What if you could get tactics and advice from the world’s top performers and industry leaders? Well, that’s “Tools of Titans.” The author, Tim Ferriss, identified as coming up from many people interviewed in this book. The first is quite surprising. Over 80 percent of these successful people said they practice daily meditation or mindfulness.
Many also pointed out that they repeatedly listen to a single song when trying to focus. Almost all of them had turned a weakness into a competitive advantage. That never worked in their favor.
10 Best Lessons From Tools Of Titans Book
Tools of Titans is a book where you can find some of the finest minds in the world. You’ll see what makes them different, what works for them, and their routines. What are the tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers? It is the best book in the world on self-development, personal growth, business finance, and anything that will take your life and elevate it.
Let’s dive into the ten best ideas and summaries from the “Tools of Titans” book.
1. Model the masters
What would happen if we could tap into that exact blueprint, that same roadmap? If you find the blueprints for someone who built a five-story mansion. You got to assemble the materials and put effort into them.
- Success leaves clues.
- Figure out clues and pieces from model people.
- Analyze successful people and know their habits and blueprints.
How can we get the blueprints of success and apply that in our life? But the work in and achieve the same result? The answer is model people. You can figure out those clues and piece them together yourself. You can achieve similar results in your life. The book analyzes the most successful people globally and tries to distill down how they got their big idea.
2. Problem solver
Human brains are two million years old, and they’re not all designed to make us happy. They’re not designed to make us fall in love. They’re designed to make us keep us alive and make us survive. Tony Robbins says that we’re suffering because we’re depressed. We’re filling in the blank because we’re focused on ourselves. That’s a great statement because you can think back on your life.
Suffering comes from three words lossless and never afraid of losing something. That’s what Buddhist texts tell us, that suffering is desires and attachments.
- Don’t solve the problem in bad feeling conditions.
- Never journal when you’re feeling sad, down, or depressed.
- Decide on a cool and positive situation.
There isn’t going to be too pretty. It’s going to go down the rabbit hole of that path. You’re on doom and gloom lossless. So what you got to do first is you’ve got to get in a good state. You’ve got to feel positive, do something to move, and take a cold shower. It’s a great way to do it.
Take a sauna, run, do jumping jacks, and jump on a trampoline, which gets you in a peak or a positive state. Then start going into the problem-solving state, the story you’re telling yourself, and the strategy. So with the state, we discussed that you’ve got to feel good to have good answers.
3. Quality control
Kevin Kelly says that success is overcomplicated. When you simplify it, all it matters is making a thousand people extremely happy. It’s so sexy to go after one hundred thousand people and sell your product to a million people for a dollar, and you’ll be a millionaire. You get a million people on your Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube and try and sell and go after the masses.
- Make your customer happy and be sure of the quality of the products.
- Create a product’s brand and focus on free marketing through customer reviews.
- Don’t always be available and create a unique value.
With this concept, the saying is that’s the wrong approach! You’ll spend more time and energy doing it that way and won’t make people happy when you skim the surface. This concept is saying go after a thousand people. You get these thousand people yearly and spend one hundred dollars on your products. That’s all you do. You make a thousand people happy. You got a six-figure income. Don’t you think making a thousand people extremely happy is easier? So what is a true fan?
Kevin Kelly says a true fan will buy anything you produce. They’ll drive two hundred miles to see you sing. They’ll buy the hardback, paperback, and audiobook. So if you focus on making those ten people extremely happy, they do the marketing for you.
4. Select ideas
If you generate enough bad ideas, a few good ones tend to show up as well when it comes to being creative and coming up with new ideas. Perfectionism is normally the enemy.
- The more you do something, the more it’s trained, and your brain can do it better.
- Develop your idea muscle and remove stress.
If you deliberately develop some bad ideas, it removes that pressure. Once you get started, you’ll find a few good ideas in the book. This is called Developing Your Idea Muscle, but it references the theory that everything is a rap.
