Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2017; Tools of Titans, from December 2016, is described as Tim Ferriss’s latest book, and Tribe of Mentors came out later that month.
Tim Ferriss inspired thousands of entrepreneurs with his famous book The 4-Hour Workweek, where he not only told his own business story but also laid out a roadmap and a series of tips that he applied himself, and that a great many entrepreneurs apply today to start their online businesses.
Now, in his book Tools of Titans, we find a much more mature Tim Ferriss, with a collection of advice he gathered from the hundreds of interviews he has done with all kinds of people, including Tony Robbins, Arnold Schwarzenegger and lesser-known people such as business owners, scientists, military officers and so on.
Seven lessons we can learn from Tim Ferriss’s latest book
1. Doing is the key to everything
If knowledge and information were the most crucial part of success, we’d all be multimillionaires with perfect abs.
The hardest part is putting everything we learn into practice. Today there are thousands of books and blogs offering endless advice. You don’t have to put all of it into practice. Start small, but start. It doesn’t matter what you do, but start doing.
As Jim Rohn said, “Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.”
Taking it into another field, Dan Ariely gives another example: if you apologise to someone, even if you don’t mean it, and even if the other person knows you don’t mean it, you will still have a better relationship with that person a year later than people who never say sorry.
2. Don’t be afraid to show your scars
Tim Ferriss shares how there was a time when suicide crossed his mind, and he talks about the period when he was struggling with the demons of anxiety and depression.
Most people tend to complain about the outside world, when it is much better to reveal to our inner world what it is that we are afraid of.
Some studies have shown that people who write down their three biggest anxieties each day show fewer signs of stress after a few months. Let’s say they are being honest with themselves, and that way they can be honest with everyone else.
It’s also important to write down what you are grateful for. This is one of the pieces of advice most often repeated by Tony Robbins, author of Awaken the Giant Within.
3. Become a good speaker if you want success to come easily
Scott Adams always advises young people and entrepreneurs to learn to speak in public. Anyone can do it with practice.
Whether you are in a management position or starting your own business, capitalism rewards things that are rare and valuable. So if you are good at public speaking and you have another skill, you are rare and valuable. And people like you.
Remember that Warren Buffett acknowledged that things started going much better for him after he took a Dale Carnegie public speaking course.
4. Don’t be afraid to do something you’re not qualified for
Dan Carlin is not a historian and doesn’t have a PhD, but he loved history. One day his mother asked him why he didn’t do a podcast about the stories he told at the dinner table. Carlin told her that he didn’t have a PhD in the subject, that he wasn’t a historian or anything of the sort.
So his mother asked him since when you needed a PhD to tell stories.
And Dan Carlin now has Hardcore History, the most popular history podcast on the planet.
In an interview, Kamal Ravikant tells Tim Ferriss that if he only did the things he was qualified for, he’d be pushing a broom somewhere.
School, companies, the government, parents, friends… they all want to pigeonhole you, and society offers you a very limited menu. That’s where some people choose from the options on the menu while others decide to cook their own food at home.
5. The theory of 1,000 true fans
For Kevin Kelly, success doesn’t have to be complicated: it starts with making 1,000 people extremely happy.
Kelly’s idea is that if they are true fans, you can build a product, charge for it, and they will pay. Create a product that improves their lives.
Start small. Focus on the people who really care about what you are doing.
6. Ask dumb questions
Tony Robbins tells Tim Ferriss that we are the quality of the questions we ask.
- Tell me about a time when…
- Tell me about the day when…
- What exactly were the steps that led you to…
- Describe the conversation when…
They seem like absurd questions, but they make the person we are talking to feel comfortable and want to give us answers. Answers that can give us valuable information.
The opposite would be to stay in constant complaint mode. When you never stop complaining, few people will want to help you. If you focus only on the negative, you will attract only negative people.
Become a source of growth for the people around you, so that they in turn can become a source of growth for you.
7. Say no
When you are young and just starting out, you should say “yes” to practically everything. Once we’re up and running, we can’t allow most interruptions, and we have to say “no” to anything that interrupts our creativity or our time.
Sam Harris tells Tim Ferriss
For a few years, he says, he had been writing about a daily practice he had used many times when things were at their worst for him. In 2015 two really difficult things happened to him, one financial and the other in his relationships.
Every night he went through his checklist: had he improved 1% that day physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually?
Without doing this, he believes, he would have slipped into depression.
See also: Which books to read to get smarter and make better decisions
Featured image: Todd White, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
