A defence of Tim Ferriss's Four Hour Week - important book for other reasons than you think
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THIS POST REWARDS GOOD COMMENTS! Some books stick, some impact your life profoundly. I recommend this book often to people, often they don't read it...
I find people have some preconceptions that make them suspicious of this book, and yes it has its faults.
So in order to avoid having the same conversation over and over,
I am going to write this article and be done with it.
A simple link will hopefully suffice in the future ...
Source Wikipedia
Why all the hate and doubt? Well, ole Tim did not exactly help himself...
- First of all, there is the title, sounds like a scammy telemarketing product...
- Second of all the writing , it is not exactly great literature and it was the first book written by a guy who swore after his thesis never to write anything longer than an email. (He has gotten a lot better lately, and each book is longer than the next...)
- Third, on the surface it seems to outline yet another get rich quick scheme...
- Fourth, Tim is a master at self promotion and used all means fair or foul to get his book in the spotlight. That screams scam artist for many people...
- Fifth, the assumption is that you to convert yourself to a hippie digital nomad type to benefit from this book...
Yup, these arguments are all true and you can perceive the book like this and give up on it.
I perceive it like this:
The world we live in is increasingly non-linear.
Effort no longer is directly related to rewards.
The 4 HWW is simply a great toolset to identify and benefit from non-linear rewards
This nonlinearity is driven by many things, I explore the reasons in other articles here and here and here and no doubt many more to come...
In short, a non-linear world means everything is increasingly unfair!
This means you can get a massive reward for relatively little effort.
The core idea of this book is how to maximize per hour output by recognizing non-linear effort/reward situations!
In other words: leverage in your personal life and career
Honest effort is not necessarily going to receive an linear / honest compensation.
Some people get exceptional rewards because they were smart enough to recognize leverage opportunities
(Whales anyone? )
You can be upset about his, or learn from it... this non-linear world is not going away, in fact it will only increase to be more and more unfair.
I am guessing that is why you are here on Steemit.com right?
Who wouldn't want one of those juicy 1,000.00 SBD articles for an hour's worth of work, admit it...
That is what this book is about, not working 4 hours a week and ANYONE can use these principles in ANY activity, they are very profound.
10x your income per hour is perfectly feasible, not necessarily easy, but it can be achieved.
That gives you options in life:
Work 10 times less for the same income = stereotypical dream to have the digital nomad life-style
Work half the time, get 5 times more done, spend more time with your family and become your business's most valuable employee
Work the same amount of time, 10 x your income = become a very successful executive or business owner
Work an insane amount of time 10x per hour income = start-up model, high risk/high reward
That is all possible, I have seen many individuals succeed at converting their humdrum 9 to 5 life to a 4HWW model.
This books is about recognizing non-linear opportunities and tools.
To be able to use them you need to challenge your assumptions about how life, society and business works, and you will need to be willing to experiment to benefit from these disproportionate returns.
The 4HWW gets more important with time, because of the other side of the coin in a non-linear world: see here why
For years we expected that there exists a linear relationship between our effort and the payoffs.
That is increasingly less true and we have to examine those assumptions closely:
Plodding along, putting in your time in a 9-5 generic job is less and less likely to have an honest compensation.
Technological progress, abundance and globalisation are all going to attack the "safe" jobs.
And with it the assumptions we all have about how life is supposed to work:
eg.
Work 40 years and enjoy retirement?
Buy a nice house, pay off the mortgage and sell with a nice profit?
Follow established food recommendations and stay healthy ? (food pyramid)
Go to college and get a good paying job that pays back your tuition cost in the long run?
Put in your time, climb that corporate ladder and eventually get promoted to executive management where you'll earn the big bucks?
The tools to get non-linear rewards however are more accessible than ever!
Technological progress, abundance and globalisation at the same time also have made non-linear methods and tools more and more accessible than ever:
- Amazon FBA, online shops, e-commerce opportunities are growing exponentially
- Virtual Assistants, freelancing (upwork.com etc) allow you to reach people who do excellent work for low cost
- running a remote workforce is going to become the norm, scaling your business has been easier than ever
- Amazon AWS, Google cloud etc. completely take away any capital investment in servers etc.
- Steemit.com and no doubt others make it possible to get paid for your content
- the traditional gatekeepers (editors, agents, banks, corporate buyers, universities) are losing their grip in an increasingly decentralised world with Kindle, Youtube, Instagram and Facebook available to create your audience.
