Tools Of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

Metadata

• Title: Tools Of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
• Author: Timothy Ferriss and Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Book URL: https://amazon.com/dp/B01HSMRWNU?tag=malvaonlin-20
• Open in Kindle: kindle://book/?action=open&asin=B01HSMRWNU
• Last Updated on: Friday, September 29, 2017

Highlights & Notes

The worst thing you can ever do is think that you know enough. Never stop learning. Ever.

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

“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.” —W.H. Auden

You are forced to shed artificial constraints, like shedding a skin, to realize that you had the ability to renegotiate your reality all along. It just takes practice.

Success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits.

You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them.

Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. The heroes in this book are no different. Everyone struggles. Take solace in that.

information without emotion isn’t retained.

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” —Lao Tzu

• What would you put on a billboard? “No one owes you anything.”

Dr. Patrick introduced me to using teeth for stem-cell banking. If you are having your wisdom teeth removed, or if your kids are losing their baby teeth (which have a particularly high concentration of dental pulp stem cells), consider using a company like StemSave or National Dental Pulp Laboratory to preserve them for later use. These companies will send your oral surgeon a kit, and then freeze the biological matter using liquid nitrogen. Costs vary, but are roughly $625forsetupandthen$125 per year for storage and maintenance.

When in doubt, work on the deficiencies you’re most embarrassed by.

“You’re not responsible for the hand of cards you were dealt. You’re responsible for maxing out what you were given.”

“If you don’t have cancer and you do a therapeutic fast 1 to 3 times per year, you could purge any precancerous cells that may be living in your body.”

Dom suggests a 5-day fast 2 to 3 times per year.

I now aim for a 3-day fast once per month and a 5- to 7-day fast once per quarter.

2 cups sour cream (I like Straus Creamery brand) or unsweetened coconut cream (not coconut water) 1 tablespoon dark chocolate baking cocoa 1–2 pinches of sea salt (my favorite is flaky Maldon) 1–2 pinches of cinnamon A small dash of stevia (Dom buys NOW Foods organic stevia in bulk)

“Fasting before chemotherapy is definitely something that should be implemented in our oncology wards,”

“Fasting essentially slows (sometimes stops) rapidly dividing cells and triggers an ‘energetic crisis’ that makes cancer cells selectively vulnerable to chemo and radiation.”

I had to get back to this place where you just want water, food, and shelter. All the craziness of my life—this Wall Street life I had taken on—would go away, would melt away.”

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.”

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot

“Sparta, Rome, the knights of Europe, the samurai … worshipped strength. Because it is strength that makes all other values possible.”

“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

Low enough doses (i.e., 100 mcg of LSD or 200 mg of mescaline) can immensely increase the capacity to solve problems.

“What I’m finding is that microdoses of LSD or mushrooms may be very helpful for depression because they make you feel better enough that you do something about what’s wrong with your life. We’ve made [depression] an illness. It may be the body’s way of saying, ‘You better deal with something, because it’s making you really sad.’

“If you get the answer, you should hang up the phone.” In other words, when you get the message you need, you shouldn’t keep asking

There’s no point in going to a motivational seminar if you’re not going to take any next steps.

I haven’t had this extreme a reaction since, but it happened. And such a response, while not typical, is also not that uncommon. You might wonder: Why would I ever use ayahuasca again after that? Here’s why: Over subsequent weeks, I realized that some of the most critical relationships in my life had been completely repaired. I saw things differently, reacted differently, and interacted differently, as if I had been reprogrammed. Those changes all persist to this day. So, there’s a huge potential upside but equally huge potential downside if taken lightly or done with the wrong people.

You go through deep, psychological healing, oftentimes pre-verbal healing around traumatic issues that [occurred] between birth and age 4. From a developmental psychological perspective, this is when most of the long-term personality traits are formed. You gain a witness perspective, the fear centers relax, the trauma is brought back up onto the screen of the mind … you oftentimes get this replay of very early things and can have a corrective experience… .

“Just because something is effective doesn’t mean somebody is ready for it.

“Many cases of addiction are linked to post-traumatic stress disorder. This can also be resolved with ibogaine because it allows a person to go back to that traumatic event and experience it without any emotional pain. One is able to go back and let go of the experience, come to terms with the experience, or just re-contextualize the experience. “Like Dr. Engle was saying, a lot of trauma that happens is pre-verbal… . The brain stores this as an emotional charge because there are no words associated with the experience. Ibogaine allows them to go back and see what happened, almost as if they were floating in the room as an observer. Because they’re seeing this experience through the eyes of an adult, it allows them to put it in a different context.

This is referred to as the ‘integration phase,’ where a person takes action to fuel the necessary positive changes that were revealed through the experience. It is important to take advantage of the learning and growth opportunities in this phase, and to develop habits that will help sustain self-control once noribogaine flushes out.”

So many people, when they have a big experience, want to go share it, and sometimes the response they get isn’t always supportive. That alters the healing that they just received.”

Dune by Frank Herbert and The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

For men, the “boner or no boner” test is a simple but excellent indicator of sleep quality, hormonal health (GH, FSH, testosterone), circadian rhythm timing, and more.

“If you can’t squat all the way down to the ground with your feet and knees together, then you are missing full hip and ankle range of motion.

Dark means DARK. “They’ve done studies where they shine a laser on the back of someone’s knee, and people pick it up. It’s light. You cannot have your phone in your room. You cannot have a TV in your room. It needs to be black, black as night.”

Lie on a bed at a mattress store for 5 minutes. If you have to cross your feet, your bed is too hard.

If you need to put a pillow under your legs to put you into flexion, then you need a softer bed. You should also focus on opening up hip extension.

Go-To Multivitamin The whole-food based Nutriforce WODPak (Nutriforce Sports).

“Don’t systematically shorten your kids’ heel cords (Achilles) with bad shoes. It results in crappy ankle range of motion in the future. Get your kids Vans, Chuck Taylors, or similar shoes. Have them in flat shoes or barefoot as much as possible.”

“Kids don’t do what you say. They do what they see. How you live your life is their example.”

‘Okay. Is that a dream or a goal? Because there’s a difference.’

‘Is that a dream, or a goal? Because a dream is something you fantasize about that will probably never happen. A goal is something you set a plan for, work toward, and achieve.

‘Why would I be wound up? I’m either ready or I’m not. Worrying about it right now ain’t gonna change a damn thing. Right? Whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen. I’ve either done everything I can to be ready for this, or I haven’t.’”

“My work isn’t done tonight. My work was done 3 months ago, and I just have to show up.”

“What am I continuing to do myself that I’m not good at?” Improve it, eliminate it, or delegate it.

• Recommended documentaries G4M3RS: A Documentary (can be found for free on YouTube) The King of Kong

Most-gifted or recommended books Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse Suffering Is Optional by Cheri Huber

If what I’m doing sounds reasonable to most people, then I’m not working in a space that is creative and innovative enough!”

To be answered in the morning: I am grateful for … 1. __________ 2. __________ 3. __________ What would make today great? 1. __________ 2. __________ 3. __________ Daily affirmations. I am … 1. __________ 2. __________ 3. __________ To be filled in at night: 3 amazing things that happened today … 1. __________ 2. __________ 3. __________ (This is similar to Peter Diamandis’s “three wins” practice; see page 373.) How could I have made today better? 1. __________ 2. __________ 3. __________

An old relationship that really helped you, or that you valued highly. An opportunity you have today. Perhaps that’s just an opportunity to call one of your parents, or an opportunity to go to work. It doesn’t have to be something large. Something great that happened yesterday, whether you experienced or witnessed it. Something simple near you or within sight. This was a recommendation from Tony Robbins. The gratitude points shouldn’t all be “my career” and other abstract items. Temper those with something simple and concrete—a beautiful cloud outside the window, the coffee that you’re drinking, the pen that you’re using, or whatever it might be.

“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.

The goal is not to “quiet the mind,” which will give your brain a hyperactive tantrum; the goal is to observe your thoughts.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe.” —Abraham Lincoln

Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence.

On the Advantage of Cultivating Beginner’s Mind “Experience often deeply embeds the assumptions that need to be questioned in the first place. When you have a lot of experience with something, you don’t notice the things that are new about it. You don’t notice the idiosyncrasies that need to be tweaked. You don’t notice where the gaps are, what’s missing, or what’s not really working.”

if you find someone diving too deep into the numbers, that means they are struggling to find a reason to deeply care about you.”

