Tools of Titans

by Timothy Ferriss

  “So, the point is: I had such a nice time. It was purely pleasant. There was no red face, there was no huffing. And when I got back to my usual stopping place, I looked at my watch, and it said 45 minutes. I thought, ‘How the hell could that have been 45 minutes, as opposed to my usual 43? There’s no way.’ But it was right: 45 minutes. That was a profound lesson that changed the way I’ve approached my life ever since. . . .

  “We could do the math, [but] whatever, 93-something-percent of my huffing and puffing, and all that red face and all that stress was only for an extra 2 minutes. It was basically for nothing. . . . [So,] for life, I think of all of this maximization—getting the maximum dollar out of everything, the maximum out of every second, the maximum out of every minute—you don’t need to stress about any of this stuff. Honestly, that’s been my approach ever since. I do things, but I stop before anything gets stressful. . . .

  “You notice this internal ‘Argh.’ That’s my cue. I treat that like physical pain. What am I doing? I need to stop doing that thing that hurts. What is that? And, it usually means that I’m just pushing too hard, or doing things that I don’t really want to be doing.”

  On Lack of Morning Routines

  “Not only do I not have morning rituals, but there’s really nothing that I do every day, except for eating or some form of writing. Here’s why: I get really, really, really into one thing at a time. For example, a year ago I discovered a new approach to programming my PostgreSQL database that made all of my code a lot easier. I spent 5 months—every waking hour—just completely immersed in this one thing.

  “Then after 5 months, I finished that project. I took a week and I went hiking in Milford Sound in New Zealand. Totally offline. When I got back from that, I was so zen-nature-boy that I spent the next couple of weeks just reading books outside.”

  ✸ What’s something you believe that other people think is crazy?

  “Oh, that’s easy. I’ve got a lot of unpopular opinions. I believe alcohol tastes bad, and so do olives. I’ve never tried coffee, but I don’t like the smell. I believe all audio books should be read and recorded by people from Iceland, because they’ve got the best accent. I believe it would be wonderful to move to a new country every 6 months for the rest of my life. I believe you shouldn’t start a business unless people are asking you to. I believe I’m below average. It’s a deliberate, cultivated belief to compensate for our tendency to think we’re above average. I believe the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a masterpiece. I believe that music and people don’t mix; that music should be appreciated alone without seeing or knowing who the musicians are and without other people around. Just listening to music for its own sake, not listening to the people around you and not filtered through what you know about the musician’s personal life.”

  Treat Life as a Series of Experiments

  “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. . . . The best book about this subject is Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. His recommendation is to talk to a few people who are currently where you think you want to be and ask them for the pros and cons. Then trust their opinion since they’re right in it, not just remembering or imagining.”

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

  “There’s this beautiful Kurt Vonnegut quote that’s just a throwaway line in the middle of one of his books, that says, ‘We are whatever we pretend to be.’”

  The Most Successful Email Derek Ever Wrote

  At its largest, Derek spent roughly 4 hours on CD Baby every six months. He had systematized everything to run without him. Derek is both successful and fulfilled because he never hesitates to challenge the status quo, to test assumptions. It doesn’t have to take much, and his below email illustrates this beautifully.

  Enter Derek

  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 I first built CD Baby, every order had an automated email that let the customer know when the CD was actually shipped. At first, it was just the normal, “Your order has shipped today. Please let us know if it doesn’t arrive. Thank you for your business.”

  After a few months, that felt really incongruent with my mission to make people smile. I knew could do better. So I took 20 minutes and wrote this goofy little thing:

  Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

  A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

  Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

  We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th.

  I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

  That one silly email, sent out with every order, has been so loved that if you search Google for “private CD Baby jet” you’ll get more than 20,000 results. Each one is somebody who got the email and loved it enough to post on their website and tell all their friends.

  That one goofy email created thousands of new customers.

  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.

