Tools of Titans

by Timothy Ferriss

  State → Story → Strategy

  I learned this from my first Tony Robbins event, Unleash the Power Within (UPW), which Tony invited me to after our first podcast. Perhaps more than any other lesson from Tony, I’ve thought about this the most in the last year. If you were to look at my daily journal right now, you’d see that I’ve scribbled “STATE → STORY → STRATEGY” at the top of each page for the next several weeks. It’s a reminder to check the boxes in that order.

  Tony believes that, in a lowered emotional state, we only see the problems, not solutions. Let’s say you wake up feeling tired and overwhelmed. You sit down to brainstorm strategies to solve your issues, but it comes to naught, and you feel even worse afterward. This is because you started in a negative state, then attempted strategy but didn’t succeed (due to tunnel vision on the problems), and then likely told yourself self-defeating stories (e.g., “I always do this. Why am I so wound up I can’t even think straight?”). To fix this, he encourages you to “prime” your state first. The biochemistry will help you proactively tell yourself an enabling story. Only then do you think on strategy, as you’ll see the options instead of dead ends.

  “Priming” my state is often as simple as doing 5 to 10 push-ups or getting 20 minutes of sun exposure (see Rick Rubin, page 502). Even though I do my most intense exercise at night, I’ve started doing 1–2 minutes of calisthenics—or kettlebell swings (see Justin Boreta, page 356)—in the morning to set my state for the day. Tony’s own priming process is included below.

  I now often ask myself, “Is this really a problem I need to think my way out of? Or is it possible I just need to fix my biochemistry?” I’ve wasted a lot of time journaling on “problems” when I just needed to eat breakfast sooner, do 10 push-ups, or get an extra hour of sleep. Sometimes, you think you have to figure out your life’s purpose, but you really just need some macadamia nuts and a cold fucking shower.

  Morning “Priming” Instead of Meditation

  Upon waking, Tony immediately goes into his priming routine, which is intended to produce a rapid change in his physiology: “To me, if you want a primetime life, you’ve got to prime daily.” There are many tools that I’ve seen Tony use over the years, several of which I’ve adopted for myself, including:

  Cold-water plunge (I use a quick cold shower, which could be just 30 to 60 seconds)

  Tony follows this with breathing exercises. He does 3 sets of 30 reps. His seated technique is similar to the rapid nasal “breath of fire” in yoga, but he adds in rapid overhead extension of the arms on the inhale, with the elbows dropping down the rib cage on the exhale.

  Alternative: “Breath walking.” This is vintage Tony, but I still use it quite often when traveling. Simply walk for a few minutes, using a breathing cycle of 4 short inhales through the nose, then 4 short exhales through the mouth.

  Following something like the above, Tony does 9 to 10 minutes of what some might consider meditation. To him, however, the objective is very different: It’s about cueing and prompting enabling emotions for the rest of the day. His 9 to 10 minutes are broken into thirds. Here is an abbreviated synopsis:

  The first 3 minutes: “Feeling totally grateful for three things. I make sure that one of them is very, very simple: the wind on my face, the reflection of the clouds that I just saw. But I don’t just think gratitude. I let gratitude fill my soul, because when you’re grateful, we all know there’s no anger. It’s impossible to be angry and grateful simultaneously. When you’re grateful, there is no fear. You can’t be fearful and grateful simultaneously.”

  The second 3 minutes: “Total focus on feeling the presence of God, if you will, however you want to language that for yourself. But this inner presence coming in, and feeling it heal everything in my body, in my mind, my emotions, my relationships, my finances. I see it as solving anything that needs to be solved. I experience the strengthening of my gratitude, of my conviction, of my passion. . . .”

  The last 3 minutes: “Focusing on three things that I’m going to make happen, my ‘three to thrive.’ . . . See it as though it’s already been done, feel the emotions, etc. . . .

  “And, as I’ve always said, there’s no excuse not to do 10 minutes. If you don’t have 10 minutes, you don’t have a life.”

  This reminded me of something I’ve heard from many adept meditators (such as Russell Simmons) in various forms: “If you don’t have 20 minutes to delve into yourself through meditation, then that means you really need 2 hours.”

  Four Commonalities Across the Best Investors

  Tony has interviewed and developed friendships with some of the best investors in the world, including Paul Tudor Jones (who he’s coached for more than 10 years), Ray Dalio, Carl Icahn, David Swensen, Kyle Bass, and many more. These are the hard-to-interview “unicorns” who consistently beat the market, despite the fact that it’s called impossible. Tony wrote a book based on his learnings (Money: Master the Game), and here are few of the patterns he identified:

  Capping the downside: “Every single one of those [people] is obsessed with not losing money. I mean, a level of obsession that’s mind-boggling.” On Richard Branson: “His first question to every business is, ‘What’s the downside? And how do I protect against it?’ Like when he did his piece with Virgin [air travel]—that’s a big risk to start an airline—he went to Boeing and negotiated a deal that [he] could send the planes back if it didn’t work, and he wasn’t liable.”

