Book Summary: Tools of Titans

These are the passages and lessons I took away from the book Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris. All content credit goes to the author(s).

—

On Writing

“When you can write well, you can think well.” – Matt Mullenweg
“Write two crappy pages per day. → Writer’s block is almost like the equivalent of impotence. It’s performance pressure you put on yourself that keeps you from doing something you naturally should be able to do.” – Neil Strauss
“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” – Justin Boretta
“Keep it simple. Trust your reader. Understand that he or she can fill the empty spaces. Don’t over explain.” – Paulo Coelho
“You don’t find time. It’s only real if it’s on the calendar.” – Noah Kagan

“If you’re planning to do something with you life, if you have a 10-year plan of how to get there, you should ask: Why can’t you do it in 6 months?” – Peter Thiel
“Be different, not just better. Reinvent the game while playing it.” – Chase Jarvis
“Copyright your faults. Make them part of your style.” – Dan Carlin
“If you want to solve a problem – any problem that you care enough about to want to solve – you almost certainly come to it with a whole lot of ideas about it. Ideas about why it’s an important problem, what is it that bothers you exactly, who the villains are in the problem, etc.” – Stephen J. Dubner
“The biggest predictor of job satisfaction isn’t passion, it’s mentally engaging work. It’s the nature of the job itself. It’s whether the job provides a lot of variety, gives you good feedback, allows you to exercise autonomy, contributes to the wider world – is it actually meaningful? It is making the world better? Does it allow you to exercise a skill that you’ve developed?” – Will MacAskill
“Losers have goals. Winners have systems. Choose projects and habits that, even if they result in “failures” in the eyes of the outside world, give you transferable skills or relationships.” – Scott Adams

“Step back and observe. Detach yourself from the situation, so you can see what’s happening.” – Jocko Willink
“You have to be prepared to fail. That’s how you’re going to expand yourself and grow. As you work through the process of failure and learning, you will really deepen into the human being you’re capable of being.” – Sebastian Junger
“75% of success is staying calm and not losing your nerve. The rest you figure out, but once you lose your calm, everything else starts falling apart fast.” – Sam Kass
“In any situation in life, you only have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it.” – Naval Ravikant

“What’s the ultimate quantification of success? For me, it’s not how much time you spend doing what you love. It’s how little time you spend doing what you hate.” – Casey Neistat
“Don’t please anyone but yourself. The second you start doing it for an audience, you’ve lost the long game because creating something that is rewarding and sustainable over the long run requires, most of all, keeping yourself excited about it.” – Maria Popova
“Appreciate what’s good about this moment. Don’t always think that you’re on a permanent journey. Stop and enjoy the view.” – Alain de Botton
“Always end the word day with very high quality, which for one thing means you’re internalizing quality overnight.” – Joshua Waitzkin

—