care more about he few who hate your work than the multitude who loves it
Cynicism is a disease that robs people of the gift of life
Happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop
Watch every thought
All greatness comes from suffering
Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts
Nothing that we do lasts
This is such a short and precious life, it is really important that you don’t spend it being unhappy. There is no excuse for spending most of your life in misery
Be willing to fail or succeed on who you really are. Don’t ever try to be anything else
75% of success is staying calm and not losing your nerve. The rest you figure out, but once you lose your calm, everything else starts falling apart
If you want to be taken seriously, take things seriously. Do the work
Love yourself. You’ve got to love yourself before you can love others