Tools of Titans

by Timothy Ferriss

  So I took the trip, right? Well, I’ll get to that. First, I felt it prudent to dance around with my shame, embarrassment, and anger for 6 months, all the while playing an endless loop of reasons why my cop-out fantasy trip could never work. One of my more productive periods, for sure.

  Then, one day, in my bliss of envisioning how bad my future suffering would be, I hit upon a gem of an idea. It was surely a highlight of my “don’t happy, be worry” phase: Why don’t I decide exactly what my nightmare would be—the worst thing that could possibly happen as a result of my trip?

  Well, my business could fail while I’m overseas, obviously. Probably would. A legal warning letter would accidentally not get forwarded, and I would get sued. My business would be shut down, and inventory would spoil on the shelves while I’m picking my toes in solitary misery on some cold shore in Ireland. Crying in the rain, I imagine. My bank account would crater by 80% and certainly my car and motorcycle in storage would be stolen. I suppose someone would probably spit on my head from a high-rise balcony while I’m feeding food scraps to a stray dog, which would then spook and bite me squarely on the face. God, life is a cruel, hard bitch.

  Conquering Fear = Defining Fear

  * * *

  “Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’”

  —Seneca

  Then a funny thing happened. In my undying quest to make myself miserable, I accidentally began to backpedal. As soon as I cut through the vague unease and ambiguous anxiety by defining my nightmare, the worst-case scenario, I wasn’t as worried about taking a trip. Suddenly, I started thinking of simple steps I could take to salvage my remaining resources and get back on track if all hell struck at once. I could always take a temporary bartending job to pay the rent if I had to. I could sell some furniture and cut back on eating out. I could steal lunch money from the kindergarteners who passed by my apartment every morning. The options were many. I realized it wouldn’t be that hard to get back to where I was, let alone survive. None of these things would be fatal—not even close. Mere panty pinches on the journey of life.

  I realized that on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being nothing and 10 being permanently life-changing, my so-called worst-case scenario might have a temporary impact of 3 or 4. I believe this is true of most people and most would-be “holy sh*t, my life is over” disasters. Keep in mind that this is the one-in-a-million disaster nightmare. On the other hand, if I realized my best-case scenario, or even a probable-case scenario, it would easily have a permanent 9 or 10 positive life-changing effect.

  In other words, I was risking an unlikely and temporary 3 or 4 for a probable and permanent 9 or 10, and I could easily recover my baseline workaholic prison with a bit of extra work if I wanted to. This all equated to a significant realization: There was practically no risk, only huge life-changing upside potential, and I could resume my previous course without any more effort than I was already putting forth.

  That is when I made the decision to take the trip and bought a one-way ticket to Europe. I started planning my adventures and eliminating my physical and psychological baggage. None of my disasters came to pass, and my life has been a near–fairy tale since. The business did better than ever, and I practically forgot about it as it financed my travels around the world in style for 15 months.

  Q&A: Questions and Actions

  * * *

  “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”

  —Mark Twain

  If you are nervous about making the jump or simply putting it off out of fear of the unknown, here is your antidote. Write down your answers, and keep in mind that thinking a lot will not prove as fruitful or as prolific as simply brain-vomiting on the page. Write and do not edit—aim for volume. Spend a few minutes on each answer.

  Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering. What doubt, fears, and “what-ifs” pop up as you consider the big changes you can—or need to—make? Envision them in painstaking detail. Would it be the end of your life? What would be the permanent impact, if any, on a scale of 1 to 10? Are these things really permanent? How likely do you think it is that they would actually happen?

  What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if temporarily? Chances are, it’s easier than you imagine. How could you get things back under control?

  What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probable scenarios? Now that you’ve defined the nightmare, what are the more probable or definite positive outcomes, whether internal (confidence, self-esteem, etc.) or external? What would the impact of these more-likely outcomes be on a scale of 1 to 10? How likely is it that you could produce at least a moderately good outcome? Have less intelligent people done this before and pulled it off?

  If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control? Imagine this scenario and run through questions 1 to 3 above. If you quit your job to test other options, how could you later get back on the same career track if you absolutely had to?

  What are you putting off out of fear? Usually, what we most fear doing is what we most need to do. That phone call, that conversation, whatever the action might be—it is fear of unknown outcomes that prevents us from doing what we need to do. Define the worst case, accept it, and do it. I’ll repeat something you might consider tattooing on your forehead: What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. As I have heard said, a person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear. I got into this habit by attempting to contact celebrities and famous businesspeople for advice.

