Tools of Titans

by Timothy Ferriss

  “Most people to this day think of them as so radically different from each other. But I want to posit a different way to look at it. It comes from what I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of art on the part of most people. Because they think of art as learning to draw or learning a certain kind of self-expression. But in fact, what artists do is they learn to see.”

  Meditation

  Ed practices vipassana meditation for 30 to 60 minutes per day in one session. He got started after visiting the Symbol of Man Center, which is Tibetan.

  ✸ Most-gifted or recommended book?

  “I would say there are certain children’s books I’ve given a few times, like One Monster After Another by Mercer Mayer. I love that book.”

  Spirit animal: Bee

  * * *

  Tracy DiNunzio

  Tracy DiNunzio (TW: @TracyDiNunzio, tradesy.com) is a killer. She’s the founder and CEO of Tradesy, which has taken off like a rocket ship. She’s raised $75 million from investors including Richard Branson, Kleiner Perkins, and yours truly, and board members include the legendary John Doerr. Tradesy is on a mission to make the resale value of anything you own available on demand. Their tagline is “Cash in on your closet.”

  “When You Complain, Nobody Wants to Help You”

  “I was born with spina bifida, which is a congenital birth defect where your vertebrae don’t form around your spinal cord. This is likely attributed to my dad’s exposure to Agent Orange when he was in Vietnam. . . . I did a lot of painting when I was recovering from surgeries, so I had to use interesting techniques, like crawling on the floor to make the painting because I couldn’t stand up. [As a coping mechanism] I tried complaining and being bitter. It didn’t work. It was just terrible. . . . Stephen Hawking actually has the best quote on this and also [a] legitimate story. . . . [He] has the right to complain probably more than anybody. He says that, ‘When you complain, nobody wants to help you,’ and it’s the simplest thing and so plainly spoken. Only he could really say that brutal, honest truth, but it’s true, right? If you spend your time focusing on the things that are wrong, and that’s what you express and project to people you know, you don’t become a source of growth for people, you become a source of destruction for people. That draws more destructiveness.

  “Because I was thinking about how I was in pain and talking about how I was in pain, it started a momentum that went in a negative direction in my life. At one point, probably 2006 to 2007, I just decided to put myself on a ‘complaining diet,’ where I said, ‘Not only am I not going to say anything negative about the situation I’m in, but I’m not going to let myself think anything negative about it.’ . . . It took a long time and I wasn’t perfect at it, but . . . not only did replacing those thoughts helped me start moving my life in a better direction, where I wasn’t obsessing about what was wrong, . . . it also made me not feel physical pain as much, which is very liberating and kind of necessary if you want to do anything.”

  Pick the Right Audience to Suck in Front Of

  “If anybody is going to go out and pitch investors, my advice is to make your first 10 meetings with investors that you don’t really want funding from, because you’re probably going to suck in the beginning. I sucked for a really long time.”

  TF: Even Jerry Seinfeld bombs with early material (see the Comedian documentary), so he develops it at small venues. Nike tests a lot of their new products and campaigns in places like New Zealand before getting on the big stage in the United States. I was turned down 27 times when pitching The 4-Hour Workweek to New York City publishers. Fortunately, you often only need one publisher, one lead investor, one X. Book your A list for after your first 10 pitches.

  Spirit animal: Octopus

  * * *

  Phil Libin

  Phil Libin (TW: @plibin, evernote.com) is the co-founder and executive chairman of Evernote. Evernote has roughly 150 million users, and I personally use it at least 10 times a day. It is my external brain for capturing all the information, documents, online articles, lists, etc., in my life. It was used to capture all the research for this book. Phil is also a managing director at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm that has invested in companies such as Airbnb, Snapchat, Stripe, and Warby Parker. Phil’s roster of mentors blows my mind, as evidenced in this profile.

  ✸ Who’s the first person who comes to mind when you think of the word “successful”?

  “The first thing that popped into my mind when you said ‘successful’ was [the] iPhone. . . . I guess I don’t really think of people as ‘successful.’ . . . Tons of people deserve to be successful because they’re supersmart and interesting and work hard, but they just haven’t had the luck.”

  ✸ Must-watch documentary

  The Gatekeepers (2012) features interviews with all of the living heads of the Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency, who talk frankly about life, war, and peace. The motto of the Shin Bet is “Magen veLo Yera’e,” literally “the unseen shield,” or “defender who shall not be seen.”

  Jeff Bezos on Questioning Assumptions

  “Basically, every time I talk to Bezos [Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com], it changes my life. . . . [For example,] I’ve spent my entire life thinking that I want to go to Mars . . . it was on The Brady Bunch. I thought this was the best thing ever.

  “At some point, if I structure my life correctly, maybe I’ll get to go. I think it’s just so important for humanity to be able to do that . . . and I talked to Elon [Musk] a couple of times and was vastly inspired by everything that he and SpaceX are doing. . . .

  “I ran into Jeff Bezos a bit later and was saying I just got to talk with Elon, and I’m superexcited about Mars. I really hope that one day I can go. And Bezos looks at me and goes, ‘Mars is stupid.’ And I say, ‘What?’ He says, ‘Once we get off of the planet, the last thing we want to do is go to another gravity.’

