4 Hour Workweek Review | Timothy Ferriss Review
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Book Reviewed: The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated
The The 4-Hour Workweek
This has been such an influential book because I was going through the motions in my everyday life, trying to accumulate as much as possible with no actual meaning behind it. I knew that I wanted something different but didn’t know what it was or how to get it. Or, even the fallacy of the old “get a day job, work for 40 years/40 hours a week, retire” mantra.
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The 4-Hour Workweek changed my mindset completely.
Here is a summary:
“Step I: D is for Definition”
The first section describes how status-quo ideas about work and retirement are something to re-evaluate. If you work lots of hours and accumulate lots of money just so you can “retire”, you are wasting your life in pursuit of an event, “retirement” that might never come or you probably won’t have enough money to fund.
If you do accumulate enough money to fund it, you’re likely such a disciplined work-horse that you’ll be so bored during this retirement that “you’ll want to stick bicycle spokes in your eyes”.
Ferriss recommends playing by your own rules and using “lifestyle design” to evaluate what your real priorities are. By knocking out the fear of failure, you are free to pursue other avenues besides just survival. He suggests defining your worst case scenario, then conquering the fear of it by defining solutions to prevent it.
After working through your fear, Ferriss suggests defining your dream, something he calls creating a “Dreamline”. What exactly would you go after if you could have anything you want? He suggests that defining your goals or asking yourself “what you want?” doesn’t really get this point across, because what people are really looking for is excitement.
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His remedy for regular boring goal setting is to get “unrealistic” and start defining what would really interest you, not just what you think is attainable or achievable, but what you would really be interested in. Is it skydiving? Write that. Is it buying an Aston Martin? write it. The idea is to really explore what would be exciting and you would enjoy, unrestrained by reason.
Then, through “dreamlining”, define exactly what the plan would cost, and how to take action immediately to bring about your “dreamline”.
Finally, Ferriss suggests ‘Comfort Challenges’ designed to make yourself more confident about taking action outside the box, because this is what you’ll ultimately have to do if you want to be different than most people you know and go after what you really want.
“Step II: E is for Elimination”
Next, Ferriss suggests a totally new perspective on time management, with the chapter heading “The End of Time Management”. What he suggests is not necessarily stopping managing your time, it is more like managing your time on steroids.
He explains this using Pareto’s Law, which is that 80% of your productivity takes place in 20% of your time. Thus, you should slash and burn all activities that aren’t directly contributing to the bottom line.
He goes on to point out that if you’re an employee, time inefficiency is not your fault because the 9-5, 8 hour workday is just the way things are set up in the working culture, not the most efficient way to do things. He points to Parkinson’s Law, which is that a task will fill the available time allotted to it, regardless of what that amount of time is. So, if you give something three weeks, it will take three weeks. If you give the same task 24 hours, you’ll find a way to execute that task in 24 hours out of necessity.
Through these two ideas, he suggests first cutting out all of the fat from your schedule, then condensing the next tasks into shorter time periods, forcing you to focus and get the task completed more efficiently.
He suggests achieving these things by maintaining a low information diet, knocking out interruptions from voice mail and co-workers, refusing to do tasks that are of little to no consequence and batching necessary tasks. He explains how to get more slack if you’re a micromanaged employee, and how to avoid non-essential meetings.
Click here to visit The 4-Hour Workweek
“Step III: A is for Automation”
This section is all about automating your life to free up your time for other things.
First, Ferriss discusses how to outsource your life with virtual assistants (VAs), and what to do about this if you’re an employee. He uses some great examples of what kind of tasks he has the out-sourcers do and what his day looks like with the assistance of a VA (or several). There is a thorough section about the dangers of outsourcing as well, and how you should make sure that you eliminate non-essential tasks before you delegate them. Tasks should be pared down to a minimum before you add people.
