"TOOLS OF TITANS: THE TACTICS, ROUTINES, AND HABITS OF BILLIONAIRES, ICONS, AND WORLD-CLASS PERFORMERS" by Timothy Ferriss, Arnold Schwarzenegger

• My goal is to learn things once and use them forever.
• Here are a few patterns, some odder than others: More than 80% of the interviewees have some form of daily mindfulness or meditation practice A surprising number of males (not females) over 45 never eat breakfast, or eat only the scantiest of fare (e.g., Laird Hamilton, page 92; Malcolm Gladwell, page 572; General Stanley McChrystal, page 435) Many use the ChiliPad device for cooling at bedtime Rave reviews of the books Sapiens, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Influence, and Man’s Search for Meaning, among others The habit of listening to single songs on repeat for focus (page 507) Nearly everyone has done some form of “spec” work (completing projects on their own time and dime, then submitting them to prospective buyers) The belief that “failure is not durable” (see Robert Rodriguez, page 628) or variants thereof Almost every guest has been able to take obvious “weaknesses” and turn them into huge competitive advantages (see Arnold Schwarzenegger, page 176)
• Success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits.
• You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them.
• RumbleRoller: Think foam roller meets monster-truck tire.
• Rolling your foot on top of a golf ball on the floor to increase “hamstring” flexibility.
• The combination of GST and AcroYoga (page 52) has completely remodeled my body in the last year.
• When in doubt, work on the deficiencies you’re most embarrassed by.
• To assess your biggest weaknesses, start by finding a Functional Movement Screen (FMS) near you.
• “Flexibility” can be passive, whereas “mobility” requires that you can demonstrate strength throughout the entire range of motion, including the end ranges.
• The ketogenic diet, often nicknamed “keto,” is a high-fat diet that mimics fasting physiology.
• Dom suggests a 5-day fast 2 to 3 times per year.
• The more often you enter keto, the faster the transition takes place.
• WARNING: NEVER DO BREATHING EXERCISES IN WATER OR BEFORE TRAINING IN WATER. SHALLOW-WATER BLACKOUTS CAN BE FATAL, AND YOU WILL NOT FEEL THE ONSET UNTIL IT’S TOO LATE.
• Tell people what you want, not what you don’t want, and keep it simple.
• As Tony Robbins would say, “The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life.”
• Scapular mobility is one of the keys to upper-body function and longevity.
• It’s important to get blood tests often enough to trend, and to repeat/confirm scary results before taking dramatic action.
• “If you’re over 40 and don’t smoke, there’s about a 70 to 80% chance you’ll die from one of four diseases: heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, cancer, or neurodegenerative disease.”
• On Good Doctors “The length of time they spend with you on your first visit is probably your best indicator [of their quality].”
• Halos Grasp a weight with both hands and rotate it around your head to loosen up the shoulder girdle.
• When everything else failed, Cossack squats with a kettlebell (as shown below) roughly doubled my ankle mobility, which had a chain of positive effects. Keep your heels on the ground throughout, keep your knees in line with your toes, and keep your hips as low as possible when switching sides.
• “Strengthening your midsection and your grip will automatically increase your strength in any lift.
• ‘Calm is contagious.’”
• Be first, because—not all times, but most times—it comes in your favor.
• If you can’t handle at least 60 minutes in a flotation tank, you aren’t ready to have an unstoppable psychedelic experience.
• According to Dan, most people get exponentially more benefit from a single 2-hour session than 2 separate 1-hour sessions.
• Keeping it simple, Dan suggests you start with 2 to 3 floats inside of 1 month.
• “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.
• You should be waking up in the morning feeling amazing without having to loosen up your lower back.
• The softest mattress you can get your hands on is ideal, but avoid those made solely of memory foam, as it locks you into extension.
• Get your kids (and yourself) flat “zero drop” shoes, where the toes and heel are an equal distance from the ground.
• “Kids don’t do what you say. They do what they see. How you live your life is their example.”
• 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.
• ‘What do you think about that really gets you excited?’
• Sleep temperature is highly individualized.
• Honey + ACV: My go-to tranquilizer beverage is simple: 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (I use Bragg brand) and 1 tablespoon honey, stirred into 1 cup of hot water.
