The Tim Ferriss Show - #439: Tools of Titans — Derek Sivers, BJ Miller, and Christopher Sommer

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show! It will showcase some of my favorite advice and profiles from the audiobook of Tools of Titans. Thousands of you have asked for years for the audiobook versions of Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors, and they are now available. Go to audible.com/ferriss for more details or to download. Today’s episode will focus on Tools of Titans and features the introduction of the book, as well as the profiles of Derek Sivers, BJ Miller, and Christopher Sommer.Just a few notes on the audiobook's format: I recorded the introduction and selected three fantastic, top-ranked narrators to handle the rest, along with some surprise appearances from friends. The short bios, which you will hear at the beginning of each profile, are read by Kaleo Griffith. Ray Porter reads the bulk of each profile including all of my own words. Ray actually narrated my first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, and did an incredible job. Quotations from female guests are read by the wonderful Thérèse Plummer.The audiobook of Tools of Titans contains the distilled tools and routines I’ve gathered after interviewing hundreds of world-class performers. Everything has been vetted and applied to my own life in some fashion. The techniques, strategies, and philosophies in Tools of Titans have made me more effective, saved me years of wasted effort and frustration, and helped me navigate many periods of darkness and uncertainty. The advice has truly made me a happier, healthier person and changed my life. I hope that they help change yours as well. Please enjoy this episode, and if you’d like to listen to the other 100-plus profiles and chapters from Tools of Titans, just head to audible.com/ferriss.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests.For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode will share some of my favorite advice and profiles from

the audiobook of Tools of Titans. You heard that right, audiobook. Thousands of you have asked for years for the audiobook versions of Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors and they are available today. Go to audible.com slash Ferris for more details or to download either of them. Today's episode will focus on Tools of Titans and features the introduction of the book, as well as a few of my favorite people, profiles of Derek Sivers, BJ Miller, and Coach Christopher Sommer. Shows you the breadth of expertise and how different these profiles can also be. Just a few notes on format. I recorded the introduction to the book and selected three fantastic top-ranked

narrators to handle the rest, along with some surprise appearances from friends of mine you might know. The short bios, which you'll hear at the beginning of each profile, are read by Kaleo Griffith. Ray Porter reads the bulk of each profile, including all of my words. Ray actually narrated my first book, The 4-Hour Workweek. A lot of you love him already. He did an incredible job. Quotations from female guests are read by the wonderful Therese Plummer. The audiobook of Tools of Titans contains the distilled tools and routines I've gathered

after interviewing hundreds of world-class performers on this podcast. Everything has been vetted and applied to my own life in some fashion. The techniques, the strategies, and the philosophies and tools of Titans have made me more effective, saved me years of wasted effort and frustration, and have helped me navigate, quite frankly, some very difficult periods of my life, many periods of darkness and uncertainty. The advice has truly made me a happier, healthier person and changed my life. I hope the same for you. Please enjoy this episode. And if you'd like to listen to 100 plus profiles and chapters from Tools of Titans, the audiobook, just head to audible.com slash Ferris. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports

whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim.

Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time. Because after all,

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slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Listen to this first. How to use this book. Out on the edge, you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. Big, undreamed of things. The people on the edge see them first. Kurt Vonnegut. Routine in an intelligent man is a sign of ambition. W.H. Auden. I'm a compulsive note-taker. To wit, I have recorded nearly every workout since age 18 or so. Roughly eight feet of shelf space in my home is occupied by spine upon spine of notebook upon notebook. That, mind you, is one subject. It extends to dozens. Some people would call this OCD, and many would probably consider it a manic

wild goose chase. I view it simply. It is the collection of my life's recipes. My goal is to learn things once and use them forever. For instance, let's say I stumble upon a picture of myself from June 5th, 2007, and I think, I really wish I looked like that again. No problem. I'll crack open a dusty volume from 2007, review the eight weeks of training and food logs preceding June 5th, repeat them, and voila, end up looking nearly the same as my younger self, minus the hair. It's not always that easy, but it often is. This book, like my others, is a compendium of recipes for high performance that I gathered for my own use. There's one big difference, though. I never planned on publishing this one.

As I write this, I'm sitting in a cafe in Paris overlooking the Luxembourg Garden, just off of Rue Saint-Jacques. Rue Saint-Jacques is likely the oldest road in Paris, and it has a rich literary history. Victor Hugo lived a few blocks from where I'm sitting. Gertrude Stein drank coffee, and F. Scott Fitzgerald socialized within a stone's throw. Hemingway wandered up and down the sidewalks, his books percolating in his mind, wine no doubt percolating in his blood. I came to France to take a break from everything. No social media, no email, no social commitments, no set plans, except one project. The month had been set aside to review all of the lessons I'd learned from nearly 200 world-class performers I'd interviewed on The Tim Ferriss Show, which recently passed 400 million downloads. The guests included chess

prodigies, movie stars, four-star generals, pro athletes, and hedge fund managers. It was a motley crew. More than a handful of them had since become collaborators in business and creative projects spanning from investments to indie film. And as a result, I'd absorbed a lot of their wisdom outside of our recordings, whether over workouts, wine-infused jam sessions, text message exchanges, dinners, or late-night phone calls. In every case, I'd gotten to know them well beyond the superficial headlines in the media. My life had already improved in every area as a result of the lessons I could remember, but that was just the tip of the

iceberg. The majority of the gems were still lodged in thousands of pages of transcripts and hand-scribbled notes. More than anything, I longed for the chance to distill everything into a playbook. So, I'd set aside an entire month for review, and, if I'm being honest, chocolate croissants, to put together the ultimate cliff notes for myself. It would be the notebook to end all notebooks, something that could help me in minutes but be read for a lifetime. That was the lofty goal, at least, and I wasn't sure what the result would be. Within weeks of starting, the experience exceeded all expectations. No matter the situation I found myself in, something in this book was able to help. Now, when I'm feeling stuck, trapped, desperate, angry, conflicted, or simply unclear, the first thing I do is flip through these pages with a strong cup of coffee in hand.

