Tools of Titans

by Timothy Ferriss

  When he appeared on my podcast, I attempted to get him drunk on sipping tequila (Casa Dragones Blanco; he also likes Don Julio 1942) and make him curse, both of which are hard.

  Behind the Scenes

  Matt truly doesn’t curse. I once heard him say—I kid you not—“That’s really bad butt,” to which I responded “What? You’re trying to get around ‘bad ass’? No, you’re not allowed to do that.”

  We’re both big fans of Peter Drucker and his book The Effective Executive, as well as Alain de Botton’s (page 486) How Proust Can Change Your Life.

  Matt wrote the majority of the code for WordPress over a year of “polyphasic” sleep: roughly 4 hours of waking, followed by 20 to 30 minutes of sleep, repeated indefinitely. This is nicknamed the “Uberman” protocol. Why did he stop? “I got a girlfriend.”

  We have traveled to many countries together. He takes all the photos, and I try and learn the language to translate. On one flight to Greece in 2008, I was all wound up about people pirating The 4-Hour Workweek online. He asked me “Why are you upset?” which threw me off. Wasn’t it obvious? He followed up with “The people who download your book as a bad PDF aren’t your customers. They would never buy it in the first place. Look at it as free advertising.” And with a 30-second intervention, he eliminated my worrying about it.

  Matt is one of the people I most try to emulate. He is exceptionally calm and logical under pressure. I’ve seen him face multiple data-center collapses with near-indifference, calmly sipping beer before another billiards shot. What should I tell a hugely influential journalist asking about it? “Tell him we’re on it.” Then he sunk another ball. He’s the epitome of “getting upset won’t help things.” I frequently ask myself “What would Matt do?” or “What would Matt say to me?”

  Don’t Be a Dog—Think “What If?”

  “From the early days of WordPress, we would always think: ‘Okay, if we do X today, what does that result in tomorrow, a year from now, ten years from now?’ The metaphor I think of the most—because it’s simple—is the dog chasing the car. What does the dog do if he catches the car? He doesn’t have a plan for it. So I find it just as often on the entrepreneurial side. People don’t plan for success.”

  On Losing a $400,000 Check

  Matt constantly misplaces things.

  “I have a meeting and I spend 10 minutes looking for my wallet because I just stuck it someplace. It’s in the fridge or something. I don’t know. I’m always losing something. Actually, I lost one of our initial investment checks. It was a check for $400,000.”

  TIM: “That’s not good to lose.”

  MATT: “It was investor Phil Black, who’s still on the board today, and he wrote a paper check, like the kind you would use at the grocery store or for normal things. The most money I’d ever seen in my life. I was 20 years old. I was like: ‘What is this?’ I expected it to be a check like a Publishers Clearing House, you know? Like the size of a table.”

  TIM: “Right, that you could surf like a floating carpet from Aladdin down to the bank.”

  MATT: “Luckily, the other investors wired their money because I misplaced this check. And I was thinking, ‘Oh, my goodness, what do I do in this situation?’ Because obviously, he could stop the check, but then he’s just entrusted me with $400,000 and I’ve lost it. Do I tell him? Do I not tell him? Is he going to notice at some point? And months passed. Literally months passed. He doesn’t say anything, I don’t say anything.”

  TIM: “Because you didn’t want to ask him.”

  MATT: “I didn’t ask him. And I’m going back to Houston for Thanksgiving, and I open the book I’m reading and I had used it as a bookmark. And it kind of fell out of the book on the plane. I was like: ‘Oh, my goodness!’”

  The Tail End

  On a hike in San Francisco, Matt recommended I read “The Tail End” by Tim Urban on the Wait But Why blog—if you only read one article this month, make it that one. It uses diagrams to underscore how short life really is. Here’s just one gem: “It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.” Might be time for you (and me) to rethink our personal priorities. On a related and sad note, Matt’s father passed away unexpectedly weeks after he recommended this article to me. Matt was at his bedside.

  Qwerty Is for Junior Varsity

  The normal QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to slow down human operators to avoid jams. That time has passed, so try the Dvorak layout instead, which is easier on your tendons and helps prevent carpal tunnel syndrome. Read The Dvorak Zine (dvzine.org). Colemak is even more efficient, if you dare. Within Automattic, Matt has held speed-typing challenges, where the loser has to switch to the winner’s layout. So far, Dvorak has always beaten QWERTY.

  On Getting the Ma.tt Domain Name

  “I had to wire money [several grand] to Trinidad and Tobago. I was in the Bank of America, and they said, ‘Sir, are you sure about this?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s fine. I read it on the Internet.’”

  Tools of the Trade

  Here are some of Matt’s go-to tech enablers:

  P2 (WordPress theme) for replacing email—p2theme.com

  Slack for replacing IM—slack.com

  Momentum: Chrome extension to help you focus.

  Wunderlist: To-do management app/tool to help you get stuff done.