5. To-do list
The important lesson is to ask yourself whether you’re on the offense or the defense. An email is an excellent example because your inbox is a to-do list to which anybody can add an action item.
- Organize the work and do timely.
- Create sticky notes and set periods serially. Attach them on the wall or monitor screen, whatever you look at most.
You need to focus on your to-do list, which is linked to the fact that we often seem busy because we’re doing tasks like email. But we’re postponing the things that matter most and would have the biggest impact. It’s time to take back control and go on the offense, not the defense.
6. Long-term plans
Number six comes from Peter Thiel, who asks why you can’t complete your ten-year plan in six months, which sounds a little crazy initially. But he then says, what would you do if you had a gun to your head right now? Radically different to achieve your goals in a much shorter time?
- Make some long-term plans and work hard until success.
- Don’t be hopeless because these types of plans are time-consuming.
Many self-improvements are trying to tell you to work harder, which isn’t very helpful. At first glance, it seems like that’s what this is saying. But it resonated with me when I thought about this a little more. A lot of us won’t have ten-year plans mapped out. But most of us probably have a vague idea of where we’d like to be or what we’d like our life to be like in 10 years.
Yet we often overestimate how long it takes to achieve that and underestimate the more short-term goals. There would certainly be things you could start doing sooner to bring that into place if you had to.
7. Positive feedback
The small details can have a huge impact. If you can make the boring, small things more interesting, it stands out and can benefit greatly. We can learn from everyone. Everyone’s got their own story to tell. So the advice in the book is to go first. Even if that’s saying hello to the person at the checkout, you’ll be surprised that most people are quite nice.
- Learn from others’ failures and successes.
- Don’t underestimate any customer.
- Be positive and focus on positive feedback.
Most people in this cynical world are too scared to engage with people first. But if you do, it normally works in your favor. If you’ve created some new content or a new product, you should first give it to 10 people who already know. Like you, if they then give it to someone else. But if they don’t tell anybody else, start over.
This is because when we tell people, we know about our new idea or something we’ve made. They’ll often give lovely feedback because they’re trying to be helpful. But the way to truly know what someone thinks is whether they tell anybody else.
8. Journal writing
Newspapers are designed to scare people, and now a lot of externalism. Productive people don’t read them and opt for selective ignorance. Is it offering much value to your life?
- Write a journal daily/weekly basis.
- Note down your mistake and make improvements.
- Write your ideas and experience.
Successful people keep a journal and answer a few simple daily questions, like what they feel grateful for, which is linked to a huge increase in overall happiness. Several people in this book point out how fleeting thoughts and memories can be. So writing more ideas and experiences down is helpful.
We all have dozens of pain points that many people can relate to. So talking or writing about those and how you’ve tried to overcome them is an excellent way to connect with people. Tim Ferriss says that many of his best content and most famous works have come from things that he was a bit embarrassed or uncomfortable talking about them.
9. Learn from others
Don’t overestimate people on pedestals. All the superheroes in our minds are walking flaws who’ve maximized one or two strengths. A great quote from Steve Jobs: everything around us that we call life was made by people no smarter than us.
- Every day, try to learn something new.
- Read books and collect knowledge.
- Communicate with the competitor and build a good relationship.
We absolutely can influence and change things. So what this book shows is that your version of success has already been done. It is achievable because someone else has already proven that by accomplishing it. So the real question is whether it’s your dream or a goal, and have a plan for now.
10. Failure is temporary
Many stories are about people who would have been failures by society’s standards, but they pushed through it and achieved massive success. They overcame the struggle. They had the mindset that this, too, shall pass. Failure is not durable, and there’s no failure because we learn something. There are only outcomes.
- Bounce back and try again.
- Don’t give up and restart with a new experience.
- Be creative and unique, and do something new.
Tim Ferriss wrote the four-hour workweek, consistently on the New York Times bestseller list. He said he got turned down by over 20 different publishers before he got one. Colonel Sanders knocked on doors for his fried chicken recipe and got turned down a thousand and nine times before someone finally took him up on his recipe. Imagine that going around a thousand different times.