  Spirit animal: Black bear

  * * *

  Alexis Ohanian

  Alexis Ohanian (TW/IG: @alexisohanian, alexisohanian.com) is perhaps best known for being a co-founder of Reddit and Hipmunk. He was in the very first class of Y Combinator, arguably the world’s most selective startup “accelerator,” where he is now a partner. He is an investor or advisor in more than 100 startups, an activist for digital rights (e.g., SOPA/PIPA), and the best-selling author of Without Their Permission.

  “You Are a Rounding Error”

  “[I had] an executive at Yahoo! who brought me and Steve in [for a potential acquisition discussion]—this was early in Reddit—and told us we were a rounding error because our traffic was so small. . . . I put, ‘You are a rounding error,’ on our wall in the Reddit office after that meeting as a wall of negative reinforcement for me. That ended up being kind of valuable for me and helpful, and I still am grateful to this day that he was such a dick, because it was so motivating. But I don’t want to be that guy.”

  (See Amanda Palmer’s quote, “Take the pain and wear it like a shirt” on page 521.)

  TF: Reddit is now a global top-50 website.

  You Have to Give a Lot of Damns

  “[Our site] made [users] laugh sometimes because we had jokes in the error messages, that kind of thing. I ask people, . . . ‘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.” ’ I mean, people still fucking tweet about our error message on Hipmunk, and it’s an error message. Why are they doing that? Because it gave them a moment of levity while they were doing something that they expected to be pretty boring, like searching for a flight.

  “Founders have to realize the ba
r is set so low because most companies stopped giving a fuck so long ago. . . . It’s something that I really expect other founders to do, and it ends up being pretty easy. Compared to building out the actual site or architecting the back end, this doesn’t require a few years of programming expertise. It just requires you to gives lots of damns, which not enough people do.”

  A Damn-Giving Assignment of Less Than 15 Minutes

  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.”

  (See Derek Sivers’s best email ever on page 192.)

  ✸ One of his questions for founders who apply to Y Combinator:

  “What are you doing that the world doesn’t realize is a really big fucking deal?”

  Giving Feedback to Founders—How Do You Express Skepticism?

  Alexis has many approaches, of course, but I liked this example of what Cal Fussman (page 495) might call “letting the silence do the work”: “I really think a lot can be conveyed with a raised eyebrow.”

  Organizations Alexis introduced me to:

  Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.

  Fight for the Future (fightforthefuture.org) is dedicated to protecting and expanding the Internet’s transformative power in our lives by creating civic campaigns that are engaging for millions of people.

  “Productivity” Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me)

  This chapter was one of the harder for me to write. I drafted a portion, then I’d let it sit for months. Feeling guilty, I’d spend a few more hours on it, then repeat my procrastination. As a result, the lessons are spread out over a few years.

  Eventually, it was the below quote that helped me finish this piece, which I hope will be as helpful to you as it is embarrassing for me.

  “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, University of the Arts commencement speech

  So, here goes, and I hope it aids at least a few of you.

  Reality Check

  * * *

  Not long ago, I had a birthday party.

  A dozen friends and I gathered for several days of wonderful sun, beach, and catching up. On the last day, I didn’t get up until 11:30 a.m., knowing full well that the last remaining friends were leaving at 12 noon.

  I was afraid of being alone.

  Like a child, I hid my head under the covers (literally) and hit snooze until reality couldn’t be postponed any further.

  But . . . why am I telling you this?

  The Dangerous Myths of “Successful” People

  * * *

  We all like to appear “successful” (a nebulous term at best) and the media like to portray standouts as superheroes.

  Sometimes, these dramatic stories of overcoming the odds are inspiring. More often, they lead to an unhealthy knee-jerk conclusion:

  “Well . . . maybe they [entrepreneur/artist/creator painted as superhero] can do it, but I’m just a normal guy/girl. . . .” This chapter is intended to give you a behind-the-scenes look at my own life. Though I’ve occasionally done profiles like “A Day In The Life” with Morgan Spurlock’s crew, I rarely let journalists follow me for a “normal” day.