• 10 minutes of Tetris before bed:
• Sleep Master sleep mask and Mack’s Pillow Soft Silicone Putty (ear plugs):
• Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.”
• More than 80% of the world-class performers I’ve interviewed have some form of daily meditation or mindfulness practice.
• I believe there is a minimum effective dose for meditation, and it’s around 7 days.
• Start small and rig the game so you can win.
• Whenever all or part of a sensory experience suddenly disappears, note that. By note I mean clearly acknowledge when you detect the transition point between all of it being present and at least some of it no longer being present.
• Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence.
• Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process. The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home.
• Are You Playing Offense or Defense?
• Go to as Many Higher-Level Meetings as Possible
• “Experience often deeply embeds the assumptions that need to be questioned in the first place.
• think authenticity is one of the most lacking things out there these days.”
• “The number-one theme that companies have when they really struggle is they are not charging enough for their product.
• “To do original work: It’s not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.”
• 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.
• “In negotiation, he who cares the least wins.”
• When deal-making, ask yourself: Can I trade a short-term, incremental gain for a potential longer-term, game-changing upside?
• It’s not what you know, it’s what you do consistently.
• 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
• ‘Busy,’ to me, seems to imply ‘out of control.’
• Lack of time is lack of priorities.
• I believe you shouldn’t start a business unless people are asking you to.
• Life as a Series of Experiments
• ‘We are whatever we pretend to be.’”
• Most “superheroes” are nothing of the sort. They’re weird, neurotic creatures who do big things DESPITE lots of self-defeating habits and self-talk.
• Email is the mind-killer.
• Most important usually equals most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict.
• What you do is more important than how you do everything else, and doing something well does not make it important.
• Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
• Don’t overestimate the world and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.
• ‘You don’t want to become a gimmick.’
• “Losers react, leaders anticipate.”
• The reason you’re suffering is you’re focused on yourself.
• “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.
• When in doubt about your next creative project, follow your anger
• 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.”
• You can always work harder than the next guy.”
• I often use reading to procrastinate.
• Morning pages don’t need to solve your problems. They simply need to get them out of your head, where they’ll otherwise bounce around all day like a bullet ricocheting inside your skull.
• “I have come to learn that part of the business strategy is to solve the simplest, easiest, and most valuable problem. And actually, in fact, part of doing strategy is to solve the easiest problem, so part of the reason why you work on software and bits is that atoms [physical products] are actually very difficult.”
• “How do you know if you have A-players on your project team? You know it if they don’t just accept the strategy you hand them. They should suggest modifications to the plan based on their closeness to the details.”
• So if you’re planning to do something with your life, if you have a 10-year plan of how to get there, you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months?
• I’m very much in favor of learning. I’m much more skeptical of credentialing or the abstraction called ‘education.’
• “It’s always the hard part that creates value.”
• “You are more powerful than you think you are. Act accordingly.”
• If You Generate Enough Bad Ideas, a Few Good Ones Tend to Show Up
• “I think we need to teach kids two things: 1) how to lead, and 2) how to solve interesting problems.
• “The way you teach your kids to solve interesting problems is to give them interesting problems to solve. And then, don’t criticize them when they fail.
• James recommends the habit of writing down 10 ideas each morning in a waiter’s pad or tiny notebook.
• No idea is so big that you can’t take the first step. If the first step seems too hard, make it simpler.
• “Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.”
• Business school = curriculum + network.
• Lesson #1: If you’ve formulated intelligent rules, follow your own f*cking rules.
• Learn to confront the challenges of the real world, rather than resort to the protective womb of academia. You can control most of the risks, and you can’t imagine the rewards.
• Naval Ravikant (page 546) regularly credits Scott’s short blog post “The Day You Became a Better Writer” for improving his writing.
• Fundamentally, “systems” could be thought of as asking yourself, “What persistent skills or relationships can I develop?” versus “What short-term goal can I achieve?” The former has a potent snowball effect, while the latter is a binary pass/fail with no consolation prize.
• I think what matters is the degree of focus and the commitment you have to that focus.