They don’t charge enough for their product to be able to afford the sales and marketing required to actually get anybody to buy it. Is your product any good if people won’t pay more for it?”

“He says the key to success is, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’”

“The perfect day is caffeine for 10 hours, alcohol for 4. It balances everything out perfectly.”

“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 again.”

“My goal is not to fail fast. My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not the same thing.”

“To do original work: It’s not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.”

“Andy Grove had the answer: For every metric, there should be another ‘paired’ metric that addresses adverse consequences of the first metric.” “Show me an incumbent bigco failing to adapt to change, I’ll show you top execs paid huge cash compensation for quarterly and annual goals.” “Every billionaire suffers from the same problem. Nobody around them ever says, ‘Hey, that stupid idea you just had is really stupid.’” “‘Far more money has been lost by investors trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost in corrections themselves.’—Peter Lynch”

I am a big believer that if you have a very clear vision of where you want to go, then the rest of it is much easier.

I wasn’t there to compete. I was there to win.”

“In negotiation, he who cares the least wins.”

This reminded me of the deal that George Lucas crafted for Star Wars, in which the studio effectively said, “Toys? Yeah, sure, whatever. You can have the toys.” That was a multi-billion-dollar mistake that gave Lucas infinite financing for life (an estimated 8,000,000,000+ units sold to date). When deal-making, ask yourself: Can I trade a short-term, incremental gain for a potential longer-term, game-changing upside? Is there an element here that might be far more valuable in 5 to 10 years (e.g., ebook rights 10 years ago)? Might there be rights or options I can explicitly “carve out” and keep? If you can cap the downside (time, capital, etc.) and have the confidence, take uncrowded bets on yourself. You only need one winning lottery ticket.

“If [more] information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”

“How to thrive in an unknowable future? Choose the plan with the most options. The best plan is the one that lets you change your plans.”

You’ve probably heard the fable, I think it’s ‘Buridan’s ass,’ about a donkey who is standing halfway between a pile of hay and a bucket of water. He just keeps looking left to the hay, and right to the water, trying to decide. Hay or water, hay or water? He’s unable to decide, so he eventually falls over and dies of both hunger and thirst. A donkey can’t think of the future. If he did, he’d realize he could clearly go first to drink the water, then go eat the hay. “So, my advice to my 30-year-old self is, don’t be a donkey. You can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience.”

So $35setupfee,$4 per CD sold, and then, Tim, for the next 10 years, that was it. That was my entire business model, generated in 5 minutes by walking down to the local record store and asking what they do.”

“Because most of us say yes to too much stuff, and then, we let these little, mediocre things fill our lives… . The problem is, when that occasional, ‘Oh my God, hell yeah!’ thing comes along, you don’t have enough time to give it the attention that you should, because you’ve said yes to too much other little, half-ass stuff, right? Once I started applying this, my life just opened up.”

Lack of time is lack of priorities.

“My recommendation is to do little tests. Try a few months of living the life you think you want, but leave yourself an exit plan, being open to the big chance that you might not like it after actually trying it…

“Even when everything is going terribly, and I have no reason to be confident, I just decide to be.”

When you make a business, you’re making a little world where you control the laws. It doesn’t matter how things are done everywhere else. In your little world, you can make it like it should be.

When you’re thinking of how to make your business bigger, it’s tempting to try to think all the big thoughts, the world-changing, massive-action plans. But please know that it’s often the tiny details that really thrill someone enough to make them tell all their friends about you.

. ‘Give me an example of something that you’ve built into your product or your service that you’re especially proud of, that’s one of these touch points for someone to just go, “Wow … if you can inject this life into your software, into the copy, into the whatever, you can connect with people.”

It just requires you to gives lots of damns, which not enough people do.”

Improve a notification email from your business (e.g., subscription confirmation, order confirmation, whatever): “Invest that little bit of time to make it a little bit more human or—depending on your brand—a little funnier, a little more different, or a little more whatever. It’ll be worth it, and that’s my challenge.”

“The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.” —Neil Gaiman,

Most “superheroes” are nothing of the sort. They’re weird, neurotic creatures who do big things DESPITE lots of self-defeating habits and self-talk.

What you do is more important than how you do everything else, and doing something well does not make it important.

Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.

Don’t overestimate the world and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think. And you are not alone.

“When you can write well, you can think well.”   “Everyone is interesting. If you’re ever bored in a conversation, the problem’s with you, not the other person.”

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.”

“You know something I can say, you asked about what we look for in candidates: clarity of writing. I think clarity of writing indicates clarity of thinking.”

“I didn’t survive, I prepared.” Nelson Mandela’s answer when Tony asked him, “Sir, how did you survive all those years in prison?”

Is There a Quote That Guides Your Life? “It’s a belief: 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.”

Short and Sweet   “‘Stressed’ is the achiever word for ‘fear.’”   “Losers react, leaders anticipate.”   “Mastery doesn’t come from an infographic. 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 freedom… . 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.”

A Focus on “Me” = Suffering “This brain inside our heads is a 2 million-year-old brain… . It’s ancient, old survival software that is running you a good deal of time. Whenever you’re suffering, that survival software is there. 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.”

I now often ask myself, “Is this really a problem I need to think my way out of? Or is it possible I just need to fix my biochemistry?” I’ve wasted a lot of time journaling on “problems” when I just needed to eat breakfast sooner, do 10 push-ups, or get an extra hour of sleep. Sometimes, you think you have to figure out your life’s purpose, but you really just need some macadamia nuts and a cold fucking shower.

It’s impossible to be angry and grateful simultaneously. When you’re grateful, there is no fear. You can’t be fearful and grateful simultaneously.”

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.”

• Most-gifted or recommended books? Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl The Fourth Turning by William Strauss (Also, Generations by William Strauss, which was gifted to Tony by Bill Clinton) Mindset by Carol Dweck (for parenting) As a Man Thinketh by James Allen (see Shay Carl, page 441)

TF: How can you make your bucket-list dreams pay for themselves by sharing them? This is, in effect, how I’ve crafted my entire career since 2004. It’s modeled after Ben Franklin’s excellent advice: “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.”

“What is the ultimate quantification of success? For me, it’s not how much time you spend doing what you love. It’s how little time you spend doing what you hate.

hope is not a strategy. luck is not a factor. fear is not an option.

“Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts [nebulous worries, jitters, and preoccupations] on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes.”

Morning pages don’t need to solve your problems. They simply need to get them out of your head, where they’ll otherwise bounce around all day like a bullet ricocheting inside your skull. Could bitching and moaning on paper for 5 minutes each morning change your life? As crazy as it seems, I believe the answer is yes.

Avalon Hill board games,

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

It Doesn’t Always Have to Be Hard “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, so part of the reason why you work on software and bits is that atoms [physical products] are actually very difficult.”

Which of these highest-value activities is the easiest for me to do? You can build an entire career on 80/20 analysis and asking this question.

“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? .

“The very first thing I do when I get up, almost always, is to sit down and work on that problem [I’ve set the day before] because that’s when I’m freshest. I’m not distracted by phone calls and responses to things, and so forth. It’s the most tabula rasa—blank slate—moment that I have. I use that to maximize my creativity on a particular project. I’ll usually do it before I shower, because frequently, if I go into the shower, I’ll continue to think about it.”

“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”—Thomas Edison

“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.”

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? Sometimes, you have to actually go through the complex, 10-year trajectory. But it’s at least worth asking whether that’s the story you’re telling yourself, or whether that’s the reality.”

“I think people actually do not learn very much from failure. I think it ends up being quite damaging and demoralizing to people in the long run, and my sense is that the death of every business is a tragedy. It’s not some sort of beautiful aesthetic where there’s a lot of carnage, but that’s how progress happens, and it’s not some sort of educational imperative. So I think failure is neither a Darwinian nor an educational imperative. Failure is always simply a tragedy.”

What I prefer over trends is a sense of mission. That you are working on a unique problem that people are not solving elsewhere.

“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.”

I would ask questions. Why am I doing this? Am I doing this just because I have good grades and test scores and because I think it’s prestigious? Or am I doing this because I’m extremely passionate about practicing law?

And when you’re very competitive, you get good at the thing you’re competing with people on. But it comes at the expense of losing out on many other things.

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?’ ”

We always need to ask: Is this true? And this is always what I get at with this indirect question: ‘Tell me something that’s true that very few people agree with you on.’ ”

Peter will also sometimes ask potential hires, “What problem do you face every day that nobody has solved yet?” or “What is a great company no one has started?”

