Tools of Titans

by Timothy Ferriss

  TF: This reminded me of the deal that George Lucas crafted for Star Wars, in which the studio effectively said, “Toys? Yeah, sure, whatever. You can have the toys.” That was a multi-billion-dollar mistake that gave Lucas infinite financing for life (an estimated 8,000,000,000+ units sold to date). When deal-making, ask yourself: Can I trade a short-term, incremental gain for a potential longer-term, game-changing upside? Is there an element here that might be far more valuable in 5 to 10 years (e.g., ebook rights 10 years ago)? Might there be rights or options I can explicitly “carve out” and keep? If you can cap the downside (time, capital, etc.) and have the confidence, take uncrowded bets on yourself. You only need one winning lottery ticket.

  Meditate for a Year, Get Benefits for Life?

  When Arnold’s movie career first began to gel, he was inundated with new opportunities and options. For the first time, he felt overly worried and anxious, due to pressures he’d never felt before. By sheer coincidence, he met a Transcendental Meditation teacher at the beach. “He says, ‘Oh, Arnold, it is not uncommon. It is very common. A lot of people go through this. This is why people use Transcendental Meditation as one way of dealing with the problem.’ He was very good in selling it, because he didn’t say that it was the only answer. He said it’s just one of many.” The man encouraged Arnold to go to Westwood, in L.A., to take a class the following Thursday.

  “I went up there, took a class, and I went home after that and tried it. I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to give it a shot.’ I did 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes at night, and I would say within 14 days, 3 weeks, I got to the point where I could really disconnect my mind and stay and find a few seconds of this connection and rejuvenate the mind and learn how to focus more and to calm down. I saw the effect right away. I was much more calm about all of the challenges that were facing me. I continued doing that for a year. By that time, I felt that, ‘I think I have mastered this. I think that now I don’t feel overwhelmed anymore.’

  “Even today, I still benefit from that because I don’t merge and bring things together and see everything as one big problem. I take them one challenge at a time. When I go and I study my script for a movie, then that time of day when I study my script, I don’t let anything else interfere. I just concentrate on that. The other thing that I’ve learned is that there are many forms of meditation in the world. Like when I study and work really hard, where it takes the ultimate amount of concentration, I can only do it for 45 minutes, maybe an hour.

  “I also figured out that I could use my workouts as a form of meditation because I concentrate so much on the muscle, I have my mind inside the bicep when I do my curls. I have my mind inside the pectoral muscles when I do my bench press. I’m really inside, and it’s like I gain a form of meditation, because you have no chance of thinking or concentrating on anything else at that time.”

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

  He mentioned several people, including Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Nelson Mandela, and Muhammad Ali, but his final addition stuck out:

  “Cincinnatus. He was an emperor in the Roman Empire. Cincinnati, the city, by the way, is named after him because he was a big idol of George Washington’s. He is a great example of success because he was asked to reluctantly step into power and become the emperor and to help, because Rome was about to get annihilated by all the wars and battles. He was a farmer. Powerful guy. He went and took on the challenge, took over Rome, took over the army, and won the war. After they won the war, he felt he’d done his mission and was asked to go and be the emperor, and he gave the ring back and went back to farming. He didn’t only do this once. He did it twice. When they tried to overthrow the empire from within, they asked him back and he came back. He cleaned up the mess through great, great leadership. He had tremendous leadership quality in bringing people together. And again, he gave the ring back and went back to farming.”

  * * *

  Derek Sivers

  Derek Sivers (TW/FB: @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+ books at sivers.org/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 (page 210) 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: fourhourworkweek.com/derek

  “If [more] information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”

  TF: It’s not what you know, it’s what you do consistently. (See Tony Robbins, page 210.)

  “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.”

  TF: 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” (see Marc Andreessen, page 170), “Expect disaster” (see Tony Robbins, page 210), and “Own as little as possible” (see Jason Nemer, page 46, and Kevin Kelly, page 470).

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

  “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.”

  TF: This is genius. Ric
ardo 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 Derek’s.

  For People Starting Out—Say “Yes”

  When Derek was 18, he was living in Boston, attending the Berklee College of Music.

  “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 gonna 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 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 3 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.”

  The Standard Pace Is for Chumps

  “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.’”

  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 ‘Buridan’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:

  “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 wanna 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 musicians’ spelling mistakes in their own bio, and all that kinda 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, oooh . . . 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 gonna make it $35, that will let me give anyone a discount any time 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 5 minutes by walking down to the local record store and asking what they do.”

  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 on page 385, but here’s the origin story:

  “It was time to book the ticket [for a trip he’d committed to long ago], and I was thinking, ‘Ugh. 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 Rubarth, 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-ass stuff, right? Once I started applying this, my life just opened up.”

  “Busy” = Out of Control

  “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.”

  TF: 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 reexamine my systems and rules.

  ✸ What would you put on a billboard?

  “I really admire those places, like Vermont and São Paulo, Brazil, that ban billboards. But, I know that 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 superstores around the world. That’s my life mission. Anybody in? Anybody with me? Let’s do it.”

  Take 45 Minutes Instead of 43—Is Your Red Face Worth It?

  “I’ve always been very Type-A, so a friend of mine got me into cycling when I was living in L.A. 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 gonna 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.