So far, the needed medicine has popped out within 20 minutes of revisiting these friends, who will now become your friends. Need a reassuring pat on the back? There's someone for that. An unapologetic slap in the face? Plenty of people for that too. Someone to explain why your fears are unfounded or why your excuses are bullshit? Done. There are a lot of powerful quotes, but this book is much more than a compilation of quotes. It is a toolkit for changing your life. There are many books full of interviews. This is different because I don't view myself as an interviewer. I view myself as an experimenter. If I can't test something or replicate results in the messy reality of everyday life, I'm not interested. Everything in these pages has been vetted, explored, and applied to my own life in some fashion.

I've used dozens of these tactics and philosophies in high-stakes negotiations, high-risk environments, and large business dealings. The lessons have made me millions of dollars and saved me years of wasted effort and frustration. They work when you need them most. Some applications are obvious at first glance, while others are subtle and will provoke a holy shit, now I get it realization weeks later, while you're daydreaming in the shower or about to fall asleep. Many of the one-liners teach volumes. Some summarize excellence in an entire field in one sentence.

As Josh Waitzkin, chess prodigy and the inspiration behind Searching for Bobby Fisher might put it, these bite-sized learnings are a way to learn the macro from the micro. The process of piecing them together was revelatory. If I thought I saw the matrix before, I was mistaken where I was only seeing 10% of it. Still, even that 10% islands of notes on individual mentors had already changed my life and helped me to 10x my results. But after revisiting more than a hundred minds as part of the same fabric, things got very interesting very quickly. For the movie nerds among you, it was like the end of The Sixth Sense or the usual suspects. The red doorknob, the fucking Kobayashi coffee cup. How did I not notice that? It was right in front of me the whole time. You get the idea. To help you see the same, I've done my best to

weave patterns together throughout the book, noting where guests have complementary habits, beliefs, and recommendations. The completed jigsaw puzzle is much greater than the sum of its parts. What makes these people different? Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers. Pierre-Marc Gaston These world-class performers do not have superpowers. The rules they have crafted for themselves allow the bending of reality to such an extent that it may seem that way, but they've learned how to do this, and so can you.

These rules, if you want to think of them that way, are often uncommon habits and bigger questions. In a surprising number of cases, the power is in the absurd. The more absurd, the more seemingly impossible the question, the more profound the answers. Take, for instance, a question that serial billionaire Peter Thiel likes to ask himself and others. If you have a 10-year plan of how to get somewhere, you should ask, why can't you do this in six months?

For purposes of illustration, I might reword that to, what might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next six months if you had a gun against your head? Now, let's pause. Do I actually expect you to take 10 seconds to ponder this and then magically accomplish 10 years worth of dreams in the next few months. No, I don't. But I do expect that the question will productively break your mind, like a butterfly shattering a chrysalis to emerge with new capabilities. The so-called normal systems that you have in place, the social rules you've forced upon yourself, the standard frameworks, they don't work when answering a question like this. You are forced to shed artificial constraints, like shedding a skin,

to realize that you had the ability to renegotiate your reality all along. It just takes practice. My suggestion is that you spend real time with the questions you find most ridiculous in this book. 30 minutes of stream-of-consciousness journaling, which we'll talk about later, could change your life. On top of that, while the world is a goldmine, you need to go digging in other people's heads to unearth riches. Questions are your pickaxes and competitive advantage. This book will give you an arsenal to choose from. Performance-enhancing details.

When organizing all of the material for myself, I didn't want an onerous 37-step program. I wanted low-hanging fruit with immediate returns. Think of the bite-sized rules within these pages as PEDs, performance-enhancing details. They can be added to any training regimen, for instance, different careers, personal preferences, unique responsibilities, etc., to pour gasoline on the fire of progress. Fortunately, 10x results don't always require 10x effort. Big changes can come in very small packages. To dramatically change your life, you don't need to run a 100-mile race,

get a PhD, or completely reinvent yourself. It's the small things, done consistently, that are the big things. For example, red teaming once a quarter, Tara Brock's guided meditations, strategic fasting or exogenous ketones, etc. Tool is defined broadly in this book. It includes routines, books, common self-talks, supplements, favorite questions, and much more. What do they have in common? In this book, you'll naturally look for common habits and recommendations, and you should. Here are a few patterns, some odder than others. More than 80% of the interviewees have some form of daily mindfulness or meditation practice.

A surprising number of males, but not females, over 45 never eat breakfast or eat only the scantiest of fare. For example, Laird Hamilton, Malcolm Gladwell, General Stanley McChrystal. Many use the chili pad device for cooling at bedtime. Rave reviews of the books Sapiens, Poor Charlie's Almanac, Influence, and Man's Search for Meaning, among others. The habit of listening to single songs on repeat for focus. Nearly everyone has done some form of spec work, in other words, completing projects on their own time and dime,

then submitting them to prospective buyers. The belief that failure is not durable, for instance, Robert Rodriguez, or variants thereof. Almost every guest has been able to take obvious weaknesses and turn them into huge competitive advantages, for instance, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Of course, I will help you connect these dots, but that's less than half of the value of this book. Some of the most encouraging workarounds are found in the outliers. I want you to look for the black sheep who fit your unique idiosyncrasies. Keep an eye out for the non-traditional paths,

like Shay Carl's journey from manual laborer to YouTube star to co-founder of a startup sold for nearly $1 billion. The variation is the consistency. As a software engineer might say, that's not a bug, it's a feature. So borrow liberally, combine uniquely, and create your own bespoke blueprint. This book is a buffet.

Here's how to get the most out of it. Rule number one, skip liberally. I want you to skip anything that doesn't grab you. This book should be fun to read, and it's a buffet to choose from. Don't suffer through anything. If you hate shrimp, don't eat the goddamn shrimp. Treat it as a choose-your-own-adventure guide, as that's exactly how I've written it. My goal is for each reader to like 50%, love 25%, and never forget 10%. And here's why.

