Tools of Titans

by Timothy Ferriss

  Short and Sweet

  ✸ Little-known fact

  We’re both huge fans of Hayao Miyazaki animated films. In fact, Princess Mononoke was one of the main inspirations behind Linkin Park’s video for “In the End.” And since you asked, my favorite museum in the world is the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, created in the “Mitaka Forest” by Miyazaki.

  ✸ Lesser-known bands Mike introduced me to

  Royal Blood: I like “Figure It Out” and use it for writing.

  Doomriders: “Come Alive” is for headbangers and reminiscent of Danzig. Best suited for workouts or piñata-smashing.

  ✸ Both Mike and Justin Boreta of The Glitch Mob (page 356) use Ableton Live for editing

  Boreta uses Universal Audio plug-ins to emulate all of the outboard gear that you could buy. Ira Glass of This American Life also uses Ableton for live performances.

  ✸ Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”?

  Mike thought of Rick Rubin (page 502), not only for songwriting and producing, but also for life lessons.

  Spirit animal: Giant squid

  * * *

  Justin Boreta

  Justin Boreta is a founding member of The Glitch Mob (TW/IG: @theglitchmob, theglitchmob.com). Their last album, Love Death Immortality, debuted on the Billboard charts as the #1 Electronic Album, #1 Indie Label, and #4 Overall Digital Album. The Glitch Mob is an artist-owned group, so it’s a true self-made startup. Their music has been featured in movies like Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, Edge of Tomorrow, Captain America: The First Avenger, and The Amazing Spider-Man. Their remix for “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes is featured in the most-viewed video game trailer of all time, Battlefield 1.

  ✸ Do you live your life by any quotes?

  “Be the silence that listens.”—Tara Brach

  “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!’”—Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955–1967

  JUSTIN: “I have a reminder on Hunter S. Thompson’s birthday each year. This one in particular reminds me to not take myself so seriously and to have fun with the process. I also keep a handful of blank pages in my morning journal to build a quote section over the course of the journal (pulling quotes from reading, podcasts, etc.). That way, I can easily refer back to it and flip through when looking for some insight.”

  ✸ If you could take one album, one book, and one luxury item to a desert island, what would they be?

  Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and a Chemex for coffee.

  ✸ One of Justin’s favorite artists—Boards of Canada

  “It’s very droney, beautiful music, and their albums, for me, are like a familiar old friend that I can revisit over and over again.”

  ✸ Best advice ever received?

  “It’s something my father told me when I was very, very little, I was probably 5 or 6, and that was, ‘Don’t force it.’ It’s seemingly such a simple thing. . . . I think that for the creative process, that’s really our guiding light. . . . [Trying to force a square peg into the round hole] very rarely has the intended results, whether it’s something creative, or in life in general. . . .”

  TF: The question I ask whenever I’m straining for extended periods is, “What would this look like if it were easy?”

  ✸ What is the worst advice you see or hear given in your trade or area of expertise?

  “There’s a lot of bad advice thrown around about getting inspired and searching for a revelation. Like Chuck Close says, ‘Inspiration is for amateurs—the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will—through work—bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’”

  ✸ If you could give your 20-year-old self one piece of advice, what would it be?

  “‘Chill out. Calm down.’ I feel like myself and other people I know that are in their early- to mid-20s get really wound up about things having to be a certain way. It doesn’t matter as much as you think it does.”

  TIM: “Yeah, that’s the truth. Will you remember this in 10 years? Probably not.”

  JUSTIN: “No. People don’t even remember a tweet 12 minutes later.”

  Short and Sweet

  ✸ What are three people or sources you’ve learned from—or followed closely—in the last year?

  “Nautilus magazine, Brain Pickings, Esther Perel.”

  ✸ What is the best or most worthwhile investment you’ve ever made?

  “After being laid off from my job, I decided to switch paths and dive into music headfirst. I maxed out a credit card to buy my first pair of pro studio monitors (speakers): Genelec 8040A. Monitors are arguably the most important studio purchase you will make. I still use this same pair today.”

  ✸ Podcast recommendation

  Radiolab “In The Dust of This Planet”: The episode explores why a little-known academic treatise suddenly ended up appearing in pop culture (in True Detective and fashion magazines, on one of Jay Z’s jackets, etc.).

  ✸ Morning routine

  Every morning, Justin does 20 minutes of Transcendental Meditation followed by outdoor kettlebell swings with 24 kg (53 lbs). I do exactly the same thing 2 to 3 times per week, aiming for 50 to 75 repetitions of two-handed swings per The 4-Hour Body.

