#072 | Money lessons from Tim Ferriss’s Tools of Titans

November 30, 2020

Episode Summary:

In this week’s episode, we share some of our favorite money lessons from Tim Ferris’s book Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers. There were so many amazing learnings and nuggets of wisdom in these 647 pages, but in this episode, we focused on the financial lessons and insights. The learnings include reminders that stuff won’t make you happy, the role of money in your life, understanding why you spend money, knowing how much it costs you to live, the chains money can put on you, and the importance of financial freedom.

Episode Notes:

It took Mike about 2 weeks to read Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss. It took Maggie about 48 weeks to read Tools of Titans. In Maggie’s defense, it was 647 pages and 2020 was a doozie of a year and it threw a lot of interruptions her way. Either way, in the end, they both read it. And Maggie used her 48 weeks to take better notes on it than Mike did.

Our top money-related insights and lessons from Tools of Titans:

Stuff and how it won’t make you happy. More broadly, happiness and money.

Derek Sivers quote on a billboard, “It won’t make you happy,” to be placed outside of shopping malls and car dealerships.
Naval Ravikant said, “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.” He then went on to say, “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. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving yet, and not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that inversion, that is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase that I probably use the most myself and my head is just one word:accept.”

The role of money in your life

The idea of enough. Our wants vs. needs episode. Studies about how your happiness doesn’t increase after you have some basic level of money to take care of yourself.. after that more doesn’t buy happiness. It often does the opposite.
Money is a great servant but a terrible master.

Knowing your target monthly income and ideal lifestyle cost.

“What’s my real target monthly income. TMI. For the latter, in other words: how much does my dream life—the stuff I’m deferring for “retirement”—really cost if I pay on a monthly basis.”

Why you, sometimes, spend money.

“Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity.” – Colin Powell
“If you stop caring about what others think, you’ll magically start spending less money.”

The chains money can put on you. Be careful!

“If you find yourself saying but I am making so much money” about a job or project, pay attention. These are warning signs that you’re probably not on the right track.
“It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.” – Thomas Huxley

Financial freedom

There is a chapter titled “How to earn your freedom”. It’s worth reading a few times. “Instead our insane culture of fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don’t really need – we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts.” In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called, “lifestyle,” travel becomes just another accessory – a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase in the same way as buying clothing or furniture.”
The trend of vacations towards a “more simple life.” “Purchasing a package vacation to find a simpler life is kind of like using a mirror to see what you look like when you aren’t looking in the mirror.”
Naturalist Edwin Way Teale wrote in his 1956 book Autumn Across America…. “Freedom as John Muir knew it, with its wealth of time, it’s unregimented days, its latitude of choice… such freedom seems more rare, more difficult to attain, more remote with each new generation.”
Thoreau said that we end up spending “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” We’d love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. 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.
“Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.” Vagabonding to me is a metaphor. Your goal may not be to vagabond, but the goal of financial freedom is the same thing.

Top 3 Takeaways:

Read inspiring books. They are full of so much inspiration and learning.
It doesn’t cost money to learn new things. We both checked out this book from the library.
There is no one single path to success or to fulfillment. Learn from others, test out their methods for yourself and when you find something that resonates, try it. If it works for you, stick with it.

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