Tools of Titans
Page 16
ChiliPad
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This was first introduced to me by Kelly Starrett (page 122) and Rick Rubin (page 502). Rick and I both set it to the coldest temperature possible about 1 hour prior to bed.
Let’s paint a familiar scene. A man and a woman are sleeping in bed under the same set of sheets and blankets. The woman’s temperature is running at roughly 700°F, giving off the heat of a pizza oven. The guy gets sweaty and kicks one leg out and on top of the sheets. Then he gets cold 10 minutes later and puts the leg underneath, repeating this cycle ad nauseam. He might even yank the covers like a child, upsetting the woman. It’s a huge headache for everybody. Sleep temperature is highly individualized.
The ChiliPad allows you to put an extremely thin—almost imperceptibly thin—sheet underneath your normal sheets that circulates water through a bedside contraption at a very precise temperature of your choosing. There are versions with two zones, so two people side by side can choose different numbers. Maybe your magic sleeping temperature is 55°F. Or 61°F, or 75°F? If you’re cold, you can increase the temperature of the ChiliPad underneath you instead of throwing a thick blanket on top that’s going to make your partner sweat to death. It can modulate between 55 and 110°F. Experiment and find your silver bullet.
Several of my close friends in Silicon Valley sheepishly admitted that, of all the advice I’ve ever given in my books and podcasts, the ChiliPad had the biggest impact on their quality of life. Several others have said the same about honey + ACV, described next.
Honey + Apple Cider Vinegar or Yogi Soothing Caramel Bedtime Tea or California Poppy Extract
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Your mileage may vary, but usually at least one of these will work.
Honey + ACV: My go-to tranquilizer beverage is simple: 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (I use Bragg brand) and 1 tablespoon honey, stirred into 1 cup of hot water. This was taught to me by the late and great Seth Roberts, PhD. Some of his readers also noticed large and immediate strength improvements in exercise after a few days of using this pre-bed cocktail.
Yogi Soothing Caramel Bedtime Tea: If you’re trying to avoid sugar (honey), this is an alternative. The packaging of this tea is targeted toward women to a comical degree. I recall dismissing it when an ex-girlfriend first offered me some, thinking it was for menstrual cramps. A few nights later, little Timmy found himself alone craving a hot beverage with flavor. I grabbed the caramel, let it brew for 5 minutes, and polished it off. 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. It was around 9 p.m. Note: This tea appears to affect only 30% of my readers this way.
California Poppy Extract: If both honey + ACV and Yogi Bedtime Tea fail, try plan C: a few drops of California poppy extract in warm water. Yogi Bedtime Tea does contain California poppy extract, but taking it directly allows you to increase the dose.
Visual Overwriting
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“Visual overwriting” is what I do right before bed to crowd out anything replaying or looping in my mind that will inhibit sleep (e.g., email, to-do lists, an argument, “I should have said . . .”). Here are two specific tools that I’ve found effective:
10 minutes of Tetris before bed: This recommendation is from Jane McGonigal, PhD (page 132). The free version works fine.
OR
Short and uplifting episodic television: I’ll offer just one recommendation here: Escape to River Cottage, Season One. I’ve watched this series multiple times. If you’ve ever fantasized about saying “Fuck it,” quitting your job, and going back to the land, buy this as a present for yourself. If you’ve ever dreamed of getting out of the city and moving to Montana or God-knows-where rural Utopia, procuring your own food and so on, then this is your Scooby snack. It’s endearingly retro, like a warm quilt from Mom, and host/chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall will make you want to grow tomatoes, even if you hate tomatoes. And catch eels, too. Don’t forget the eels.
Into the Darkness
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Sleep Master sleep mask and Mack’s Pillow Soft Silicone Putty (ear plugs): The Sleep Master sleep mask—great product, terrible name. I’ve tried dozens of sleep masks, and this is my favorite. It was introduced to me by Jeffrey Zurofsky, who was an integral piece of The 4-Hour Chef, where he appeared as “JZ.” Some of you may recall our “food marathon,” which involved 26.2 dishes in 26 different locations in Manhattan in less than 24 hours. But I digress . . . 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. Furthermore, it uses Velcro instead of elastic to secure the contraption to your head.
Mack’s Silicone Putty can be used for blocking out snores, water (for swimming), or just about anything irritating. Comfortable even for side sleepers, they’re soft on your ears, hard on noise.