  TF: Branson also tested with little or no risk. In Losing My Virginity, which had a huge impact on me around college graduation, he described his very first flight: “We were trying to catch a flight to Puerto Rico, but the local Puerto Rican scheduled flight was canceled. The airport terminal was full of stranded passengers. I made a few calls to charter companies, and agreed to charter a plane for $2,000 to Puerto Rico. I divided the price by the number of seats, borrowed a blackboard, and wrote virgin airways: $39 single flight to puerto rico. I walked around the airport terminal and soon filled every seat on the charter plane. As we landed in Puerto Rico, a passenger turned to me and said: ‘Virgin Airways isn’t too bad—smarten up the service a little and you could be in business.’”

  Back to Tony, “cap the downside” also applies to thinking long-term about fees and middlemen: “If three of my friends [and I] all put aside the same amount of money, and we all get a 7% return, but my buddy’s getting fees of 3%, my other buddy’s 2%, and I’m 1%, and all three of us put $1 million in or $100,000 . . . the person with 3% of fees ends up with 65% less money [in the long-term]. . . .”

  Asymmetrical risks and rewards: “Every single one of them is obsessed with asymmetrical risk and reward. . . . It simply means they’re looking to use the least amount of risk to get the max amount of upside, and that’s what they live for. . . . [They don’t believe they] have to take huge risks for huge rewards. Say, ‘How do I get no risk and get huge rewards?’ and because you ask a question continuously and you believe [there’s an] answer, you get it.”

  TF: Here’s a wild example. Kyle Bass at one point bought $1 million worth of nickels (roughly 20 million coins). Why? Because their face value was 5 cents and their scrap metal value was 6.8 cents at the time. That’s an immediate gain of $360,000. Nicely done.

  Asset allocation: “They absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, know they’re going to be wrong . . . so they set up an asset allocation system that will make them successful. They all agree asset allocation is the single most important investment decision.” In Money: Master the Game, Ray Dalio elaborated for Tony: “When people think they’ve got a balanced portfolio, stocks are three times more volatile than bonds. So when you’re 50/50, you’re really 90/10. You really are massively at risk, and that’s why when the markets go down, you get eaten alive. . . . Whatever asset class you invest in, I promise you, in your lifetime, it will drop no less than 50% and more likely 70% at some point. That is wh
y you absolutely must diversify.”

  Contribution: “And the last one that I found: almost all of them were real givers, not just givers on the surface . . . but really passionate about giving. . . . It was really real.”

  TF: One great example is the Robin Hood Foundation, conceived of by Paul Tudor Jones, which fights poverty in New York City.

  ✸ Who comes to mind when I say the word “punchable”?

  For a few dozen podcast episodes, I asked the question: “When you think of the word ‘punchable,’ whose face is the first that comes to mind?” Nine times out of ten, it fell flat, and I’ve since stopped asking it. But in my interview with Tony, all of those flops were redeemed. He took a long pause and then said, “Punchable. Oh, my gosh. Well, I had an interesting meeting with President Obama . . .” and proceeded to describe a closed-session conversation with President Obama (you can hear the full story at 42:15 in episode #38). It was one of those “God, I really hope my audio equipment is working” moments. He closed it with “So, I don’t know if I’d say ‘punch,’ but ‘shake’ him.”

  ✸ Most-gifted or recommended books?

  Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

  The Fourth Turning by William Strauss (Also, Generations by William Strauss, which was gifted to Tony by Bill Clinton)

  Mindset by Carol Dweck (for parenting)

  As a Man Thinketh by James Allen (see Shay Carl, page 441)

  Spirit animal: Sled dog

  * * *

  Casey Neistat

  Casey Neistat (TW/IG: @CaseyNeistat, youtube.com/caseyneistat) is a New York–based filmmaker and YouTuber. Casey ran away from home at 15 and had his first child at 17. He went on welfare to get free milk and diapers and never asked his parents for money again.

  His online films have been viewed nearly 300 million times in the last 5 years. He is the writer, director, editor, and star of the series The Neistat Brothers on HBO and won the John Cassavetes Award at the 2011 Independent Spirit Awards for the film Daddy Longlegs. His main body of work consists of dozens of short films he has released exclusively on the Internet, including regular contributions to the critically acclaimed New York Times Op-Docs series. He is also the founder of Beme, a startup aiming to make creating and sharing video dead simple.

  All you need to know is from World War II

  “I always say I got all my understanding of how business and life works from studying the Second World War.”

  Aside from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Casey’s favorite book is The Second World War by John Keegan. He’s read this massive tome three times, cover to cover. He remembers showing up to work and getting in trouble because he was tired from staying up all night reading this textbook.

  The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is Casey’s favorite movie, made during World War II. Wes Anderson studied this film, and you can see a lot of his adapted style in this movie.

  ✸ Favorite documentary

  Little Dieter Needs to Fly by Werner Herzog is Casey’s favorite documentary, made in 1997. This is about a U.S. fighter pilot in Vietnam who gets shot down in his very first mission, and is trapped as a POW for a number of years. This documentary will bring you to your knees. Any time you are having a bad day (or you think you have it hard), watch this movie and you will understand what it means to survive. (See Jocko Willink, page 412.)

