This is the first part of a four-part series on Titans, by Tim Ferriss. Other parts are listed below:
The Hackmaster General of the U.S., all will agree, is Tim Ferriss.
For almost a decade, Ferriss has been using his own body and life as a lab to figure out what forks to be healthy, wealthy, and wise. Like any good scientist, even one with an n of 1, Ferriss does his literature research before embarking on experiments. He has interviewed hundreds of masters of their domain, from lit’ry blogger Maria Popova to General Stanley McCrystal, to find out what works for them. Then he tests it all out.
In Tools of Titans, Ferriss asked the super achievers–athletes, actors, investors, entrepreneurs, writers, and more–for the secrets of their success. I decided to scoop out all the best ideas for writers.
The ideas can be grouped into ten categories: (1) Commitment, (2) Focus, (3) Planning, (4) Journaling and Note Taking, (5) Divergent Thinking, (6) Gathering Material, (7) Questions, (8) Storytelling, (9) Details and Style, and (10) Integrity.
It all starts with routines—developing the habits of work and imagination that can help you create something fresh. The most notable fact of the Ferriss Way is that he thinks he can learn anything—or at least enough of anything to make a difference. He is a deep generalist, someone who believes that the answer to any question can be found in an intelligent, often counterintuitive mashup of approaches taken from different fields. He tests and tests, gathering volumes of his notebooks as his lab books. He creates strategies for himself that usually work for other people.
Who Is Tim Ferriss?
Ferriss, you recall, won fame and fortune with The Four-Hour Workweek, published in 2007. The premise was simple: By following a set of life hacks, we can massively improve our productivity. That book is built on three pillars: innovating (on what you offer and how you do it), outsourcing (getting others to do the routine stuff so you can focus on high-value propositions), and building a core (constantly improving your own body, mind, and soul, so you’re alert to life’s possibilities).
The next two books built on this foundation. The Four-Hour Body showed how simple attention to nutrition and a few intensive exercises (kettle bells) can help you shed unnecessary weight, build a little muscle, and, most important, improve your focus and energy for the stuff that matters in life. The Four-Hour Chef uses the theme of cooking—and some useful hacks in the kitchen—to make broader points about creating recipes for life.
Last week, Ferriss released Tools for Titans, which collects the wisdom and hacks of hundreds of successful people, offered in their own word with Ferriss’ commentary. As I expected, there are lots of hacks for writers—routines, mind management tricks, tips for focusing the mind and letting ideas blast through the fog.
Ferriss claims to find writing an arduous process, for which he is seeking the four-hour solution.
Note to Tim: I’ve got it right here. The premise of The Elements of Writing dovetails with your approach to everything else—that most problems have solutions that someone else has invented, and the trick is to track down those tricks and use them in the right order.
Now, on to some of the most useful tools from the Titans.
1. Commitment
When he was first training to be a boxing champion, Evander Holyfield’s coach asked him: “Is that a dream or a goal?”
Christopher Sommer, the former U.S. National Team gymnastics coach, says you need to adopt one big hairy audacious goal—and then just do the work necessary to make it happen. So you want to write a book? Say it! Then build everything around that project.
The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home. … If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made in and here too. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift away from your chosen goal. The single decision is one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.
Tony Robbins, the modern master of self-mastery, pushes for action over mere knowledge: “Mastery doesn’t come from an infographic. What you know doesn’t mean s—. What do you do consistently?”
Robert Rodriguez, a screenwriter, producer, and musician, developed his just-do-it approach when drawing a comic strip for his college paper at the University of Texas. He found that inspiration visited only infrequently. So he made a habit of just sitting down to work:
I realized the only way to do it was by drawing. You’d have to draw and draw and draw. Then one drawing would be kind of funny or cool. That one’s kind of neat. This one kind of goes with that. Then you draw a couple of filler ops and that’s how it would be created. You had to actually move.
The approach works for writing too. Just sit down and start putting down the lines.
For a lot of people, … they think, well, I don’t have an idea, so I can’t start. I know you’ll only get the idea once you start. It’s this total reverse thing. You have to act first before the inspiration will head. You don’t wait for inspiration and then that, or you’re never going to act, because you’re never going to have the inspiration, not consistently.
Justin Boreta, a founding member of The Glitch Mob, adds:
There’s a lot of bad advice thrown around about getting inspired and searching for a revelation. Like Chuck Close says, “Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of us just show up and get to work.” And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will– through work– bump into other possibilities and kick open the other doors that you would never have dreamt if you were just sitting around looking for great “art idea.”
The best-selling author Kevin Kelly adds: “I write in order to think. I’d say, ‘I think I have an idea,’ but I realize, when I begin to write it, ‘I have no idea,’ and I don’t actually know what to think until I try and write it. … That was the revelation.”
Some people just don’t want to work, plain and simple. But there’s even a hack for them. It requires a slight mind shift offered by Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “I don’t like the work, but I like what’s in the work.”
2. Focus
About four of five Titans use meditation to develop disciplined—and calm, grateful—minds. Meditation is hard, and you shouldn’t push it too hard. Chade-Meng Tan, the former programmer at Google, says all you need to do is take one breath a day: “Breathe in and breathe out mindfully, and your commitment for the day is fulfilled. Everything else is a bonus.”
Don’t try to be too ambitious. The mind is a stubborn beast. If you push it too hard, it will rebel.
The point of meditation is not to reach a state of nirvana. It’s to pay attention to what matters in your life—and screen out all the noise. “The muscle you’re working is bringing your attention back to something,” Ferriss says. “My sessions are 99 percent monkey mind but it’s the other 1 percent that matters.”
Most of us, when first introduced to meditation, try to go into a state of complete oneness with the world. Like Tan, Ferriss says to set your sights low: “The goal is to observe your thoughts. If you’re replaying some bullshit in your head and notice it, just say, ‘Thinking, thinking’ to yourself to return to your focus.”
Observe your thoughts—that’s the ticket. Nothing matters more to a writer than sorting thoughts, cutting through the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of the world.
Eric Weinstein, the managing director of Thiel Capital, has a more aggressive approach to achieving focus. He goes all Tourette, with a mood-altering series of rants.
You know the strings of obscenities of Tourette’s patients involuntarily utter? [The medical term is coprolalia.] So, I find that when we use words that are prohibited to us, it tells our brain we are inhabiting unsafe space. It’s a bit of a sign that you’re going into a different mode. … When I’m going to do deep work, very often, it has a very powerful, aggressive energy to it. It’s not easy to be around. It’s very exacting, and I think I would probably look very autistic to people who know me to be social, were they ever to see me in the work mode.
In a way, the end result is the same as meditation: To break away from the unthinking, automatic normality of life.