There are some life altering concepts in this book I will cover in-depth in other posts ( it has been pointed out to me, my posts get a bit long... :) )
Derek Sivers does fantastic book reviews : here is his if you think mine sucks ! :) Derek himself by the way had a very similar path to Tim, read his adventure with CDbaby.com .
https://sivers.org/book/4HourWorkWeek
Here is another overview you might also enjoy:
http://www.deconstructingexcellence.com/the-4-hour-workweek-summary/
Are you on the right side of these trends? Or are they going to erode your income until there is nothing left...
To be continued...
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COMMENT CHALÑLENGE on this post! 3 guaranteed prizes of 5.00 SBD!
If the post goes over 15.00 SBD author share I will GIVE AWAY ALL of it to divide up among constructive comments made.
(You must have upvoted the post to build the pot for everyone though)
GUARANTEED 1 prize ( 5.00 SBD) for someone's personal 4 HWW story
Is Tim Ferris your god, have you read the book already and gotten great results? Let us know, if you have explained it already in a previous post, give a short description and a link!
GUARANTEED 1 Prize (5.00 SBD) For an intelligent commenter who tells me why they think
4 HWW is a total scam and overhyped a constructive argument and intelligent comment will get you potentially 5.00 SBD
GUARANTEED 1 Prize (5.00 SBD or several ) Miscellaneous
EITHER point me out other Steemians who are living the 4 HWW right now! Bonus if you leave them a comment. with a link to this post.
OR a resteem with a good reply why you are re-steeming will also be eligible!
OR good links to similar books and sources...
OR a request to ask me to review and explain a particular concept of the 4 HWW
It's been too long since i read the book but i definitely think it is achievable. It's like Rich Dad Poor Dad with a few more concrete examples and steps to take.
Is it doable? Definitely. Build the system so that it can run without you. I know a few small business owners w o don't do much work other than come to the office for updates once in a while lol.
Rich dad, poor dad was a strange one . I got some good concept from it but the specific tactical advice seemed extremely dodgy to me pre 2008 . I think that people who followed that could have done well for a while but had a high risk of being completely wiped out. looking into Kiyosaki, it seems definitely more of a case of "fake it until you make it'' he got rich writing books about how to get rich mostly. But it is never black or white : there are undeniably good lessons to learn from that one... For me it challenged the idea of a house as an asset ...
Yeah i liked the concept of RDPD/CQ but his specific advice was meh. He's like the 90s version of all the Internet advertising / affiliate marketing / trading systems gurus out there today.
I think our work lives work very much the same way as steemit. Let me explain. One of my philosophy teachers put it this way: "How much time would you be willing to work to earn an X amount of money?" He then let us think about it. After we had thought about it, he said: "What if I told you that it doesn't matter when you start, but you will anyway work the same amount for that amount of money". What this meant was that one could start at school, or at work, the more time and effort you put into developing yourself the more you would earn. If you start early on, you'll get a job that pays much more for your time than if you put minimal effort before. Or if you work hard at first you can eventually slow down and still make the same amount.
Of course, I think it really comes down to what your workplace will pay you. Some people manage in 4 hours what others in 40 hours, but their work week is still 40 hours. But with a higher chance they will go higher up in ranks and earn more.
The way I can see a 4 hour work week become reality is to work harder in the beginning by saving and investing, to become financially independent/ free and only use a few, maybe 2-4 hours a week to check the situation of your investments and live off of them. However, with regular work, well good luck trying.
I agree that effort is unavoidable but as l wrote here in my article about leverage : choosing where to apply your efforts intelligently can give you much better rewards in return. Going for a job means you
are giving responsibility for generating the money that pays your income to the company that hired you. They pay you less than your labour is worth (or they'd go out of business) in return your risk and headache is somewhat reduced. Your downside is limited to losing your job , but you don't have to deal with the liability or put up the working capital of the company .
That might be a great strategy, or it might not. You don't control your destiny and you are a mere tool as far as your company is concerned, become too expensive and you are out. (the true meaning of Human Resources: you'll be considered more as a resource then as a human)
For me, one of the most useful aspects at the time was that it showed me that having a regular job is not the only viable avenue anymore to earn a decent income. Mind you that was in 2008. Since then tools and possibilities have increased exponentially to generate income either in parallel or in substitution of a fulltime job.