• One of the ways to not worry about stress is to eliminate it.
• Diversification works in almost every area of your life to reduce your stress.”
• If you want an average, successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1) Become the best at one specific thing. 2) Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.
• I always advise young people to become good public speakers (top 25%). Anyone can do it with practice. If you add that talent to any other, suddenly you’re the boss of the people who have only one skill.
• Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable.
• I constantly recommend that entrepreneurs read The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout, whether they are first-time founders or serial home-run hitters launching a new product.
• If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.
• There are many different ways to be first.
• Forget the brand. Think categories.
• Little note: If someone ever says ‘yes’ that quickly, you didn’t ask for enough.”
• Novice podcasters (which I was), bloggers, and artists of all types get too distracted in nascent stages with monetization.
• “Good content is the best SEO,”
• Amplify Your Strengths Rather Than Fix Your Weaknesses
• Amplify your strengths rather than fix your weaknesses.
• “If I’ve learned anything from podcasting, it’s don’t be afraid to do something you’re not qualified to do.”
• Just copyright your faults, man.”
• If you understand principles, you can create tactics.
• One of his most-gifted books is Age of Propaganda by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, and his favorite copywriting book is an oldie: The Robert Collier Letter Book, originally published in 1931.
• In general, I split my content in a very binary fashion: free or ultra-premium.
• “Success” need not be complicated. Just start with making 1,000 people extremely, extremely happy.
• A true fan is defined as “a fan who will buy anything you produce.”
• True fans are not only the direct source of your income, but also your chief marketing force for the ordinary fans.
• A fundamental virtue of a peer-to-peer network (like the web) is that the most obscure node is only one click away from the most popular node.
• You do not have to sacrifice the integrity of your art for a respectable income. You just need to create a great experience and charge enough.
• Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo allow you to introduce (test) a new product before you start manufacturing, removing a huge amount of risk.
• If you want to raise a lot of money on Kickstarter, you need to drive a lot of traffic to your project.
• If you add a + to the end of any bit.ly URL, you can see stats related to that link.
• Questions are your pickaxes. Good questions are what open people up, open new doors, and create opportunities.
• In General—Ask the Dumb Question Everyone Else Is Afraid to Ask
• Asking the right dumb question is often the smartest thing you can do.”
• I think everyone should try starting a podcast at least once for the learning,
• My suggestion is to start with recording phone interviews via Skype. It allows you to test-drive podcasting extremely cheaply, and it allows you to cheat: to refer to questions, notes, and cheat sheets in Evernote or another program while speaking.
• ALWAYS put in new batteries for every important interview. I use simple earbuds for sound checks.
• Shure SM58-LC cardioid vocal microphone:
• For the money, nothing beats these old-school stage mics for in-person podcasting.
• Most would-be podcasters quit because they get overwhelmed with gear and editing.
• To date, I have not used any pre-amps, mixers, or other hardware. It would marginally improve things, but I haven’t found the additional complexity, added luggage, and risk of mechanical failure worth it.
• To Become an Artist, Learn to See
• ‘When you complain, nobody wants to help you,’
• 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.
• “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.
• big companies are constantly pushing all of these bullshit innovation initiatives because they feel like they have to do something.
• “The interesting jobs are the ones that you make up.”
• 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.”
• Hold the standard. Ask for help. Fix it. Do whatever’s necessary. But don’t cheat.”
• 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.
• Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.
• Noah was my co-teacher in the “Starting a Business” episode of The Tim Ferriss Experiment.
• you don’t have to be on the extreme, but you have to ask for things, and you have to put yourself out there.”
• Aim to optimize upstream items that have cascading results downstream.
• Related—“What is the best or most worthwhile investment you’ve made?” Lasik surgery.
• Don’t Try and Find Time. Schedule Time.
• It’s only real if it’s on the calendar.
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
• “The Who book [by Geoff Smart, Randy Street] is a condensed version of Topgrading, and I learned of it at Mint, where the founder was using it.”
• Noah is known for his copywriting skills, and he recommends two resources: The Gary Halbert Letter (also The Boron Letters) and Ogilvy on Advertising.
• This week, try experimenting with saying “I don’t understand. Can you explain that to me?” more often.