  Telegram: a messaging app with really good encryption

  Calm.com for meditation

  How Matt Got in Shape

  He committed to one push-up before bed. Yes, just one push-up:

  “No matter how late you’re running, no matter what’s going on in the world, you can’t argue against doing one push-up. Come on. There’s no excuse. I often find I just need to get over that initial hump with something that’s almost embarrassingly small as a goal, and then that can become a habit.”

  TF: Remember Chade-Meng Tan’s “one breath” on page 155? Same idea.

  Fully Text, Fully Distributed

  Automattic has more than 500 employees and is fully distributed across more than 50 countries. They have almost no in-person or phone meetings. There is no “headquarters,” so to speak. They skip the offices, hire the best talent worldwide, and spend the savings on $250 per month co-working stipends and other benefits.

  “The interview process is as much like the actual work as possible. It’s all [email or] text chat, because that’s how we primarily communicate. It also prevents you from any subconscious bias.”

  TIM: “What do you look for or disqualify against?”

  MATT: “I look for a passion, attention to detail, drive beyond the things that they need to do. I’m totally down with quirky.”

  TIM: “What questions do you ask to get an indication of those things?”

  MATT: “So at this point [in the early stages] all I’m doing is looking at emails. So literally there’s no chat, no anything. It’s purely based on the care and effort that they put into this email. We’ve tried forms and things they fill out before, and we’ve gone back to just a freeform email because I want to see what kind of attachment they use. I want to see who their email client is. I want to see if you can tell they’ve copied and pasted things because of different text and different font sizes. All of those are indicators, and not any one of them [alone].

  “You know something I can say, you asked about what we look for in candidates: clarity of writing. I think clarity of writing indicates clarity of thinking.”

  TF: I highly recommend reading “The CEO of Automattic on Holding ‘Auditions’ to Build a Strong Team” from the April 2014 issue of the Harvard Business Review (find it on hbr.org).

  Words That Work

  Matt pays incredible attention to word choice and ordering (diction and syntax). He loves studying “code poets”—coders wh
o have elegant, poetic style—but he does the same with spoken language. He recommended I read the book Words That Work, written by Republican political strategist Frank Luntz. It’s brilliant. Matt added, “If someone likes that book, then I might point them to George Lakoff. He has a great seminal work from the 1980s called Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.” He loves books about framing and language.

  ✸ Advice to your 20-year-old self?

  “Slow down. I think a lot of the mistakes of my youth were mistakes of ambition, not mistakes of sloth. So just slowing down, whether that’s meditating, whether that’s taking time for yourself away from screens, whether that’s really focusing in on who you’re talking to or who you’re with.”

  104 Chicken McNuggets

  “The Super Bowl was in Houston, Texas [in 2004]. I lived like a mile from Reliant Stadium. For the Super Bowl, McDonalds did a special where you could get 20 McNuggets for around $4, and I was super broke at the time. So I thought: ‘Man, I’m just gonna stock up on these,’ the way you might get ramen or cans of Campbell’s, which I would do when they went on sale. I’d always buy a bunch of them.

  “So I just like got a bunch of McNuggets and then—I love McNuggets—I had to sweet-talk the person so they gave me lots of extra sweet and sour sauce.”

  TIM: “Oh, my God.”

  MATT: “And the McDonalds sweet and sour sauce is not like sweet and sour sauce anywhere else in the world. All sweet and sour sauce is red, and for some reason theirs is brown. I don’t know why. You might.”

  TIM: “It’s been genetically engineered to be as addictive as possible? I don’t know.”

  MATT: “It’s so good. So I just start popping them, and next thing I knew it was 104.”

  TIM: “It wasn’t even a bet or anything? You just rampaged through 104?”

  MATT: “While watching the Super Bowl.”

  * * *

  Nicholas McCarthy

  Nicholas McCarthy (TW: @NMcCarthyPiano, nicholasmccarthy.co.uk) was born in 1989 without his right hand, and started to play the piano at the age of 14. He was told he would never succeed as a concert pianist. The doubters were wrong. His graduation from the prestigious Royal College of Music in London in 2012 appeared in press around the world, as he became the only one-handed pianist to graduate from the Royal College of Music in its 130-year history.

  Nicholas has now performed extensively throughout the world, including playing alongside Coldplay and giving a rendition of the Paralympic Anthem in front of an in-person audience of 86,000 people and half a billion worldwide TV viewers. His first album, entitled Solo, features 17 pieces of left-hand repertoire spanning three centuries and has been released around the world to great acclaim.

  Franz Liszt

  I’m embarrassed to admit that I’d never heard of Liszt before my conversation with Nicholas. Now, he’s part of my regular listening. Search YouTube for “Best of Liszt” (Halidon Music):

  “Franz Liszt is one of the great romantic composers of piano literature. He was really held as the super-virtuoso of the 19th century.”

  ✸ Lesser-known musicians to explore?

  “The concert(s) of the Argentinian pianist Martha Argerich. She is just superhuman. She is quite elderly now, but she still plays. She’s coming to the BBC Proms this year. She has cult status in our world.”

  TF: I now routinely listen to her. To have your mind explode, search “Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No 1 FULL Argerich Charles Dutoit” and check out minute 31.