  ✸ Music for sleep

  Justin listens to Max Richter’s From Sleep, a composed album with a shortened version on Spotify. “I put it on very quietly as I am starting my bedtime routine, so it usually ends 15 to 20 minutes after I’m asleep. Or I will use the Sonos sleep timer, if I’m at home. It started to have this Pavlovian knockout effect after a while, if I use it every day, like a lullaby. If that’s too much melody, there’s an artist called Mute Button that has high-quality, long-field recordings. The gentle rain sounds plus sleep timer are fantastic. I find it great to drown out hotel sounds when traveling.”

  Spirit animal: Polar bear

  * * *

  Scott Belsky

  Scott Belsky (TW: @scottbelsky, scottbelsky.com) is an entrepreneur, author, and investor. He is a venture partner at Benchmark, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco. Scott co-founded Behance in 2006 and served as CEO until Adobe acquired Behance in 2012. Millions of people use Behance to display their portfolios, as well as track and find top talent across the creative industries. He is an early investor and advisor in Pinterest, Uber, and Periscope, among many other fast-growing startups.

  ✸ What do you believe that others think is insane?

  “It is essential to get lost and jam up your plans every now and then. It’s a source of creativity and perspective. The danger of maps, capable assistants, and planning is that you may end up living your life as planned. If you do, your potential cannot possibly exceed your expectations.”

  ✸ How has a “failure” set you up for later success?

  “The hardest decisions to make in business are those that disappoint people you care about. One of the biggest mistakes I made in the early days of Behance was doing too many things. We had multiple products in market, multiple business lines, and our energy was divided across too many things. Finally, about 5 years into the business, it all came to a head. We were running out of time and needed to focus on one thing. I shut down a number of projects including our popular task-management application and disappointed thousands of customers. But doing so allowed our team to focus on building a product that ultimately reached many millions of creative people around the world.

  “From this experience I learned what legendary writers call ‘killing your darlings’—the plot points and characters that detract from a novel. Sometimes you need to stop
doing things you love in order to nurture the one thing that matters most.”

  ✸ The worst advice you hear being given out often?

  “‘Look for patterns.’ As an entrepreneur and investor, I am surrounded by people who try to categorize and generalize the factors that make a company successful. . . . Most people forget that innovation (and investing in innovation) is a business of exceptions.

  “It’s easy to understand why most investors rely on pattern recognition. It starts with a successful company that surprises everyone with a new model. Perhaps it is Uber and on-demand networks, Airbnb and the sharing economy, or Warby Parker and vertically integrated e-commerce. What follows is endless analysis and the mass adoption of a playbook that has already been played. . . . Sure, [those companies] may create a successful derivative, but they won’t change the world.

  “I try to learn from the past without being inspired by it. My big question is always, ‘What did they try, and why did it work?’ When I hear stories of success and failure, I look for the little things that made a big difference. What conventional wisdom was shunned? . . . I avoid using a past success as a proxy for the future. After all, the dirty little secret is that every success was almost a failure. Timing and uncontrollable circumstances play more of a role than any of us care to admit.

  “Perhaps the greatest lesson from the past is how important it is to be inspired by things that surprise us. When I come across a quirky business model in an unpopular space, I try to find a fascinating thread worth pulling. I challenge myself to stop comparing what I learn to the past. If you only look for patterns of the past, you won’t venture far.”

  ✸ Advice to your 30-year-old self?

  “In the wrong environment, your creativity is compromised. At 30, I assumed my strengths would always be with me regardless of where I applied them. I was wrong. Truth is, your environment matters.”

  ✸ What would you put on a billboard?

  “‘It’s not about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen.’ I’d put it on every college campus in the world. In our youth, we are wonderfully creative and idealistic. . . . Truth is, young creative minds don’t need more ideas, they need to take more responsibility with the ideas they’ve already got.”

  Spirit animal: Hermit crab

  How to Earn Your Freedom

  In thinking of “wealth,” it’s easy to obsess over accumulation. This is natural, but it’s not always helpful. Oftentimes, finances aren’t the primary constraint holding us back. Starting in 2004, I traveled the world for roughly 18 months. The lessons learned formed the basis for much of my first book, The 4-Hour Workweek. On my journey—from the back alleys of Berlin to the hidden lakes of Patagonia—I had next to nothing: one backpack and one tiny suitcase. I took only two books with me. One was Walden by Henry David Thoreau (naturally), and the other was Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts (TW: @rolfpotts, rolfpotts.com).

  I penciled a list of dream destinations on the inside cover of Vagabonding when I first bought it, including places like Stockholm, Prague, Paris, Munich, Berlin, and Amsterdam. The list went on. Using Rolf’s roadmap and tips, I checked them all off. I was able to explore many of them for 2 to 3 months at a time at my own pace, unrushed and unworried. It was a dream come true. Reading it over and over again during my travels, I realized: Travel isn’t just for changing what’s outside, it’s for reinventing what’s inside.