• If you want great mentors, you have to become a great mentee. If you want to lead, you have to first learn to follow.
• Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.
• When you are just starting out, we can be sure of a few fundamental realities: 1) You’re not nearly as good or as important as you think you are; 2) you have an attitude that needs to be readjusted; 3) most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong.
• Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room—until you change that with results.
• Find what nobody else wants to do and do it.
• Produce more than everyone else and give your ideas away.
• “Do people you respect or care about leave hateful comments on the Internet?” (No.) “Do you really want to engage with people who have infinite time on their hands?” (No.)
• ‘The biggest mistake you can make is to accept the norms of your time.’ Not accepting norms is where you innovate, whether it’s with technology, with books, with anything. So, not accepting the norm is the secret to really big success and changing the world.”
• Neil and I, and many other writers, use “TK” as a placeholder for things we need to research later (e.g., “He was TK years old at the time.”). This is common practice, as almost no English words have TK in them (except that pesky Atkins), making it easy to use Control-F when it’s time to batch-research or fact-check.
• Draft ugly and edit pretty.
• Neil is a seasoned interviewer and taught me a golden key early on: Open up and be vulnerable with the person you’re going to interview before you start.
• The moral of the story is, whenever possible, do print/text interviews via email. A paper trail will give you evidence and recourse if people misbehave.
• Missing any one media opportunity won’t kill you, but a terrible misquote can persist like an incurable disease.
• “The hardest decisions to make in business are those that disappoint people you care about.
• Sometimes you need to stop doing things you love in order to nurture the one thing that matters most.”
• Timing and uncontrollable circumstances play more of a role than any of us care to admit.
• “In the wrong environment, your creativity is compromised.
• “‘It’s not about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen.’
• Truth is, young creative minds don’t need more ideas, they need to take more responsibility with the ideas they’ve already got.”
• The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live.
• Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place.
• In this way, quitting should never be seen as the end of something grudging and unpleasant. Rather, it’s a vital step in beginning something new and wonderful.
• The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.”
• “When 99% of people doubt you, you’re either gravely wrong or about to make history.”
• “The best way to become a billionaire is to help a billion people.”
• There are two elements that tie very much to human longevity. It’s strange. . . . One is those people who floss and, second, those people who have a higher VO2 max.”
• Peter recommends Tony Robbins’s Date with Destiny program, which he feels helps people improve their “operating system.”
• “What did you want to do when you were a child, before anybody told you what you were supposed to do? What was it you wanted to become? What did you want to do more than anything else?
• Start with Why by Simon Sinek.
• One of the most fundamental realizations is that every entrepreneur, every business, every company will get disrupted.
• Find the smartest 20-somethings in your company. I don’t care if they’re in the mail room or where they are. Give them permission to figure out how they would take down your company.”
• “I just really want people to remember that they’re capable of doing everything that the people they admire are doing.
• Money can always be regenerated. Time and reputation cannot.
• When possible, always give the money to charity, as it allows you to interact with people well above your pay grade.
• Make commitments in a high-energy state so that you can’t back out when you’re in a low-energy state.
• you really learn something when you attempt to parody it.
• Mischief is critical in comedy.
• B.J. likes and recommends two podcasts related to debating, the second of which is completely farcical: Intelligence Squared and The Great Debates.
• The Oxford Book of Aphorisms by John Gross
• So take as long as you want if you’re talented. You’ll get their attention again if you have a reason to.”
• A long life is far from guaranteed. Nearly everyone dies before they’re ready.
• To become “successful,” you have to say “yes” to a lot of experiments. To learn what you’re best at, or what you’re most passionate about, you have to throw a lot against the wall.
• To develop your edge initially, you learn to set priorities; to maintain your edge, you need to defend against the priorities of others.
• Once you reach a decent level of professional success, lack of opportunity won’t kill you. It’s drowning in “kinda cool” commitments that will sink the ship.
• Some words are so overused as to have become meaningless. If you find yourself using nebulous terms like “success,” “happiness,” or “investing,” it pays to explicitly define them or stop using them.
• Life favors the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.
• The artificial urgency common to startups makes mental and physical health a rarity.