For the millions who've heard the podcast and the dozens who've proofread this book, the 50, 25, 10 highlights are completely different for every person. It's blown my mind. I've even had multiple guests in this book, people who are the best at what they do, proofread the same profile, answering my question of, what 10% would you absolutely keep and which 10% would you absolutely cut? Oftentimes, the 10% must keep of one person was the exact must-cut of someone else. This is not one-size-fits-all. I expect you to discard plenty. Read what you enjoy. Rule number two, skip but do so intelligently. Take a brief mental note of anything you skip. Perhaps it's skipping and glossing over precisely these topics or questions that has

created blind spots, bottlenecks, and unresolved issues in your life. That was certainly true for me. If you decide to skip something, note it, return to it later at some point, and ask yourself, why did I skip this? Did it offend you, seem beneath you, seem too difficult, and did you arrive at that by thinking it through? Or is it a reflection of biases inherited from your parents and other people? Very often, our beliefs are not our own. This type of practice is how you create yourself instead of seeking to discover yourself. There's value in the latter, but it's mostly past tense. It's a rearview mirror. Looking out the windshield is how you get where you want to go. Just remember two principles. I was recently standing

in Place Louis Aragon, a shaded outdoor nook on the River Seine, having a picnic with writing students from the Paris American Academy. One woman pulled me aside and asked what I hoped to convey in this book, at the core. Seconds later, we were pulled back into the fray as the attendees were all taking turns talking about the circuitous paths that brought them there that day. Nearly everyone had a story of wanting to come to Paris for years, in some cases 30, 40 years, but assuming it was impossible. Listening to their stories, I pulled out a scrap of paper and jotted down my answer to her question. In this book, at its core,

I want to convey the following. Number one, success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits. Someone else has done your version of success before, and often many have done something similar. But you might ask, what about a first, like colonizing Mars? There are still recipes. Look at empire building of other types. Look at the biggest decisions in the life of Robert Moses, in the book The Power Broker. Or simply find someone who stepped up to do great things that were deemed impossible at the time. for example, Walt Disney, there is shared DNA you can borrow. Number two, the superheroes you have in your mind, idols, icons, titans, billionaires, etc., are nearly all walking flaws

who've maximized one or two strengths. Humans are imperfect creatures. You don't succeed because you have no weaknesses. You succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them. To make this crystal clear, I've deliberately included two sections in this book that will make you think, wow, Tim Ferriss is a mess. How the hell does he ever get anything done? Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. The heroes in this book are no different. Everyone struggles. Take solace in that. A few important notes on format. Structure. This book is comprised of three sections, healthy, wealthy, and wise. Of course, there's tremendous overlap across the sections as the

pieces are interdependent. In fact, you could think of the three as a tripod upon which life is balanced. One needs all three to have any sustainable success or happiness. Wealthy, in the context of this book, also means much more than money. It extends to abundance in time, relationships, and more. My original intention with The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, and The 4-Hour Chef was to create a trilogy themed after Ben Franklin's famous quote, early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. People constantly ask me, what would you put in The 4-Hour Workweek if you were to write it again? How would you update it?

Ditto for the four-hour body and the four-hour chef. Tools of Titans contains most of the answers for all three. Extended Quotes Before writing this book, I called Mason Curry, author of Daily Rituals, which profiles the rituals of 161 creatives like Franz Kafka and Pablo Picasso. I asked him what his best decisions were related to the book. Mason responded with, I let my subject's voices come through as much as possible, and I think that was one of the things that I did right. Often, it wasn't the details of their routine, habits, so much as how they talked about them that was interesting. This is a critical observation and exactly why most books of quotes fail to have any real impact.

Take, for example, a one-liner like, what's on the other side of fear? Nothing, from Jamie Foxx. It's memorable, and you might guess at the profound underlying meaning. I'd still wager you'd forget it within a week. But what if I made it infinitely more powerful by including Jamie's own explanation of why he uses that maxim to teach his kids confidence? The context and the original language teaches you how to think like a world-class performer, not just regurgitate quotes.

This is the key meta skill we're aiming for. To that end, you'll see a lot of extended quotes and stories. How to listen to the quotes. One of my podcast guests, also one of the smartest people I know, was shocked when I showed him his raw transcript. Wow, he said, I generally like to think of myself as a decently smart guy, but I use past, present, and future tense like they're the same fucking thing. It makes me sound like a complete moron. Transcripts can be unforgiving. I've read my own, so I know how bad it can be. In the heat of the moment, grammar can go out the window to be replaced by false starts and sentence fragments.

Everyone starts an ungodly number of sentences with end and so. I and millions of others tend to use and I was like dot dot dot instead of and I said. Many of us mix up plural and singular. This all works fine in normal conversation, but it can hiccup for an audiobook. Quotes have therefore been edited in some cases for clarity, length, and as a courtesy to listeners and guests alike. I did my best to preserve the spirit and point of quotes while making them as smart and listenable as possible. Sometimes I keep it fast and loose to preserve the kinetic energy and emotion of the moment. Other times I smooth out the edges, including my own stammering. If anything sounds silly or off, assume it was my mistake.

Everyone in this book is amazing, and I've done my best to showcase that. Patterns. Where guests have related recommendations or philosophies, I've noted that. For instance, if Jane Doe tells a story about the value of testing higher prices, I might add, listen to Marc Andreessen. Since his answer to, if you could have a billboard anywhere, what would you put on it, was raise prices, which he explains in depth. Humor. I've included ample doses of the ridiculous. First of all, if we're serious all the time, we'll wear out before we get the truly serious stuff done. Second, if this book were all stern looks and no winks, all productivity and no grab-assing, you'd remember very little. I

agree with Tony Robbins, who's in this book, that information without emotion isn't retained. Look up von Restorff effect and primacy and recency effect for more science, but this book has been deliberately constructed to maximize your retention, which leads us to spirit animals. Yes, spirit animals. There wasn't room for photographs in the print edition of this book, but I wanted some sort of illustrations to keep things fun. Seemed like a lost cause, but then after a glass or four of wine, I recalled that one of my guests, Alexis Ohanian, likes to ask potential hires, What's your spirit animal? Eureka! So, in this audiobook version, you'll hear spirit animals for anyone who would humor me and play along.