  “Bezos said, ‘The whole point, the reason this is so hard to get off the earth, is to defeat gravity the first time. Once we do that, why would you want to go to Mars? We should just live on space stations and mine asteroids and everything is much better than being on Mars.’ And in 30 seconds, he had completely changed the course of my life, because he’s totally right.”

  Mikitani on Necessary Reinvention—The Rule of 3 and 10

  Phil considers Hiroshi Mikitani, the founder and CEO of Rakuten, one of the most impressive people in the world. Almost 90% of Japan’s Internet population is registered with Rakuten, the country’s largest online marketplace. Mikitani taught Phil “the rule of 3 and 10.”

  “[This effectively means] that every single thing in your company breaks every time you roughly triple in size.

  “He was the first employee at Rakuten, and now they’ve got 10,000 or more. He said when you’re just one person, everything kind of works. You sort of figure it out. And then, at some point, you have three people, and now, things are kind of different. Making decisions and everything with three people is different. But you adjust to that. Then, you’re fine for a while. You get to 10 people, and everything kind of breaks again. You figure that out, and then you get to 30 people and everything is different, and then 100 and then 300 and then 1,000.

  “His hypothesis is that everything breaks at roughly these points of 3 and 10 [multiples of 3 and powers of 10]. And by ‘everything,’ it means everything: how you handle payroll, how you schedule meetings, what kind of communications you use, how you do budgeting, who actually makes decisions. Every implicit and explicit part of the company just changes significantly when it triples.

  “His insight is [that] a lot of companies get into trouble because of this. When you’re a quickly growing startup, you get into huge trouble because you blow right through a few of these triplings without really realizing it. And then, you turn around, and you realize . . . we’re at 400 people now, but some of our processes and systems we set in place when we were 30. . . . You should constantly, perpetually be thinking abou
t how to reinvent yourself and how to treat the culture.

  “Big companies get in trouble for exactly the opposite reason. Let’s say you get to 10,000 people in your company and, theoretically, you figured out how to run things at 10,000. Well, your next big point isn’t until 30,000. But you’re probably not going to get the 30,000 ever, or certainly not within a few years. It might take a decade or more for a company to go from 10,000 to 30,000. But no one feels like waiting around for a decade or more to reinvent themselves, and so big companies are constantly pushing all of these bullshit innovation initiatives because they feel like they have to do something. But they’re not actually connected to any fundamental change in the company.”

  TF: Have you outgrown your systems or beliefs? Is it time that you upgraded? Or, on a personal level, as Jerry Colonna, executive coach to some of the biggest tech stars in Silicon Valley, would ask: “How are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want?”

  Spirit animal: Frigate

  * * *

  Chris Young

  Chris Young (TW: @ChefChrisYoung, chefsteps.com) is an obsessive tinkerer, inventor, and innovator. His areas of expertise range from extreme aviation to mathematics and apocalyptic-scale BBQs. Above all, he is one of the clearest thinkers I know.

  Chris is the principal co-author of the genre-redefining six-volume work Modernist Cuisine. Chris was also the founding chef of Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck experimental kitchen, the secret culinary laboratory behind the innovative dishes at one of the best restaurants in the world. Prior to becoming a chef, he completed degrees in theoretical mathematics and biochemistry. He is now the CEO of ChefSteps, based above Pike Place Market in Seattle, Washington.

  Behind the Scenes

  Matt Mullenweg (page 202) and I have visited Chris’s lab many times. Search “Ferriss aerated green apple sorbet” to see video of me resembling Puff the Magic Dragon.

  Off hours, Chris is training to break a world record in unpowered gliding. Target location: Patagonia.

  Chris was my go-to scientist for the “Scientist” section of The 4-Hour Chef, and several of his recipes led me to a live cooking demo with Jimmy Fallon.

  Chris is good friends with science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson, who’s penned several of my all-time favorites, including Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. Many guests in this book recommend both Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (Seth Godin, page 237, and Kelly Starrett, page 122). Every year, Chris and Neal have the Annual Loudness Fest in Neal’s backyard, where they build outrageous machines and cooking contraptions: “It wasn’t a big deal that we dug a 6' x 6' x 6'-deep pit in his backyard and turned it into a Jacuzzi to sous-vide cook a 300-pound pig,” Chris says. “Each year after that for the next 5 years, it had to be more over-the-top, more outlandish, more ludicrously dangerous. Dangerous in the sense of maybe the neighbors’ houses will burn down, maybe somebody will be killed by spilling concrete, maybe somebody will be burned to cinders because we’re cooking with magma, that kind of thing.”

  ✸ What would you put on a billboard?

  “‘It all worked out anyway,’” placed outside of his high school. “High school was not a great time for me.”

  “The interesting jobs are the ones that you make up.”

  His dad, a very successful entrepreneur, gave Chris advice when he was a freshman or sophomore in high school:

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

  “What interesting thing are you working on? Why is that interesting to you? What’s surprising about that? Is anybody else thinking about this?”

