Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 472

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Tools Of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers," by Timothy Ferriss.

I think of Siddhartha’s answers often and in the following terms: 

"I can think” → Having good rules for decision-making, and having good questions you can ask yourself and others. 

“I can wait” → Being able to plan long-term, play the long game, and not misallocate your resources. 

"I can fast” → Being able to withstand difficulties and disaster. Training yourself to be uncommonly resilient and have a high pain tolerance. 

This book will help you to develop all three.

Amelia [Boone, obstacle course racing champion] loves doing training runs in the rain and cold, as she knows her competition is probably opting out. This is an example of “rehearsing the worst-case scenario” to become more resilient.

Top professional athletes occasionally visit Laird [Hamilton, surfer] to test-drive his famed pool workout. If a big musclehead comes in with an attitude, he’ll suggest they go “warm up” with Gabby [Reece, volleyball player]. This is code. Gabby proceeds to casually annihilate them, leaving them bug-eyed, full of terror, and exhausted. Once they’ve been force-fed enough humble pie, Laird will ask “Okay, are you ready to start the workout?” As Brian [MacKenzie, founder of CrossFit Endurance] has put it: “The water goes, ‘Oh, mighty and aggressive? Perfect. I’ll just drown you.’”

[Dan Engle, psychiatrist and neurologist] “[Floating in an isolation tank] is the first time that we’ve been without sensory experience, sensory environmental stimuli, since we were conceived. There is no sound, no sight, no temperature gradient, and no gravity. So all of the brain’s searching and gating information from the environment is relaxed. Everything that was in the background—kind of ‘behind the curtain’—can now be exposed. When done consistently over time, it’s essentially like meditation on steroids. It starts to recalibrate the entire neuroendocrine system. People who are running in stress mode or sympathetic overdrive start to relax that over time, and you get this bleed-over effect into everyday life. It’s not just what happens in the tank. It continues outside of the tank. You see heart rate normalize, hypertension normalize, cortisol normalize. Pain starts to resolve. Metabolic issues start to resolve."

[Jane McGonigal, futurist] “'Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous’ by Jim Dator. Also, ‘When it comes to the future, it’s far more important to be imaginative than to be right’ by Alvin Toffler. Both are famous futurists. These quotes remind me that world-changing ideas will seem absurd to most people, and that the most useful work I can be doing is to push the envelope of what is considered possible. If what I’m doing sounds reasonable to most people, then I’m not working in a space that is creative and innovative enough."

Each week, I sent [US Gymnastics National Team] Coach [Christopher] Sommer videos of my workouts via Dropbox. In my accompanying notes at one point, I expressed how discouraging it was to make zero tangible progress with this exercise. Below is his email response, which I immediately saved to Evernote to review often. 

It’s all great, but I’ve bolded my favorite part. 

Hi Tim, 

Patience. Far too soon to expect strength improvements. Strength improvements [for a movement like this] take a minimum of 6 weeks. Any perceived improvements prior to that are simply the result of improved synaptic facilitation. In plain English, the central nervous system simply became more efficient at that particular movement with practice. This is, however, not to be confused with actual strength gains. 

Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence. In fact, it is essential and something that every single elite athlete has had to learn to deal with. If the pursuit of excellence was easy, everyone would do it. In fact, this impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals. Unreasonable expectations timewise, resulting in unnecessary frustration, due to a perceived feeling of failure. Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process. 

The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home. 

A blue collar work ethic married to indomitable will. It is literally that simple. Nothing interferes. Nothing can sway you from your purpose. Once the decision is made, simply refuse to budge. Refuse to compromise. 

And accept that quality long-term results require quality long-term focus. No emotion. No drama. No beating yourself up over small bumps in the road. Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process. This is especially important because you are going to spend far more time on the actual journey than with those all too brief moments of triumph at the end. 

Certainly celebrate the moments of triumph when they occur. More importantly, learn from defeats when they happen. In fact, if you are not encountering defeat on a fairly regular basis, you are not trying hard enough. And absolutely refuse to accept less than your best. 

Throw out a timeline. It will take what it takes. 

If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not to a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made and adhered to. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift from your chosen goal. The single decision is one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.

We’re wired completely opposite in that sense. Basically, he’s betting against change. We’re betting for change. When he makes a mistake, it’s because something changes that he didn’t expect. When we make a mistake, it’s because something doesn’t change that we thought would. We could not be more different in that way. But what both schools have in common is an orientation toward, I would say, original thinking in really being able to view things as they are as opposed to what everybody says about them, or the way they’re believed to be.” - Marc Andreesen about Warren Buffett

[Chris Young, chef] “I distinctly remember him saying not to worry about what I was going to do because the job I was going to do hadn’t even been invented yet. . . . The interesting jobs are the ones that you make up. That’s something I certainly hope to instill in my son: Don’t worry about what your job is going to be. . . . Do things that you’re interested in, and if you do them really well, you’re going to find a way to temper them with some good business opportunity.” 

