Review: “The 4-Hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferriss

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]