Inspiring Quotes from Tim Ferriss' Tools of Titans

The New Rich are those who abandon the deferred-life plan [save and retire after 20-40 years] and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as Lifestyle Design… $1,000,000 in the bank isn’t the fantasy. The fantasy is the lifestyle of complete freedom it supposedly allows. The question is then, How can one achieve the millionaire lifestyle of complete freedom without first having $1,000,000? [Page 278]

1. If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months?” “What might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next 6 months, if you had a gun against your head?” [Page xix]
2. I can think, I can wait, I can fast. Having good rules for decision-making, and having good questions you can ask yourself and others. Being able to plan long-term, play the long game, and not misallocate your resources. Being able to withstand difficulties and disaster. Training yourself to be uncommonly resilient and have a high pain tolerance. [Page xxvii]
3. I’m not the strongest. I’m not the fastest. But I’m really good at suffering. ~ Amelia Boone [Page 2]
4. “Hyperthermic conditioning” (calculated heat exposure) can help you to increase growth hormone (GH) levels and substantially improve endurance. ~ Rhonda Perciavalle Patrick [Page 7]
5. If you want to be a stud later, you have to be a pud now. When in doubt, work on the deficiencies you’re most embarrassed by. ~ Christopher Sommer [Page 10]
6. If you don’t have cancer and you do a therapeutic fast 1 to 3 times per year, you could purge any precancerous cells that may be living in your body. ~ Dominic D’Agostino [Page 24]
7. It could always be worse. ~ Joe De Sena [Page 40]
8. All the problems I have in the daily world subside when I do [cold exposure]. Exposing myself to the worthy cold…it is a great cleaning purifying force. ~ Wim Hof [Page 43]
9. I assume the best in people. I assume that I can trust them until they prove me wrong. When you do this practice enough, trusting is like a muscle that you flex. ~ Jason Nemer [Page 49]
10. If you’re in your 40s or beyond and you care about living longer, which immediately puts you in a selection bias category, there’s an 80% chance you’re going to die from [one of] those four diseases (heart disease, cerebrovascular disease/stroke, cancer, or neurodegenerative disease). So any strategy toward increasing longevity has to be geared toward reducing the risk of those diseases as much as is humanly possible. ~ Dr Peter Attia [Page 67]
11. We want to judge things as good or bad… So, there’s this idea that inflammation is bad, [thus the opposite] is good. High cholesterol bad, low cholesterol good. [But] you have to understand what blood testing actually represents. First of all, it’s a snapshot. It’s a moment in time, and we’re not an object, we’re a process. ~ Justin Mager [Page 73]
12. What you put in your mouth is a stressor, and what you say – what comes out of your mouth – is also a stressor. ~ Charles Poliquin [Page 74]
13. Strength is the mother quality of all physical qualities. Strength is a skill, and, as such, it must be practiced. Lift heavy, not hard. Anything more than 5 reps is bodybuilding…If you want to be strong, you want to keep your reps at 5 and under. If you are training for strength, you want to try and avoid the burn altogether. The burn is your enemy. Training is something that should be enjoyed. ~ Pavel Tsatsouline [Page 87]
14. Not to take anything personally, but also don’t hold yourself back. I think this is a trait of a female more than of a male. We have a tendency sometimes to sit on our talents and potential because we don’t want to offend anyone or be singled out. ~ Gabby Reece [Page 98]
15. If you can’t squat all the way down to the ground with your feet and knees together, then you are missing full hip and ankle range of motion. This is the mechanism causing your hip impairment, plantar fasciitis, torn Achilles, pulled calf, etc. ~ Dr Kelly Starrett [Page 124]
16. Is that a dream, or a goal? Because a dream is something you fantasize about that will probably never happen. A goal is something you set a plan for, work toward, and achieve. The people who were successful models to me were people who had structured goals and then put a plan in place to get to those things. ~ Paul Levesque [Page 130]
17. I’ve learned an important trick: To develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight. The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression. ~ Jane McGonigal [Page 132]
18. I would say to have no fear. I mean, you’ve got one chance here to do amazing things, and being afraid of being wrong or making a mistake or fumbling is just not how you do something of impact. You just have to be fearless. ~ Dr Adam Gazzaley [Page 137]
