Tools of Titans, Ferris

Created: September 01, 2023

Clippings

These are taken verbatim from the book.

  • 5-Minute Journal
  • ‘What would I probably tell myself as an older version of myself?’
  • Using CouchSurfing.com or a similar service to live in hosts’ homes for free, even if in your own
  • My trauma therapist said every time you meet someone, just in your head say, ‘I love you’ before you have a conversation with them, and that conversation is going to go a lot better.
  • MOJO’s 100 Greatest Albums Ever Made, or Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, or any trusted source’s top 100 albums, and start listening to what are considered the greats.”
  • The following bullets are writing prompts that Cheryl has suggested when asked for assignment ideas for students who’ve read Wild. They are brilliant and make fantastic jumping-off points for any type of journaling or writing.
  • Whenever we meet someone who we know doesn’t care about meeting us, my wife and I always try and come up with a trick question that throws them off.
  • “Interval training often at midday or lunch break and meditation together are beautiful habits to develop to cultivate the art of turning it on and turning it off.”
  • I’ve met are seasonal workers—carpenters, park service workers, commercial fishermen—who winter every year in warm and exotic parts of the world.
  • Make commitments in a high-energy state so that you can’t back out when you’re in a low-energy state.
  • Tonight or tomorrow morning, think of a decision you’ve been putting off, and challenge the fuzzy “what ifs” holding you hostage.
  • 10% Happier, Dan Harris
  • Psych by Dr. Judd Biasiotto
  • Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda
  • Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse
  • I Seem to Be a Verb by Buckminster Fuller
  • “The Tail End” by Tim Urban on the Wait But Why
  • The Living Gita: The Complete Bhagavad Gita—A Commentary for Modern Readers
  • Grab Zero to One for all of them
  • Goals: Setting and Achieving Them on Schedule, How to Stay Motivated, and Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar: “Zig is your grandfather and my grandfather.
  • The War of Art
  • Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.
  • Iacocca: An Autobiography by Lee Iacocca and William Novak.
  • Life Is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera
  • The Oxford Book of Aphorisms by John Gross because it contains the most brilliant one-liners in history.
  • The diaries of Henry David Thoreau. Speaking of this intersection of the outer world and the inner world, nobody writes more beautifully about the immutable dialog between the two than he. There is just so much—and I mean so much—universal timeless truth in his private reflections, on everything from the best definition of success to the perils of sitting, which he wrote about 150 years before we started saying, ‘Sitting is the new smoking.’”
  • On the Shortness of Life by Seneca.
  • If you’re open to reading a “dark” book to help put things in perspective, If This Is a Man and The Truce (often combined into one volume) by Primo Levi
  • Derek Parfit, who has spent his entire life at All Souls College at Oxford, which is elite even within Oxford. Derek wrote a book called Reasons and Persons, which Will considers one of the most important books written in the 20th century.
  • Jekyll and Hyde
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude to would-be writers: “If you’ve never written a book and you’re going to tell somebody you want to write a great book, all right. Read this and know what a great book is.”
  • Leaves of Grass (first edition).
  • In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell
  • Levels of the Game by John McPhee, an entire book about a single tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner in 1968. It’s a short 162 pages and the New York Times gushed, “This may be the high point of American sports journalism.”
  • I first met Josh after reading his book, The Art of Learning, and we’ve become dear friends.
  • Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
  • Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
  • The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
  • Brooklyn Castle, a film about chess in inner-city schools.
  • The Fog of War (Errol Morris)—Many guests recommend this. It’s incredible and has an unbelievable 98% average on Rotten Tomatoes.
  • The Naked Gun will do anything for a laugh.
  • True Films 3.0, contains the 200 documentaries he feels you should see before you die, and it is available as a PDF on kk.org.
  • The Up series: This ongoing series is filmed in the UK, and revisits the same group of people every 7 years. It started with their 7th birthdays (Seven Up!) and continues up to present day, when they are in their 50s. Subjects were picked from a wide variety of social backgrounds. Alain calls these very undramatic and quietly powerful films “probably the best documentary that exists.”
  • Bennett Miller’s The Cruise and Adam Curtis’s films. “He’s got a four-part film called The Century of the Self, and then a three-part series called The Power of Nightmares. I think those are absolutely brilliant films, dense but really eye-opening.” TF: The Century of the Self has been recommended to me by several podcast guests.

Quotes

“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.”

Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.



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