  Playing the Long Game

  Nicholas explains why he decided to specialize in left-hand repertoire, instead of also using his right “little hand,” a very short extension of his forearm from the elbow:

  “It was what my teacher at the time said: ‘You don’t want to become a gimmick.’ Especially with all the TV talent shows, which were just coming about then. It was at the start of Britain’s Got Talent. . . . I’m so relieved I took her advice, because I would’ve been that gimmick who maybe made a quick buck over two years, but I certainly wouldn’t have the respect that I have now as a pianist, and I certainly wouldn’t have had the career that I’ve had to date and that I look forward to continuing until I’m in my 60s.”

  ✸ Nicholas’s best $100 or less purchase?

  Neal’s Yard aromatherapy diffuser, which he uses every day when at home: “I find [geranium] relaxes me, but at the same time keeps me perked up enough to be able to work.”

  TF: I started using geranium oil shortly after our podcast, when working on early brainstorming and drafting for this book. Lacking a diffuser, I started by dabbing a bit on my wrists and then rubbing it on my neck near my ears. Placebo or not, I felt noticeably more stamina. I later purchased an InnoGear 200 ml aromatherapy diffuser in “wood grain” (most diffusers look cheap otherwise) for home use.

  * * *

  Tony Robbins

  Tony Robbins (TW/FB/IG: @tonyrobbins, tonyrobbins.com) is the world’s most famous performance coach. He’s advised everyone from Bill Clinton and Serena Williams to Leonardo DiCaprio and Oprah (who calls him “superhuman”). Tony Robbins has consulted or advised international leaders including Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, and three U.S. presidents. Robbins has also developed and produced five award-winning television infomercials that have continuously aired—on average—every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, somewhere in North America, since 1989.

  Back Story

  I first read Tony Robbins’s Unlimited Power in high school, when it was recommended by a straight-A student. Then, just out of college, I listened to a used cassette set of Personal Power II during my commute in my mom’s hand-me-down minivan. It catalyzed my first real business, which led to many of the adventures (and misadventures) in The 4-Hour Workweek. People say, “Don’t meet your heroes” because it nearly always ends in disappointment. With Tony, however, it’s been the opposite: The more I get to know him, the more he impresses me.

  Little-Known Fact

  The first Instagram pic I ever posted (@timferriss) was of Tony literally palming my entire face. His hands are like catcher’s mitts.

  “I didn’t survive, I prepared.”

  Nelson Mandela’s answer when Tony asked him, “Sir, how did you survive all those years in prison?”

  Is There a Quote That Guides Your Life?

  “It’s a belief: Life is always happening for us, not to us. It’s our job to find out where the benefit is. If we do, life is magnificent.”

  Short and Sweet

  “‘Stressed’ is the achiever word for ‘fear.’”

  “Losers react, leaders anticipate.”

  “Mastery doesn’t come from an infographic. What you know doesn’t mean shit. What do you do consistently?”

  The Best Investment He’s Ever Made?

  $35 for a 3-hour Jim Rohn seminar, attended at age 17. He agonized over the $35 decision, as he was making $40 a week as a janitor, but Jim gave Tony’s life direction. Decades later, when Tony asked Warren Buffett what his all-time best investment was, the answer was a Dale Carnegie public speaking course, taken at age 20. Prior to that, Buffett would vomit before public speaking. After the course—and this is the critical piece—Buffett immediately went to the University of Omaha and asked to teach, as he didn’t want to lapse back into his old behaviors. As Tony recounted, Buffett told him, “Investing in yourself is the most important investment you’ll ever make in your life. . . . There’s no financial investment that’ll ever match it, because if you develop more skill, more ability, more insight, more capacity, that’s what’s going to really provide economic freedom. . . . It’s those skill sets that really make that happen.” This echoes what Jim Rohn famously said, “If you let your learning lead to knowledge, you become a fool. If you let your learning lead to action, you become wealthy.”

  Quality Questions Create a Quality Life

  Tony sometimes phrases this
as, “The quality of your life is the quality of your questions.” Questions determine your focus. Most people—and I’m certainly guilty of this at times—spend their lives focusing on negativity (e.g., “How could he say that to me?!”) and therefore the wrong priorities.

  A Focus on “Me” = Suffering

  “This brain inside our heads is a 2 million-year-old brain. . . . It’s ancient, old survival software that is running you a good deal of time. Whenever you’re suffering, that survival software is there. The reason you’re suffering is you’re focused on yourself. People tell me, ‘I’m not suffering that way. I’m worrying about my kids. My kids are not what they need to be.’ No, the reason [these people are] upset is they feel they failed their kids. It’s still about them. . . . Suffering comes from three thought patterns: loss, less, never.”

  TF: The bolded portion above, combined with another friend’s advice, changed my life. It took a while for me to connect the dots. I don’t think I’m a complete narcissist (too bald and pale for that), but I still wondered how to put this into a concrete daily practice. Then, I learned the dead simple “loving-kindness meditation” exercise from my friend Chade-Meng Tan (page 157), which had a profound effect after just 3 to 4 days. Try it.