Is Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss any good? (My Book Review)

Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss

• Is this Tim Ferriss' biggest work since his ground-breaking 4 Hour Workweek?
• Has Tim Ferriss successfully condensed valuable life and business advice from some of the leading VCs, entertainers and sports personalities in the world into this book?
• What are the key takeaways from Tools of Titans that you can use to become a better entrepreneur?

Here's My Review... Leave a comment at the end of this post to share your feedback on the book

Yes, Tim Ferriss, he of The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, and The 4-Hour Chef fame, is back to share with us the tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers.

So, what is it? What is Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss?

It’s a collection of the tips, tricks, hacks, techniques from all the guests that Tim Ferriss has interviewed for his podcast, The Random Show.

If you have a look at the book, look at the size of this thing. It’s 650+ pages. It has over 200 guests featured in this book. I’ll talk a little bit about who’s in this book in a minute.

When I heard about the format, I was a little bit skeptical, and here’s why: I love The 4-Hour Workweek. When I read The 4-Hour Workweek, I’m pretty sure it was the seed that was sowed in my mind when I took my family to travel the world for three years after selling a business.

Then I read The 4-Hour Body, and in that there were lots of great tips and tricks that I used to help me complete an Ironman Triathlon. There was also a lot of noise in that book as well, and I didn’t really like the format. In some cases, it was very note form-driven, and I thought that it lacked in certain chapters.

Then The 4-Hour Chef for me was a bit mmmm, not quite sure. The jury’s out on that one. When I heard about The Tools of Titans, I have to admit I was skeptical. When I heard that he was just taking these interviews that he had done on The Random Show and condensing them, well, condensing them into a 600+ page book, I wasn’t sure that I was going to get much value out of that.

Who are the “Titans”?

But, here goes. First, take a look at the kind of people that Tim has interviewed for Tools of Titans.

I’ll just read you some of the people on this list:

• Investors: Mark Andreesen, founder of Netscape; Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal
• Authors: Brene Brown, James Altucher, Ramit Sethi, Paulo Coelho author of The Alchemist, Derek Sivers, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin
• Actors/Producers: Kevin Costner, Edward Norton, Jamie Foxx, Rick Rubin, who’s the founder of Def Jam Records
• Entrepreneurs: Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, Reid Hoffman founder of Linkedin
• Sports: Shaun White the snowboarder, Laird Hamilton, the surfer;
• And Not Forgetting: Tony Robbins, Arnold Schwarzenegger

That list is really one of the best who’s who of people who have achieved the peak performance in their respective fields anywhere that you’ll find.

The challenge is, has Tim successfully taken that list and condensed it down into something useful for us as changemakers, entrepreneurs, people of action, people who want to improve their life? Let’s move on to the next session and we’ll talk about what are the key takeaways from Tools of Titans.

3 Key Takeaways from Tools of Titans

(1) Successful People Meditate Every Day

You wake up in the morning. Now what? That’s the challenge that we all face. Every day, it doesn’t change. Interestingly, in this book Tim shares with us the five morning rituals that help me win the day. In these five morning rituals, the one standout for me is number two, which is meditate 10 to 20 minutes a day. Now, he doesn’t say why we need to meditate. He just provides us this really insightful statistic. 80% of all the guests profiled in this book have some form of daily mindfulness practice. Think about that. 80% of all the people that I’ve just shared with you in that long list meditate or do some kind of mindfulness practice every day.

80% of all the guests profiled in this book have some form of daily mindfulness practice.

What Tim does is do this 10 to 20 minutes every morning. It’s a routine. It’s before breakfast. Everybody has 10 to 20 minutes. It’s just the discipline of putting that in your day. I’ve tried meditation in the past and with mixed success. I’ve got to say, more unsuccessful attempts than success attempts, but I’m back at it. This is the key with meditation. It’s like training a puppy. Every time the puppy gets off and walks off, you got to pick it up and put it back down where it was sitting originally. That’s like training your mind. It’s a bit like a puppy.

What I’m using to do this, as suggested in this book, is the Headspace app, which I think is fantastic. It’s free. There’s also a premium version of it. Just listening to that 10 minutes a day really helps. Why do I think that’s useful for an entrepreneur? Why have I shared that with you now is because, we entrepreneurs, we face a challenge every day: decision, decision, decision. If you work for somebody else, if you’re an employee, the decisions you make won’t necessarily impact the amount of food that you put on your table at the end of the month for your family. But as an entrepreneur you make a bad decision, bang, you could lose all that food, all that income that you were expecting in the month.

