Review: Tools Of Titans by Tim Ferriss (4)
If you didn't know there is a new book by Tim "Four Hour Work Week" Ferriss out, Elon Musk would like to talk to you about your successful Mars colonisation effort.
So yeah. The latest book from the guy who wrote "Four Hour Work Week" - and got a significant number of us into affiliate marketing or similar things, including me - is in the shops and on the Kindle. And a short while ago I promised STM a review of it.
So, having now finished the book - finally - here's a summary of what it is, what it's about, and what I expect STMers and affiliate marketers in particular to get out of it.
So What Is It?
If you're expecting a standard Tim Ferriss book a la Four Hour Cook/Body/Workweek, you're not going to get it.
Tools Of Titans is a collection of what Tim considers the most valuable insights he's gotten from interviewing a lot of very impressive people - from Hollywood directors like Robert Rodriguez to ex-Navy SEALs like Jocko Willink. It's dozens upon dozens of 3-4 page summary interviews, containing recommended tools, books, and techniques to make your life better.
First note: this is a big book. Ridiculously big.
I normally finish reading books in a few hours. A thin novel is about an hour and a half. It took me about half of a 14-hour flight plus a good few hours subsequent reading to get through ToT (as I shall subsequently call it).
That's for two reasons. Firstly, it's just damn big. Secondly, it contains a lot of really big ideas and interesting insights, and they're on a massively wide range of topics. I frequently felt I needed to take a half-hour break to absorb what I'd read before I was ready to read more - otherwise the fascinating ideas about meditation I'd just read would be overwritten with all the interesting discussion about funding startups.
What's In It?
The book's split into three broad sections: Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise. They cover, respectively, physical and mental health (quite evenly split between the two), making money (largely focused on startup-like activities, including investment), and general "how to live a good life" advice.
It's very close to being a classic "Almanack", a type of book which has thoroughly vanished from the shelves in the last couple of decades.
Healthy
"Healthy" interviews doctors, trainers, athletes, and a few other people of interest. You might recognise:
- Pavel Tsatsouline, the guy primarily responsible for introducing the US to the kettlebell.
- Wim Hof, nicknamed "The Iceman".
- Paul Levesque, aka wrestler Triple H.
Quite a few names who will be familiar if you've read Four Hour Body also make an appearance, and some of the interviews (but by no means all) revisit topics Tim covered in that book. Overall, he takes an impressively broad mandate for the term "Health" here: in addition to the expected sections on weight training, endurance, etc (which have finally persuaded me to buy Simple And Sinister), he also goes into:
- Meditation techniques, including several rather simple approaches I hadn't heard of. Meditation is an area where Tim's "Minimum Effective Dose" principle really works well, and there's some very useful thinking in here.
- Common causes of death and how to mitigate against them - including some very contrarian thinking that's interesting, but I'd probably want a second opinion on. In particular, his questions to doctors about what treatment they'd prescribe themselves in the event they were diagnosed with cancer is grim but probably useful reading.
- Use of psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin for mental health purposes. For obvious reasons, most authors are reluctant to touch this topic with the proverbial 10 foot barge pole, and it's clear that this section was written after some consultation with a lawyer. It's fascinating - not sure I'll use any of it but it's all in the "very good to know" category.
Personally, I found Healthy arguably the most interesting, and certainly the most immediately actionable, section in the book. It's immediately added one item to my Amazon orders (the Rumble Roller, an improved foam roller recommended by the #2 Tough Mudder competitor in the world), and I came out of it with a long "to read" and "to try" list.
Given that I'm already reasonably knowledgable about most of the topics he touches on in his interviews, that's quite impressive.
As various people have noted in the past, STMers tend to be quite physically active and interested in our health - so I'd expect this section to be of interest to most of us.
Wealthy
OK, straight up - this section has very little that will be of direct use in running your affiliate campaigns, although a lot of the advice may be indirectly useful. Just don't expect a section entitled "Stackman: How To Make A Million Dollars As An Affiliate". (Fortunately STM has you covered on that one
) . Wealthy is split more or less straight up between startup / Silicon Valley names (Marc Andressen, Peter Thiel, Matt Mullenweg) and creative types who have managed to make a business success of their creativity (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ed Catmull of Pixar fame, Scott Adams).
Topics covered in this section include:
- How to make a success of a startup.
- Investing in startups and investment in general.
- Figuring out what you should and shouldn't be doing with your time.
- Making art or creativity work as a business.
- Life hacks to get things done.
It has a semi-heavy focus on investing in startups, which Tim explains has been his other interest for some years. Despite being very successful, he's now given it up to focus on writing, and the section where he explains why he did that and how he made the leap is probably the most interesting part of "Wealthy".
