Review: “The 4-Hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferriss
7 Comments Published by Joel April 29th, 2007 in Books, Jobs, Travel. Share This
I just put down Timothy Ferriss’ book, “The 4-Hour Workweek,” to find myself indolent between self-loathing, ideas, and hope. The books is a challenge to reanalyze my life to achieve the goals I have immediately—or at least before a far-away retirement. While I want to disparage it to give myself an excuse to ignore it, I can’t. I’d rather ask: Why can’t I live this lifestyle, too?
Dethroner was created with one over-arching goal: to create a business that would allow me to do what I want with my life, which is to travel around the country and planet, learning new things, and document them in writing and pictures. I’ve lost the plot a bit over the last few months, falling too easily into patterns I learned while working at Gawker Media as a blogger, instead of making smart decisions in pursuit of the goal as a business owner. 4-Hour Work Week comes on the heels of several hand-delivered slaps to the face by circumstance. Which is great—it’s time to stop wallowing that things haven’t worked out as effortlessly as I’d hoped.
Atypical optimism after the jump.
Ferriss’ concept can be summed up easily: establish self-sustaining sources of revenue, such as internet-based retail operations; minimize both your reoccurring fiscal and informational expenses by cutting fat and outsourcing responsibility at every opportunity; use your new-found freedom to travel, learn new things, and enjoy life’s adventures.
For me, as a writer, I’ve learned that diversifying is the secret to a strong freelance life. I have regular magazine work, occasional long-form/front-of-the-book pieces, and Dethroner. That works primarily because I want to do all those three things, but I’m doing the two former things to pay for the latter. (Making Dethroner pay for itself is an ongoing project, the ups-and-downs of which are best saved for another post.)
What I should now, according to Ferriss, is to add businesses unrelated to writing, or at least aligned in parallel to my skill set. (Technical knowledge, dick jokes.) I already have about half-a-dozen ideas waiting in the wings, which is frightening. What if one of them turned out to be a success?
There is a sense of guilt I get when I start thinking about living this sort of lifestyle, not just using currency disparity to hire Indian personal assistants, but even having people work for me at all. If I’m able to live the lifestyle I want because other people are working for me, shouldn’t I, too, be working as much as I ask of them? I haven’t quite figured this one out, but I think I’m going to put that aside for the moment to worry about until after I’m fully self-sufficient. (To paraphrase Nathan Rolf, I’m hoping trickle-down economics can be more than just paying a bum a dollar to let me piss on him.)
Even if you aren’t already self-employed, Ferriss has several ideas for regaining control of your time from your employer, mainly involving mild duplicity to slowly weasel your way out of your office, culminating in complete remote working that will allow travel, etc. (I suspect this will be difficult for those who work in steel mills or bordellos.) Again the middle-class guilt appears: why should I let myself live this lifestyle when it isn’t available to so many others? Another opposing-but-unrelated defense: Lots of rich people are assholes.
Anyway, a lot to think about, but I wanted to pass on my tentative thumbs-up. It’s a competently-written and practical read (and occasionally and surprisingly crass, which of course I think is awesome.) I can’t give it my full endorsement until I am writing one from the deck of a chartered dive boat steaming through the Caribbean.
The 4-Hour Workweek [Amazon]
Audiobook [Amazon]
Ferris’s Blog [FourHourWorkweek.com]
I need at least 50% more than you’d pay some ol’ bum if you wanna pee on me. I mean, we’re friends…
Alex drives a hard bargain.
I went to dude’s website, and…I feel like I should be more skeptical, I feel like it all sounds just too EASY, which of course is what a good salesman does, in trying to sell me a book. But it also seems like a lot of his ideas are pretty sound, if followed properly and you’re self-disciplined enough. I’m definitely intrigued though, I might pick up the book. If nothing else, ideas for convincing an employer to allow me to work from home can’t be bad.
In reading the book, I didn’t so much get the idea that the ideas were “easy” so much as “simple.” You obvs. still have to go through all the work to set them up.
Alex: Expect a call. Wear a slicker.
I’m ready. I ordered my book today. Thanks.
Sounds interesting….I’m gonna have to look this one up. Why oh why don’t any of the area libraries have this?!? Guess I’ll have to shell out some dough.
So, basically, you need to have some sort of skill or idea that you can in turn make into some way for it to make money without you actually spending time on it? I.e., have your money make money? But don’t you have to have some sort of tangible or marketable skill or worth in the first place? How do I, as a developer for a small company, turn what I do into something where I don’t have to actually *do* what I do, but yet still have it making me income?
Granted, I *can* work from home pretty easily, though there’s something to be said at this point to being available in the office. But the opportunity is there. But that doesn’t get me away from the “shackles” of working for someone else. And I don’t see what I can immediately do to change that since I don’t perceive myself to have any tangible ideas of how I can make a living independent of working for someone else. I’d love to be a writer (moreso because of that old romatic ideal of writing than actually having talent) and set my own hours, but I’m not seeing it.
I’m still gonna have to check the book out, though. :-)
So Pete, maybe you could still be a developer for a small company, but do most of the work from home. Then, if you wanted, you could do most of the work from abroad. It wouldn’t get you a 4-hour work week, per se, but it would allow you to change from an hours-based employee to a results-based one, which is really the goal. What you do with that extra time is up to you.