Marpac Dohm DS “sound conditioner” white noise machine: If earplugs bother you—and they occasionally bother me—use a Marpac Dohm DS dual-speed sound conditioner white noise machine. This was introduced to me by readers, and it tunes out everything from traffic (why I bought it) to loud neighbors, leaky faucets, and fidgety dogs. It currently has nearly 10,000 reviews on Amazon and ~75% are 5 stars. If you want to MacGyver it, a cheap fan (needs to be loud-ish) pointing away from you can get close.
5 Morning Rituals that Help Me Win the Day
And then . . . you wake up. Now what?
After asking 100+ interviewees about morning routines, I’ve tested a lot and figured out what works for me.
Here are five things that I attempt to do every morning. Realistically, if I hit three out of five, I consider myself having won the morning. And if you win the morning, you win the day. I’m probably not the first person to say this, but it’s how I frame the importance of the first 60 to 90 minutes of the day. They facilitate or handicap the next 12+ hours. I’ve deliberately set a low bar for “win.”
These will probably seem like small things, but just remember: The small things are the big things.
#1—Make Your Bed (<3 minutes)
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In 2011 in Toronto, I chanced upon a former monk named Dandapani (Dandapani.org) at an event called Mastermind Talks. I was going through a very scattered period in my life and felt like my energy was traveling a millimeter outward in a million directions. For grounding, he convinced me to start making my bed.
If a monk with three dots on his forehead is too much for you, I would say first: Open your mind, you savage. Second, I would quote legendary Naval Admiral William McRaven, who has commanded at every level within the Special Operations community, including acting as head of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) during the Osama bin Laden raid. From his University of Texas at Austin commencement speech:
“If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.”
What is “making your bed” to me? I use the sweep-it-under-the-rug approach. The goal is visual tidiness, not Four Seasons. I don’t tuck in the sheets. I have a large blanket or duvet, and I’ll use that to cover the sheets, smoothing it out. Then, I place the pillows symmetrically underneath or on top of the blanket, and I’m done. That’s it. It’s very simple. If you work from home, this serves double duty, especially if you work in or near your bedroom. If you see an external distraction (speaking personally), you end up creating an internally distracted state. Noah Kagan (page 325) and I “make” our beds even when at hotels.
Life is also unpredictable. There are many unexpected problems that will pop up, and I’ve found that two things help me sail choppy water during the day. Both are done in the morning: A) read a few pages of stoicism, like Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and B) control at least a few things you can control. I’ll elaborate.
First, for A, here is one Marcus Aurelius quote on my refrigerator that often does the trick (bolding mine):
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.” (For more on stoicism, see page 474.)
Now, B) control what you can control. No matter how shitty your day is, no matter how catastrophic it might become, you can make your bed. And that gives you the feeling, at least it gives me the feeling, even in a disastrous day, that I’ve held on to the cliff ledge by a fingernail and I haven’t fallen. There is at least one thing I’ve controlled, there is something that has maintained one hand on the driver’s wheel of life. At the end of the day, the last experience you have is coming back to something that you’ve accomplished. It’s hard for me to overstate how important this ritual has become, but number one: Make your bed.
#2—Meditate (10 to 20 minutes)
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I cover different options on page 149. At least 80% of all guests profiled in this book have a daily mindfulness practice of some type. Sometimes I will do “Happy Body” mobility exercises from Jerzy Gregorek (introduced to me by Naval Ravikant, page 546) in place of meditation.
When I’m done, I walk into the kitchen and flip a switch to near-boil water (about 85% of the full dial) using a cheap Adagio utiliTEA electric kettle. This is for tea (in step 4).
#3—Do 5 to 10 Reps of Something (<1 minute)
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I started doing this after numerous exchanges with the 4:45 a.m.–rising Jocko Willink (page 412). He trains before most people wake, and I train when most people are getting ready for bed (like Triple H on page 128).
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. My preferred exercise is push-ups with ring turn out (RTO) (see page 16), as it nicely lights up the nervous system. I’ll often take a 30- to 60-second pure cold shower after this, à la Tony Robbins (page 210).
#4—Prepare “Titanium Tea” (this name was a joke, but it stuck) (2 to 3 minutes)
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I prepare loose-leaf tea in a Rishi glass teapot but you could use a French press. The below combo is excellent for cognition and fat loss, and I use about 1 flat teaspoon of each:
Pu-erh aged black tea
Dragon well green tea (or other green tea)
Turmeric and ginger shavings (often also Rishi brand)
Add the hot water to your mixture and let it steep for 1 to 2 minutes. Some tea purists will get very upset and say, “Damn it, Ferriss, you should really do your homework, because the steeping temperatures for those teas are all different. And the first steeping should be 15 seconds!” This is all true, and I can do the fancy stuff, but when I’m groggy in the morning, I don’t give a shit and like my uppers simple. Explore the complexities of tea on the weekends. Roughly 185°F is fine.