  Why?

  Because I’m no superhero. I’m not even a consistent “normal.”

  In 2013, I hit a rough patch of three months, during which I:

  Cried while watching Rudy.

  Repeatedly hit snooze for 1 to 3 HOURS past my planned wake time, because I simply didn’t want to face the day.

  Considered giving everything away and moving to Montreal, Seville, or Iceland. Location varies based on what I imagine escaping.

  Saw a therapist for the first time, as I was convinced that I was doomed to lifelong pessimism.

  Used gentlemanly (ahem) websites to “relax” during the day when I clearly had urgent and important shit to do.*

  Took my daily caffeine intake (read: self-medication) so high that my “resting” pulse was 120+ beats per minute. 8 to 10 cups of coffee per day at minimum.

  Wore the same pair of jeans for a week straight just to have a much-needed constant during weeks of chaos.

  Seems pretty dysfunctional, right?

  But, in the last 8 weeks of that same period, I also:

  Increased my passive income 20%+.

  Bought my dream house.

  Meditated twice per day for 20 minutes per session, without fail. That marked the first time I’d been able to meditate consistently.

  Ended up cutting my caffeine intake to next-to-nothing (in the last 4 weeks): usually pu-erh tea in the morning and green tea in the afternoon.

  With the help of my blog readers, raised $100,000+ for charity: water for my birthday.

  Raised $250,000 in 53 minutes for a startup called Shyp.

  Signed one of the most exciting business deals of my last 10 years—my TV show, The Tim Ferriss Experiment.

  Added roughly 20 pounds of muscle after learning the pain and joy of high-rep front squats (and topical DHEA) courtesy of Patrick Arnold (page 35).

  Transformed my bloodwork.

  Realized—once again—that manic-depressive symptoms are just part of entrepreneurship.

  Came to feel closer to all my immediate family members.

  The Point

  * * *

  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.

  Personally, I suck at efficiency (doing things quickly). To compensate and cope, here’s my 8-step process for maximizing efficacy (doing the right things):

  Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. Email is the mind-killer.

  Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh) and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper.

  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.

  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?”

  Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions.

  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.

  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.

  If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward-spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.

  Congratulations! That’s it.

  This is the only way I can create big outcomes despite my never-ending impulse to procrastinate, nap, and otherwise fritter away days with bullshit. If I have 10 important things to do in a day, it’s 100% certain nothing important will get done that day. On the other hand, I can usually handle one must-do item and blo
ck out my lesser behaviors for 2 to 3 hours a day.

  It doesn’t take much to seem superhuman and appear “successful” to nearly everyone around you. In fact, you just need one rule: What you do is more important than how you do everything else, and doing something well does not make it important.

  If you consistently feel the counterproductive need for volume and doing lots of stuff, put these on a Post-it note:

  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.

  And when—despite your best efforts—you feel like you’re losing at the game of life, remember: Even the best of the best sometimes feel this way. When I’m in the pit of despair, I recall what iconic writer Kurt Vonnegut said about his process: “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”

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

  And you are not alone.

  * * *

  * Any guy who claims he’s never done this shouldn’t be trusted.

  “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.”

  Spirit animal: Mantis shrimp

  * * *

  Matt Mullenweg

  Matt Mullenweg (TW/IG: @photomatt, ma.tt) has been named one of BusinessWeek’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web, but I think that’s an understatement. He is best known as the original lead developer of WordPress, which now powers more than 25% of the entire web. If you’ve visited sites like Wall Street Journal, Forbes, TED, NFL, or Reuters (or my li’l website), you’ve seen WordPress in action. Matt is also the CEO of Automattic, which is valued at more than $1 billion and has a fully distributed team of 500 employees around the world. I’m honored to be an advisor.