Before Arnold Schwarzenegger was ever “The Terminator” he was simply the landlord.
In the late 1970s, Schwarzenegger, an unknown outside the world of bodybuilding and still struggling to overcome an Austrian accent as thick as his chiseled biceps, saved up $100,000 from odd jobs as a bricklayer and mail-order weight-lifting coach and plunked it down on some choice real estate.
“I did not rely on my movie career to make a living,” he said of his early years in trying to break into Hollywood. “I realized in the 1970s that the inflation rate was very high and therefore an investment like that is unbeatable.
“I benefited from a [magic decade] and I became a millionaire from my real estate investments,” the 69-year old movie icon and California governor said. “That was before my career took off in show business and acting, which was after ‘Conan the Barbarian,’ ” which came out in 1982.
Ahnold’s insider tale of how he forged a successful life is just one anecdote in Tim Ferriss’ new book, “Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which profiles 112 different people — from “Sausage Party” star Seth Rogan to Silicon Valley Trump supporter Peter Thiel. Ferriss, 39, is a self-proclaimed “guru,” of shortcuts to greatness, such as “The 4-Hour Work Week,” “The 4-Hour Body” and “The 4-Hour Chef.”
The 673-page tome is, as Ferriss puts is, a “a toolkit for changing your life.” The interviews inside are largely culled from podcasts he’s done with celebrities and entrepreneurs over the years, and are distilled to a few pages of life lessons and anecdotes.
“My life had already improved in every area as a result of the lessons I could remember,” he wrote of the interviews.
- Comedian Margaret Cho, one of only 15 women profiled in the book, talked about how learning to handle hecklers from the stage taught her a life lesson.
When someone interrupts her show, Cho will stop her own act to question hecklers and the people around them to find out what’s behind it, she said.
“It’s really going deeper, and finding out why this person has chosen to disrupt a performance that everybody has paid for, and that everybody is there for and agreed to sit for,” she said. “There’s potential to create a whole show around them.”
- Marc Andreessen, the billionaire Silicon Valley investor and co-founder of Netscape, says it’s important not to price yourself, or your product, too low just to get a quick sale.
Just the opposite is the way to go.
New companies should raise their prices if they want customers to commit to the brand, he said.
“It has become conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that the way to succeed is to price your product as low as possible, under the theory that if it’s low-priced, everybody can buy it, and that’s how you get to volume,” he said.
“And we just see over and over and over again people failing with that, because they get into a problem called, ‘too hungry to eat.’ They don’t charge enough for their product to be able to afford the sales and marketing required to actually let anybody to buy it.”
Remember this, he said. “Is your product any good if people won’t pay more for it?”
- Producer Rick Rubin, who’s worked behind the scenes for musical greats, from Johnny Cash to Kanye West, has unusual advice that could require thick curtains.
Rubin takes regular ice baths and walks around in the nude for about 20 minutes first thing in the morning — “reversing a lifetime of nocturnal living,” he said.
When an artist feels stuck, Rubin gives them very small tasks to break their writer’s block.
“There was an artist I was working with recently who hadn’t made an album in a long time, and he was struggling with finishing anything,” he said. “But I would give him very doable assignments that almost seemed like a joke. ‘Tonight, I want you to write one word in this song that needs five lines, that you can’t finish. I just want one word that you like by tomorrow. Do you think you could come up with one word?’ ”
- When Mike Birbiglia, the comedian and actor behind the recent film, “Don’t Think Twice,” was asked what advice he had for his 20-year old self, he said, “Write everything down because it’s all very fleeting.”
“And also, it’s not about being good; it’s about being great. Because what I find, the older I get is that a lot of people are good, and a lot of people are smart, and a lot of people are clever. But not a lot of people give you their soul when they perform.”
- Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor behind Palantir and PayPal — who recently destroyed the gossip site Gawker by funding Hulk Hogan’s successful defamation lawsuit this year, pontificates on failure:
“I think people actually do not learn very much from failure,” he said.
“I think it ends up being quite damaging and demoralizing to people in the long run, and my sense is that the death of every business is a tragedy. It’s not some sort of beautiful aesthetic where there’s a lot of carnage, but that’s how progress happens, and it’s not some sort of educational imperative. So I think failure is neither a Darwinian nor an educational imperative. Failure is always simply a tragedy.”
Later on, he chides himself for being too competitive.
“I’ve become, I think, much more self-aware over the years about the problematic nature of a lot of the competition. There have been rivalries that we get caught up in. And I would not pretend to have extricated myself from this altogether. So I think, every day, it’s something to reflect on and think about, ‘How do I become less competitive in order that I can become more successful?’”
The subjects in the book are active people — those who make movies or businesses — not people who sit around and study and pontificate on what works and what doesn’t.
Jocko Willink, an ex-Navy SEAL and entrepreneur, laid that contradiction out most clearly:
“If you want to be tougher mentally, it is simple: Be tougher. Don’t meditate on it,” he said.
In the end, the problem with Ferriss’ book is that there is not enough high-caliber advice — like that offered up by Willink and Schwarzenegger.
Too much is thin broth, like the insight dished up by Jack Dorsey.
Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder and CEO, who recently topped Bloomberg Businessweek’s “40 and Under (And Underperforming)” list, comes off in a single-page interview, sounding as thoughtful as a yoga T-shirt.
Dorsey said if he could have a gigantic billboard say anything, it would say “Breathe.” Oka-ay. He seemingly mangles Socrates’ famous paradox of “All I know is I know nothing.”