[Luis Von Ahn, CEO of Duolingo] “My PhD advisor [at Carnegie Mellon was] a guy named Manuel Blum, who many people consider the father of cryptography [encryption, etc.]. He’s amazing and he’s very funny. I learned a lot from him. When I met him, which was like 15 years ago, I guess he was in his 60s, but he always acted way older than he actually was. He just acted as if he forgot everything. . . . “I had to explain to him what I was working on, which at the time was CAPTCHA, these distorted characters that you have to type all over the Internet. It’s very annoying. That was the thing I was working on [later acquired by Google], and I had to explain it to him. It was very funny, because usually I would start explaining something, and in the first sentence he would say, ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying,’ and then I would try to find another way of saying it, and a whole hour would pass and I could not get past the first sentence. He would say, ‘Well, the hour’s over. Let’s meet next week.’ This must have happened for months, and at some point I started thinking, ‘I don’t know why people think this guy’s so smart.’ Later, [I understood what he was doing]. This is basically just an act. Essentially, I was being unclear about what I was saying, and I did not fully understand what I was trying to explain to him. He was just drilling deeper and deeper and deeper until I realized, every time, that there was actually something I didn’t have clear in my mind. He really taught me to think deeply about things, and I think that’s something I have not forgotten.” 

[Scott Belsky, venture capitalist] “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.”

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

[Chris Fussell, aide de camp to General Stanley McChrystal] “I’ll answer it this way, and I don’t know if this gets to the exact point. I had a great mentor early on in my career give me advice that I’ve heeded until now, which is that you should have a running list of three people that you’re always watching: someone senior to you that you want to emulate, a peer who you think is better at the job than you are and who you respect, and someone subordinate who’s doing the job you did—one, two, or three years ago—better than you did it. If you just have those three individuals that you’re constantly measuring yourself off of, and you’re constantly learning from them, you’re going to be exponentially better than you are.”

Advice to your 20-year-old self? 

[Will MacAskill, philosophy professor] “One is emphasizing that you have 80,000 working hours in the course of your life. It’s incredibly important to work out how best to spend them, and what you’re doing at the moment—20-year-old Will—is just kind of drifting and thinking. [You’re] not spending very much time thinking about this kind of macro optimization. You might be thinking about ‘How can I do my coursework as well as possible?’ and micro optimization, but not really thinking about ‘What are actually my ultimate goals in life, and how can I optimize toward them?’ “An analogy I use is, if you’re going out for dinner, it’s going to take you a couple of hours. You spend 5 minutes working out where to go for dinner. It seems reasonable to spend 5% of your time on how to spend the remaining 95%. If you did that with your career, that would be 4,000 hours, or 2 working years. And actually, I think that’s a pretty legitimate thing to do—spending that length of time trying to work out how should you be spending the rest of your life.”

In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. In the Dickens Process, you’re forced to examine limiting beliefs—say, your top two or three handicapping beliefs—across each tense. Tony [Robbins, motivational speaker] guides you through each in depth, and I recall answering and visualizing variations of: 

What has each belief cost you in the past, and what has it cost people you’ve loved in the past? 

What have you lost because of this belief? See it, hear it, feel it. What is each costing you and people you care about in the present? See it, hear it, feel it. 

What will each cost you and people you care about 1, 3, 5, and 10 years from now? See it, hear it, feel it. 

Why does this appear to work so well? I asked Tony months later, as I saw persistent personal results, and he sent me the following example via audio text: 

“If they are coughing like crazy right now [from lung cancer], how do they keep smoking? They say to themselves, ‘Well, I smoked for years and it was never a problem.’ Or they say, ‘It will get better in the future. After all, George Burns lived until 102 smoking cigars.’ They find the exception to the rule because no one knows what the future is. We can make it up, we can convince ourselves it’s going to be okay. Or we can remember a past time in which it was okay. That’s how people get out of it. 

“When we feel pain in one time zone—meaning past, present, or future—we just switch to another time zone rather than change, because change brings so much uncertainty and so much instability and so much fear to people.” 

The Dickens Process doesn’t allow you to dodge any time zones. 

Naturally, it’s one thing to read about swimming, and another to go swimming. The live process took at least 30 minutes, with Tony on stage and 10,000 people in the audience. I could hear hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people crying. It was the straw that productively broke the camel’s back of resistance. Confronted with vivid and painful imagery, attendees (present company included) could no longer rationalize or accept destructive “rules” in their lives. As Tony put it to me later, “There is nothing like a group dynamic of total immersion, when there is nothing around to distract you. Your entire focus is on breaking through and going to the next level, and that’s what makes the Dickens Process work.” 

After you feel the acute pain of your current handicapping beliefs, you formulate 2 to 3 replacement beliefs to use moving forward. This is done so that “you are not pulled back into [old beliefs] by old language patterns.” One of my top 3 limiting beliefs was “I’m not hardwired for happiness,” which I replaced with “Happiness is my natural state.” Post-event, I used Scott Adams’s (page 261) affirmation approach in the mornings to reinforce it. Now, I’m well aware how cheesy this all might sound on paper. Nonetheless, I experienced a huge phase shift in my life in the subsequent 3 to 4 weeks. Roughly a year later, I can say this: I’ve never felt consistently happier in my entire adult life. 