The best part? Dozens of people took the question very seriously. Extended explanations, emotional changes of heart, and Venn diagrams ensued. Questions poured in. Would a mythological creature be acceptable? Can I be a plant instead? Alas, I couldn't get a hold of everyone, so these spirit animals are sprinkled throughout the book like Scooby Snacks.

In a book full of practicality, treat these like little rainbows of absurdity. People had fun with it. Non-profile content and Tim Ferriss chapters. That's me. In all sections, there are multiple non-profile pieces by guests and yours truly. These are typically intended to expand upon key principles and tools mentioned by multiple people. URLs, websites, and social media. I've omitted most URLs as outdated URLs,

that means website address, are nothing but frustrating for everyone. For nearly anything mentioned, assume that I've chosen wording that will allow you to find it easily on Google or Amazon. All full podcast episodes can be found at tim.blog forward slash podcast. Just search the guest's name and

the extended audio, complete show notes, links, and resources will pop up like warm toast on a cold morning. In nearly every guest's profile, I also indicate where you can best interact with them on social media. Your send-off, the three tools that allow all the rest. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse is recommended by many guests in this book. There is one specific takeaway that Naval Ravikant has reinforced with me several times on our long walks over coffee. The protagonist, Siddhartha, a monk who looks like a beggar, has come to the city and falls in love with a famous courtesan named Kamala. He attempts to court her, and she asks, What do you have?

A well-known merchant similarly asks, What can you give that you have learned? His answer is the same in both cases, so I've included the latter story here. Siddhartha ultimately acquires all that he wants. Merchant If you are without possessions, how can you give? Siddhartha. Everyone gives what he has.

The soldier gives strength, the merchant goods, the teacher instruction, the farmer rice, the fisherman fish. Merchant. Very well. And what can you give? What have you learned that you can give? Siddhartha. I can think, I can wait, I can fast. Merchant, is that all? Siddhartha, I think that is all. Merchant, and of what use are they? For example, fasting. What good is that?

Siddhartha, it is of great value, sir. If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do. If, for instance, Siddhartha man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do. If, for instance, Siddhartha had not learned to fast, he would have had to seek some kind of work today, either with you or elsewhere, for hunger would have driven him. But, as it is, Siddhartha can wait calmly. He is not impatient. He is not in need. He can ward off hunger for a long time and laugh at it.

I think of Siddhartha's answers often and in the following terms. I can think. Equals having good rules for decision making and having good questions you can ask yourself and others. I can wait. Equals being able to plan long term, play the long game, and not misallocate your resources. I can fast. Equals being able to withstand difficulties and disaster.

Training yourself to be uncommonly resilient and to have a high pain tolerance. This book will help you develop all three. I created Tools of Titans because it's the book that I've wanted my entire life. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Derek Sivers Derek Sivers, Twitter, Facebook, at Sivers, Sivers.org, is one of my favorite humans, and I often call him for advice. Think of him as a philosopher-king programmer, master teacher, and merry prankster.

Originally a professional musician and circus clown, he did the latter to counterbalance being introverted, Derek created CD Baby in 1998. It became the largest seller of independent music online, with $100 million in sales for 150,000 musicians. In 2008, Derek sold CD Baby for $22 million, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. He is a frequent speaker at TED

conferences with more than 5 million views of his talks. In addition to publishing 33 books via his company Wood Egg, he is the author of Anything You Want, a collection of short life lessons that I've read at least a dozen times. I still have an early draft with highlights and notes. Behind the Scenes Derek has read, reviewed, and rank-ordered 200-plus books at Sivers.org forward slash books. They're automatically sorted from best to worst. He is a huge fan of Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, and introduced me to the book Seeking Wisdom from Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin. He read Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins when he was 18, and it changed his life. I posted the following on Facebook while writing this chapter. I might need to do a second volume of my next book 100% dedicated to the knowledge bombs of Derek Sivers.

So much good stuff. Hard to cut. The most upvoted comment was from Kevin O., who said, Put a link to the podcast and have them listen. It's less than two hours and it will change their life. Tim, you and Derek got me from call center worker to location independent freelancer with more negotiation power for income and benefits than I previously imagined. You both also taught me the value of enough and contentment and appreciation as well as achievement. That made my week, and I hope this makes yours. 4hourworkweek.com forward slash Derek. If more information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs.

Tim Ferriss, it's not what you know, it's what you do consistently. How to thrive in an unknowable future? Choose the plan with the most options. The best plan is the one that lets you change your plans. Tim Ferriss. This is one of Derek's directives, which are his one-line rules for life, distilled from hundreds of books and decades of lessons learned. Others include, be expensive, expect disaster, and own as little as possible. Who do you think of when you hear the word successful? Quote, the first answer to any question isn't much fun because it's just automatic.

What's the first painting that comes to mind? Mona Lisa. Name a genius. Einstein. Who's a composer? Mozart. This is the subject of the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. There's the instant, unconscious,

automatic thinking, and then there's the slower, conscious, rational, deliberate thinking. I'm really, really into the slower thinking, breaking my automatic responses to the things in my life and slowly thinking through a more deliberate response instead. Then for the things in life where an automatic response is useful, I can create a new one consciously. What if you asked, when you think of the word successful, who's the third person that comes to mind? Why are they actually more successful than the first person that came to mind? In that case, the first would be Richard Branson because he's the stereotype. He's like the Mona Lisa of success to me. Honestly, you might be my second answer, but we could talk about that a different time. My third and real answer, after thinking it through, is that we can't know without knowing a

person's aims. What if Richard Branson set out to live a quiet life, but like a compulsive gambler, he just can't stop creating companies? Then that changes everything and we can't call him successful anymore. End quote. Tim Ferriss. This is genius. Ricardo Semler, CEO and majority owner of the Brazil-based Semco Partners, practices asking why three times.