The Monopoly Question: Are you starting with a big share of a small market? The Secret Question: Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see? The Distribution Question: Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product?

“It’s always the hard part that creates value.”   “You are more powerful than you think you are. Act accordingly.”

• Seth!

“Trust and attention—these are the scarce items in a post-scarcity world.” “We can’t out-obedience the competition.”

Be a Meaningful Specific Instead of a Wandering Generality

“Money is a story … and it’s better to tell a story about money you’re happy with.” “Once you have enough for beans and rice and taking care of your family and a few other things, money is a story. You can tell yourself any story you want about money, and it’s better to tell yourself a story about money that you can happily live with.”

So the goal isn’t to get good ideas; the goal is to get bad ideas. Because once you get enough bad ideas, then some good ones have to show up.”

What You Track Determines Your Lens—Choose Carefully “Those of us who are lucky enough to live in a world where we have enough and we have a roof and we have food—we find ourselves caught in this cycle of keeping track of the wrong things. Keeping track of how many times we’ve been rejected. Keeping track of how many times it didn’t work. Keeping track of all the times someone has broken our heart or double-crossed us or let us down. Of course, we can keep track of those things, but why? Why keep track of them? Are they making us better?

“If a narrative isn’t working, well then, really, why are you using it? The narrative isn’t done to you; the narrative is something that you choose. Once we can dig deep and find a different narrative, then we ought to be able to change the game.”

“Stories Let Us Lie to Ourselves and Those Lies Satisfy Our Desires”

Try Sitting at a Different Table “If you think hard about one’s life, most people spend most of their time on defense, in reactive mode, in playing with the cards they got instead of moving to a different table with different cards. Instead of seeking to change other people, they are willing to be changed. Part of the arc of what I’m trying to teach is: Everyone who can hear this has more power than they think they do. The question is, what are you going to do with that power?”

“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.”

“Sooner or later, parents have to take responsibility for putting their kids into a system that is indebting them and teaching them to be cogs in an economy that doesn’t want cogs anymore. Parents get to decide … [and] from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m., those kids are getting homeschooled. And they’re either getting home-schooled and watching The Flintstones, or they’re getting homeschooled and learning something useful.

“I think we need to teach kids two things: 1) how to lead, and 2) how to solve interesting problems. Because the fact is, there are plenty of countries on Earth where there are people who are willing to be obedient and work harder for less money than us. So we cannot out-obedience the competition. Therefore, we have to out-lead or out-solve the other people… .

“Deep down, I am certain that people are plastic in the positive sense: flexible and able to grow. I think almost everything is made, not born, and that makes people uncomfortable because it puts them on the hook, but I truly believe it.”

Which is, you can spend a lot of time trying to fix stuff later but starting with the right raw materials makes a huge difference.”

“What am I embarrassed to be struggling with? And what am I doing about it?”

James recommends the habit of writing down 10 ideas each morning in a waiter’s pad or tiny notebook. This exercise is for developing your “idea muscle” and confidence for creativity on demand, so regular practice is more important than the topics:

No idea is so big that you can’t take the first step. If the first step seems too hard, make it simpler. And don’t worry again if the idea is bad. This is all practice.”

10 old ideas I can make new 10 ridiculous things I would invent (e.g., the smart toilet) 10 books I can write (The Choose Yourself Guide to an Alternative Education, etc). 10 business ideas for Google/Amazon/Twitter/etc. 10 people I can send ideas to 10 podcast ideas or videos I can shoot (e.g., Lunch with James, a video podcast where I just have lunch with people over Skype and we chat) 10 industries where I can remove the middleman 10 things I disagree with that everyone else assumes is religion (college, home ownership, voting, doctors, etc.) 10 ways to take old posts of mine and make books out of them 10 people I want to be friends with (then figure out the first step to contact them) 10 things I learned yesterday 10 things I can do differently today 10 ways I can save time 10 things I learned from X, where X is someone I’ve recently spoken with or read a book by or about. I’ve written posts on this about the Beatles, Mick Jagger, Steve Jobs, Charles Bukowski, the Dalai Lama, Superman, Freakonomics, etc. 10 things I’m interested in getting better at (and then 10 ways I can get better at each one) 10 things I was interested in as a kid that might be fun to explore now (Like, maybe I can write that “Son of Dr. Strange” comic I’ve always been planning. And now I need 10 plot ideas.) 10 ways I might try to solve a problem I have This has saved me with the IRS countless times. Unfortunately, the Department of Motor Vehicles is impervious to my superpowers.

“Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.”

The most important characteristic of my personal MBA: I planned on “losing” $120K.

the Nassim Taleb “barbell” school of investment,

“If you want to make a small fortune, start with a large fortune and angel invest.”

Less entitlement and megalomania usually means better decisions and better drinking company,

Breaking your rules to co-invest with well-known investors is usually a bad idea, but following your rules when others reject a startup can work out extremely well.

Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson Venture Hacks (venturehacks.com), co-created by Naval Ravikant (page 546) and Babak “Nivi” Nivi. Free how-to content on just about any facet of this game imaginable. Some terms and norms may be out of date, but that’s less than 20% of the content, and the game theory and strategy is spot on. AngelList, also co-founded by Naval and Nivi. Great for finding deals, seeing who’s investing in what, and finding jobs at fast-growing startups. I’m an advisor to AngelList, and you can see my entire portfolio at angel.co/tim

“Losers have goals. Winners have systems.”

He is the best-selling author of How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, God’s Debris, and The Dilbert Principle.

“Systems” Versus “Goals” Scott helped me refocus, to use his language, on “systems” instead of “goals.” 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.

Fundamentally, “systems” could be thought of as asking yourself, “What persistent skills or relationships can I develop?” versus “What short-term goal can I achieve?” The former has a potent snowball effect, while the latter is a binary pass/fail with no consolation prize.

“The model is: Your brain can’t find good contact, not directly in an intellectual sense. Obviously, the brain’s involved, but what I mean is that as I’m thinking of these ideas and they’re flowing through my head, I’m monitoring my body; I’m not monitoring my mind. And when my body changes, I have something that other people are going to care about, too.”

Diversification works in almost every area of your life to reduce your stress.”

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.

“In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue.” —Thomas L. Friedman

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

When you launch a new product, the first question to ask yourself is not “How is this new product better than the competition?” but “First what?” In other words, what category is this new product first in?

This is counter to classic marketing thinking, which is brand oriented: How do I get people to prefer my brand? Forget the brand. Think categories. Prospects are on the defensive when it comes to brands. Everyone talks about why their brand is better. But prospects have an open mind when it comes to categories. Everyone is interested in what’s new. Few people are interested in what’s better. When you’re the first in a new category, promote the category. In essence, you have no competition. DEC told its prospects why they ought to buy a minicomputer, not a DEC minicomputer. In the early days, Hertz sold rent-a-car service. Coca-Cola sold refreshment. Marketing programs of both companies were more effective back then.

“Creativity is an infinite resource. The more you spend,the more you have.”

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 $50Kperyearandmorethan$1 million per year.

Both Chase and Derek Sivers (page 184) are big fans of the book Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.

“If I’ve learned anything from podcasting, it’s don’t be afraid to do something you’re not qualified to do.”

“That’s my style. ‘I meant to do that. As a matter of fact, if you do it, you’re imitating me.’ So it’s partly taking what you already do and saying, ‘No, no, this isn’t a negative. This is the thing I bring to the table, buddy. I copyrighted that. I talk real loud, and then I talk really quietly, and if you have a problem with that, you don’t understand what good style is.’ Just copyright your faults, man.”

Infusionsoft: Complete sales and marketing automation software for small businesses, with a particular focus on “funnels” Visual Website Optimizer: A/B testing software for marketers

Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got,

“Success” need not be complicated. Just start with making 1,000 people extremely, extremely happy.

True fans are not only the direct source of your income, but also your chief marketing force for the ordinary fans.

“Why aim for a mere $100K when I can try to build a billion-dollar business?” Two reasons: 1) Aiming for the latter from the outset often leads to neglecting the high-touch 1,000 true fans who act as your most powerful unpaid marketing force for “crossing the chasm” into the mainstream. If you don’t build that initial army, you’re likely to fail. 2) Do you really want to build and manage a big company? For most people, it’s not a fun experience; it’s an all-consuming taskmaster. There are certainly ace CEOs who thread the needle and enjoy this roller coaster, but they are outliers. Read Small Giants by Bo Burlingham for some fantastic examples of companies that choose to be the best rather than the biggest.