• “Make your peace with the fact that saying ‘no’ often requires trading popularity for respect.” —Greg McKeown, Essentialism
• What do you have to lose? Chances are, next to nothing.
• “Don’t believe everything that you think.”
• To “fix” someone’s problem, you very often just need to empathically listen to them.
• If you don’t have the patience to read something, don’t have the hubris to comment on it.”
• Plato’s The Republic.
• “My mantra is a very simple one, and that’s ‘Discipline equals freedom.’”
• If you have two of something, you will break or lose one and end up with one remaining; if you have one, you will break or lose it and be screwed.
• Where can you eliminate “single points of failure” in your life or business? Jocko adds, “And don’t just have backup gear—have a backup plan to handle likely contingencies.”
• If This Is a Man and The Truce (often combined into one volume) by Primo Levi
• “If you want to be tougher mentally, it is simple: Be tougher. Don’t meditate on it.”
• “Being tougher” was, more than anything, a decision to be tougher. It’s possible to immediately “be tougher,” starting with your next decision.
• It doesn’t matter how small or big you start. If you want to be tougher, be tougher.
• Stay humble or get humbled.”
• ‘Hmmm . . . that’s what you need to do: step back and observe.’ I realized that detaching yourself from the situation, so you can see what’s happening, is absolutely critical.
• About Face, by Colonel David H. Hackworth.
• Blood Meridian [by Cormac McCarthy].”
• If you don’t give young men a good and useful group to belong to, they will create a bad group to belong to.
• You have to be prepared to fail. That’s how you’re going to expand yourself and grow.
• Being wise includes knowing how to defend yourself or disappear when needed. Step one is becoming aware of the threats.
• “The future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed.”—William Gibson
• Life is a full-contact sport, and the black swans will come visiting sooner or later.
• Put tape or a cover over your laptop camera (and perhaps your phone) when you’re not using it.
• Encrypt your hard drive using “full disk encryption” in order to keep your confidential data protected in case your machine is ever lost or stolen, preventing others from extracting data from your device without the password.
• Don’t ever use the same password twice!
• A long password, even if mostly English words, is typically stronger than a short password with random characters.
• Don’t plug in any USB device that you don’t trust!
• If you wish to charge something, it’s safer to use a USB charger/adapter [for a wall outlet] rather than your computer.
• I had a great mentor early on in my career give me advice that I’ve heeded until now, which is that you should have a running list of three people that you’re always watching: someone senior to you that you want to emulate, a peer who you think is better at the job than you are and who you respect, and someone subordinate who’s doing the job you did—one, two, or three years ago—better than you did it. If you just have those three individuals that you’re constantly measuring yourself off of, and you’re constantly learning from them, you’re going to be exponentially better than you are.”
• Gates of Fire, by Steven Pressfield.
• You can tell the true character of a man by how his dog and his kids react to him.”
• Ultimately, it was the simple that worked. He didn’t need sophisticated answers. They were right in front of him the whole time. What advice are you ignoring because you think it’s trite or clichéd? Can you mine it for any testable action?
• ‘What would I probably tell myself as an older version of myself?’
• ‘Work will work when nothing else will work.’”
• It’s about the relationship you build, not the production quality.
• I think there’s a great power in not taking things so seriously.”
• “If you earn $68K per year, then globally speaking, you are the 1%.”
• Of course, if a charity is doing the wrong things, being financially lean means nothing, hence Will’s quote. It’s all about real-world results.
• “Follow Your Passion” Is Terrible Advice
• the biggest predictor of job satisfaction is mentally engaging work.
• Mindfulness by Mark Williams and Danny Penman.
• The ability to be convincing, sell ideas, and persuade other people is a meta-skill that transfers to many areas of your life.
• “Being an entrepreneur is being willing to do a job that nobody else wants to do, [in order] to be able to live the rest of your life doing whatever you want to do.”
• “When I articulated that I didn’t care anymore about what anybody thought about what I did except me, all the weight of the world came off my shoulders, and everything became possible.
• “On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice. It’s actually very easy to give people good advice. It’s very hard to follow the advice that you know is good. . . . If someone came to me with my list of problems, I would be able to sort that person out very easily.”
