Tools of Titans: A Sausage Fest
OK, so they aren’t all tools, but this was just too easy
Does Tim Ferriss write only for men?
Before I had a kid, this never occurred to me. But now...
Tim Ferriss’s recommended morning routine:
Make your bed
Meditate
Do 10 reps of something
Make special tea
Write morning pages
My morning:
Get woken up by a 5-year-old climbing over me to see my face so she can tell if I’m awake
Pee while she watches me and talks non-stop about Frozen conspiracy theories
Go 10 rounds about what is appropriate food for breakfast
Make tea with coconut oil, realize that it’s disgusting, then make a new cup without it
Mindlessly scroll Instagram while arguing about getting dressed
I’ve been reading Tim Ferriss books since the 4-Hour Workweek came out in 2007. It was one of the books that pushed me to think differently about my career and life goals, so for that one, I thank him.
I like non-fiction and self-improvement type books, so while his other 4-hour books, 4-Hour Body and 4-Hour Chef, were less useful to me, I borrowed them from the library and don’t regret the time they took to read.
Then I borrowed Tools of Titans.
WTF.
The book is an encyclopedia of a bunch of his podcast guests, with their best wisdom distilled. The first two people featured were women, and I thought - great!
It took a loooong time to get to the next woman- not just a guest, but even as a quote, or recommended author, or mentor…turns out only 10% of the people in this book are women. I’ll let you guess how many of them are White.
It seems that not only does Tim Ferriss not interview women on his podcast, but none of the men he does are aware that women also have useful ideas to contribute to their lives.
Ferriss asks guests about their top book recommendations. Of the 17 most recommended books, the only female author is...Ayn Rand. Ugh.
I am far from the first one to notice the book’s gender imbalance. My favorite was the Financial Times calling it a “tsunami of testosterone”.
Did Ferriss deliberately limit the number of women guests, to appeal to his fan-boy base of Silicon Valley bros? Did he invite women on as guests and they declined? Or maybe worse, did he and his editors and friends who reviewed the manuscript just not notice this insane imbalance? Is the white male as the default human identity that strong?
To be fair, this problem of male-focused self-improvement is not something Ferriss alone created (and since this book was published, he has slightly increased the number of women on his podcast).
If you google the best books for self-help or self-improvement, you will find lists upon lists with only a couple of female authors. As of today, only 13 of the 50 top-selling self-help books on Amazon are by women - and one is a coloring book.
I don’t know if it’s the recent news on inequitable racial and gender representation, but in the past, I haven’t paid much attention to the gender or race of authors I was reading. Looking back through my Kindle, the gender breakdown is pretty even, race is so-so (even lots of the books about Africa I’ve read are written by White people…).
This year I spent a long time on the library waitlist to read Ultralearning and Atomic Habits. When I finally got them, they were a bit of a letdown. In the vein of Ferriss, they use research combined with self-experimentation and lots of male examples. The intensive self-focus is exhausting.
Are men the only ones interested in self-improvement? No.
Are they the only ones who can reach the pinnacle of human perfection and pass their secrets on to the rest of us? Ha.
Are they the only ones who focus so much on themselves that they can write entire books about their journeys without acknowledging the role their backgrounds, families, and teachers have played in their success? Maybe...
The best female equivalents of these bros that I have read are Gretchen Rubin, for the research/self-experimentation side, and Laura Vanderkam, on learning lessons from successful people (including a whole book on how high-earning working mothers structure their time- which sadly my library doesn’t have). They are clearly writing for a female audience.
I don’t want to stop reading books by men, as some of them have interesting things to say. It’s not that I learned nothing from the sausage fest that is Tools of Titans - it was just frustrating to turn page after page of the so-called best-of-the-best and only find men. And even worse, that they only read (White) men.
What would the world look like if men read more books by women? Or anyone who is not a cis-gendered straight white man? Gender equality? Racial harmony? World peace?