This is true when questioning his own motives or when tackling big projects. The rationale is identical to three times. This is true when questioning his own motives or when tackling big projects. The rationale is identical to Derek's. For people starting out, say yes. When Derek was 18, he was living in Boston attending the Berklee College of Music. Quote, I'm in this band where the bass player one day in rehearsal says,

hey man, my agent just offered me this gig. It's like $75 to play at a pig show in Vermont. He rolls his eyes and he says, I'm not going to do it. Do you want the gig? I'm like, fuck yeah, a paying gig. Oh my God, yes. So I took the gig to go up to Burlington, Vermont, and I think it was a $58 round trip busrip bus ticket. I get to this pig show, I strap my acoustic guitar on, and I walked around a pig show playing music. I did that for about three hours and took the bus home. And the next day, the booking agent called me up and said, hey, yeah, so you did a really good job at the pig show so many opportunities and 10 years of stage experience came from that one piddly little pig show when you're earlier in your career i think

the best strategy is to just say yes to everything every little gig you just never know what are the lottery tickets, end quote. The standard pace is for chumps. Quote, Kimo Williams is this large black man, a musician who attended Berklee School of Music and then stayed there to teach for a while. What he taught me got me to graduate in half the time it would normally take. He said, I think you can graduate Berklee School of Music in two years instead of four. The standard pace is for chumps. The school has to organize its curricula around the lowest common denominator so that almost no one is left out. They have to slow down so everybody can catch up. But, he said, you're smarter than that. He said, I think you could just buy the books for those, skip the classes, and then contact the department head to take the final exam to get credit.

End quote. Don't be a donkey. Tim, what advice would you give to your 30-year-old self? Derek, don't be a donkey. Tim, and what does that mean? Derek, well, I meet a lot of 30-year-olds who are trying to pursue many different directions at once, but not making progress in any, right? They get frustrated that the world wants them to pick one thing because they want to do them all. Why do I have to choose? I don't know what to choose. But the problem is, if you're thinking short-term, then

you act as though if you don't do them all this week, they won't happen. The solution is to think long-term. To realize that you can do one of these things for a few years and then do another one for a few years and then another. You've probably heard the fable, I think it's Buradan's Ass, about a donkey who is standing halfway between a pile of hay and a bucket of water. He just keeps looking left to the hay and right to the water trying to decide. Hay or water. Hay or water. He's unable to decide, so he eventually falls over and dies of both hunger and thirst.

A donkey can't think of the future. If he did, he'd realize he could clearly go first to drink the water, then go eat the hay. So my advice to my 30-year-old self is, don't be a donkey. You can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience. Business models can be simple. You don't need to constantly pivot. Derek tells the story of the sophisticated origins

of CD Baby's business model and pricing. Quote, I was living in Woodstock, New York at the time, and there was a cute tiny record store in town that sold consignment CDs of local musicians on the counter. So I walked in there one day and I said, hey, how does it work if I want to sell my CD here? And she said, well, you set the selling price at whatever you want. We just keep a flat $4 per CD sold and then just come by every week and we'll pay you. So I went home to my new website that night and wrote, you set your selling price at what you want. We'll just keep a flat $4 per CD sold and we'll pay you every week. And then I realized that it took about 45 minutes for me to set up a new album into the system because I had to lay the album art on the scanner,

Photoshop it and crop it, fix the musician's spelling mistakes in their own bio, and all that kind of stuff. I thought, 45 minutes of my time, that's worth about $25. That shows you what I was valuing my time at in those days. So I'll charge a $25 setup fee to sign up for this thing, and then, ooh, in my head, $25 and $35 don't feel very different when it comes to cost. $10 is different and $50 is different, but $25, $35, that occupies the same space in the mind. So you know what? I'm going to make it $35 and that will let me give anyone a discount anytime they ask. If somebody's on the phone and upset, I'll say, you know what? Let me give you a discount. So I added in that little buffer so I could give people a discount, which they love. So $35 setup fee, $4 per CD sold, and then Tim,

for the next 10 years, that was it. That was my entire business model generated in five minutes by walking down to the local record store and asking what they do, end quote. Once you have some success, if it's not a hell yes, it's a no. This mantra of Derek's quickly became one of my favorite rules of thumb, and it led me to take an indefinite startup vacation starting in late 2015. I elaborate on this later, but here's the origin story. Quote, it was time to book the ticket for a trip he'd committed to long ago, and I was thinking, I don't really want to go to Australia right now. I'm busy with other stuff. I was on the phone with my friend Amber Rhubarth, who's a brilliant musician,

and I was lamenting about this. She's the one who pointed out, it sounds like from where you are, your decision is not between yes and no. You need to figure out whether you're feeling like, fuck yeah, or no. Because most of us say yes to too much stuff, and then we let these little mediocre things fill our lives. The problem is, when that occasional, oh my god, hell yeah, thing comes along, you don't have enough time to give it the attention that you should, because you've said yes to too much other little half-assed stuff, right? Once I started applying this, my life just opened up, end quote. Busy equals out of control. Quote, every time people contact me, they say, look,

I know you must be incredibly busy. And I always think, no, I'm not. Because I'm in control of my time. I'm on top of it. Busy to me seems to imply out of control. Like, oh my God, I'm so busy. I don't have any time for this shit. To me, that sounds like a person who's got no control over their life. End quote. Tim Ferriss. Lack of time is lack of priorities. If I'm busy, it is because I've made choices that put me in that position. So I've forbidden myself to reply to how are you with busy. I have no right to complain. Instead, if I'm too busy, it's a cue to re-examine my systems and rules. What would you put on a billboard? Quote, I really admire those places like Vermont and Sao Paulo, Brazil that ban billboards, but I know that wasn't really what you were asking. So my better answer is, I think I would make a billboard that says, it won't make you happy.

