“Don’t believe everything that you think” & 37 other transformative lifehacks
Book Review of Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
This +700-page, $16 book is a summarization of the +200 interviews that Tim Ferriss has done on his podcast.
In this review, I’m going to do more than just summarize the summarization; I’ve been living a Tim Ferriss kind of lifestyle for well over a decade now and I’m going to add my own edifying experiences and insights to some of the passages of the book.
You may think…
I don’t need to read this book. I’ll just listen to the podcast.
As I discussed in the High Leverage Information Diet, podcasts themselves are a pretty limited medium for learning…
- With listening to podcasts, your listening comprehension is pretty low because you’re almost always doing something else at the same time (Commuting, working, at the gym, etc). With reading, the only thing you are doing is reading, your attention is not divided. Reading is one of the better ways to absorb knowledge; this is why wealthy, successful people are consistently really well-read.
- With reading you can meter your absorption of knowledge, speed read sections on stuff you already understand well, or take your time on something new you want to understand.
- Tim’s interviews are long, often over 2 hours. Some of the interviews are quite technical as well, they’ll spend a lot of time having a granular discussion of weight lifting techniques or risk quantification of startup investment.
- Also, the podcast has ads and sponsors, which aren’t really annoying but I’d much rather spend $15 on a book than listen to hundreds of advertisements.
- The book summarizes each interview, so it’s a great companion to the podcast. After reading the book I went and listened to the podcast interviews that I found particularly interesting.
I hope to see more podcasts doing the same thing! In fact, I’m considering doing the same thing myself because I’m aware that few people are going to go through and watch the +600 videos I’ve done and +800 articles. Update: Check out my memoir and lifehacking manifesto, How to Be Cross Eyed…
If you’re bored of the tired problem>generalization>platitude>strategy formula that most self-help books follow you’ll enjoy this memoir of adventures, failures, and unexpected successes across three continents. I’ll share with you some powerful tools for transformation — biohacking, smart drugs, flowstate, red pill mindset, and tantric sex — with which I’ve managed to pack several lifetimes’ worth of peak experiences into a single decade.
An information diet/highlighting hack
I’ve got a bit of a system for devouring content-rich, dense books like this, I highlight in three different colors
- Yellow — Anything useful I want to remember — might get added to my SuperMemo mnemonic flashcard collection
- Blue — Anything I want to research or look up videos or podcasts on later
- Red — Anything that strikes me as beautiful language or is cleverly worded.
Meditation
Unsurprisingly…
More than 80% of the world-class performers I’ve interviewed have some form of daily meditation or mindfulness practice.
Or
“cultivating a present-state awareness that helps you to be nonreactive.”
(p. 149)
That’s a pretty good definition of mindfulness!
I believe there is a minimum effective dose for meditation, and it’s around 7 days.
(p. 152)
With “Just Note Gone” we train the mind to notice that something previously experienced is no more. For example, at the end of a breath, notice that the breath is over. Gone. As a sound fades away, notice when it is over. Gone. At the end of a thought, notice that the thought is over. Gone. At the end of an experience of emotion — joy, anger, sadness, or anything else — notice it is over. Gone.
(p. 156)
It’s said that this is the meditation technique you might want to do if you’re ever tortured (I do it when I’m getting an arduous deep-tissue massage!)
Loving-Kindness Meditation
to increase your happiness, all you have to do is randomly wish for somebody else to be happy.
(p. 158)
I tend to do a single 3- to 5-minute session at night, thinking of three people I want to be happy, often two current friends and one old friend I haven’t seen in years.
(p. 159)
This is an intermittent meditation method, you do it for just seconds every hour and it has a real antidepressant effect. My reminder is to just do it every time I go to the bathroom which is about once an hour because I drink a lot of water and tea.
One woman reported:
Happiest day in 7 years. And what did it take to achieve that? It took 10 seconds of secretly wishing for two other people to be happy for 8 repetitions, a total of 80 seconds of thinking.
(p. 158)
Men vs Women
He notes that substantially more men end up at Transcendental Meditation (TM), and substantially more women end up at vipassana.
(p. 150)
Which I like because it’s politically incorrect; saying that men and women prefer different types of meditation — because our minds differ fundamentally…
On a tangent; I’ve always wished I could be in a woman’s mind for just a day …
Women, in general, are more impulsive and make decisions more emotionally but at the same time I think are more introspective — more self-reflective.