19. The core of it was to be your unapologetically weird self. I think authenticity is one of the most lacking things out there these days. Weirdness is why we adore our friends… Weirdness is what bonds us to our colleagues. Weirdness is what sets us apart, gets us hired. Be your unapologetically weird self. In fact, being weird may even find you the ultimate happiness. ~ Chris Sacca [Page 169]
20. Forward, like: We don’t stop. We don’t slow down. We don’t revisit past decisions. We don’t second guess. ~ Marc Andreessen [Page 173]
21. My confidence came from my vision… I am a big believer that if you have a very clear vision of where you want to go, then the rest of it is much easier. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger [Page 177]
22. I meet a lot of 30-year-olds who are trying to pursue many different directions at once, but not making progress in any. 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 can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience. ~ Derek Sivers [Page 187-8]
23. I think a lot of the mistakes of my youth were mistakes of ambition, not mistakes of sloth. So just slowing down, whether that’s meditating, whether that’s taking time for yourself away from screens, whether that’s really focusing in on who you’re talking to or who you’re with. ~ Matt Mullenweg [Page 207]
24. Life is always happening for us, not to us. It’s our job to find out where the benefit is. If we do, life is magnificent. ~ Tony Robbins [Page 211]
25. 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 Neistat [Page 220]
26. You can’t be afraid to show your scars. That’s who you are, and you have to continue to stay true to that. ~ Morgan Spurlock [Page 223]
27. What are the kinds of key things that might be constraints on a solution, or might be the attributes of a solution, and what are tools or assets I might have? I actually think most of our thinking, of course, is subconscious. Part of what I’m trying to do is allow the fact that we have this kind of relaxation, rejuvenation period in sleeping, to essentially possibly bubble up the thoughts and solutions to it. ~ Reid Hoffman [Page 230]
28. I wish I would have known that there was no need to wait. So if you’re planning to do something with your life, if you have a 10-year plan on how to get there, you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months? ~ Peter Thiel [Page 233]
29. The goal isn’t to get good ideas; the goal is to get bad ideas. Because once you get enough bad ideas, then some good ones have to show up. ~ Seth Godin [Page 238]
30. If you can’t get 10 good ideas, get 20 ideas. It’s hard to come up with more than 3,000 business ideas a year. I’m lucky if I come up with a few business ideas. The key is to have fun with it, or else you don’t do it. ~ James Altucher [Page 248]
31. All you do is you pick a goal and you write it down 15 times a day in some specific sentence form. And you do that every day. Then it will seem as if the universe just starts spitting up opportunities. It will look to you like these are coincidences, and whether they are or not is less relevant than the fact that they seem to pop up. ~ Scott Adams [Page 265]
32. Every single season I set a goal…it’s usually two goals. It’s something very serious and something funny, something stupid. ~ Shaun White [Page 273]
33. The point is thinking about, ‘What is the unique mojo that I bring, and how can I try and amplify that? Amplify your strengths rather than fix your weaknesses. ~ Chase Jarvis [Page 281]
34. Just copyright your faults, man. ~ Dan Carlin [Page 286]
35. Tactics are great, but tactics become commoditized. If you understand principles, you can create tactics. ~ Ramit Sethi [Page 289]
36. Occasionally, a good idea comes to you first, if you’re lucky. Usually, it only comes after a lot of bad ideas. ~ Alex Blumberg [Page 303]
37. 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. ~ Ed Catmull [Page 312]
38. When you complain, nobody wants to help you. ~ Tracy DiNunzio [Page 314]
39. How are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want? ~ Jerry Colonna | Phil Lubin [Page 317]
40. The job I was going to do hadn’t even been invented yet… The interesting jobs are the ones that you make up. 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. ~ Chris Young [Page 319-20]

When you launch a new product, the first question to ask yourself is not “How is this new product better than the competition?” but “First what?” In other words, what category is this new product first in? ~ Tim Ferriss [Page 277]

('Part 1' covers first half of the book, up to Page 322)