You do not have to sacrifice the integrity of your art for a respectable income. You just need to create a great experience and charge enough.

If you drag and drop any image file into the search bar at images.google.com, you’ll be shown every website that has ever posted that image. Pretty cool, huh?

Research Site Traffic on SimilarWeb.com or Alexa.com

When we pitched a blogger without a relationship, less than 1% even responded. With introductions, our success rate was over 50%.

TextExpander allows you to paste any saved message—whether it’s a phone number or a two-page email—into any document or text field, simply by typing an abbreviation. This is extremely helpful for repetitive outreach. It’s a must-have app that probably saved us 1 to 2 hours a day in typing.

“Occasionally, a good idea comes to you first, if you’re lucky. Usually, it only comes after a lot of bad ideas.”

Good questions are what open people up, open new doors, and create opportunities.

Asking the right dumb question is often the smartest thing you can do.”

Some of Alex’s Tools Field Recording Audio-Technica AT8035 shotgun microphone TASCAM DR-100mkII recorder Sony MDR-7506 headphones XLR cable(s)   Software Avid Pro Tools for editing Chartbeat for analytics

“Once you get fancy, fancy gets broken.”

fourhourworkweek.com/podcastgear

Phone/Skype Interviews Ecamm Call Recorder for Skype: This is used for recording “phoners” via Skype. I haven’t found any software that blows me away, but this gets the job done. I’ve used it for more than 50% of my podcast interviews. Zencastr also gets good reviews but sometimes requires a lot of hard drive space on the part of your interviewee. Audio-Technica ATR2100-USB cardioid dynamic USB/XLR microphone: This is my go-to travel mic for all phone interviews. It can also be used for recording intros, sponsor reads, etc., with QuickTime. I often mail guests this mic via Amazon Prime if they need one, as it has the best bang-for-the-buck value I’ve found. Be sure to use a foam ball windscreen or “pop filter.” Yellowtec iXm: I use this mic for last-minute travel recording and post-production intros. It is an amazing all-in-one mic, which allows you to record without a Zoom or laptop. It automatically corrects levels and—quite frankly—produces the best audio of all the various mics I own. I use it for my intros (“Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show …”) and sponsor reads, which I record separately from the interviews. If I’m traveling but might need a mic, I stick this in my backpack. This bad boy is pricey, but I love the quality and convenience. Post-Production and Editing Whatever: I edited perhaps 20 of my first 30 episodes using GarageBand, despite disliking it. Why? Because I could learn it quickly, and it forced me to keep the podcast format dead simple. Fancy nonsense wasn’t possible for a Luddite like me, nor for the software, and that’s what I wanted: a positive constraint. If GarageBand appears too amateur for your first 1 to 3 episodes, I’d bet money 99% of you will quit by episode 5. Most would-be podcasters quit because they get overwhelmed with gear and editing. Much like Joe Rogan, I decided to record and publish entire conversations (minimizing post-production), not solely highlights. Keep it simple: Here are a few options my editors/engineers have used: Audacity (free), Ableton, Sound Studio, and Hindenburg. If I were to learn another piece of editing software, I would likely choose Hindenburg. Auphonic: I often use Auphonic.com to finalize and polish my podcasts after editing on the above. It’s a web-based audio post-production mastering tool, designed to help you improve the overall audio quality of your podcast.

‘When you complain, nobody wants to help you,’

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. That draws more destructiveness.

“I ran into Jeff Bezos a bit later and was saying I just got to talk with Elon, and I’m superexcited about Mars. I really hope that one day I can go. And Bezos looks at me and goes, ‘Mars is stupid.’ And I say, ‘What?’ He says, ‘Once we get off of the planet, the last thing we want to do is go to another gravity.’ “Bezos said, ‘The whole point, the reason this is so hard to get off the earth, is to defeat gravity the first time. Once we do that, why would you want to go to Mars? We should just live on space stations and mine asteroids and everything is much better than being on Mars.’ And in 30 seconds, he had completely changed the course of my life, because he’s totally right.”

Mikitani taught Phil “the rule of 3 and 10.” “[This effectively means] that every single thing in your company breaks every time you roughly triple in size.

“His hypothesis is that everything breaks at roughly these points of 3 and 10 [multiples of 3 and powers of 10]. And by ‘everything,’ it means everything: how you handle payroll, how you schedule meetings, what kind of communications you use, how you do budgeting, who actually makes decisions. Every implicit and explicit part of the company just changes significantly when it triples. “His insight is [that] a lot of companies get into trouble because of this. When you’re a quickly growing startup, you get into huge trouble because you blow right through a few of these triplings without really realizing it. And then, you turn around, and you realize … we’re at 400 people now, but some of our processes and systems we set in place when we were 30… . You should constantly, perpetually be thinking about how to reinvent yourself and how to treat the culture.

Have you outgrown your systems or beliefs? Is it time that you upgraded? Or, on a personal level, as Jerry Colonna, executive coach to some of the biggest tech stars in Silicon Valley, would ask: “How are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want?”

the job I was going to do hadn’t even been invented yet… . The interesting jobs are the ones that you make up.

“What interesting thing are you working on? Why is that interesting to you? What’s surprising about that? Is anybody else thinking about this?”

“If you had $100 million, what would you build that would have no value to others in copying?”

“Valve: Handbook for New Employees”

If it’s not ready, we’re not going to send it out, and just hope they don’t notice that it’s not that good. We’ll fix it. We’ll do something else, but don’t try to slip by something that you know is below the standard.’

Hold the standard. Ask for help. Fix it. Do whatever’s necessary. But don’t cheat.”

“The first thing is, on a good day, I will try to step back and say, ‘What context does this person even have, and have I provided appropriate context?’ … Given all the context they had, maybe I would’ve made the same decision, or I could imagine somebody else making the same decision. So increasingly, I try to think about: ‘What context and visibility do I have and what do they have? Am I basically being unfair because I’m operating from a greater set of information?’”

“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.”

“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.”

“Money is a great servant but a horrible master.”

Most-gifted or recommended books? Think and Grow Rich, Who Moved My Cheese?, Blue Ocean Strategy, Invisible Selling Machine, The Richest Man in Babylon, and Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.

• What is the worst advice you see or hear given in your trade or area of expertise? “That you should prioritize growing your social following (Instagram, FB, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube). Grow things that you can fully control that directly affect sales, like your email list. ‘Likes’ don’t pay the bills. Sales do.”

The Classics for Copywriting Noah is known for his copywriting skills, and he recommends two resources: The Gary Halbert Letter (also The Boron Letters) and Ogilvy on Advertising.

“Every time I left the house, my dad would always say, ‘Remember who you are.’

• Iconic albums to start with? Daft Punk Homework (Discovery is also great, but he’s a bigger fan of Homework) Any Kraftwerk album

This week, try experimenting with saying “I don’t understand. Can you explain that to me?” more often.

I’ve had successful exits from founders based in every place from Oklahoma and Colorado (Daily Burn) to Ottawa, Canada (Shopify). From a recruiting standpoint, not only is Shopify one of the major go-to tech companies in Eastern Canada, but they also don’t have a lot of attrition. People are settled in Ottawa, and they’re not getting poached by Facebook, Google, Uber. These families don’t want to move to San Francisco, and Shopify therefore doesn’t need to enter a bloodbath of bidding wars. Think you’re doomed because you’re outside of the epicenter of your industry? See if you can find benefits, as there might be some non-obvious advantages.

If you want great mentors, you have to become a great mentee. If you want to lead, you have to first learn to follow.

Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.

Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room—until you change that with results.

Maybe it’s coming up with ideas to hand over to your boss. Find people, thinkers, up-and-comers to introduce to each other. Cross wires to create new sparks. Find what nobody else wants to do and do it. Find inefficiencies and waste and redundancies. Identify leaks and patches to free up resources for new areas. Produce more than everyone else and give your ideas away.

The person who clears the path ultimately controls its direction, just as the canvas shapes the painting.

• One of his favorite tools for habit tracking and behavioral modification Way of Life app.

“Writer’s block does not actually exist… . Writer’s block is almost like the equivalent of impotence. It’s performance pressure you put on yourself that keeps you from doing something you naturally should be able to do.”

“It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.” If you’re good, you’ll have more than one chance.