He discusses where your VA should be based, the security of your information, and getting exactly what you want from your VA, especially with language barriers, depending on where your VA is based. There are referrals to VA firms. He applies the Pareto principle and Parkinson’s Law to VA based tasks as well.
The next part of this section is devoted to developing income autopilots so that you can make income regardless of what other things you are doing. The basic idea is to “generate cash without consuming time”. He uses the concept of a “muse” which, in this case is your capital generator.
He points out that products are more likely to produce income faster and get you to a point where you are able to fulfill your “dreamlines” much quicker than many other methods. He explains his method for choosing for finding a niche, brainstorming product to sell, testing the market, developing the product, licensing a product or selling someone else’s product. Next he describes how to get past the marketing phase and finally to the “management by absence” phase.
“Step IV: L is for Liberation”
The final step in the book is liberation. This section talks primarily about what to do now that you have created an income stream for yourself. Tim humorously discusses “how to escape the office”, “killing your job”, “mini-retirements”, what to do with your time now that you aren’t tied to a job and common mistakes that people make once they finally create the fortunate situation of being liberated from their day job.
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What I thought about The 4-Hour Workweek
The 4-Hour Workweek is not meant to be the cure-all for work dissatisfaction, but it provides a completely different perspective for looking at jobs, retirement and work. Why am I reviewing it on a personal finance web site? Because what you are ultimately trying to accomplish with your life has so much to do with your personal finances.
Are you swinging for the fences like Timothy Ferriss in The 4-Hour Workweek, aiming for an Aston Martin and mini-retirements, or are you barely trying to get by? or worse, digging yourself out of a massive consumer debt pile?
All of this has a huge bearing on what you are doing with your money. Would you like to aim for financial freedom or ho-hum security? Being debt free, or happily buying investment real estate that cash flows until you are in debt up to your eyeballs? What are you going to do with your time if you get to financial freedom? You probably worked so hard at it that you won’t just want to lay there.
Timothy Ferriss makes the point that we shouldn’t be the walking dead, aiming for spending our life in a soulless day job, wage slaving while making someone else rich. He uses his own experience in the corporate world, and then with his own business as an example. I liked how he used his supplement business as an example of how he had monopolized his time and made himself miserable.
It illustrated the point well that even though he had reached a point where he had more money coming in than he knew what to do with, since he had no time, it didn’t matter how much money he made. This part of the book is particularly important to me because it illustrates the point that more money doesn’t always solve lifestyle design problems.
If you have a lot of money but no time, you are on the same treadmill toward life dissatisfaction as the person who makes $7 an hour and works two jobs to make ends meet. While it seems different to the person making $7 an hour, it is a different breed of a similar problem, time scarcity.
The points about freeing up your time are some of the most valuable in the entire book.
Click here to visit The 4-Hour Workweek
In the nearly two years since this book has come out, he’s been criticized a lot for some of his methods. The fact remains that ultimately, anyone wanting to get on Ferriss’s entrepreneurial path would have to get to his level of entrepreneurship by doing something, and pleasing the boss definitely isn’t it.
If you don’t like the way he did something, go try it yourself and see how much time it takes you to get to the point where you can break tango world records. A lot of time. It is the subtlety of this point that is lost on most of his critics.
He will go the extra mile on a lot of things, but refuses to waste his valuable time on this planet on the mundane details that no one would miss anyway. For a lot of people, their day job falls into this category.
Now, if you are doing something that makes your heart sing every day and you love every minute of it, this book isn’t written for you. You are already living a life close to what you wanted in the first place, and I applaud you for that. For most people, this simply isn’t the case, and the book is for them.
The bottom line is that I wholeheartedly recommend The 4-Hour Workweek. Maybe you don’t want to be the world champion in Chinese Kickboxing, but this book challenges you to figure out what it is that you WOULD want and go after that with a vengeance. Either that or you can keep being one of the working dead and complain that what Timothy Ferriss has clearly done himself isn’t achievable for the “average person” while you sit on your couch watching your life pass you by. You choose.
