Productivity

In his epic 707-page Tools of Titans, Tim Ferriss shares the habits and beliefs of 101 people at the top of their game, including tech investors like Chris Sacca and Peter Thiel, entrepreneurs like Linkedin’s Reid Hoffman and Evernote’s Phil Libin, superhuman athletes like Amelia Boone and Wim Hof, media figures like Edward Norton and Whitney Cummings, and more.

These are the principles that successful people use to achieve audacious goals, improve themselves, and be happier. If you can apply the lessons from this book, you can be more effective.

The problem with Tools of Titans is its organization – every titan has a separate chapter, leading to over 140 short chapters over 707 pages. For Tim, this makes sense, as he wants to pay homage to the titans and make it easy to find personalities you care about. But when organized this way, it’s hard to see the bigger picture.

What I really wanted to know were patterns of habits across the titans. What do many successful people do that I don’t currently do? I wanted to see the beliefs of titans organized by theme, like how to define your life goals, how to think of good ideas, how to be happier everyday.

That’s what I’ve done in this summary. I’ve extracted my favorite lessons from the book and reorganized them by theme. This way, you can see how 10 titans focus their lives to cut out the noise, and how 9 titans find time to be grateful every single day.

When you read a book, do you find yourself forgetting what you read? Do you regret wasting time on books that you should have skimmed instead?

If you read a lot of books a year, then it makes sense to spend a few hours learning how to read better and double the value from your reading. That’s the point of How to Read a Book, a classic by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren.

The argument is compelling: after you learn phonics as a child and go through high school English, no one really teaches you how to read intelligently. College courses rarely touch on this, and the workforce even less so.

As a result, plenty of adults read at an elementary level – not in the sense of having a limited vocabulary, but in absorbing the value of a book efficiently. See if any of these problems apply to you:

• You don’t really know what a book is about until you start reading it.
• You read at the same pace, regardless of whether it’s a good book or a terrible book.
• You don’t critique your books, articulating exactly why you liked or disliked it.

In this How to Read a Book summary, learn:

• Tactics to understand what a book is about, in minutes
• How you should read a novel differently from a nonfiction book
• How to intelligently critique a book
• The highest possible level of reading

When you’re trying to be productive, are you easily distracted by wandering thoughts or urges? Do you mindlessly open up your favorite website or app, craving novelty or fearing you’re missing out? Do you wish you could focus better, spending hours more per day driving toward your most important goals?

These are laughably universal problems. Internet apps are engineered to deliver hits of novelty and trigger cravings so strong you don’t even realize you’re under their control. If you examine your behavior, you’d likely find elements of drug addiction.

(My drug of choice is Reddit. Like an addict, I get sudden impulses out of nowhere to check it, fearing I’ll miss something hilarious or provocative. Also like an addict, I have an efficient sequence of delivery – “Ctrl+T” to open a new tab, “RE” to get reddit as the top choice in the search bar, “Enter” to load the page. I didn’t realize how ingrained this habit was until I tried to stop.)

It’s common knowledge that today’s media is addictive – yet ultimately unsatisfying, providing little more than frivolous amusement. What’s less common knowledge is how to overcome these distractions so you can focus on the goals you really care about.

Deep Work teaches you how to develop your focus and resist distractions. Focus is like a mental muscle – you need to structure training sessions and push yourself to your mental limit to increase your focus capacity. Implement the strategies in this Deep Work summary, and you’ll be more productive than you’ve ever been.

In this Deep Work summary, learn:

• Why deep work is critical to your success as an information worker
• How to set up your work environment to maximize focus
• How to send effective emails that cut down on dreaded back-and-forth email chains
• How to memorize the sequence of a pack of cards – and why this will improve your focus