  These are common questions from Heston Blumenthal, the former executive chef of The Fat Duck, the then–#1 ranked restaurant in the world. Chris explains: “I’ve never seen somebody as curious as him, who could talk to just about anyone else about whatever it was they did. He would pose questions like the above to anyone about anything, whether they were psychologists, sports trainers, chefs, writers, or otherwise.”

  This made me smile. I met Heston once in the early 2000s at a book signing inside a culinary school in San Francisco. I sheepishly approached him and asked, “What is your favorite way to cook beans? I’m embarrassed to ask, but I have a lot of trouble getting them right.” He perked up, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “You know, people don’t know how complex beans can be,” asked perhaps a dozen clarifying questions, then proceeded to give me a 5-minute master’s degree in cooking beans. I’ve been a fanboy since.

  “If you had $100 million, what would you build that would have no value to others in copying?”

  Gabe Newell, the billionaire co-founder of video game development and distribution company Valve, has largely funded Chris’s company ChefSteps. He’s been a huge supporter, but only after asking questions that stretch Chris’s brain:

  “So Gabe goes, ‘If I gave you $100 million, what would you guys go build? That by building it, there’s no value for anyone copying?’ I’ll give you an example. When Intel goes to build a new chip fabricator, it’s billions and billions of dollars, and there’s no value in anybody else copying it, because not only do they have to spend even more billions to catch up, but they have to spend more billions to learn everything else Intel knows about this, and then they have to be 10 times better for anyone to want to switch. So it’s just a waste of everyone’s time [to attempt copying].”

  TF: One of the top 10 venture capitalists I know uses a variant of this litmus test as his measurement of “disruptive”: For each $1 of revenue you generate, can you cost an incumbent $5 to $10? If so, he’ll invest. As a related aside, one of my favorite business-related PDFs floating around the Internet is “Valve: Handbook for New Employees” from Gabe’s company. As Chris put it: “It’s the only HR document you will ever knowingly want to read.”

  The Accidental Jedi Mind Trick

  Chris got his first line cook job by accidentally appealing to the chef’s (William Belickis’s) ego. He had been staging (interning) and wanted to make the jump to full-timer:

  “At the end of service, William was really gracious. He sat down with me in the dining room, and he had a glass of wine. He offered me a glass. He said, ‘You know, now’s probably not really a great time. I’m not sure I have the work for you.’ Being very earnest, I said, ‘I totally understand. Is there anybody in town you’d recommend would be a good place for me to work? I’m really committed to doing this. I really want to see what it’s about.’

  “And what I didn’t realize at the time, was that was probably the perfect thing to have said to William, because William had an enormous ego and he was just not going to be capable of bringing himself to say anybody else in town was any good at all. So you could just see him sort of sputtering. ‘Well, really there’s no one. I think I’m probably the right person to teach you. So why don’t you come back on Tuesday?’”

  Hold the Standard

  Chris mentioned that by the time he arrived at The Fat Duck, Heston no longer yelled at people, but “he signaled disappointment in other ways . . . he really pushed you, the team, everyone else to strive for excellence all the time.” I asked him to give me an example. Here’s his response, shortened for space:

  “The order came on for [quail jelly], and I saw that they weren’t fully set up. I tried to float the langoustine cream on top anyway, and I sent them out to the pass knowing that they weren’t perfect. Those things came back like a boomerang. Heston just came around the corner holding them in his hand and just goes, ‘Chris.’ He’s looking at me, and he’s looking at the dish, and he’s looking at me, and he’s looking at the
dish, and . . . ‘Not a chance.’ Puts it back. I just remember the withering look—like if I ever did that again, don’t show up again. I remember the lesson because he said, ‘We can do something else. If it’s not ready, we’re not going to send it out, and just hope they don’t notice that it’s not that good. We’ll fix it. We’ll do something else, but don’t try to slip by something that you know is below the standard.’ You only need that lesson once. That wasn’t the standard, and you know what the standard is. Hold the standard. Ask for help. Fix it. Do whatever’s necessary. But don’t cheat.”

  TIM: “But how do you manage the fine line between insisting on high standards and simply being an overbearing asshole?” [Chris now manages a company of 50+ employees.]

  CHRIS: “The first thing is, on a good day, I will try to step back and say, ‘What context does this person even have, and have I provided appropriate context?’ . . . Given all the context they had, maybe I would’ve made the same decision, or I could imagine somebody else making the same decision. So increasingly, I try to think about: ‘What context and visibility do I have and what do they have? Am I basically being unfair because I’m operating from a greater set of information?’”

  The Anti-Bullshit Manual

  One of the books that Chris has found himself gifting a lot is an out-of-print book on thermodynamics called The Second Law. “It was written by an Oxford physical chemistry professor named P.W. Atkins. That book is just a phenomenal, casual, infographic-laden read on how the world works from an energy perspective. I found that so incredibly useful in trying to understand how to do something, how to make something work, whether something’s even possible. It’s frequently my bullshit detector.”