Even within a fulltime job there is more leeway then you'd expect. The whole premise of an 8 hour workday is more and more ridiculous . If your job is producing x things an hour , yes it makes sense. But in most cases it doesn't. Some questions need to be asked about jobs , no one does that better than Ricardo Semler : check out
his presentation :
Yeah, I suppose that is true. However, just about everyone has the possibility to start as an entrepreneur. Doing that, you can work as much as you like, but the less you work, the greater the risks are.
However, if you've done a lot of work before, it might not be that risky anymore.
I think the notion of an 8h work day is mostly about the work that would go into checking if someone did enough, so by having everyone do 8h balances the risk. But, not sure if 8h is actually the best amount. I don't know where it comes from. Some studies show that 6h a day is more productive. Well, hard to say.
l think it is a remnant from the industrial age: 3× 8 hour shifts is 24 hrs of production. If you are producing something @X / hr that might make sense. But cognitive demanding work after 3-4 hours stops being productive : you are basically warming your chair : in aviation human error has been studied a long time and Human Performance factors are well understood : if you are fatigued you have the same mental performance or being legally drunk... Always makes me laugh when you hear these stories of lawyers or bankers doing 100 hr+ weeks : phsiologically they are functional idiots , their brains are fried, unless they are doing drugs which they probably are, these hours don't have 20 % of the work quality and the likelihood of serious errors climbs exponentially.
They are masters at window dressing though...
I agree. I always try to limit the amount of studying I do. I know my own limits. I cannot study during the night, and I cannot study the whole day. Pulling an all nighter is a no brainer. But I still see many people doing it. I don't know if people still do while working, but it makes no sense. Even though people seem to prefer it for some reason.
Regarding the becoming an entrepreneur, l think there is a lot of success fetishizing going on. Running a business is definitely not for everyone ... I think there'll be more and more interesting hybrid formats in between employee and entrepreneurship and the standard relationships and expectations will change . Even companies themselves will shapeshift eventually.
I think the word "Work" itself needs a whole new definition today.
I can't remember who said it and too lazy to look it up, but it was something like, "Doing something you enjoy is not work."
Have to agree with that after years of working at the wage slave game.
When my daughter died and I had a break down, I was done. Done with society and done certainly with work.
I went to live in a shack in West Virginia arriving from the UK with just the pack on my back. We survived on my small, very small war pension,
I convinced my fiancee life on a sailing boat would be more life rewarding, so e moved onto an old beat up sailboat and worked our way down the east coast.
A return to the UK showed me exactly what I wasn't missing.
The same miserable faces of family and friends I'd left, all chasing the weekend for some free time to spend what they'd sacrificed the rest of their week for. Pathetic.
I heard Portugal was a good bet for poor pensioners like me so off we went to the Algarve.
We both ghostwrite novels. Probably more than four hours a week but hardly taxing and most days are spent on the patio or the beach.
The clock only ticks one way. It never goes backwards. Those, minutes, hours, days and years can never be reclaimed to play with once you decide to retire.
Thanks for the last payment by the way, it was greatly appreciated.
Yes I agree that the concepts of work and jobs need to be looked at. Too many outdated assumptions.
Sorry to hear you had such an ordeal. I hope you found a more peaceful and rewarding life though. If anything it points out that life is too short to waste on trivialities...
Working a job you hate to be able to buy stuff you don't really like...
Re the comment reward: paid with pleasure!
I like to reward people who take it seriously and put in an honest effort.
I really don't like the random lotteries. They are not stimulating the right behaviour or adding something meaningful.
In the end they are manipulations of the system... Garbage in = garbage out...
I was fortunate enough to have the war pension, small as it was to allow me to escape. As long as I don't go chasing fancy cars and big houses, life becomes a great adventure especially sharing it with my fiancee @smuggly-sparrow.
That, I think is another key to making a success of the 4 HWW. Having a reason not to work. Perhaps a bit of a catch-22 for some but plenty are in relationships they feel trapped in and prefer to be in some cubicle for 8 hours a day to escape. Poor buggers.
I read this book very early after graduating and appreciate the time in my life when I read it. It didn't change my life and I didn't suddenly create a lifestyle business, but I definitely enjoyed Tim Ferris' perspective on the rat race and seeing it from a different, more self-sufficient, angle. I agree he can come off as a little douchey and scammy, but that aspect has quieted down with future books.
