The 4-Hour Work Week

I'm reading an interesting book by a guy named Timothy Ferriss, “The 4-Hour Work Week”.  The book came out in 2007 and is labeled as “The #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller.” As of today, the Wall Street Journal has it ranked as the #5 business book, and the New York Times lists it as #2 on the Hardcover Business Best Sellers list.

 

I had heard about the book some time ago and wasn’t compelled to read it after I saw a bad review, but a friend gave me a copy so I decided to give it a shot.

 

Tim defines a group he calls the New Rich versus the “Deferrers,” or “those who save it all for the end only to find that life has passed them by.”  He goes on to talk about retirement as “Worst-Case-Scenario Insurance” that is “nothing more than a hedge against becoming physically incapable of working and needing a reservoir of capital to survive.”  According to Tim, “Retirement as a goal or final redemption is flawed” for several reasons, but the most compelling to me is this: “It is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life.  This is a non-starter—nothing can justify that sacrifice.”  That's pretty hard to disagree with.

 

The book defines the New Rich based on their goals and the life philosophies and priorities that they reflect, and then contrasts these with the goals of Deferrers.  One I found particularly interesting is that Deferrers strive to “retire early or young” whereas the New Rich focus on doing what excites them and pursuing their passion, seeking to distribute recovery periods and “mini-retirements” throughout life on a regular basis.  Tim says that he shoots for one month off for every two months of work.  Sounds nice.

 

Basically, the idea is to free your life of all the minutia and useless clutter that take up most of your time, and by doing that you can achieve a new level of focus and productivity, even to the point where you accomplish the same amount in one-tenth the time, or four hours versus forty hours.

 

Now I don’t agree with everything Tim says in the book, and it’s likely that most people won’t be able to achieve a 4-hour work week and maintain their lifestyle or avoid getting fired, but Tim devotes almost 300 pages to telling you how to do it.  He apparently puts his money where is mouth is: in addition to writing the 4-Hour Work Week, being a TV host in Thailand, an actor in a hit TV series in Hong Kong, shark diver, monkey trainer, and the first American in history to hold a Guinness world record in tango, Tim won the Chinese national kickboxing championship with only four weeks of preparation by undergoing dramatic weight loss to qualify in a lower weight class, and then gaining all the weight back in a day.  Then, along with the major weight advantage he had over those in "his class," he found an obscure loophole in the rules that allowed him to win every match by TKO using a single technique to push his opponents off the elevated platform three times in a single round.  I’m not kidding, and apparently neither is Tim.  He even mentions how angry the Chinese judges were at such a blatant abuse of the rules.  While winning the Chinese national kickboxing championship is a pretty amazing accomplishment, winning it this way probably doesn't appeal to most people, but I suppose it does show that Tim is a creative problem solver--I'm just surprised he got out of there in one piece.

 

To Tim’s credit, he doesn’t appear to shy away from criticism.  There is a short, and not so flattering, video linked to the 4-Hour Work Week web site of an interview by Matt Lauer of the Today show of Tim and Danny Deutsch, the annoying host of The Big Idea, where Deutsch condescendingly tells Tim he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  Maybe he doesn’t, but don’t take Donny’s word for it, decide for yourself.

 

One thing I like about the book is the quotes Tim uses at the beginning of various sections and chapters.  Here are a few of them, some of which I drew inspiration from regarding Alibre’s strategy to change the CAD market – and the world – by making professional CAD accessible to anyone.

 

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

-Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist

 

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”

-Niels Bohr

 

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

-Albert Einstein

 

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

-Mark Twain

 

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

-George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

Comments

[gordon rigg]

Hi Greg
If you want to find these "new rich" people then look in any time consuming participation sport, the kind of sports that will only ever have a handful of professional participants and even they will never be rich. You will find these folks on the yachts that are actually sailed (rather than moored and visited occasionally), and at the car/motorcycle race track, sailing windsurfers, wake boarding, kite surfing, hang gliding and paragliding. You will find a good percentage of professional people in their 30s and 40s enjoying a brief bit of retirement while earning a living. In many of these sports you will find them still participating into their 50's and beyond because of the healthy way they have lived their life, by not "deferring" but actually "living".
Gordon Rigg, 8 times UK national hang gliding champion.

[David Gagin]

If only I could have a 4 hour work week! Just think of all the other things I could do besides my J.O.B....Like having the time to play around with Alibre. It's funny how many crack-pots there are out there who come up with some hare-brained idea, and camp out with it at the water cooler until they've just about ticked everyone off. Tim's gone one better...he's written a book about his!