  What is it costing you—financially, emotionally, and physically—to postpone action? Don’t only evaluate the potential downside of action. It is equally important to measure the atrocious cost of inaction. If you don’t pursue those things that excite you, where will you be in 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years? How will you feel having allowed circumstance to impose itself upon you and having allowed 10 more years of your finite life to pass doing what you know will not fulfill you? If you telescope out 10 years and know with 100% certainty that it is a path of disappointment and regret, and if we define risk as “the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome,” inaction is the greatest risk of all.

  What are you waiting for? If you cannot answer this without resorting to the BS concept of “good timing,” the answer is simple: You’re afraid, just like the rest of the world. Measure the cost of inaction, realize the unlikelihood and repairability of most missteps, and develop the most important habit of those who excel and enjoy doing so: action.

  “Productivity is for robots. What humans are going to be really good at is asking questions, being creative, and experiences.”

  * * *

  Kevin Kelly

  Kevin Kelly (TW: @kevin2kelly, kk.org) is “senior maverick” at Wired magazine, which he co-founded in 1993. He also co-founded the All Species Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at cataloging and identifying every living species on earth. In his spare time, he writes best-selling books, co-founded the Rosetta Project, which is building an archive of all documented human languages, and serves on the board of the Long Now Foundation. As part of the last, he’s investigating how to revive and restore endangered or extinct species, including the woolly mammoth. He might be the real-world “most interesting man in the world.”

  Behind the Scenes

  I attended the very first Quantified Self meet-up on September 10, 2008, at Kevin’s picturesque wood cabin-style home. From that small, 28-person gathering, “QS” has grown into a pop-culture term and international phenomenon, with organizations in m
ore than 20 countries.

  Sit, Sit. Walk, Walk. Don’t Wobble.

  “The Zen mantra is ‘Sit, sit. Walk, walk. Don’t wobble.’ . . . It’s this idea that when I’m with a person, that’s total priority. Anything else is multitasking. No, no, no, no. The people-to-people, person-to-person trumps anything else. I have given my dedication to this. If I go to a play or a movie, I am at the movie. I am not anywhere else. It’s 100%—I am going to listen. If I go to a conference, I am going to go to the conference.”

  TF: This is very similar to Derek Sivers’s (page 184) “Don’t be a donkey” rule. In a world of distraction, single-tasking is a superpower.

  The Death Countdown Clock

  “I actually have a countdown clock that Matt Groening at Futurama was inspired by, and they did a little episode of Futurama about it. I took the actuarial tables for the estimated age of my death, for someone born when I was born, and I worked back the number of days. I have that showing on my computer, how many days. I tell you, nothing concentrates your time like knowing how many days you have left. Now, of course, I’m likely to live longer than that. I’m in good health, etc. But nonetheless, I have 6,000-something days. It’s not very many days to do all the things I want to do.

  “I learned something from my friend Stewart Brand [founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, president of the Long Now Foundation], who organized his remaining days around 5-year increments. He says any great idea that’s significant, that’s worth doing, for him, will last about 5 years, from the time he thinks of it, to the time he stops thinking about it. And if you think of it in terms of 5-year projects, you can count those off on a couple hands, even if you’re young.”

  TF: One massively successful private equity investor I know uses an Excel spreadsheet to display his own death countdown clock. Memento mori—remember that you’re going to die. It’s a great way to remember to live.

  ✸ One manual project that every human should experience?

  “You need to build your own house, your own shelter. It’s not that hard to do, believe me. I built my own house.”

  Write to Get Ideas, Not to Express Them

  “What I discovered, which is what many writers discover, is that I write in order to think. I’d say, ‘I think I have an idea,’ but when I begin to write it, I realize, ‘I have no idea,’ and I don’t actually know what I think until I try and write it. . . . That was the revelation.”

  The Problem with Being Nostradamus

  Kevin has an incredible track record of predicting tech innovations and trends. It’s a blessing and a curse:

  “The dilemma is that any true forecast about the future is going to be dismissed. Any future that is believable now is going to be wrong, and so you’re stuck. If people believe it, it’s wrong, and if they don’t believe it, where does it get you?”

  TF: One of his tools for coming up with unbelievable (yet ultimately accurate) predictions is making a list of what everyone thinks is true or will be true, and asking “What if that weren’t true?” for each, brainstorming the ramifications.

  Can You Flip the Deferred-Life Plan and Make It Work?

  “Many, many people are working very hard, trying to save their money to retire so they can travel. Well, I decided to flip it around and travel when I was really young, when I had zero money. And I had experiences that, basically, even a billion dollars couldn’t have bought.”

