Tools Of Titans

If there’s anything to be learned from this book, I believe it’s that there is no recipe you can just plug and play on your path to a fit body, a jacked up bank account, or a serene mind. This book has all the tools and tactics used by the best in the world in their field, and yet, it’s up to you to pick which ones will work for you.

I’m generalizing here, because the lesson in the book this relates to is one about health, which Tim learned from Dr. Justin Mager, physician to Olympic athletes, health experts and elite entrepreneurs. Justin says you have to figure out your own approach to health by running experiments. Sure, you can read books, educate yourself and try different diets. But that doesn’t free you from having to eat gluten to find out if you’re gluten-intolerant.

What works for the cubicle champion might not for the professional sprinter or the stay-at-home mom. This expands to the other two topics of the book. Learning is good. But only through applied learning can you translate those lessons into real results.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot through the first semester of my Master’s degree. By my admittedly high standards, most college students are lazy. They do the bare minimum required to slip through exams, if that, and spend the rest of their time recovering from their “demanding college life.” Naturally, the peer pressure to procrastinate here is huge.

“Come on, just one beer!”

“A cup of coffee, how bad can it be?”

“I didn’t get a thing done today, might as well…”

As someone who’s eager to get back to work, that’s tough to deal with. Do I love to take a break? Sure. Just not all the time.

Professional snowboarder Shaun White acquired the thick-headed attitude you need to beat peer pressure and do your thing early in his career. When he was 15, his parents paid for his trip to Japan, to compete in an event. Unlike all the other athletes, whose trips were all paid for and who partied the night before the competition, he wasn’t going to waste his parents’ money by slacking.

So instead of agreeing to the deal to just show off and split the prize money, Shaun did the best he could – and won. He didn’t just pocket the $50,000 prize, but also a valuable lesson for life: If you’re not stubborn enough to swim upstream, you’ll never be able to take the rare actions required to find success.