So I imagine that being in a woman’s mind is kind of like being constantly pulled in different directions by my emotions and being anxious all the time that I was going to make a bad decision on a whim and that life was going to go badly for me.
Maybe some female commenters can tell me if that is pretty accurate or if I’m way off.
Diet
The book synopsizes Tim’s Slow Carb Diet…
Rule #1: Avoid “white” starchy carbohydrates (or those that can be white). This means all bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, and grains (yes, including quinoa).
(p. 81)
Rule #2: Eat the same few meals over and over again, especially for breakfast and lunch.
(p. 81)
Rule #4: Don’t eat fruit.
(p. 82)
Rule #5: Whenever possible, measure your progress in body fat percentage, NOT total pounds.
(p. 82)
Rule #6: Take one day off per week and go nuts.
(p. 82)
I’m skeptical of that last one…
How do you know when you’re in ketosis? The most reliable way is to use a device called the Precision Xtra by Abbott.
(p. 22)
Cold showers
you can start with a cold water “finish” to showers. Simply make the last 30 to 60 seconds of your shower pure cold.
(p. 43)
I’ve heard so many places that this is such a full-spectrum lifehack that I’ve been doing it and added it to my daily Coach.me habits.
AcroYoga
AcroYoga is a blend of three complementary disciplines: yoga, acrobatics, and therapeutics.
(p. 52)
There are some photos floating around on the Internet of me looking ridiculous doing this at a sushi restaurant in Panama with three hot girls…
Longevity
“If you’re over 40 and don’t smoke, there’s about a 70 to 80% chance you’ll die from one of four diseases: heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, cancer, or neurodegenerative disease.”
There are really two pieces to longevity. The first is delaying death as long as possible by delaying the onset of chronic disease (the ‘big four’ above). We call that the defensive play. The second is enhancing life, the offensive play.
(p. 67)
Hacking Testosterone — According to Charles Poliquin
“As a rule . . . the best thing to increase testosterone is to lower cortisol. Because the same raw material that makes testosterone and cortisol is called pregnenolone. Under conditions of stress, your body is wired to eventually go toward the cortisol pathway.”
(p. 78)
The “boner test”
“Men, if you wake up and you don’t have a boner, there’s a problem. Yes or no? One or zero? Boner, no boner?”
(p. 124)
Psychedelics
Jim [Fadiman]’s opinion, microdosing psychedelics does a far better job than a whole class of drugs we now call “cognitive enhancers,”
(p. 106)
Why? Does he have evidence for this? Perhaps someone more experienced with Psychedelics than myself can comment. After having done psychedelics myself and reviewing the scientific literature on them, I urge biohackers to be skeptical of Psychedelics.
It’s easy to use the medicine as a crutch and avoid doing your own work, as the compounds themselves help in the short term as antidepressants.
(p. 108)
The same thing sort of applies to smart drugs, they can become a crutch if you don’t implement other positive habits while your discipline is enhanced.
Sleep
My go-to tranquilizer beverage is simple: 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (I use Bragg brand) and 1 tablespoon honey,
(p. 140)
That I must try! He also recommends Yogi Soothing Caramel Bedtime Tea
10 minutes later, I start getting wobbly, and then I felt like Leonardo DiCaprio in the pay phone scene from The Wolf of Wall Street. In the most awkward fashion possible, I dragged my ass to the bedroom and fell asleep.
(p. 140)
The Sleep Master sleep mask, it’s only $25 on Amazon.
The most important feature of this mask is that it goes over your ears, not on top of them. This may seem minor, but it’s a huge design improvement: It quiets things down, it doesn’t irritate your ears, and it doesn’t move around.
(pp. 141–142)
I like these sleep hacks because they can work for a digital nomad guy like me.
Waking up
The 5 to 10 reps here are not a workout. They are intended to “state prime” and wake me up. Getting into my body, even for 30 seconds, has a dramatic effect on my mood and quiets mental chatter.
(p. 145)
Business and entrepreneurship
When deal-making, ask yourself: Can I trade a short-term, incremental gain for a potential longer-term, game-changing upside?
(p. 181)
On profit margins
So, I added in that little buffer so I could give people a discount, which they love.
(p. 188)
On email
Improve a notification email from your business (e.g., subscription confirmation, order confirmation, whatever):
(p. 195)
Scott Adams on hacking expertise
But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1) Become the best at one specific thing. 2) Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.
(p. 269)
You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. . . . At least one of the skills in your mixture should involve communication, either written or verbal.
