Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2018. The words recently and one of the best books of 2018 refer to Tools of Titans as of June 2018.
One book packed with excellent business lessons is The 4-Hour Workweek, in which Tim Ferriss gives new entrepreneurs a learning guide that can save them hundreds of stumbles when starting a company, along with some very good ideas on productivity. Tim Ferriss has become one of the most important figures in the world of entrepreneurship.
He recently treated us to one of the best books of 2018, Tools of Titans, in which he gathers hundreds of interviews with notable people that can help us in life and in business.
So, naturally, I wanted to collect Tim Ferriss’s best advice, his best quotes and his best thoughts, in the hope that they serve as motivation and help for anyone who wants to succeed in life, in their career and in business.
Tim Ferriss’s 12 business lessons for success
1. Many people prefer unhappiness to uncertainty
Ironically, the truth is that most people prefer to stay as they are (even if they don’t like their situation) because they’re more afraid of taking risks than of carrying on as before. The problem is that years later, a large percentage of these people regret not having taken certain risks and changed their situation when they could have.
2. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker
The famous shades of grey may help when you’re choosing a colour for your kitchen, but in life we need to simplify, and as a general rule there are no greys, only black and white. If someone isn’t adding to your life, they’re subtracting. If they’re not pushing you forward, they’re holding you back. If they’re not making you stronger, they’re making you weaker. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, so try not to underestimate the effect of your mediocre friends, the pessimists, the unambitious and the disorganised.
Sometimes, to change yourself, you first have to change your environment and your circle. When you want to get fit by exercising, you don’t go to a restaurant. You go to a gym, because that’s the environment equipped for the purpose. Well, there are environments set up for success and environments set up for failure. Look around you.
See also: 4 truths about the art of negotiation
3. Time is king
To really enjoy life, you don’t need great luxuries. You only need to be in control of your time. Business success is no use to you if you won’t have time to do what you want and to spend that time with the people you really want to spend it with. That’s why Tim Ferriss is such an enthusiast of time management and of delegating any task that someone else could do, simply to have more of that all-important asset: time.
You need to realise that most things simply aren’t as serious as you think they are.
4. Knowing when to quit is for winners
We’re constantly bombarded with the idea that success belongs to those who persist, but that’s false. Success belongs to those who know when to quit: to quit what isn’t working, to quit what has already gone rotten. When you give something up, you get the chance to start something else. It’s essential to be able to drop what isn’t working quickly so you can focus on what is.
And this applies to both life and business. For example, if you leave a bad partner in time, you can find a good one sooner. If you quickly drop a business idea that isn’t working, you can bring to life two ideas that do work. So change the paradigm: if you know when to quit, and don’t persist where you shouldn’t, you’re closer to the right path and to success.
5. Toxic people don’t deserve your time; to think otherwise is masochism
Devoting your time, energy and resources to the wrong people is the best way to end badly or, as Ferriss puts it, masochism. We need to keep toxic people at a distance so that we can get closer to other kinds of people who may be a much better fit for our shared projects and interests.
And above all, don’t let a snake into your company, because it can wreck an entire healthy team.
6. Many missteps have come from not taking any steps
Sometimes the worst decision we can make is to make no decision at all. The step that leads us to failure may be precisely the one we don’t take.
7. Information is useless
We live in the greatest information age in history. We all have access to the same information, and practically all of it is free. So why don’t most people succeed? Simple. Information is useless if it isn’t applied to something important, or if you forget what you’ve learned before you get the chance to apply that supposed knowledge.
8. Emphasise your strengths; don’t fix your weaknesses
It may sound counterintuitive, but we all tend to recognise our weaknesses and want to improve them. Someone sold us that idea. And it’s a bad idea, because the truth is that most of us are a big bag of weaknesses with only a few strengths. So if you focus on improving your weak points, you’ll end up frustrated. Focus on boosting the areas where you’re already strong. That’s how you win. And this is one business lesson you shouldn’t forget, because successful companies didn’t get there by improving where they fall short, but by making the most of what made them different and competitive.
9. Ideas can be stolen, but execution can’t
Business ideas can be stolen, but an idea is nothing if it isn’t executed well. In other words, a business idea carried out without passion and with terrible execution will only work once someone brings that passion and planning to it.
10. The best entrepreneurs I’ve met were all good communicators
Everyone really does agree on this. Even Warren Buffett admits that he had to take a Carnegie course to learn to communicate more effectively and lose his fear of public speaking. An idea is conveyed through communication. A sale is closed thanks to the art of communication. You get funding because you know how to communicate your project. In business, everything is based on communication. Start there, because this is probably one of the few unifying factors you need to succeed in business.
11. Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated
There’s little to add to this point, which Tim Ferriss made so clear in The 4-Hour Workweek: if you ignore this advice, all you do is waste someone else’s time instead of your own, and in many cases both.
12. Success is measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have
We have to have many uncomfortable conversations throughout our lives. In fact, bear in mind that the only thing that separates successful people from those who don’t achieve much in life is that successful people do many things that scare most people. And that includes uncomfortable conversations.
We’re often afraid to ask for what we want for fear of rejection. On this point, I recommend the method for overcoming the fear of rejection that I explained in a previous article. Someone once said that in life we end up with what we negotiate. Quite possibly you haven’t had a pay rise at your company because you’ve never asked for one. And you haven’t asked for fear of being fired. There may also be a client missing from your portfolio because you think they’d turn you down.
Those cold calls you need to make, those icy doors you need to knock on, those tough people you have to talk to… those are the small things that separate what you could achieve from what you will achieve if you don’t do them.
This article is part of our business lessons series, where we collect the advice, ideas and thoughts of the most brilliant business people, such as Jack Ma, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Mark Cuban, among others.
Featured image: Loic Le Meur, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