Perhaps it’s time for you to take a temporary break from pursuing goals to find the knots in the garden hose that, once removed, will make everything else better and easier? It’s incredible what can happen when you stop driving with the emergency brake on.

Kevin [Costner, actor] described a rare heart-to-heart conversation with his dad, who was critical of Kevin becoming an actor. By this point, Kevin was an adult and had succeeded. His dad was sitting in the bathtub: 

“He looked at me and he says, ‘You know, I never took a chance in my life.’ I was almost in my own Field of Dreams moment. There were some tears coming down. He says, ‘I came out of that goddamn fucking Dust Bowl, and when I got a job, Kevin, I didn’t want to lose it. I was going to hold on to that, because I knew there would always be food on the table.’ And I said, ‘There was. There was.’ There was really kind of just an amazing moment, my dad sitting there.”

Once you’ve realized—and it requires a monthly or quarterly reminder—how independent your well-being is from having an excess of money, it becomes easier to take “risks” and say “no” to things that seem too lucrative to pass up. 

There is more freedom to be gained from practicing poverty than chasing wealth. Suffer a little regularly and you often cease to suffer.

[Naval Ravikant, CEO of AngelList] "I recently learned a neologism that, like political correctness, man cave, and content-provider, I instantly recognized as heralding an ugly new turn in the culture: planshopping. That is, deferring committing to any one plan for an evening until you know what all your options are, and then picking the one that’s most likely to be fun/advance your career/have the most girls at it—in other words, treating people like menu options or products in a catalog. 

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half hour with enrichment classes, tutorials, and extracurricular activities. At the end of the day they come home as tired as grownups, which seems not just sad but hateful. I was a member of the latchkey generation, and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from scouring The World Book Encyclopedia to making animated movies to convening with friends in the woods in order to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which afforded me knowledge, skills, and insights that remain valuable to this day. 

This busyness is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. I recently Skyped with a friend who had been driven out of New York City by the rents and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the South of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college—she has a circle of friends there who all go out to the café or watch TV together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone is too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality—driven, cranky, anxious, and sad—turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment, of the crushing atmospheric pressure of ambition and competitiveness. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school; it’s something we collectively force one another to do."

In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it.

I sent an email to all of my direct reports along the lines of “From this point forward, please don’t contact me with questions about A, B, or C. I trust you. If it involves less than $100, please make the decision yourself and take a note (the situation, how you handled it, what it cost) in one document, so we can review and adjust each week. Just focus on making our customers happy.” I expected the worst, and guess what? Everything worked, minus a few expected hiccups here and there. I later increased the threshold to $500, then $1,000, and the “reviews” of decisions went from weekly, to monthly, to quarterly, to—once people were polished—effectively never. This experience underscored two things for me: 1) To get huge, good things done, you need to be okay with letting the small, bad things happen. 2) People’s IQs seem to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.

For the last 5 years, I’ve asked myself, in effect, “What can I put in place so that I can go completely off the grid for 4 to 8 weeks?” To entrepreneurs who are feeling burned out, this is also the question I pose most often. Two weeks isn’t enough, as you can let fires erupt and then attempt to repair things when you return. Four to 8 weeks (or more) doesn’t allow you to be a firefighter. It forces you to put systems and policies in place, ditch ad-hoc email-based triage, empower other people with rules and tools, separate the critical few from the trivial many, and otherwise create a machine that doesn’t require you behind the driver’s wheel 24/7. 

Here’s the most important point: The systems far outlive the vacation, and when you come home, you’ll realize that you’ve taken your business (and life) to the next level. 

[Jamie Foxx, entertainer] “I ended up going to this Evening at the Improv, the Improv in Santa Monica. I had never been there. I noticed that 100 guys would show up, and 5 girls would show up. The 5 girls would always get on the show because they needed to break up the monotony. [The producers would pick randomly from the list of people who showed up.] So I said, ‘Hmmm, I got something.’ I wrote down all of these unisex names on the list: Stacy Green, Tracy Brown, Jamie Foxx . . . and the guy chooses from the list. He says, ‘Jamie Foxx, is she here? She’ll be first.’ I said, ‘No, that’s me.’ ‘Oh, okay. All right, well, you’re going up. You’re the fresh meat.’ They were shooting Evening at the Improv, this old comedy show back in the day. He said, ‘You’ll be the guy we just throw up to see if you get a laugh or two. It’s gonna be a tough crowd.’ . . . People [in the crowd] are like, ‘Who’s the kid? Is he on the show? Oh, he’s fresh meat. He’s an amateur.’ So then they started yelling my name—‘Yo, Jamie! Hey, Jamie!’—but I’m not used to the name. So now they think I’m arrogant. ‘This motherfucker . . . he’s not even listening to us. . . .’”

[Sekou Andrews, poet] “The letters I-M are all that lies between ‘Possible’ and ‘Impossible’ Which means ‘I’m’ the only thing between ‘Possible’ and ‘Impossible’ So every day I choose to do the I’mpossible.”