Tools of Titans summary

You might have noticed that people tend to gravitate toward simple answers to health questions. For instance, most of us think that, since high cholesterol is a bad thing, low cholesterol must be good.

However, things aren’t quite that straightforward. Physician Justin Mager, a personal health coach to Olympic athletes, corporate executives and even health experts like the founder of the CrossFit center in San Francisco, Kelly Starrett, has been working to counter this type of thinking for years.

Most people believe that hard work will bring success. But there’s also nothing like a hard job to make you want to be successful.

Just take Chris Sacca, a successful investor in the San Francisco Bay Area whose parents drove home this important lesson when he was still young. For the Sacca children, summers always had two halves.

The comic strip Dilbert tells the story of an innocuous office worker who is, in many ways, the perfect antihero. But that doesn’t mean he’s not a successful character. In fact, for Scott Adams, the comic’s creator, antiheroes can still be successful – because success isn’t about achieving goals; it’s about forming systems.

So what does it mean to focus on systems?

Have you ever teased a friend just because everyone else was doing it? Well, if you tend to fall into such traps, you might not have what it takes to become wealthy and successful.

In fact, to become a success, you need to develop an immunity to peer pressure. Just take the Olympic snowboarding champion Shaun White. When he was 15, his parents paid for him to travel to Japan to compete in an international snowboarding event. (The other competitors were older and had all their expenses covered by sponsors.)

If you think wisdom is all about spending hours meditating and being perfectly respectful, then you aren’t familiar with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. These two guys exemplify the human wisdom to be gained through humor and naughty behavior. Despite the puritanical underpinnings of American society, Rogen and Goldberg have managed to create films that address sexuality with irreverence and hilarity.

Their work on the subject began in 2007 with the movie Superbad. This comedy follows two awkward teenagers who are so desperate to lose their virginity that they have little brainpower left to devote to anything else.

Have you ever felt a surge in your ability to do work right after a holiday? This experience is actually pretty common and it’s not just a result of being well rested. It also happens because you’re full of new, inspiring experiences.

So, in other words, to be creative, you need to have a life. Just take the comedian Whitney Cummings, who wrote the hit TV series 2 Broke Girls. For years, she struggled with self-doubt, low self-esteem and procrastination. She was so plagued by these problems that she thought the only way she could be funny was by making fun of herself.