  Follow What Angers You

  Casey made the short film Bike Lanes in 2011, and it became his first viral hit. He was given a summons from a New York City police officer for riding his bike outside of the bike lane, which isn’t an actual infraction. Instead of going to court, fighting the $50 summons, and wasting half a day in the process, Casey redirected his anger and made a movie that expressed his frustration in a clever way.

  Casey begins the movie by repeating what the cop told him: He has to stay in the bike lane for safety and legal reasons, no matter what. Casey proceeds to ride his bike around NYC, crashing into everything that is in the bike lanes preventing people from following this rule. The film’s grand finale is Casey crashing into a police car that was truly parked in the middle of a bike lane.

  His movie went tremendously viral and was seen around 5 million times in its first day. At one point, Mayor Bloomberg had to respond to a question about the video in a press conference. When in doubt about your next creative project, follow your anger (see Whitney Cummings, page 477, and James Altucher, page 246).

  What’s the Most Outrageous Thing You Can Do?

  Make It Count, at close to 20 million views, is Casey’s all-time most popular video on YouTube. The catalyst: He’d built a successful career in advertising by 2011 but was extremely bored. He was in the middle of a three-commercial deal with Nike: “The first two movies were right down the line, what you’d expect. I had big, huge, $100-million athletes in them. They were very well received. I loved making them. But when it came time to make the third movie, I was really burnt out from the process.

  “At the ninth hour, I called my editor up and said, ‘Hey, let’s not make this advertisement. Instead, let’s do something I’ve always wanted to do, which is: Let’s just take the entire production budget and travel the world until we run out of money, and we’ll record that. We’ll make some sort of movie about that.’ And he said, ‘You’re crazy, but sure.’”

  The Make It Count video literally opens with scrolling text that says, “Nike asked me to make a movie about what it means to make it count. Instead of making their movie, I spent the entire budget traveling around the world with my friend Max. We’d keep going until the money ran out. It took 10 days.” They covered 15 countries.

  Make It Count became a video about chasing what matters to you. This was the entire message and point of the campaign to begin with. Make It Count ended up being Nike’s most watched video on the Internet for several years.

  TF: How can you make your bucket-list dreams pay for themselves by sharing them? This is, in effect, how I’ve crafted my entire career since 2004. It’s modeled after Ben Franklin’s excellent advice: “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.”

  The YouTube Inflection Point

  Casey’s subscriber count and success on YouTube hockey-sticked when he decided on his 34th birthday to vlog (video blog) daily. Shay Carl (page 441) had the same experience.

  Philosophy and Daily Routine

  “You realize that you will never be the best-looking person in the room. You’ll never be the smartest person in the room. You’ll never be the most educated, the most well-versed. You can never compete on those levels. But what you can always compete on, the true egalitarian aspect to success, is hard work. You can always work harder than the next guy.”

  Casey walks the talk. He wakes up at 4:30 a.m., 7 days a week, and he immediately finishes his vlog edit from the night before.

  The edit usually gets done between 6:30 a.m. and 7 a.m.

  7 a.m. to 7:45 a.m. is for processing, uploading, and designing the video.

  The video goes live at exactly 8 a.m., 7 days a week.

  Casey works out immediately after 8 a.m., which usually involves running (8 to 12 miles) or the gym. He likes listening to the Jonny Famous playlist on Spotify.

  He goes into the office by 9:30 a.m. after his workout. He works in his office all day, and tries to get out by 6:30 p.m. to race home and give his baby a bath. He will then hang out with his wife for about an hour until she goes to bed around 9 p.m.

  After his wife goes to bed, he sits down and edits until he passes out at his computer, usually around 1 a.m. Casey usually sleeps on the couch until 4:30 a.m., and then he starts the process all over again.

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

  “My grandmother. She passed away at 92. She’s my hero, she’s my muse, she’s my everything. She started tap dancing when she was 6 years old. She was a little fat girl and her parents made
her do something to lose the weight, so she started tap dancing, and she loved it. She fell in love with something at age 6 and she didn’t stop tap dancing until the day before she died at age 92. She died on a Monday morning, and the first thing we had to do was call her 100 students to say she wasn’t going to make class that day.

  “What is 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. And this woman spent all day, every day doing what she loved.”

  Spirit animal: Rhino

  * * *

  Morgan Spurlock

  Morgan Spurlock (TW: @MorganSpurlock, morganspurlock.com) is an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker based in New York. He is a prolific writer, director, producer, and human guinea pig. His first film, Super Size Me, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004, winning Best Directing honors. The film went on to garner an Academy Award nomination for best feature documentary.

  Since then, Morgan has directed, produced, and/or distributed the critically acclaimed CNN series Morgan Spurlock: Inside Man, the FX series 30 Days, and the films Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, Freakonomics, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, and many others.

  Morgan’s latest project is a tech startup called Clect (clect.com), which is a community and one-stop marketplace where people can browse, sell, and buy collectibles of any type imaginable (Star Wars, Smurfs, comics, a Millennium Falcon made from motorcycle parts, etc.).