• To worry about the fate of civilization in the abstract is harder than worrying about what sorts of experiences your children are going to have in the future.”
• There’s also the use of psychedelic drugs, which is not quite the same as meditation, but it does, if nothing else, reveal that the human nervous system is plastic in a very important way, which means your experience of the world can be radically transformed.”
• Mindfulness’ is just that quality of mind which allows you to pay attention to sights and sounds and sensations, and even thoughts themselves, without being lost in thought and without grasping at what is pleasant and pushing what is unpleasant away. 
• The unique power and liability [of psychedelics] is that they are guaranteed to work in some way. . . .
• have three set meals that you make.”
• Courage takes practice. It’s a skill you have to develop.
• It’s not giving up to put your current path on indefinite pause.
• Uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noises in the shadows. Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.
• Conquering Fear = Defining Fear
• Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering.
• Have less intelligent people done this before and pulled it off?
• What are you putting off out of fear? Usually, what we most fear doing is what we most need to do.
• Define the worst case, accept it, and do it.
• 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.
• 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.
• In a world of distraction, single-tasking is a superpower.
• Memento mori—remember that you’re going to die. It’s a great way to remember to live.
• “What I discovered, which is what many writers discover, is that I write in order to think.
• “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.
• Simplify, simplify. . . . A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
• 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.
• There is more freedom to be gained from practicing poverty than chasing wealth. Suffer a little regularly and you often cease to suffer.
• Perfectionism leads to procrastination, which leads to paralysis.
• As a writer, you have to be vulnerable.
• And in order for art to imitate life, you have to have a life.”
• And I think ultimately, sometimes when we judge other people, it’s just a way to not look at ourselves; a way to feel superior or sanctimonious or whatever.
• I promise, if you just tell the truth and get your heart broken as a comedian, you will have a house.”
• TIM: “If you had 8 weeks to get someone ready to do 5 minutes on stage at an open mic, what would you do?” WHITNEY: “I would get them on stage the first night [and] every night for all of the 8 weeks, whether they have material or not. . . . The material is like 10% of it. Being comfortable on stage is all of it. So I would say, just get on stage. The first year and a half, two years of standup is just getting comfortable on stage. Your material doesn’t matter. 
• “It took me a long time to realize that as soon as you get on stage, you need to address what the audience is already thinking. . . . I don’t know who said this quote, but ‘Comedians become comedians so they can control why people laugh at them.’
• Comedy is, for the most part, just an obsession with injustice: This isn’t fair. . . . So what pisses you off?
• Louis C.K. says, ‘If you think about something more than three times a week, you have to write about it.’”
• Whitney and I both love Neil Gaiman’s “Make Good Art” commencement speech, which he gave at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts.
• “The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.”
• “Happiness is wanting what you have.”
• “There are three things you can’t really fake: one is fighting, the second is sex, and the third is comedy.
• “I think the way to write standup, if you want longevity in this business, at least for me, is to start by asking yourself personal questions.
• “The difference between the people you admire and everybody else [is that the former are] the people who read.”
• “I think you should try to slay dragons. I don’t care how big the opponent is. We read about and admire the people who did things that were basically considered to be impossible. That’s what makes the world a better place to live.”
• How Proust Can Change Your Life,
• Ultimately, to be properly successful is to be at peace as well.”
• “The more you know what you really want, and where you’re really going, the more what everybody else is doing starts to diminish.
• When no one will pay directly for your subject matter, that’s often a sign that something’s gone wrong. 
• I suspect that most people with office jobs are doing as little as I am.
• Time and quiet should not be luxury items.
• The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration—it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.
• I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth is to spend it with people I love.
• Life is too short to be busy.
• “Lesson number one, when people ask me what [interviewing] tips would I give, is aim for the heart, not the head. Once you get the heart, you can go to the head. Once you get the heart and the head, then you’ll have a pathway to the soul.”
• “Don’t panic. Let the silence do the work.” This was Cal’s advice to me, when I mentioned that I sometimes panic and jump in if an interviewee freezes—seemingly stumped—after a question.
• “Listening is about being present, not just being quiet.”