And I would place it outside any big shopping mall or car dealer. You know what would be a fun project, actually? To buy and train thousands of parrots to say, it won't make you happy, and then let them loose in the shopping malls and super stores around the world. That's my life mission. Anybody in? Anybody with me? Let's do it. End

quote. Take 45 minutes instead of 43. Is your red face worth it? Quote, I've always been very type A, so a friend of mine got me into cycling when I was living in LA. I lived right on the beach in Santa Monica where there's this great bike path in the sand that goes for, I think, 25 miles. I'd go onto the bike path and I would go head down and push it, just red-faced huffing all the way, pushing it as hard as I could. I would go all the way down to one end of the bike path and back and then head home. And I'd set my little timer when doing this. I noticed it was always 43 minutes. That's what it took me to go as fast as I could on that bike path. But I noticed that over time, I was starting to feel less psyched about going out on the bike path

because mentally, when I would think of it, it would feel like pain and hard work. So then I thought, you know, it's not cool for me to associate negative stuff with going on the bike ride. Why don't I just chill? For once, I'm going to go on the same bike ride and I'm not going to be a complete snail, but I'll go at half of my normal pace. I got on my bike and it was just pleasant. I went on the same bike ride, and I noticed that I was standing up and I was looking around more. I looked into the ocean, and I saw there were these dolphins jumping in the ocean,

and I went down to Marina del Rey to my turnaround point, and I noticed in Marina del Rey that there was a pelican that was flying above me. I looked up. I was like, hey, a pelican, and he shit in my mouth. 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 two 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, end quote. On lack of morning routines, quote, 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 five months, every waking hour, just completely immersed in this one thing. Then, after five 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, end quote. What's something you believe that other people think is crazy? Quote, 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 six 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 End quote. Treat life as a series of experiments. Quote, 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. End quote. Even when everything is going terribly and I have no reason to be confident, I just decide to be. Quote, 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. End quote. The most successful email Derek ever wrote. At its largest, Derek spent roughly four 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. Quote, 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 I 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,une 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, 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. End quote. At the end of life, you can let a lot of the rules that govern our daily lives fly out the window. Because you realize that we're walking around in systems and society. And much of what consumes most of our days is not some natural order. We're all navigating some superstructure that we humans created. B.J. Miller B.J. Miller, Twitter, at Zen Hospice, zenhospice.org, is a palliative care physician at the University

of California at San Francisco and an advisor to the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco. He thinks deeply about how to create a dignified, graceful end of life for his patients. He is an expert in death. Through that, he's learned how we can dramatically improve our own lives, often with very small changes. He has guided or been involved with approximately 1,000 deaths, and he's spotted patterns we can all learn from. BJ is also a triple amputee due to an electrocution accident in college.

His 2015 TED Talk, What Really Matters at the End of Life, was among the top 15 most viewed TED Talks of 2015. Don't believe everything that you think. This was BJ's answer to, what would you put on a billboard? He wasn't sure of the source, but attributed it to a bumper sticker. By the end of this profile, you'll see how BJ loves this type of absurdity. Stargazing as therapy. Quote,

When you are struggling with just about anything, look up. Just ponder the night sky for a minute and realize that we're all on the same planet at the same time. As far as we can tell, we're the only planet with life like ours on it anywhere nearby. Then you start looking at the stars and you realize that the light hitting your eye is ancient, some of the stars that you're seeing, they no longer exist by the time that the light gets to you. Just mulling the bare naked facts of the cosmos is enough to thrill me, awe me, freak me out, and kind of put all my neurotic anxieties in their proper place. A lot of people, when you're standing at the edge of your horizon, at death's door, you can be much more in tune with the cosmos, end quote.

Tim Ferriss. Ed Cook does something surprisingly similar, and I've started doing star therapy every night that I can. The effects are disproportionate to the effort. Delighting in Perishability The following is BJ's answer to what $100 or less purchase has most positively impacted your life in recent memory. Quote, I would probably point to a beautiful Pinot Noir from Joseph Swan up in Sonoma County. It's like the artwork of Andy Goldsworthy or anyone who delights in anything ephemeral. The charm in a bottle of wine, the craft, all the work that goes into it, actually delighting in the fact that it's perishable and goes away,

I find really helpful. I've gotten a lot of miles out of a beautiful bottle of wine, not just for the taste and the buzz, but the symbolism of delighting in something that goes away, end quote. Here's a good reason to question your I can'ts. Be patient with this and listen to the whole thing.

It's worth it. Scuderia Motorcycle Dealership in San Francisco also aided BJ with his seemingly outrageous mission. Tim, I hate to focus on something perhaps superficial, but you just said riding your motorcycle in passing. Now, I apologize if this sounds like a weird question, but you have three limbs that have been damaged, effectively amputated. How do you ride a motorcycle? BJ. You know, this was sort of a long dream that recently came true.

Tim. Congratulations. I mean, it's fantastic. I'm just so curious about the logistics. BJ. Thank you. Well, it's interesting you ask. The man who helped make this dream come true, Randy, ended up being my patient and our resident at Zen Hospice Project not too

long after he converted my motorcycle, so there's a lot to this story, my friend. I love two wheels. I love the gyroscopic lifestyle. I love the feeling of it, and I've always loved riding bicycles. I'd always wanted to get on a motorcycle, but I kept going to shops, people would look at me, and I could never find a mechanic who was willing to take it on and try to help make it happen. A fellow named Mert Lawill, who's an old motorcycle racing champion, sort of legendary in that world, happens to live around here, Northern California, in Tiburon. I don't know what inspired Mert, but he's a machinist himself and a handy fella, and in his retirement, he got into the business of building a prosthetic component that lends itself very well to mounting an arm onto a

bicycle or a motorcycle. So the first piece of this puzzle was discovering Mertz invention and getting a hold of it myself, which allowed me to get my prosthetic arm attached to a handlebar in a very functional way. Tim, how are the hand controls modified? BJ, Randy figured this out. Aprilia made a model, the Mana, that is clutchless. This is essentially an automatic transmission. So do away with the clutch and gear changes. That's a huge piece of the puzzle out of the way. Then Randy figured out a way to splice the brakes front and rear in a certain ratio into a single lever.