I can’t say, “Wow, amazing. Look at the results,” but what I can say is, “Little bit calmer. Created a little bit more space inside of me so I’m not constantly reacting to the world, and I think that makes me a better entrepreneur."

Salaried employees get that anyway. We have to make those decisions every day. We face that fight-flight-feast-famine situation on a regular basis so we need to have a clear head. Meditation is absolutely key for that, and it helps us think about what we want. Once again, training the puppy.

This is what I’m doing as a result of Tools of Titans. I’ve already implemented that. I’m already doing 10 minutes every morning using the Headspace app. So far, so good. I can’t say, “Wow, amazing. Look at the results,” but what I can say is, “Little bit calmer. Created a little bit more space inside of me so I’m not constantly reacting to the world, and I think that makes me a better entrepreneur.

(2) Are You Doing it for the Audience or Scratching Your Own Itch?

The second takeaway from Tools of Titans really got me thinking. That’s why I think these books are worth their weight in gold when they can challenge your assumptions and challenge the way you think about things. In this section he interviews Maria Popova of Brainpickings. She says something which, for me, really got me thinking about my business. She says, “The second you start doing it, the business, for an audience, you’ve lost the long game. Because creating something that is rewarding and sustainable over the long run requires, most of all, keeping yourself excited about it. Trying to predict what an audience will be interested in and kind of pretzeling yourself to fit those expectations, you soon begin to begrudge it and become embittered, and it begins to show in your work.

“The second you start doing it (the business) for an audience, you’ve lost the long game."

What he’s saying is, and what Maria Popova is saying, is when it comes to building a business and growing a business, scratch your own itch. Don’t do it for anybody else. If you can do it for yourself, chances are there are a lot of people like you out there. There’s a little tribe of yous who share that same pain point, if you like, that same frustration with whatever it is, that solution is, that you’re trying to provide for these people. That is where we need to be focused.

What I think is, when I’m thinking about my business, my mistake and my weakness, if you like, is trying to do it for an audience. I think about who are the audience that I can do this for. Who are those people that I can go out and reach to? When what I should be doing is looking at myself and thinking about people like myself. Because I understand myself very well and I know there are people like me in different areas, whether they are Ironman triathletes, or entrepreneurs who share the same passions and pains that I do, rather than people that I don’t know or people that have little common connection with me.

Don’t do it for the audience. The minute you start doing it, you’ve lost the game. You need to do it for yourself to keep that passion in there. Soon as you start doing it for other people, it becomes diluted, it becomes edited, and it’s not you.

(3) Are You Hunting Antelope or Field Mice?

For the last takeaway from Tools of Titans, I’ve saved the best to last. This one is a real killer. This one really kicked me in the pants when it came to looking at my business. This takeaway alone, I believe, saved me a lot of time, money, and heartache in the long run. That’s why this book is well worth its cover price many times over.

It comes in the section which Tim titled “The 17 Questions that Changed My Life.” I’m just going to pick one of these questions for you now. This is the one which I looked at and asked myself, and really helped me reassess what I was doing and avoid what I believe was a big mistake. The question is: Are you hunting antelope or field mice? Let me explain.

This one comes from Newt Gingrich, who is an American politician, one of the most successful political leaders and career politicians of his time. Whether or not you agree with Newt Gingrich ideologically, you can’t disagree with the fact that he’s been successful in his career. Newt asks this question of himself when assessing some kind of new proposal or a project. It goes like this.

Imagine you’re a lion. A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But, it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of a field mouse. So, a lion that spends its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope. The distinction is important. Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice?

In the short term, it might give you a nice, rewarding feeling, catching field mice but in the long run you’re going to die.

This is the bit that really got me. “In the short term, it might give you a nice, rewarding feeling, catching field mice but in the long run you’re going to die. So ask yourself at the end of the day, did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?” Think about that in terms of your business. Wow, that really got me thinking. Had I got myself into a situation where I was chasing field mice because it was easy? Because I got immediate feedback? It was nice, rewarding, comfortable? Should I really be out there? How do I get out there? how do I hunt down antelope?

That’s Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss. What do you think? Did my review inform your decision to buy or not buy the book, as the case may be? If you have bought the book already, what tips, tricks, and techniques work for you? What are you implementing in your daily routine? What are you having successes with? Are there similar kind of questions that really challenged you in growing your business?

What Do You Think of Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss?

Whatever it is, leave a comment under this post.

I will try to answer every single comment or question that you have about this book or growing your business on this post or on my Youtube Channel.