  Enter Rolf

  Of all the outrageous throwaway lines that one hears in movies, there is one that stands out for me. It doesn’t come from a madcap comedy, an esoteric science-fiction flick, or a special-effects-laden action thriller. It comes from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, when the Charlie Sheen character—a promising big shot in the stock market—is telling his girlfriend about his dreams.

  “I think if I can make a bundle of cash before I’m 30 and get out of this racket,” he says, “I’ll be able to ride my motorcycle across China.”

  When I first saw this scene on video a few years ago, I nearly fell out of my seat in astonishment. After all, Charlie Sheen or anyone else could work for 8 months as a toilet cleaner and have enough money to ride a motorcycle across China. And, if they didn’t yet have their own motorcycle, another couple months of scrubbing toilets would earn them enough to buy one when they got to China.

  The thing is, most Americans probably wouldn’t find this movie scene odd. For some reason, we see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but not something that applies to the here and now. Instead—out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don’t really need—we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called “lifestyle,” travel becomes just another accessory—a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase in the same way we buy clothing and furniture.

  Not long ago, I read that nearly 250,000 short-term monastery and convent-based vacations had been booked and sold by tour agents the previous year. Spiritual enclaves from Greece to Tibet were turning into hot tourist draws, and travel pundits attributed this “solace boom” to the fact that “busy overachievers are seeking a simpler life.”

  What nobody bothered to point out, of course, is that purchasing a package vacation to find a simpler life is kind of like using a mirror to see what you look like when you aren’t looking into the mirror. All that is really sold is the romantic notion of a simpler life, and—just as no amount of turning your head or flicking your eyes will allow you to unselfconsciously see yourself in the looking-glass—no combination of 1-week or 10-day vacations will truly take you away from the life you lead at home.

  Ultimately, this shotgun wedding of time and money has a way of keeping us in a holding pattern. The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom. With this kind of mindset, it’s no wonder so many Americans think extended overseas travel is the exclusive realm of students, counterculture dropouts, and the idle rich.

  In reality, long-term travel has nothing to do with demographics—age, ideology, income—and everything to do with personal outlook. Long-term travel isn’t about being a college student—it’s about being a student of daily life. Long-term travel isn’t an act of rebellion against society—it’s an act of common sense within society. Long-term travel doesn’t require a massive “bundle of cash”; it requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way.

  This deliberate way of walking through the world has always been intrinsic to a time-honored, quietly available travel tradition known as “vagabonding.”

  Vagabonding involves taking an extended time-out from your normal life—6 weeks, 4 months, 2 years—to travel the world on your own terms.

  But beyond travel, vagabonding is an outlook on life. Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions. Vagabonding is about looking for adventure in normal life, and normal life within adventure. Vagabonding is an attitude—a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word.

  Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It’s just an uncommon way of looking at life—a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And, as much as anything, vagabonding is about time—our only real commodity—and how we choose to use it.

  Sierra Club founder John Muir (an ur-vagabonder if there ever was one) used to express amazement at the well-heeled travelers who would visit Yosemite only to rush away after a few hours of sightseeing. Muir called these folks the “time-poor”—people who were so obsessed with tending their material wealth and social standing that they couldn’t spare the time to truly experience t
he splendor of California’s Sierra wilderness. One of Muir’s Yosemite visitors in the summer of 1871 was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who gushed upon seeing the sequoias, “It’s a wonder that we can see these trees and not wonder more.” When Emerson scurried off a couple hours later, however, Muir speculated wryly about whether the famous transcendentalist had really seen the trees in the first place.

  Nearly a century later, naturalist Edwin Way Teale used Muir’s example to lament the frenetic pace of modern society. “Freedom as John Muir knew it,” he wrote in his 1956 book Autumn Across America, “with its wealth of time, its unregimented days, its latitude of choice . . . such freedom seems more rare, more difficult to attain, more remote with each new generation.”

  But Teale’s lament for the deterioration of personal freedom was just as hollow a generalization in 1956 as it is now. As John Muir was well aware, vagabonding has never been regulated by the fickle public definition of lifestyle. Rather, it has always been a private choice within a society that is constantly urging us to do otherwise.

  * * *

  There’s a story that comes from the tradition of the Desert Fathers, an order of Christian monks who lived in the wastelands of Egypt about 1,700 years ago. In the tale, a couple of monks named Theodore and Lucius shared the acute desire to go out and see the world. Since they’d made vows of contemplation, however, this was not something they were allowed to do. So, to satiate their wanderlust, Theodore and Lucius learned to “mock their temptations” by relegating their travels to the future. When the summertime came, they said to each other, “We will leave in the winter.” When the winter came, they said, “We will leave in the summer.” They went on like this for over 50 years, never once leaving the monastery or breaking their vows.