I think the most value comes from understanding his new paradigm. The rat-race method is safe, predictable, comfortable and boring. Doing things yourself, leveraging technology and global help, and setting out on the 'different path'. I've used this paradigm to talk folks out of boring MBAs that wouldn't honestly have satisfied them. They tried to take the 'safe' path instead of the right path for them.
Ultimately, I'm pro his experiment-first methodology which aligns with lean startup methods and evolutionary design, and I'm glad he's able to vocalize a different yet effective path for others. I've followed his books pretty consistently since then : "4 Hour body", "Tools of Titans".
Minimum Viable Dose is one of my favorite concepts and is great from understanding the pareto principal and leverage in general.
Thanks for your comment! Great to hear from you!
I think for me it is much the same, I read it after already making up my mind to go vagabonding for a year. So obviously I already went through the first chapters of the thought process.
But I appreciated nevertheless to get some validation (it is said that what we think is a good book is determined in a large part how much we agree with the ideas in it).
For me the same, I did not go on to create a lifestyle business but it did "stick" very well and helped me understand that everything is negotiable.
It helped me get a job in the UK and they allowed me to commute from Spain. Location independence is such a multiplier in life!
I find I constantly use concepts from the book, in my own life, working with coaching clients, working on consultancy projects,... it is surprising how universally useful they are.
Of course he did not invent most of these concepts, but he curated an awesome toolkit that aside from tactics also paid attention to the mental side, which is often overlooked.
For me the most powerful aspect of the book is that it is one that taught me to always question assumptions.
A lot of "common sense" advice is simply out of date in an ever changing world.
Experimentation and minimum viable dose are great concepts,
I see a lot of material for future posts! What are the concepts from the book you think I should discuss first?
Ohh, thats tricky. Its been too long since I read the book to dig into anything too specific. It would probably be interesting to here how your time vagabonding overlaps with the themes of the book.
Or, how asking for non-monetary things - like location-agnostic work, or more vacation time - can ultimately be more fulfilling and get you off the rat-race sooner.
yeah that is a good one. could be about the inherent trade off's we make to get a job, what are the implications that has on your cost of living etc. Will probably think about it during the weekend ! Thanks for the suggestion!
https://steemit.com/economy/@the-traveller/recognizing-leverage-in-your-life-concepts-of-the-4-hour-work-week-by-tim-ferris
Here is a follow on post about leverage specifically...
nice review, I will see if the comments caught on :)
As Nassim Taleb would say, we are more and more living in Extremistan, where asymmetry rules. I wrote an ebook in 2010 (51 pages long, SEO-related) and the first real promotion I did was to have a rather well known SEO guy promote it to his list (I was his customer and a frequenter commenter on his blog, so we developed a relationship). He sent out an email and within 24 hours I had sold almost 1000 copies!
The most interesting part is that it took me a day and a half to write it and one single promotion made me more money than anyone in my family earned in a year!
So, it can be done, and people shouldn't settle for less than amazing:)
Forgot about that one but it is a very apt quote!
Great example, the idea we have about the relationship between earnings and effort comes from a too simplistic and mechanistic view of the world.
We like simple stories with a clear cause and effect.
In your story, the cause of the success seems disconnected from the huge effects it had.
But before you could write a credible 51 page report in a day and a half, you had to have studied and applied SEO a good while.
So I'd say in many cases the effort is actually already expended but we tend to write it off or take it for granted and don't even attempt to monetize it. EDIT : this idea I think is an important one : A lot of people are getting wise to the idea that their attic is stuffed with items that are valuable to someone else on Ebay .
The next decade people will start to see that their head is filled with stories and experiences that might have value to someone on Steemit !
In your case : it seems that the value you offered was clear: instead of repeating all your study and mistakes (and I'd guess at the time, 2008, there weren't many sources for SEO ), your client could buy a report and save the time and headache.
The relationship with the SEO guy was an interesting twist, must remember and apply that more myself ; using providers you like and turn them into associates and allies.
But you looked at something that could provide leverage and applied it well it seems!
Good on ya !
Yes, the lead up to the "asymmetrical success" was more than a year of studying and testing SEO every day, during which time I built and ranked on page one of Google a site in the internet marketing niche. The rewards were slow and uneven at first, and then they jumped sky high and exponentially.
The interesting thing is that my next "big one" came in 2013, was monetarily way more significant and required way less prep and lead up. I'd conclude that with time and investment of energy, we grow in potential and ability to use asymmetry and exponential rewards.