(p. 269)
This totally applies to me! I’m never going to be as knowledgeable as a Ph.D. researcher like Dr. Mark Ashton Smith who has spent decades in a lab. I’m also never going to be as compelling a lifestyle video blogger as Tom Torero nor am I going to be as articulate as the philosopher Sam Harris, but I’m easily within the top 25% percentile of competence in these three areas.
On being self-promotional
When you’re the first in a new category, promote the category.
(p. 278)
Tim makes the good point that those who are self-promotional are annoying! What you want to do is promote a category that you are in. I do this by advocating for Biohacking tools that upgrade Cognitive capital — tools that improve your capacity to make money. My smart drug Caballo is something novel within this category.
On work
The interesting jobs are the ones that you make up.
(pp. 319–320)
Picking a billion-dollar idea
“If you had $100 million, what would you build that would have no value to others in copying?”
(p. 320)
To clarify, the question is asking, if you had unlimited resources what would you build that would put you so far ahead of the competition and everyone else that there was no point in them even trying to catch up with you? Dwell, on that question for just a moment. It’s profound.
Peter Diamandis on Opportunity
“The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.”
(p. 370)
“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.”
(p. 374)
Networking
B.J Novak on charity
When possible, always give the money to charity, as it allows you to interact with people well above your pay grade.
(p. 379)
I discussed this further in the Secret Society Infiltration Model.
Productivity
Paraphrasing Peter Thiel
“What might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next 6 months, if you had a gun against your head?”
Tim’s 8-step process for maximizing efficacy…
1. Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. Email is the mind-killer.
2. Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh) and sit down with a pen/ pencil and paper.
3. Write down the 3 to 5 things — and no more — that are making you the most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually equals most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict.
4. For each item, ask yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” “Will moving this forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?”
5. Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions.
6. Block out at 2 to 3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow.
7. TO BE CLEAR: Block out at 2 to 3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work. No phone calls or social media allowed.
8. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward-spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.
There are a bunch of different productivity strategies and it’s kind of hard to determine which is best for you. You just have to try a few thoroughly. I think Tim’s is pretty good though.
Noah Kagan on time management
Don’t Try and Find Time. Schedule Time.
(p. 327)
This is similar to Jordan Harbinger’s time management system. There seems to be a spectrum with the effective granularity of scheduling; some people like Jordan will schedule the entire day, every day into 15-minute chunks. They’ll schedule things like have a meaningful conversation with my girlfriend — for 15 minutes!
I tried this and it was way too regimented for me. Here’s what I do:
Every project and mini-project I need to do is an Evernote on my computer and smartphone. In Evernote, you can schedule reminders for projects. So I will just set a to-do reminder at a specific (yet sometimes arbitrary) time that week. In my Google calendar I schedule reoccurring to-do’s, like on Tuesdays afternoons at 2 PM for about an hour I dig into my traffic reports and income stream reports.
Scheduling is important; if you’re not scheduling, start now.
On laziness
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence, or a vice: It is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body,
(p. 493)
Scott Adams on systems vs goals
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.
(p. 263)
Scott Adams on positive affirmations
you can use these affirmations, presumably — this is just a hypothesis — to focus your mind and your memory on a very specific thing. And that would allow you to notice things in your environment that might have already been there. It’s just that your filter was set to ignore, and then you just tune it through this memory and repetition trick until it widens a little bit to allow some extra stuff in. Now, there is some science to back that. . . .
(p. 266)
Scott Adams on problem-solving with your body as opposed to your mind
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.”
(p. 268)
On cursing for creativity
This odd technique does seem to quickly produce a slightly altered state. Try it — write down a precise sequence of curse words that takes 7 to 10 seconds to read. Then, before a creative work session of some type, read it quickly and loudly like you’re casting a spell or about to go postal.
(pp. 528–529)
This is hilarious! My cursing sequence features hijueputa malparido (Spanish), putain merde (French), and blyat (Russian) among other expletives.
Morning Pages
Is a morning activity that Tim advocates pretty seriously throughout the book. Basically, you spend just a few minutes in the morning freewriting about what you hope to accomplish in the day. The key point is to actually write with pen and paper in a notebook or diary before you do any else cerebral (like look at your smartphone!)
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.
(p. 227)
Evening Pages
Is the flipside, where before going to bed you write…
“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?
(p. 230)“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” — Thomas Edison
On Saying “No”
If I’m not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, then I say no.
(p. 386)
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!”
(p. 386)
I made a cool Turkish-pop-style AI song about this book and the Lifehacker lifestyle…