“Be the silence that listens.”—Tara Brach

‘Inspiration is for amateurs—the rest of us just show up and get to work.

Scott Belsky (TW: @scottbelsky, scottbelsky.com)

“It is essential to get lost and jam up your plans every now and then. It’s a source of creativity and perspective. 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.”

“The hardest decisions to make in business are those that disappoint people you care about.

Sometimes you need to stop doing things you love in order to nurture the one thing that matters most.”

“Perhaps the greatest lesson from the past is how important it is to be inspired by things that surprise us. When I come across a quirky business model in an unpopular space, I try to find a fascinating thread worth pulling. I challenge myself to stop comparing what I learn to the past. If you only look for patterns of the past, you won’t venture far.”

“In the wrong environment, your creativity is compromised. At 30, I assumed my strengths would always be with me regardless of where I applied them. I was wrong. Truth is, your environment matters.”

Truth is, young creative minds don’t need more ideas, they need to take more responsibility with the ideas they’ve already got.”

Travel isn’t just for changing what’s outside, it’s for reinventing what’s inside.

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.

At a certain level, the idea that freedom is tied to labor might seem a bit depressing. It shouldn’t be. For all the amazing experiences that await you in distant lands, the “meaningful” part of travel always starts at home, with a personal investment in the wonders to come.

“I don’t like work,” says Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself.”

Work is not just an activity that generates funds and creates desire: It’s the vagabonding gestation period, wherein you earn your integrity, start making plans, and get your proverbial act together. Work is a time to dream about travel and write notes to yourself, but it’s also the time tie up your loose ends. Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from. Work is how you settle your financial and emotional debts—so that your travels are not an escape from your real life, but a discovery of your real life.

And even leaving your job in a more permanent manner need not be a negative act—especially in an age when work is likely to be defined by job specialization and the fragmentation of tasks. Whereas working a job with the intention of quitting might have been an act of recklessness 100 years ago, it is more and more often becoming an act of common sense in an age of portable skills and diversified employment options.

the act of quitting “means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something.

Quitting—whether a job or a habit—means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.” In this way, quitting should never be seen as the end of something grudging and unpleasant. Rather, it’s a vital step in beginning something new and wonderful.

“I talk to CEOs all the time, and I say, ‘Listen, the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. If it wasn’t a crazy idea, it’s not a breakthrough; it’s an incremental improvement. So where inside of your companies are you trying crazy ideas?’ ”

“I think of problems as gold mines. The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.”

“When 99% of people doubt you, you’re either gravely wrong or about to make history.” “I saw this the other day, and this comes from Scott Belsky

Are you working on something that can change the world? Yes or no? The answer for 99.99999% of people is ‘no.’ I think we need to be training people on how to change the world.”

Stone Soup. “It’s a children’s story that is the best MBA degree you can read.

‘Why do I believe this is important?’ It’s, ‘Look how far I’ve taken it so far.’ It’s a matter of reminding yourself what your purpose in life is, right? What you’re here for.

Find out what you need to be doing on this planet, why you were put here, and what wakes you up in the mornings.”

“What did you want to do when you were a child, before anybody told you what you were supposed to do? What was it you wanted to become? What did you want to do more than anything else? “If Peter Diamandis or Tim Ferriss gave you $1billion,howwouldyouspenditbesidesthepartiesandtheFerrarisandsoforth?IfIaskedyoutospend$1 billion improving the world, solving a problem, what would you pursue? “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’ [those things you can’t stop thinking about in the shower]?” [Peter recommends environments like Singularity University.]

Still struggling with a sense of purpose or mission? Roughly half a dozen people in this book (e.g., Robert Rodriguez) have suggested the book Start with Why by Simon Sinek.

“First of all, 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. For me, [take asteroid mining as an example]. I don’t have a lot of asteroid mining competition out there, or prospecting. Or take human longevity, trying to add 40 years in healthy lifespan with HLI. There are not a lot of companies out there [attempting this]. “The second thing is, when you are trying to go 10 times bigger, you have to start with a clean sheet of paper, and you approach the problem completely differently. I’ll give you my favorite example: Tesla. How did Elon start Tesla and build from scratch the safest, most extraordinary car, not even in America, but I think in the world? It’s by not having a legacy from the past to drag into the present. That’s important. “The third thing is when you try to go 10 times bigger versus 10% bigger, it’s typically not 100 times harder, but the reward is 100 times more.”

Find the smartest 20-somethings in your company. I don’t care if they’re in the mail room or where they are. Give them permission to figure out how they would take down your company.”

Law 2: When given a choice … take both. Law 3: Multiple projects lead to multiple successes. Law 6: When forced to compromise, ask for more. Law 7: If you can’t win, change the rules. Law 8: If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them. Law 11: “No” simply means begin again at one level higher. Law 13: When in doubt: THINK. Law 16: The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live. Law 17: The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. (adopted from Alan Kay) Law 19: You get what you incentivize. Law 22: The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. Law 26: If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

“I like to make promises that I’m not sure I can keep and then figure out how to keep them. I think you can will things into happening by just committing to them sometimes.

“A day that ends well is one that started with exercise.

There’s no reason that you can’t have the things that the people you admire have.

“It doesn’t get any easier … the challenges are bigger with bigger things.”

“A good comedy operates the exact same way a good mystery operates. [Which is] the punchline is something that is right in front of your face the whole time and you never would have put your finger on it.”

“Any time I’m telling myself, ‘But I’m making so much money,’ that’s a warning sign that I’m doing the wrong thing.”

Get the Long-Term goal on the Calendar Before the Short-Term Pain Hits

Make commitments in a high-energy state so that you can’t back out when you’re in a low-energy state.

“To me, everything is idea and execution and, if you separate idea and execution, you don’t put too much pressure on either of them.”

“I consider being in a good mood the most important part of my creative process.”

“The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.” —Lin Yutang “Discipline equals freedom.” —Jocko Willink (page 412)

Every time I’ve tried to get “sophisticated,” the universe has kicked me in the nuts.

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.

Are you squandering your unique abilities? Or the chance to find them in the first place?

If I’m not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, then I say no. Meaning: When deciding whether to commit to something, if I feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!”—then my answer is no. When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say, “HELL YEAH!” We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.

Saying yes to too much “cool” will bury you alive and render you a B-player, even if you have A-player skills. To develop your edge initially, you learn to set priorities; to maintain your edge, you need to defend against the priorities of others.

Once you reach a decent level of professional success, lack of opportunity won’t kill you. It’s drowning in “kinda cool” commitments that will sink the ship.

How Much of Your Life Is Making Versus Managing? How Do You Feel About the Split?

“Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” by Paul Graham of Y Combinator fame.

What Blessings in Excess Have Become a Curse? Where Do You Have Too Much of a Good Thing?

Why Are You Investing, Anyway?

Life favors the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.

An investment that produces a massive financial ROI but makes me a complete nervous mess, or causes insomnia and temper tantrums for a long period of time, is NOT a good investment.

Don’t push a boulder uphill just because you can.

Are You Fooling Yourself with a Plan for Moderation? “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” —Richard P. Feynman

You Say “Health Is #1” … But Is It Really?

The artificial urgency common to startups makes mental and physical health a rarity. I’m tired of unwarranted last-minute “hurry up and sign” emergencies and related fire drills. It’s a culture of cortisol.

“Make your peace with the fact that saying ‘no’ often requires trading popularity for respect.” —Greg McKeown, Essentialism

To me, it means using pain to find clarity. If pain is examined and not ignored, it can show you what to excise from your life.

For me, step one is always the same: Write down the 20% of activities and people causing 80% or more of your negative emotions.

“I am an old man and I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” —Mark Twain

“He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary.” —Seneca

If not now, when? If left at the status quo, what will your life and stress look like in 6 months? In 1 year? In 3 years? Who around you will also suffer?

Sometimes, it just takes a piece of paper and a few questions to create a breakthrough.

“The struggle ends when the gratitude begins.” —Neale Donald Walsch “There is no way to happiness—happiness is the way.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

“[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 consumes most of our days is not some natural order. We’re all navigating some superstructure that we humans created.”

“Don’t believe everything that you think.”

“When you are struggling with just about anything, look up. Just ponder the night sky for a minute and realize that we’re all on the same planet at the same time.

“If you’re looking for a formula for greatness, the closest we’ll ever get, I think, is this: Consistency driven by a deep love of the work.”

“Life is a continual process of arrival into who we are.”

