4 hour work week book review / overview: part 1 of 4

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

-Oscar Wilde, Irish dramatist and novelist

Timothy Ferriss chose this quote, a favorite of mine for years, to open his latest book “The 4 Hour Work Week”. It’s a great overview of every concept contained within. This book is not for everyone. In fact, it’s not for most people. Most people are happy settling for the mediocre lifestyle they’ve settled into, 9-5 cubicle cage included.

For anyone who’s dreamed of escaping, The 4 Hour Work Week is a map of the way out.

Retirement. For most people, it’s the light at the end of the tunnel after a long hard life of working. Ferriss contends that it’s ridiculous to spend the most capable years of your life (i.e. when you’re young and healthier) wasting away in an office only to be ‘freed’ at age 65 when your physical condition alone may limit your possibilities, activities wise. Instead, he advocates taking a series of ‘mini-retirements’, for several months at a time, interspersed with periods of building up automated income sources to facilitate the next several month break.

Gold is getting old. The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as Lifestyle Design (LD).

The process of achieving this involves 4 steps:

• Definition: Includes defining your fears as well as defining your “Dreamlines”, a method of determining exactly what your ideal life will include and the resources required to achieve it.
• Elimination: How to reduce the amount of information you process on a daily basis, and streamline menial tasks to free up more of your time.
• Automation: Expands further on the concept of out sourcing every non-crucial aspect of your life and finding a hands-off income stream to finance the ideal lifestyle you’ve defined.
• Liberation: How to transition to a remote work arrangement, what to do with your free time once you’ve got 90% more of it and how to stay sane once you’re finally free.

DEFINITION

Definition. In the definition phase, Tim points out the fallacy in many work related concepts. Among these, that there is a ‘perfect time’ to try Lifestyle Design (there isn’t), and that money alone is the ’solution’ to unhappiness (in Tim’s words: the opposite of happiness is boredom).

One of the coolest concepts in this section involves relative income vs absolute income. The example he uses is one of Jane Doe making $100,000/year vs John Doe making $50,000/year. If Jane works 80 hours a week, her hourly wage is $25. If John works 10 hours per week, he’s actually making $100 per hour. More importantly, he has TIME available to enjoy the fruits of his labors.

His views on conquering fear are also compelling. The first thing he recommends is facing fear disguised as optimism.

Most who avoid quitting their jobs entertain the thought that their course will improve with time or increases in income. This seems valid and is a tempting hallucination when a job is boring or uninspiring instead of pure hell. Pure hell forces action, but anything less can be endured with enough clever rationalization.

Another key point in this section is that doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic. One of his exact points in this regard is something Greg and I have talked about many times.

It’s lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for “realistic” goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy-consuming. It is easier to raise $10,000,000 than it is $1,000,000. It is easier to pick up the one perfect 10 in the bar than the five 8s.

One of the steps he recommends in helping escape the shackles of mediocrity is setting up a “Dreamline”. A Dreamline is basically a concrete plan *for the next few months* regarding the specifics of what your ideal life would be. This includes the actual goals (getting that Ferrari, learning japanese, visiting Thailand), the amount of money required for each, and then the steps (today, tomorrow, and the day after) needed to get started.

*I originally intended to write a conventional ‘review’ of this book. Due to an exciting, upcoming Urban Monarch project (needing reader participation), I have expanded it. Hopefully this will motivate more of you to join us for the project itself. -Cash

Check out part II, Elimination, which will be available tomorrow at noon.