  “You Don’t Want ‘Premature Optimization’”

  “I really recommend slack. ‘Productive’ is for your middle ages. When you’re young, you want to be prolific and make and do things, but you don’t want to measure them in terms of productivity. You want to measure them in terms of extreme performance, you want to measure them in extreme satisfaction.”

  The Ideas You Can’t Give Away or Kill . . .

  “I became a proponent of trying to give things away first. Tell everybody what you’re doing . . . you try to give these ideas away, and people are happy, because they love great ideas. [I’ll give it to them and say,] ‘Hey, it’s a great idea. You should do it.’ I’d try to give everything away first, and then I’d try to kill everything [else]. It’s the ones that keep coming back that I can’t kill and I can’t give away, that make me think, ‘Hmmm, maybe that’s the one I’m supposed to do.’”

  TF: Kevin Rose (page 340) does EXACTLY the same thing. I’ve seen him do it dozens of times.

  Create a New Slot

  “The great temptation that people have is they want to be someone else, they want to be in someone else’s movie. They want to be the best rock star, and there are so many of those already that you can only wind up imitating somebody in that slot. To me, success is you make your own slot. You have a new slot that didn’t exist before. That’s, of course, what Jesus and many others were doing. That’s really hard to do, but I think that’s what I chalk up as success.”

  (See “The Law of Category,” page 276.)

  True Films

  On TrueFilms.com, Kevin has reviewed the best documentaries he’s seen over decades. The counterpart book series, True Films 3.0, contains the 200 documentaries he feels you should see before you die, and it is available as a PDF on kk.org. Three docs we both love are The King of Kong, Man on Wire, and A State of Mind.

  The Worst Case: A Sleeping Bag and Oatmeal

  “One of the many life skills that you want to learn at a fairly young age is the skill of being an ultra-thrifty, minimal kind of little wisp that’s traveling through time . . . in the sense of learning how little you actually need to live, not just in a survival mode, but in a contented mode. . . . That gives you the confidence to take a risk, because you say, ‘What’s the worst that can happen? Well, the worst that can happen is that I’d have a backpack and a sleeping bag, and I’d be eating oatmeal. And I’d be fine.’”

  Is This What I So Feared?

  “Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplify, simplify. . . . A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

  —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

  Fear-setting (page 463) is one instrument in the toolbox of conquering fear. Another of my favorites is fear-rehearsing—regularly microdosing myself with the worst-case scenario as inoculation. One exchange with Jocko Willink (page 412) explains the value of planned exposure to the “bad”:

  TIM: “How do you prepare people and condition them, so that they can actually function when the shit starts hitting the fan?”

  JOCKO: “The SEAL Teams do a very good job of desensitizing you to horrible situations so that you can deal with it when it comes.”

  The following is an excerpt from “On Festivals and Fasting,” letter 18 from The Moral Letters to Lucilius, which Seneca wrote to his pupil Lucilius. The source text is the Loeb Classics translation by Richard Mott Gummere of Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, vol. 1 (Harvard University Press, 1917).

  I reread letter 18 often. Half of the time, you will realize that the “horrible” isn’t so horrible, and when it is, you can make it less so with repeated exposure.

  After Seneca’s writing, I’ve included a few examples of how I personally implement this:

  Enter Seneca

  I am so firmly determined to test the constancy of your mind [Lucilius] that, drawing from the teachings of great men, I shall give you also a lesson: Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?” It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence. In days of peace the soldier performs maneuvers, throws up earthworks with no enemy in sight, and wearies himself by gratuitous toil, in order that he may be equal to unavoidable toil. If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes
. Such is the course which those men have followed who, in their imitation of poverty, have every month come almost to want, that they might never recoil from what they had so often rehearsed.

  You need not suppose that I mean meals like Timon’s, or “paupers’ huts,” or any other device which luxurious millionaires use to beguile the tedium of their lives. Let the pallet be a real one, and the cloak coarse; let the bread be hard and grimy. Endure all this for three or four days at a time, sometimes for more, so that it may be a test of yourself instead of a mere hobby. Then, I assure you, my dear Lucilius, you will leap for joy when filled with a pennyworth of food, and you will understand that a man’s peace of mind does not depend upon Fortune; for, even when angry, she grants enough for our needs.

  * * *

  How might you put this into practice? Here are a few things I’ve done repeatedly for 3 to 14 days at a time to simulate losing all my money:

  Sleeping in a sleeping bag, whether on my living room floor or outside