• A Question Cal Suggests Asking People More Often “What are some of the choices you’ve made that made you who you are?”
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe.
• As soon as you wake up, open the blinds, and go outside, naked if possible, and be in the sun for 20 minutes.’”
• The best art divides the audience.
• Need to Get Unstuck? Make Your Task Laughably Small
• Learn from the Greats, Not Your Competition
• The only way to use the inspiration of other artists is if you submerge yourself in the greatest works of all time. 
• As mentioned before, more than 80% of the world-class performers I’ve interviewed meditate in the mornings in some fashion. But what of the remaining 20%? Nearly all of them have meditation-like activities. One frequent pattern is listening to a single track or album on repeat, which can act as an external mantra for aiding focus and present-state awareness.
• Polling the most prolific authors I know, more than 90% do their best work when others are sleeping, whether they start after 10 p.m. or wake up well before 6 a.m.
• “There are only four stories: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power, and the journey. Every single book that is in the bookstore deals with these four archetypes, these four themes.”
• There is this notepad by my side, and I take notes, but I take notes only to take them out from my head. They will be useless the next day.
• “Keep it simple. Trust your reader. He or she has a lot of imagination. Don’t try to describe things. Give a hint, and they will fulfill this hint with their own imagination.
• Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird
• Even if you don’t consider yourself a writer (I never did), putting thoughts on paper is the best way to A) develop ideas, and B) review and improve your thinking. The benefits of even 30 minutes a week of scribbling can transfer to everything else that you do.
• In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell
• The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts Maxims and Reflections by Goethe:
• Dropping Ashes on the Buddha.
• “General fame is overrated. You want to be famous to 2,000 to 3,000 people you handpick.”
• I’m paraphrasing, but the gist is that you don’t need or want mainstream fame. It brings more liabilities than benefits.
• Very often, it’s a question of being the first person to connect things that have never been connected before, and something that is a commonplace solution in one area is not thought of in another.”
• Drop into something. Start creating, building. Join a lab. Skip college.”
• it’s better to be in an expanding world and not quite in exactly the right field, than to be in a contracting world where peoples’ worst behavior comes out.
• It pays to write what you know.
• Life is a full-contact sport, especially on the Internet. If you’re going to step into the arena, bloody noses and a lot of scrapes are par for the course.
• #1—It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it. What matters is how many people do.
• #2—10% of people will find a way to take anything personally. Expect it and treat it as math.
• #3—When in doubt, starve it of oxygen.
• #4—If you respond, don’t over-apologize.
• #5—You can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into.
• #6—“Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity. You’ll avoid the tough decisions, and you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted.”—Colin Powell
• #7—“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”—Epictetus
• To do anything remotely interesting, you need to train yourself to handle—or even enjoy—criticism.
• #8—“Living well is the best revenge.”—George Herbert
• it is so much less work just to be yourself.”
• “The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles.”
• “If you want to be successful, surround yourself with people who are more successful than you are, but if you want to be happy, surround yourself with people who are less successful than you are.”
• “The first rule of handling conflict is don’t hang around people who are constantly engaging in conflict. 
• “In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it.
• “Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”
• Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else.
• All the real benefits in life come from compound interest.
• Earn with your mind, not your time.
• “You get paid for being right first, and to be first, you can’t wait for consensus.”
• “My one repeated learning in life: ‘There are no adults.’ Everyone’s making it up as they go along. Figure it out yourself, and do it.”
• Be willing to fail or succeed on who you really are. Don’t ever try to be anything else.
• “The key in a restaurant, and the key in any kind of high-pressure situation, I think, is that 75% of success is staying calm and not losing your nerve. The rest you figure out, but once you lose your calm, everything else starts falling apart fast.”
• You want to be taken seriously? Then take things seriously. Do the work,
• if you work for the awards, you don’t do good work. But if you do good work, the awards will come.’”
• Talk to people about a thing they didn’t think they were going to talk about.
• I’m telling you, the best thing to do is give people questions they’re not expecting.”
• Don’t bow to the gatekeepers because I think, in essence, there are no gatekeepers. You are the gatekeeper. 
• “Don’t waste your time on marketing, just try to get better. 