Personally, I found "Wealthy" the weakest section in the book, which may be because I'm not primarily interested in the "unicorn" / VC-funded approach to startups, or may be because I'm already very familiar with most of the Valley thinking around them. I've also read multiple other interviews with or in some cases books by the interviewees here, and so I was less surprised by much of what was discussed in this section than others.
Nonetheless, there's interesting reading here, and probably more interesting reading for a lot of people who aren't as familiar with the people who are interviewed. I didn't find any blinding insights, but I found quite a few interesting approaches, and a few confirmations of things I wasn't expecting to find confirmed. (For example, it turns out Arnold Schwarzenegger's approach to mitigating risk in creative projects is exactly the same as mine - and it seems to have worked pretty well for both of us.)
There are lots of tips and tricks in this section: I'd run across most of them before, but if you haven't, they're likely to be of interest and use in your business life. My feeling was that they were mostly a bit more obvious than the tips and tricks elsewhere in ToT, but that might just, again, reflect the amount of time I've spent learning hacks in the world of business and wealth.
Specific note: if you're interested in investing in startups, and not yet particularly experienced with it, I'd expect this section is a must-read.
Wise
"Wise" is about the philosophy of life, from a wide variety of sources. It's about how to be fulfilled, happy, and get the things done you want to do.
I haven't really managed to develop a strong viewpoint on this section yet. It's clearly very interesting, but I've yet to decide if it's influenced me strongly. However, I think I'd recommend it to almost anyone as a read, just because there are so many powerful and varied ideas in here.
Interviewees include:
- Ryan Holiday, author of "The Obstacle Is The Way" (and speaker at several Affiliate World events).
- Paulo Coelho, author of "The Alchemist".
- Jocko Willink, genuine badass, author and ex-Navy SEAL commander.
- General Stanley McChrystal
- Author and philosopher Alain de Botton
- Punk musician and author Amanda Palmer
It's an eclectic bunch, and the topics are equally eclectic, including:
- Writing, how to write, and how to keep writing.
- Anxiety, and how to deal with it.
- Motivation and determination.
- Your list of "I can't" statements and how to consider them.
- What I can only term - in the best possible meaning of the phrase - "wisdom hacks".
It's very hard to summarise what's in here: in short, I'd say it's worth reading for almost everyone, but exactly how much you get out of it will vary. It's the most grab-bag of all the grab-bag sections in the book.
Essentially, Tim asks a load of very interesting and successful people what the most important ideas/tips/tricks to their lives are, and collates the answers.
So Is It Worth Buying?
Hell yes. Tools Of Titans is about $15 - at that price if you get one semi-useful idea out of it it was a steal. And the odds are you'll get significantly more than that.
The book and tool recommendations are worth it on their own - I heartily agree with Tim's thesis that if half-a-dozen insanely successful people all recommend one book very strongly, it's probably worth a read. And ToT's full of those.
It's also a great place to find out about people you might want to read more from. Nearly all the thinkers interviewed have their own blog or book - if you find what they have to say insightful or interesting, you've got a jumping-off point to explore more.
(This sort of jumping-off point can't be underestimated - some of the most valuable journeys of discovery I've ever been on have started from exactly that sort of short introduction to a new field or writer. Indeed, that's how I found affiliate marketing and STM.)
And it's a fun read. Tim Ferriss has always had an engaging style, and he's now had a lot of practise too. The book's full of fun anecdotes, amusing stories, and well-put advice. It's a pleasant, entertaining read.
It's not really a book in the conventional sense of the term. You'll not read the entire thing and say "I now know considerably more about X topic; mission accomplished".
It's more a collection of very short pieces which you can read in 5 minutes. I'd recommend keeping it around for when you're taking short breaks (which you should be doing anyway) and reading one or two pieces during that time.
Some of them won't be very useful. Some of them will be very fun but not lifechanging. Some of them will be damn useful and you'll put the tips into action immediately.
And whilst I don't - yet - think that ToT's had this effect on me, one or two of the tips in the book might well change your life. And they'll probably be completely different tips to the ones that change other peoples' lives.
Summary: give it a try.
Have you read Tools of Titans? What did you think? Did you find immediately useful, or extremely deep, insights in there? Would you recommend it to friends?
Can't wait to read the book.
Great review!
Thank you!
An addendum to this review, by the way: Tim says in the foreword that different people will get radically different things out of the book.
My girlfriend has been reading it, and it's astonishing how true that is. She's been picking up on quite a few completely different key points to the ones I picked up on: stuff that made me stop and write frantic notes didn't interest her, and she's found a bunch of useful ideas for her that I just passed over as not useful to me.
So it's definitely a "try it and see what you get out of it" book.
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