So I'm doing nothing with my prosthetic feet except holding onto the bike. I'm doing nothing with my prosthetic arm except for holding onto the bike. All the action is in my right hand. Brakes are one lever. And then Randy built this box and moved all the controls, the turn signals, horn, and all that stuff

over to the right side of the bike at a good distance for my thumb to reach them. I have throttle, brake lever, and then the turn signal box all going with one hand. Tim, that's so awesome. BJ, that's it, you know, away you go. Tim, I just have to pause here for a second and just ask everyone listening, what bullshit excuses do you have for not going after whatever it is that you want? Please, write in.

Tell us on social media why these are real excuses with hashtag bullshit afterwards. Oh my God, man, that's such a great story. The miracle of a snowball. BJ described waking up in a burn unit after being electrocuted in college and losing three limbs. Quote, A burn unit is a particular place.

A gruesome place. The pain that the patients are going through is gut-wrenching. Working in a burn unit is very difficult. People usually don't last in a burn unit very long as a clinician. The thing that often kills burn victims after they've survived the initial trauma is infection. So burn units are incredibly sterile environments. Everyone's gowned up, masked, and gloved. For the first several weeks, I could only have one person in my room at a time.

You cut off from everything. There's no day or night. There was no window in my room. Even when people are at your bedside, there's all this garb in between you and them. You have no relationship to the natural world. You can touch nothing. You're also in a fair amount of pain, of course, which does not necessarily reward your paying attention to anything. It's not fun.

So that was November. At some point in December, maybe it was early January, there were two nurses in particular I felt very close to, and it may have been one of them who brought me the snowball. One was named Joy Varkardipone. It may have been Joy. It was snowing outside, and I didn't know that. She had the bright idea of smuggling in a snowball to me so I could feel snow. Man, it was just stunning. What a simple little thing, right? But she put it in my hand and just feeling the contrast of that cold snow on my sort of crisp burnt skin, the obnoxious inflamed skin

and watching it melt and watching the snow become water, the simple miracle of it was just a stunner for me. It really made it so palpable that we as human beings, as long as we're in this body, are feeling machines. If we're cut off, if our senses are choked off, we are choked off. It was the most therapeutic moment I could imagine. I would never have guessed this. First of all, the sensation, just holding that snowball, but also the implied inherent perspective that it helped me have. That everything changes. Snow becomes water.

It's beautiful because it changes. Things are fleeting. It felt so beautiful to be part of this weird world in that moment. I felt part of the world again rather than removed from it. It was potent. End quote. The power of bearing witness and listening. I asked BJ, if you were brought in as a physician or mentor to someone who had just suffered nearly identical injuries to yours, what would your conversation look like? Or what resources, reading or otherwise, would you point them to? He replied with, quote, I think I've gotten in trouble when I've tried

to come in with some predetermined idea of advice giving. Oftentimes, that's not really what's needed. It's more just the camaraderie and bearing witness. So to answer your question, when I do go into folks' rooms, I'm there and I'll avail myself to any questions they have. But I think most of the power of the visit is just visiting, just being together and sharing this awkward body, end quote. Tim Ferriss. Since chatting with BJ, I've noticed how this applies in many areas. To fix someone's problem, you very often just need to emphatically listen to them. Even on social media or my blog, I've realized that people knowing you're listening, valuing them collectively, is more important than responding to everyone.

For instance, I sometimes put a period before readers' names when I reply to someone on Twitter, e.g. period at widget. That's a good question. The answer is so that everyone sees the reply. Even though I can't respond to everyone, it shows i'm paying attention to blog comments and at replies it's a simple i see you if an introverted hospice patient were to say give me one to three things that i can watch do absorb look at etc without human interaction what would your answer be quote i guess i'd put a picture book of Mark Rothko paintings in front of them. I would probably put any music by Beethoven

into their ears. And I probably would reserve that third thing for staring into space. End quote. Favorite documentary? Quote, Grizzly Man. Any piece of art where I'm not sure whether to sob or laugh hysterically i love that feeling where you just go in either direction and you're not even sure which is

the correct emotion you're simultaneously attracted and repulsed by something that was my experience watching that film so i think it's an amazing piece of filmmaking, end quote. Sometimes cookies are the best medicine. For hospice patients at death's door, big existential conversations aren't always the needed medicine. One oddly powerful alternative is baking cookies together. Quote, just the basic joy of smelling a cookie. It smells freaking great. And it's like the snowball. You're rewarded for being alive and in the moment. Smelling a cookie is not on behalf of some future state.

It's great in the moment by itself on behalf of nothing. And this is another thing back to art. Art for its own sake. Art and music and dance. Part of its poignancy is another thing back to art. Art for its own sake. Art and music and dance. Part of its poignancy is its purposelessness and just delighting in a wacky fact of perhaps a meaningless universe and how remarkable that is. One way for all of us to live until we're actually dead is to prize those little moments, end quote. Advice to your 30-year-old self? Quote, let it go.

I do mean to take life very seriously, but I need to take things like playfulness and purposelessness very seriously. This is not meant to be light, but I think I would have somehow encouraged myself to let go a little bit more and hang in there and not pretend to know where this is all going. You don not pretend to know where this is all

going. You don't need to know where it's all going. End quote. If the best in the world are stretching their asses off in order to get strong, why aren't you? Christopher Sommer. Christopher Sommer, Instagram, Facebook, at Gymnastic Bodies, gymnasticbodies.com, is a former U.S. National Team Gymnastics coach and founder of Gymnastic Bodies, a training system that I've tested for the last eight months. No affiliation.