• “And also, it’s not about being good; it’s about being great.
• Josh focuses on depth over breadth. He often uses a principle nicknamed “learning the macro from the micro.” This means focusing on something very small in a field (whether chess, martial arts, or elsewhere) to internalize extremely powerful macro principles that apply everywhere. This is sometimes combined with “beginning with the endgame.”
• ‘If you’re studying my game, you’re entering my game, and I’ll be better at it than you.’”
• “Lateral thinking or thematic thinking, the ability to take a lesson from one thing and transfer it to another, is one of the most important disciplines that any of us can cultivate.
• Create slack, as no one will give it to you.
• “A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.”
• you can’t really earn trust over time with people without being somewhat vulnerable [first].”
• “Don’t go for funny. Go for the truth, and you’ll hit funny along the way.”
• The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler,
• Reality is largely negotiable.
• If you stress-test the boundaries and experiment with the “impossibles,” you’ll quickly discover that most limitations are a fragile collection of socially reinforced rules you can choose to break at any time.
• What if I did the opposite for 48 hours?
• What do I spend a silly amount of money on? How might I scratch my own itch?
• What would I do/have/be if I had $10 million? What’s my real TMI?
• What are the worst things that could happen? Could I get back here?
• If I could only work 2 hours per week on my business, what would I do?
• After reading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber and The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch, I decided that extreme questions were the forcing function I needed.
• What if I let them make decisions up to $100? $500? $1,000?
• To get huge, good things done, you need to be okay with letting the small, bad things happen.
• People’s IQs seem to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.
• What’s the least crowded channel?
• People don’t like being sold products, but we all like being told stories. Work on the latter.
• What if I created my own real-world MBA?
• Do I need to make it back the way I lost it?
• What if I could only subtract to solve problems?
• What might I put in place to allow me to go off the grid for 4 to 8 weeks, with no phone or email?
• Am I hunting antelope or field mice?
• Could it be that everything is fine and complete as is?
• What would this look like if it were easy?
• How can I throw money at this problem? How can I “waste” money to improve the quality of my life?
• In the beginning of your career, you spend time to earn money. Once you hit your stride in any capacity, you should spend money to earn time, as the latter is nonrenewable.
• Be sure to look for simple solutions. If the answer isn’t simple, it’s probably not the right answer.
• What’s on the Other Side of Fear? Nothing.
• You’re either great or you don’t exist.’ 
• Good isn’t good enough.
• “What can you do that will be remembered in 200 to 400 years?”
• “Our existence is programmable.”
• Perhaps the biggest tragedy in our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.
• Oftentimes, everything you want is a mere inch outside of your comfort zone. Test it.
• You Don’t Find Time, You Make Time
• Morning Pages by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way.
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
• Sometimes, it just takes one conversation with a rational person to stop a horrible, irrational decision.
• If you can’t seem to make yourself happy, do little things to make other people happy. This is a very effective magic trick.
• “There’s a freedom [in] limitations.
• You use those gifts, because nothing ever goes according to plan.
• If everyone’s trying to get through that one little door, you’re in the wrong place.
• “Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things that they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.”
• Be a “Problem” Early
• “The technical part of any job is 10%. 90% is creativity.
• It’s this totally reverse thing. You have to act first before inspiration will hit. You don’t wait for inspiration and then act, or you’re never going to act, because you’re never going to have the inspiration, not consistently.”
• “The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research.”
• You don’t have to know. You just have to keep moving forward.”
• When you put creativity in everything, everything becomes available to you.’ 
• Start with Why by Simon Sinek.
• When things are going bad, don’t get all bummed out, don’t get startled, don’t get frustrated. No. Just look at the issue and say: “Good.”
• Accept reality, but focus on the solution.
• You are not alone, and you are better than you think.
• Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (5 mentions) Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (4) Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (4) Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (4) The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (4) The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande (4) Dune by Frank Herbert (3) Influence by Robert Cialdini (3) Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert (3) Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (3) Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman (3) The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss (3) The Bible (3) The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz (3) The War of Art by Steven Pressfield (3) Watchmen by Alan Moore (3) Zero to One by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters (3)