“Guilt [is] interesting because guilt is the flip side of prestige, and they’re both horrible reasons to do things.”

I think the paradox is that accepting the requests you receive is at the expense of the quality of the very work—the reason for those requests in the first place

Doing great work simply because you love it, sounds, in our culture, somehow flimsy, and that’s a failing of our culture, not of the choice of work that artists

“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.”

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…

• Out of more than 4,600 articles on Brain Pickings, what are Maria’s starting recommendations? “The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and the Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long” “How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love” “9 Learnings from 9 Years of Brain Pickings” Anything about Alan Watts: “Alan Watts has changed my life. I’ve written about him quite a bit.”

You discover your ‘dream’ (or sense of 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.”

Where can you eliminate “single points of failure” in your life or business? Jocko adds, “And don’t just have backup gear—have a backup plan to handle likely contingencies.”

“I think that in order to truly experience the light and the bright, you have to see the darkness. I think if you shield yourself from the darkness, you’ll not appreciate—and fully understand—the beauty of life.”

If This Is a Man and The Truce (often combined into one volume) by Primo Levi

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

“Being tougher” was, more than anything, a decision to be tougher. It’s possible to immediately “be tougher,” starting with your next decision.

“You can’t blame your boss for not giving you the support you need.

What can I do to be ready for that moment, which is coming? That propels me out of bed.”

“I think it’s hilarious when some [special operations] guys get grumpy if they don’t have protein powder every 2 hours. I have a huge advantage if I can turn anything into fuel, including garbage, or go without food.”

Later, when I was running training, we would fire a couple leaders from every SEAL Team because they couldn’t lead. And 99.9% of the time, it wasn’t a question of their ability to shoot a weapon, it wasn’t because they weren’t in good physical shape, it wasn’t because they were unsafe. It was almost always a question of their ability to listen, open their mind, and see that, maybe, there’s a better way to do things. That is from a lack of humility…

The arrogant guys, who lacked humility, they couldn’t take criticism from others—and couldn’t even do an honest self-assessment because they thought they already knew everything. Stay humble or get humbled.”

So being able to detach as a leader is critical.”

“The point of journalism is the truth. The point of journalism is not to improve society. There are things, there are facts, there are truths that actually feel regressive, but it doesn’t matter, because the point of journalism isn’t to make everything better. It’s to give people accurate information about how things are.”

“It’s not that I’m blocked. It’s that I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic.

“You guys are programmed to succeed. 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 in this school or any school: 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.”

This is why I use Uber or pseudonyms for any car service pickups around the world. By using a made-up name for your car reservation, if you see a placard with your real name on it, you know it’s a set-up. If you become successful—or simply appear successful on the Internet—and travel a lot overseas, this is not paranoia.

“The future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed.”—William Gibson

“If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.”—Omar N. Bradley

“The Purpose of Life Is a Life of Purpose.”

So red teaming is: You take people who aren’t wedded to the plan and [ask them,] ‘How would you disrupt this plan or how would you defeat this plan?’ If you have a very thoughtful red team, you’ll produce stunning results.”

you should have a running list of three people that you’re always watching: someone senior to you that you want to emulate, a peer who you think is better at the job than you are and who you respect, and someone subordinate who’s doing the job you did—one, two, or three years ago—better than you did it. If you just have those three individuals that you’re constantly measuring yourself off of, and you’re constantly learning from them, you’re going to be exponentially better than you are.”

“It also puts discipline in the day. I find that if the day is terrible, but I worked out, at the end of the day I’ll go, ‘Well, I had a good workout,’ almost no matter what happens.

“The first is to push yourself harder than you believe you’re capable of. You’ll find new depth inside yourself. The second is to put yourself in groups who share difficulties, discomfort. We used to call it ‘shared privation.’ You’ll find that when you have been through that kind of difficult environment, that you feel more strongly about that which you’re committed to. And finally, create some fear and make individuals overcome it.”

Unless you are going to go do the task yourself, then the development time you spend on the people who are going to do that task, whether they are going to lead people doing it or whether they are actually going to do it, every minute you spend on that is leveraged, is exponential return.”

The Battle of Algiers.

“You can tell the true character of a man by how his dog and his kids react to him.”

“If you don’t believe in God, you should believe in the technology that’s going to make us immortal.”

Jorge Luis Borges entitled “The Other” (“El Otro”).

What are you willing to do that is hard? I remember my Grandpa saying, ‘Work will work when nothing else will work.’”

“If you earn $68K per year, then globally speaking, you are the 1%.”

Doing Good Better

“You can’t make a lousy charity good by having a low overhead.”

GiveWell.org,

“I think it misconstrues the nature of finding a satisfying career and satisfying job, where the biggest predictor of job satisfaction is mentally engaging work. It’s the nature of the job itself. It’s not got that much to do with you… . It’s whether the job provides a lot of variety, gives you good feedback, allows you to exercise autonomy, contributes to the wider world—Is it actually meaningful? Is it making the world better?—and also, whether it allows you to exercise a skill that you’ve developed.”

The Power of Persuasion by Robert Levine.

“An analogy I use is, if you’re going out for dinner, it’s going to take you a couple of hours. You spend 5 minutes working out where to go for dinner. It seems reasonable to spend 5% of your time on how to spend the remaining 95%. If you did that with your career, that would be 4,000 hours, or 2 working years. And actually, I think that’s a pretty legitimate thing to do—spending that length of time trying to work out how should you be spending the rest of your life.”

What has each belief cost you in the past, and what has it cost people you’ve loved in the past? What have you lost because of this belief? See it, hear it, feel it. What is each costing you and people you care about in the present? See it, hear it, feel it. What will each cost you and people you care about 1, 3, 5, and 10 years from now? See it, hear it, feel it.

“If they are coughing like crazy right now [from lung cancer], how do they keep smoking? They say to themselves, ‘Well, I smoked for years and it was never a problem.’ Or they say, ‘It will get better in the future. After all, George Burns lived until 102 smoking cigars.’ They find the exception to the rule because no one knows what the future is. We can make it up, we can convince ourselves it’s going to be okay. Or we can remember a past time in which it was okay. That’s how people get out of it. “When we feel pain in one time zone—meaning past, present, or future—we just switch to another time zone rather than change, because change brings so much uncertainty and so much instability and so much fear to people.”

After you feel the acute pain of your current handicapping beliefs, you formulate 2 to 3 replacement beliefs to use moving forward. This is done so that “you are not pulled back into [old beliefs] by old language patterns.” One of my top 3 limiting beliefs was “I’m not hardwired for happiness,” which I replaced with “Happiness is my natural state.” Post-event, I used Scott Adams’s (page 261) affirmation approach in the mornings to reinforce it. Now, I’m well aware how cheesy this all might sound on paper. Nonetheless, I experienced a huge phase shift in my life in the subsequent 3 to 4 weeks. Roughly a year later, I can say this: I’ve never felt consistently happier in my entire adult life.

“Being an entrepreneur is being willing to do a job that nobody else wants to do, [in order] to be able to live the rest of your life doing whatever you want to do.”

“I usually know when I’m on to something when I’m a little bit afraid of it. I go: ‘Wow, I could mess this up.’ ”

“When I articulated that I didn’t care anymore about what anybody thought about what I did except me, all the weight of the world came off my shoulders, and everything became possible. It shifted to everybody else [being] worried. Now they’re worried. But everything for me, it shifted to a place where I felt free.”

“‘Mindfulness’ is just that quality of mind which allows you to pay attention to sights and sounds and sensations, and even thoughts themselves, without being lost in thought and without grasping at what is pleasant and pushing what is unpleasant away… .

You’re going to be fine as long as you keep your mental state intact. In those situations, I look at all the emotions I’m feeling, which are anticipation, exhilaration, focus, confidence, fun, and fear.

‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.’

“Named must your fear be before banish it you can.” —Yoda, from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.” —Benjamin Disraeli,

Uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noises in the shadows. Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.

“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’” —Seneca

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” —Mark Twain

a person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.

“Productivity is for robots. What humans are going to be really good at is asking questions, being creative, and experiences.”

In a world of distraction, single-tasking is a superpower.

“Our life is frittered away by detail… . Simplify, simplify… . A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

There is more freedom to be gained from practicing poverty than chasing wealth. Suffer a little regularly and you often cease to suffer.

“If something offends you, look inward… . That’s a sign that there’s something there.”

“Happiness is wanting what you have.”