As a world-renowned coach, Sommer is known for building his students into some of the strongest, most powerful athletes in the world. During his extensive 40-year coaching career, Coach Summer took meticulous notes on his training techniques, his wins and failures, so that he could translate the best elements into a superior exercise system for both high-level and beginner athletes. His four decades of careful observation led to the birth of gymnastics strength training, GST. Spirit Animal, Falcon. Backstory. The combination of GST and acro yoga has completely remodeled my body in the last year. I'm more flexible and

mobile at age 39 than I was at age 20. I'm going to skip explaining a lot, e.g. Maltese, Stalder, Press, Handstand. That is best seen in video or pictures, though I'll describe the most critical. Google is your friend. On working on your weakness, quote, if you want to be a stud later, you have to be a pud now, end quote. Coach first told me this when I was complaining about slow progress with shoulder extension. Imagine clasping your hands together behind your back, arms straight, then raising your arms without bending at the waist. When in doubt, work on the deficiencies you're most embarrassed by. My biggest weaknesses are shoulder extension and bridging using the thoracic spine versus lower back arch. After improving them 10% over three to four weeks,

going from making coach vomit to merely making coach laugh, a host of physical issues that plagued me for years completely disappeared. To assess your biggest weaknesses, start by finding a functional movement screen, FMS, near you. Related from Summer. Quote, you're not responsible for the hand of cards you were dealt. You're responsible for maxing out what you were given. End quote. Flexibility versus mobility. Summer's distinction between flexibility and mobility is the most concrete and clear I've heard. Flexibility can be passive, whereas mobility requires that you can demonstrate strength throughout the entire range of motion, including the end ranges. See the J-curl and pike pulse exercises later for two examples of mobility, which can also be thought of as active flexibility.

The pike pulse is a particularly clear demonstration as it tests compression strength in a range that most people never experience. Consistency over intensity. Quote, slow down, where's the fire? End quote. This is Coach's constant reminder that certain adaptations take weeks or months of consistent stimuli. If you rush, the reward is injuries. In GST, there are surprising stair steps after long periods of zero progress. Roughly six months into doing his hamstring series with minor gains, I seemingly doubled my max ranges overnight. This was completely unsurprising to Summer. Quote, I used to tell my athletes there are stupid gymnasts and there are old gymnasts, but there are no old stupid gymnasts because they're all dead. End quote.

Diet and exercise versus eat and train. Coach Summer dislikes the fitness fixation on diet and exercise. He finds it much more productive to focus on eat and train. One is aesthetic and the other is functional. The former may not have a clear goal. The latter always does. They failed warm-up. Coach describing his first ever seminar for non-gymnast adults in roughly 2007.

Quote, we've got all of these beasts there, advanced lifters, and they're strong. I tried to do my entry-level plyometric group work and some floor work with them. The stronger the athlete, the faster they went down. Knees, lower back, ankles, from baby stuff. We're not talking anything hard. We're talking about standing in place and with knees straight, being able to bounce down the floor using just your calves. No way. Their tissues couldn't take it. They hadn't done anything like it. To show you how bad mobility was, we had 15 minutes on the schedule to stretch. Nothing intricate, nothing intense, just an easy, basic stretch. Get them loosened up for the day.

That stretch took an hour and a half to complete. There were bodies lying everywhere. It was like I was in Vietnam or filming a war movie. I turned to my staff and I'm like, what the fuck am I supposed to do now? They failed warmup. They failed warmup. End quote.

Why those Olympic boys have gigantic biceps. Male Olympic gymnasts don't have biceps the size of their waists from curls. It comes largely from straight arm work, Olympic gymnasts don't have biceps the size of their waists from curls. It comes largely from straight arm work, especially Maltese work on rings. But how on earth can you practice a Maltese as a novice? I use a 50-50 pulley system to cut my body weight resistance in half, which is similar to the ring thing, power monkey fitness,

or generic dream machine that Jason Niemer loves using. I combine this with power levers, strap-on metal gauntlets that allow me to attach the ring ropes to my forearms anywhere between the elbow and the fist. This allows me to use progressive resistance, starting near the elbow and moving out to the hand. The best versions are currently only available in Europe, but there are vaguely similar iron cross trainers available in the U.S. Three movements everyone should practice. J. Curl, described in the Gymnast Strong PDF

that accompanies this audiobook. Shoulder extension. Lift a dowel behind your back standing or sit on the floor and walk your hands backward behind your hips. Thoracic bridge. Elevate your feet enough to feel the bulk of the stretch in the upper back and shoulders, not the lower back. The feet might be three plus feet off the ground. Ensure you can concentrate on straightening your arms

and legs, if possible, holding the position and breathing. Good goals for adult non-gymnasts. The following goals incorporate many different aspects of strength and mobility into single movements. Beginner, J curl. Intermediate, straddle press handstand. Tim Ferriss, I'm working on this.

Advanced, Stalder press handstand. Sometimes, you just need a vibrator. Coach Summer introduced me to a Russian medical massage specialist who recommended I use the plug-in, not cordless, model of the Hitachi Magic Wand on its high setting. I've never experienced such heights of ecstasy. Thanks, Vladimir. Just kidding. In this case, it's for relaxing hypertonic muscles, i.e. muscles that are tense even though they shouldn't be. Just place the wand on your

muscle belly, not insertion points, for 20 to 30 seconds, which is often all it takes at the proper hertz. Tension headaches or a stiff neck? It's great for relaxing the occipitals at the base of the skull. Warning, having Hitachi magic wands lying out around your house can go terribly wrong. Or terribly right. Good luck explaining your hypertonic muscles. As one friend said to me, I think my wife has that same problem. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off.

Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets

and all sorts of weird shit that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.