Separately, add one of the following to your drinking mug: 1 to 2 tablespoons of coconut oil, which is about 60 to 70% MCTs (medium-chain triglycerides) by weight or 1 scoop of Quest MCT Oil Powder, which will give the tea a creamy consistency.
Pour your tea into your mug, stir to mix, and enjoy. In my case, I grab my tea, a glass of cold water, and then take a seat at my comfy acacia wood kitchen table for the next step.
#5—Morning Pages or 5-Minute Journal (5 to 10 minutes)
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Next up is journaling, which is not a “Dear Diary” situation.
I use two types of journaling and alternate between them: Morning Pages and The 5-Minute Journal (5MJ). The former I use primarily for getting unstuck or problem solving (what should I do?); the latter I use for prioritizing and gratitude (how should I focus and execute?). I cover the Morning Pages extensively on page 224, so I’ll only describe the 5MJ here.
The 5MJ is simplicity itself and hits a lot of birds with one stone: 5 minutes in the morning of answering a few prompts, and then 5 minutes in the evening doing the same. Each prompt has three lines for three answers.
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. __________
The bolded lines are the most critical for me. I’m already a checklist and execution machine. It’s easy to obsess over pushing the ball forward as a type-A personality, which leads to being constantly future-focused. If anxiety is a focus on the future, practicing appreciation, even for 2 to 3 minutes, is counter-balancing medicine. The 5MJ forces me to think about what I have, as opposed to what I’m pursuing.
When you answer “I am grateful for . . . ,” I recommend considering four different categories. Otherwise, you will go on autopilot and repeat the same items day after day (e.g., “my healthy family,” “my loving dog,” etc.). I certainly did this, and it defeats the purpose. What are you grateful for in the below four categories? I ask myself this every morning as I fill out the 5MJ, and I pick my favorite three for that day:
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.
I use Intelligent Change’s bound 5-Minute Journal and suggest it for convenience, but you can practice in your own notebook. It’s fun and good therapy to review your p.m. “amazing things” answers at least once a month.
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Got it? My morning routine looks longer on paper than it takes in reality.
Of course, there are days when life intervenes, and you have emergencies to deal with. Do I always hit all five? Absolutely not. That’s 30% of the time, at best.
But you can always knock off at least one, and if you tick off three, I find the likelihood of the day being a home run infinitely greater.
Mind Training 101
“We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.”
—Archilochus
The Most Consistent Pattern of All
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More than 80% of the world-class performers I’ve interviewed have some form of daily meditation or mindfulness practice. Both can be thought of as “cultivating a prese
nt-state awareness that helps you to be nonreactive.” This applies to everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger (page 176) to Justin Boreta of The Glitch Mob (page 356), and from elite athletes like Amelia Boone (page 2) to writers like Maria Popova (page 406). It’s the most consistent pattern of them all.
It is a “meta-skill” that improves everything else. You’re starting your day by practicing focus when it doesn’t matter (sitting on a couch for 10 minutes) so that you can focus better later when it does matter (negotiation, conversation with a loved one, max deadlift, mind-melding with a Vulcan, etc.).
If you want better results with less stress, fewer “I should have said X” mental loops, etc., meditation acts as a warm bath for the mind. Perhaps you’re a world-conquering machine with elite focus, but you might need to CTFO (chill the fuck out) a few minutes a day before you BTFO (burn the fuck out).
Meditation allows me to step back and gain a “witness perspective” (as with psychedelics), so that I’m observing my thoughts instead of being tumbled by them. I can step out of the washing machine and calmly look inside it.
Most of our waking hours, we feel as though we’re in a trench on the front lines with bullets whizzing past our heads. Through 20 minutes of consistent meditation, I can become the commander, looking out at the battlefield from a hilltop. I’m able to look at a map of the territory and make high-level decisions. “These guys shouldn’t even be fighting over here. What the hell is Regiment B doing over there? Call them out. We need more troops around the ridge. For objectives, we should be going after A, B, and C in that order. Ignore all the other so-called emergencies until those are handled. Great. Now, deep breath, and . . . execute.”