“I remember reading Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. That’s good fodder for a young man. It sets these bold, stark characters—you could even call them Christ figures—and you think to yourself, ‘I want to be that.’ Of course, I read Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morality, etc., where the truths and truisms are really cut and dried in a lot of ways. It’s the equivalent of, I guess, intellectual red meat. But then I got into Joseph Campbell—The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell was the first person to really open my eyes to [the] compassionate side of life, or of thought… . Campbell was the guy who really kind of put it all together for me, and not in a way I could put my finger on… . It made you just glad to be alive, [realizing] how vast this world is, and how similar and how different we are.”

“I think you should try to slay dragons. I don’t care how big the opponent is. We read about and admire the people who did things that were basically considered to be impossible. That’s what makes the world a better place to live.”

“When people seem like they are mean, they’re almost never mean. They’re anxious.”

Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Michel de Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell.

But not having cable or the Internet turns out to be cheaper than having them. And nature is still technically free, even if human beings have tried to make access to it expensive. Time and quiet should not be luxury items.

Aim for the Heart, Not the Head “Lesson number one, when people ask me what [interviewing] tips would I give, is aim for the heart, not the head. Once you get the heart, you can go to the head. Once you get the heart and the head, then you’ll have a pathway to the soul.”

“Listening is about being present, not just being quiet.”

“We all know the feeling of wanting to do something so well and so badly that we try too hard and can’t do it at all.”

“For everyone: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. For females: West with the Night by Beryl Markham. For males: The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. That’s a good start for a journey.”

Let’s just completely empty our cup here and really think about what is valuable to me now. What’s honest. What’s sincere about what we’re doing?

perfectionism]—it’s almost like you’ve won the war, and to accept the fact that you’ve won the war: You have an audience. People are willing to hear what you are interested in, what you’re interested in learning about, and what you want to share. You can do that without killing yourself. And killing yourself won’t be of service, neither to you nor your audience.”

The Beginning Is “heart work,” not “head work” “So much of the job is more emotion and ‘heart work’ than it is ‘head work.’ The head comes in after, to look at what the heart has presented and to organize it. But the initial inspiration comes from a different place, and it’s not the head, and it’s not an intellectual activity.”

discography for all of my books: The 4-Hour Workweek Films: The Bourne Identity, Shaun of the Dead “Flow” album: Gran Hotel Buenos Aires by Federico Aubele “Wake-up” album: One-X by Three Days Grace The 4-Hour Body Films: Casino Royale, Snatch “Flow” album: Luciano Essential Mix (2009, Ibiza) featuring DeadMau5 “Wake-up” album: Cold Day Memory by Sevendust The 4-Hour Chef Films: Babe (Yes, the pig movie. It was the first thing that popped up for free under Amazon Prime. I watched it once as a joke and it stuck. “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.” Gets me every time.) “Flow” album: “Just Jammin’” extended single track by Gramatik “Wake-up” album: Dear Agony by Breaking Benjamin Tools of Titans Films: None! I was traveling and used people-watching at late-night cafés in Paris and elsewhere as my “movie.” “Flow” album: I Choose Noise by Hybrid “Wake-up” album: Over the Under by Down

“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.”

putting thoughts on paper is the best way to A) develop ideas, and B) review and improve your thinking.

Write about a time when you realized you were mistaken. Write about a lesson you learned the hard way. Write about a time you were inappropriately dressed for the occasion. Write about something you lost that you’ll never get back. Write about a time when you knew you’d done the right thing. Write about something you don’t remember. Write about your darkest teacher. Write about a memory of a physical injury. Write about when you knew it was over. Write about being loved. Write about what you were really thinking. Write about how you found your way back. Write about the kindness of strangers. Write about why you could not do it. Write about why you did.

• sobre que escribir en journals

In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts Maxims and Reflections by Goethe:

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

And even though I wanted to do science rather than technology, it’s better to be in an expanding world and not quite in exactly the right field, than to be in a contracting world where peoples’ worst behavior comes out.

#5—You can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into.

#6—“Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity. You’ll avoid the tough decisions, and you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted.”—Colin Powell

you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”—Epictetus

it is so much less work just to be yourself.”

‘Believe in yourself more deeply. You’re bigger than that. Dream bigger,’

“The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles.”

“If you want to be successful, surround yourself with people who are more successful than you are, but if you want to be happy, surround yourself with people who are less successful than you are.”

Handling Conflict “The first rule of handling conflict is don’t hang around people who are constantly engaging in conflict… . All of the value in life, including in relationships, comes from compound interest. People who regularly fight with others will eventually fight with you. I’m not interested in anything that’s unsustainable or even hard to sustain, including difficult relationships.”

“In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it.

“Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”

Be present above all else. Desire is suffering (Buddha). Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else (Buddhist saying). If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day. Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else. All the real benefits in life come from compound interest. Earn with your mind, not your time. 99% of all effort is wasted. Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. Praise specifically, criticize generally (Warren Buffett). Truth is that which has predictive power. Watch every thought. (Always ask, “Why am I having this thought?”) All greatness comes from suffering. Love is given, not received. Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts (Eckhart Tolle). Mathematics is the language of nature. Every moment has to be complete in and of itself.

“What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.” “Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.” “If you eat, invest, and think according to what the ‘news’ advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.” “We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.” “The guns aren’t new. The violence isn’t new. The connected cameras are new, and that changes everything.” “You get paid for being right first, and to be first, you can’t wait for consensus.” “My one repeated learning in life: ‘There are no adults.’ Everyone’s making it up as they go along. Figure it out yourself, and do it.” “A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time.”

“Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”—Thomas Jefferson

“If you want to solve a problem—any problem that you care enough about to want to solve—you almost certainly come to it with a whole lot of ideas about it. Ideas about why it’s an important problem, what is it that bothers you exactly, who the villains are in the problem, etc.

Our point is, if you try to approach every problem with your moral compass, first and foremost, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes. You’re going to exclude a lot of possible good solutions. You’re going to assume you know a lot of things, when in fact you don’t, and you’re not going to be a good partner in reaching a solution with other people who don’t happen to see the world the way you do.”

“I cultivate empty space as a way of life for the creative process.”

‘If you’re studying my game, you’re entering my game, and I’ll be better at it than you.’”

ending the work day with very high quality, which for one thing means you’re internalizing quality overnight.”

He can turn it off so deeply, and man, when he goes in the ring, you can’t turn it on with any more intensity than he can. His ability to turn it off is directly aligned with how intensely he can turn it on,

“Interval training [often at midday or lunch break] and meditation together are beautiful habits to develop to cultivate the art of turning it on and turning it off.”

if you don’t cultivate ‘turning it on’ as a way of life in the little moments—and there are hundreds of times more little moments than big—then there’s no chance in the big moments. .

I believe that when you’re not cultivating quality, you’re essentially cultivating sloppiness.”

They have to, ultimately, embrace their funk, embrace their eccentricity, embrace what makes them different, and then build on it.”

The Importance of Language on a Rainy Day “One of the biggest mistakes that I observed in the first year of Jack’s life was parents who have unproductive language around weather being good or bad. Whenever it was raining, you’d hear moms, babysitters, dads say, ‘It’s bad weather. We can’t go out,’ or if it wasn’t, ‘It’s good weather. We can go out.’ That means that, somehow, we’re externally reliant on conditions being perfect in order to be able to go out and have a good time. So, Jack and I never missed a single storm, rain or snow, to go outside and romp in it. Maybe we missed one when he was sick. We’ve developed this language around how beautiful it is. Now, whenever it’s a rainy day, Jack says, ‘Look, Dada, it’s such a beautiful rainy day,’ and we go out and we play in it. I wanted him to have this internal locus of control—to not be reliant on external conditions being just so.”

“This idea that we’re either courageous or chicken shit is just not true, because most of us are afraid and brave at the exact same moment, all day long.”

Give vulnerability a shot. Give discomfort its due. Because I think he or she who is willing to be the most uncomfortable is not only the bravest, but rises the fastest.”

“A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.”

. . Daring greatly is being vulnerable. So when you ask yourself, ‘Did I dare greatly today?’ The big question I ask is, ‘When I had the opportunity, did I choose courage over comfort?’”

If I’m not a little bit nauseous when I’m done, I probably didn’t show up like I should have shown up.”

“Shame is ‘I am a bad person.’ Guilt is ‘I did something bad.’ … Shame is a focus on self. Guilt is a focus on behavior.”

