Habits of successful people

Matt Mullenweg, former lead developer at WordPress and head of Automattic, promised himself to do one push-up before bed. So he realized that even a “shamefully small goal” can become the basis for a habit. As soon as he started, he realized that he was capable of serious training.

Wrestling champion Triple H goes in search of a gym immediately after arriving at the hotel. He found that 15 minutes of exercise on a stationary bike allows you to “reboot”, clear your thoughts and avoid jet lag.

Reed Hoffman, co-founder and executive chairman of the board of directors of LinkedIn, needs one factor, not several, to make a decision that can cost a lot of money. When there are many worthy reasons, but not a single decisive one, he recommends doing nothing, otherwise there will be a feeling that time has been wasted.

These are just three of the hundreds of productivity tips found in Titan’s Tools: The Tactics, Rituals, and Habits of Billionaires, Idols, and the World’s Most Productive People. Written by Tim Ferriss, best-selling author of The Four-Hour Workweek and The Four-Hour Body. The book is based on lessons Ferris learned from interviews for his podcast. “Tim Ferris Show” successful people from the world of sports, art and business.

The author himself notes two features of the book. First, he has experienced many of the techniques described and calls it a “high performance recipe compilation” that he put together for his own use. Secondly, Ferris believes that the people he quotes do not have superpowers: “It may seem that the rules that they created for themselves allow you to change reality, but in fact, once they have learned this, then you can follow them. example.”

Ferris believes that, whatever your definition of success, someone else has already done something similar, which means that useful recipes and new effective ways to look at the problem already exist. So why not just repeat someone else’s successful move? To make things easier, Ferriss identified the general principles followed by the most successful people on the planet.

For example, more than 80% of them develop mindfulness or meditate daily. Productivity expert Tony Robbins explains that attempts to solve a problem are often unsuccessful because people are “depressed” and only respond to difficulties. To deal with this, he does a “pre-launch” every morning — diving into cold water, doing breathing exercises and meditating, focusing on feelings of gratitude and self-awareness, and then determines three main things that he is going to bring to life during the day.

Arnold Schwarzenegger discovered transcendental meditation when his career was taking off and he felt he was unable to cope with the opportunities that opened up. Meditation helped him stay calm and find solutions to problems in order. Focus is one of the main benefits awareness.

Ferris notes that “in a world full of distractions, being able to focus on a single task is a superpower.” Even non-meditators often do meditation-like practices. For example, they listen to the same song or album on repeat, as this promotes concentration and helps to focus on the current moment.

Ferris divided his interlocutors into three groups: “healthy”, “rich” and “wise”. The section on healthy habits covers exercise, diet and nutrition, and nutritional supplements, the latter of which Ferris has capitalized on.

In the “Rich” section, Ferris mostly talks about the success of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. In the Wise section, he describes daily rituals and also reflects on how to change the habits of the mind and develop new principles of thinking.

Marc Andreessen, one of the creators of the early Mosaic and Netscape web browsers and now one of the biggest venture capitalists, says he would like to give all newbies a piece of advice: “Raise your prices.” He is even willing to write it on a billboard so that as many aspiring entrepreneurs as possible see the recommendation. He believes that insufficiently high prices are one of the main reasons for the failure: “The problem is that businessmen are “too hungry to eat.” They don’t make enough money to afford the sales and marketing people it takes to get someone to buy their product.”

Another founder and billionaire investor, Peter Thiel, recommends asking yourself the question: “If you have a plan to achieve a goal in ten years, why not achieve it in six months?” Questions like these disrupt conventional thinking and open up the possibility for the emergence of new ideas.

Phil Lieben, co-founder and executive chairman of Evernote, recalls the “rule of 3 and 10”: “Absolutely everything in the company is destroyed every time it roughly triples … and this means literally everything: how you pay salaries, how you assign meetings, what communication channels you use, how you allocate the budget, who makes decisions. Understanding this principle will help startups get rid of legacy processes as they expand.”

Titan’s Tools is a hodgepodge of rituals, habits, and philosophies that successful people believe have helped them in their lives. The publication focuses on available techniques, real cases and tips that are easy to understand and use to “add fuel to the fire of development.”

At the same time, the author does not try to give a scientific justification for the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

However, there are scientific studies supporting the benefits of rituals. In the article “Do not lose faith. Rituals increase productivity by reducing anxiety,” Harvard Business School professor Alison Wood-Brooks, along with colleagues from the Wharton School of Business, Chicago University, and Columbia University, provide evidence for this thesis and describe a series of experiments demonstrating that “performing a ritual before plunging into a stressful situation can reduce feelings of anxiety and increase productivity. This proves that productivity will increase even if the ritual itself is made up by the experimenters and makes no sense.