These people knew that there were no failures; there were only outcomes. That success, we’ve got to push past these blocks. We have to persevere and achieve our massive results.
Top 5 ideas from Tools of Titans book
1. No matter who you are and what you do, health comes first if you want to succeed. It includes physical and mental health about physical health. There are many tactics on what to do and how to do it from AcroYoga. It requires a partner to do simple jogging every day. For mental health, most people in the book are doing meditation.
2. If you want to succeed, you need a morning routine. From Bill Gates to Tim Ferriss and all successful people wake up early. Every single person has a unique morning routine that works for him. Most of them have some common things when it comes to these routines. But you must find what works for you in the book.
3. If you want to be successful, you must read books. Another common thing in almost everyone in the book is reading many books. One book can change your life. But for this to happen, you must read it. From the book, you can make great reading lists for future years. If you’re not reading, you’re not learning anything new. If you’re not learning anything new, then you’re lagging.
4. You’ll have a lot of ups and downs in your life. One of the greatest writers, Paulo Colo, twists books translated into more than 70 languages and has problems. When it comes to writing his books, he’s doing a lot Procrastination which may sound like a shock. Since he’s such a brilliant writer. Many people in the book have had many ups and downs, and we can learn a lot from them.
5. Discipline equals freedom. It is one of the phrases that remained after reading this book. What does it mean? If you want to achieve some freedom in your life, be that financial or more free time. You must be disciplined. The path to success will be different for everyone with this book. You’ll get much inspiration and highly actionable advice from the Titans of our world. These success stories of the people in this book will show that you can achieve whatever you want.
An instructive story
Derek Sivers said We’d all be billionaires walking around with six-pack abs. Saying like, look, it’s not enough to read, and it’s not enough to know. We have to do it. He also gives a story:
Don’t be a donkey. The donkey is standing between a hay bucket and a water bucket. He keeps looking left and right. Hey, water. Not knowing which one to go for ends up dying of thirst and starvation in the middle. Because the donkey didn’t realize that if he went to the water and drank, he’d have enough time and lifetimes to return to the hay and eat.
So he got overwhelmed and stood there because he couldn’t make up his mind. He didn’t see that he could do one and then the other. We can’t be that donkey. Often we give ourselves false choices. We say, should I go to college or not? Also, we don’t realize that we have time to do both. You have time to go to college and then pursue entrepreneurship or traveling. We don’t realize that you can do both.
You won’t be the donkey choosing between A and B in the middle. You can start a job part-time and do entrepreneurship part-time. Sometimes, that’s the most successful way because you have a steady income to pursue your passion.
Surprising Habits of Successful People
Based on Tim’s research in the book, these are eight themes that the ultra-successful have in common.
- Mindfulness practice.
- Used song anchor.
- Skipped breakfast.
- Invest in your ideas.
- Used chili pad device.
- Failure isn’t durable.
- Loved the same books.
- Flipped weakness.
Worksheet: Ask yourself
You should answer the best seven interview questions in your journal, or you can ask your friends.
i) When you think of the word successful, who’s the first person who comes to mind and why?
ii) What is something you believe that other people think is insane?
iii) What is the book you’ve given most as a gift number for which purchase of one hundred dollars or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months?
iv) What do the first 60 minutes of your day look like? What are your morning rituals?
v) What is the worst advice you see dispensing in your field?
vi) What advice would you give to 20, 30, or 40-year on old self?
vii) What have you changed your mind about in the last few years, and why?
You’re going to be needing an hour or so. Feel free to post comments on one or two of those in the comments below. I love reading them.
Learn More: Tools Of Titans Book Review With Summary
Download: Tools Of Titans Notes Pdf
Author: Tim Ferriss
Average Rating: 4.7/5
Category: Self-Improvement, Communication, Social Skills, Management & Leadership, Motivation & Inspiration, Sales.
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