The Power of Myth,

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

(See fourhourworkweek.com/tmi

“What 20% of customers/products/regions are producing 80% of the profit? What factors or shared characteristics might account for this?”

These unusual “edge cases” might seem like rare exceptions, but they were a daily occurrence.

1. To get huge, good things done, you need to be okay with letting the small, bad things happen. 2) People’s IQs seem to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.

People don’t like being sold products, but we all like being told stories. Work on the latter.

“What if I could only subtract to solve problems?” when advising startups. Instead of answering, “What should we do?” I tried first to hone in on answering, “What should we simplify?”

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

the analogy of the field mice and the antelope. A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope. The distinction is important. Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice?

“Which one of these, if done, would render all the rest either easier or completely irrelevant?”

“What would this look like if it were easy?”

“If you’ve got enough money to solve the problem, you don’t have the problem.”

“Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.”

“People are nervous for no reason, because no one’s gonna come out and slap you or beat you up… . When we talk about fear or a lack of being aggressive [holding someone back], it’s in your head.

“When you raise your kids, you’re the bow, they’re the arrow, and you just try to aim them in the best direction that you can, and hopefully your aim isn’t too off. That’s what [my grandmother] did for me.”

‘Let me tell you something, brother. The notes are right underneath your fingers, baby. You just gotta take the time out to play the right notes. That’s life.”

‘Challenge all assumptions.’ The story that I accompanied that with was: There are five monkeys in a room, and there is a basket of bananas at the top of a ladder. The monkeys, of course, want to climb the ladder to get the bananas, but every time one tries, they are all sprayed with cold water. After a few times of being sprayed by cold water, the monkeys learn to not climb up the ladder to get the bananas… . [The experimenters then] take one monkey out and put a new monkey in, and the new monkey sees a banana. He thinks, ‘Hey, I am going to grab a banana,’ but when he tries to go up the ladder, the other monkeys grab him and pull him back… . [The experimenters eventually] systematically pull every monkey out, and now you have five new monkeys. Any time a new monkey comes in and tries to climb the ladder, they grab the monkey and pull it back, but none of the five have ever been sprayed by cold water.”

This is a story about a tiger named Mohini that was in captivity in a zoo, who was rescued from an animal sanctuary. Mohini had been confined to a 10-by-10-foot cage with a concrete floor for 5 or 10 years. They finally released her into this big pasture: With excitement and anticipation, they released Mohini into her new and expensive environment, but it was too late. The tiger immediately sought refuge in a corner of the compound, where she lived for the remainder of her life. She paced and paced in that corner until an area 10-by-10 feet was worn bare of grass… . Perhaps the biggest tragedy in our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.

What past limitations—real or perceived—are you carrying as baggage?

“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” — Mexican proverb

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage …” — Lao Tzu

There, he hosts one of my favorite interview-format shows, The Director’s Chair.

The term “Rodriguez list” has come to mean writing down all of your assets and building a film around the list.

“I wrote everything around what we had, so you never had to go search, and you never had to spend anything on the movie.

“There were three reasons why we survived: We had no money, we had no technology, and we had no plan. Every dollar, we used very carefully.”

‘Oh, nothing worked and it was a disappointment.’ They don’t realize yet that that’s the job. The job is that nothing is going to work at all. So you go: “How can I turn it into a positive and get something much better than if I had all the time and money in the world?”

want all of them to not have enough money, not enough time, so that we’re forced to be more creative. Because that’s going to give it some spark that you can’t manufacture.

“It’s good not to follow the herd. Go the other way. If everyone’s going that way, you go this other way. You’re gonna stumble, but you’re also gonna stumble upon an idea no one came up with… .

“Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things that they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.”

idea—I’m there to learn. I’m not there to win; I’m there to learn, because then I’ll win, eventually… .

“You’ve got to be able to look at your failures and know that there’s a key to success in every failure. If you look through the ashes long enough, you’ll find something.

‘Oh, that wasn’t a failure. That was a key moment of my development that I needed to take, and I can trust my instinct. I really can.’”

“You get it in your own way—thinking that you needed to know something, a trick or a process, before it would flow. If you got out of the way, it would just flow. What gives you permission to let it flow? Sometimes if you take 4 years of schooling or you study under somebody, then you’ve suddenly given yourself permission to let it flow… . “You’re just opening up the pipe and the creativity flows through. And as soon as your ego gets in the way, and you go, ‘I don’t know if I know what to do next’ you’ve already put ‘I’ in front of it and you’ve already blocked it a little bit. ‘I did it once, but I don’t know if I can do it again.’ It was never you. The best you can do is just to get out of the way so it comes through.

Even if I didn’t know what to do, I just had to begin. For a lot of people, that’s the part that keeps them back the most. They think, ‘Well, I don’t have an idea, so I can’t start.’ I know you’ll only get the idea once you start. It’s this totally reverse thing. You have to act first before inspiration will hit. You don’t wait for inspiration and then act, or you’re never going to act, because you’re never going to have the inspiration, not consistently.”

“The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research.”

That’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to know. You just have to keep moving forward.”

When you put creativity in everything, everything becomes available to you.’ …

And if you say you’re not creative, look at how much you’re missing out on just because you’ve told yourself that. I think creativity is one of the greatest gifts that we’re born with that some people don’t cultivate, that they don’t realize it could be applied to literally everything in their lives.”

Start with Why by Simon Sinek.

Accept reality, but focus on the solution. Take that issue, take that setback, take that problem, and turn it into something good. Go forward. And, if you are part of a team, that attitude will spread throughout.

tone:

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” —Pablo Picasso

Leaves of Grass

Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel.

When you think of the word “successful,” who’s the first person who comes to mind and why? What is something you believe that other people think is insane? What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift? What is your favorite documentary or movie? What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last 6 months? What are your morning rituals? What do the first 60 minutes of your day look like? What obsessions do you explore on the evenings or weekends? What topic would you speak about if you were asked to give a TED talk on something outside of your main area of expertise? What is the best or most worthwhile investment you’ve made? Could be an investment of money, time, energy, or other resource. How did you decide to make the investment? Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often? What is the worst advice you see or hear being dispensed in your world? If you could have one gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say? What advice would you give to your 20-, 25-, or 30-year-old self? And please place where you were at the time, and what you were doing. How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Or, do you have a favorite failure of yours? What is something really weird or unsettling that happens to you on a regular basis? What have you changed your mind about in the last few years? Why? What do you believe is true, even though you can’t prove it? Any ask or request for my audience? Last parting words?

Which books came up the most? Here are the top 17—everything with 3 or more mentions—in descending order of frequency: Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (5 mentions) Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (4) Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (4) Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (4) The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (4) The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande (4) Dune by Frank Herbert (3) Influence by Robert Cialdini (3) Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert (3) Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (3) Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman (3) The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss (3) The Bible (3) The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz (3) The War of Art by Steven Pressfield (3) Watchmen by Alan Moore (3) Zero to One by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters (3)

‘Either you’re in, or you’re in the way.’”

Belsky, Scott: “‘It’s not about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen.’”

Blumberg, Alex: “‘The first draft always sucks.’”

‘No one owes you anything.’

Boreta, Justin: “‘Starve the ego, feed the soul.’”

Callen, Bryan: “‘WHAT you think isn’t as important as HOW you think.’”

Diamandis, Peter: “‘The future is better than you think.’”

Fussell, Chris: “‘Life is a series of choices—take accountability for yours.’”

“‘Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.’—Neale Donald Walsch.”

Harris, Sam: “‘Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.’”

Holiday, Ryan: “‘And this too shall pass.’”

John, Daymond: “‘There’s no reason why I could do it and you can’t.”

“‘You are only as young as the last time you changed your mind.’—Timothy Leary.”

MacKenzie, Brian: “‘Ego is how we want the world to see us. Confidence is how we see ourselves.’”

Miller, BJ: “‘Don’t believe everything you think.’”

Ohanian, Alexis: “‘Lives Remaining: 0.’”

Patrick, Rhonda: “‘Don’t exercise to lose weight … do it to improve your brain.’”

Ravikant, Naval: “‘Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want’

Reece, Gabby: “‘Yielding to your fellow man is not getting taken advantage of. We are all in it together.’”

Rose, Kevin: “‘Strive to share your fears and secrets with the world.’”

Silva, Jason: “‘We are as gods and might as well get good at it.’—Stewart Brand”

Strauss, Neil: “‘The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.’—Norman Vincent Peale”

‘Discipline equals freedom.’”