The Four Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

May 20, 2008 in Finance, Self-Improvement, Uncategorized by admin | 1 comment

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Author: Timothy Ferris

Genre: Self-Improvement

Subject: Financial freedom, Achieving your dreams

Rating: ***** (Five stars)

Summary:

The Four Hour Workweek has been getting a lot of buzz on the internet over the past year. It tells the remarkable story of how its author transitioned from working 15 hour days to traveling the world, ignoring his business except for a few hours on Mondays, while still making more money than ever before. More importantly, Ferriss doesn’t just tell his story, he shares step-by-step instructions for duplicating his results, challenging his readers to escape the daily grind and live their dreams.

The Four Hour Workweek challenges our assumptions about money and employment. Most of us grow up, go to college, spend the best years of our lives working, and hope that when we retire that we will have enough money to survive until we die. Ferriss asserts that this is unnecessary. His model is to live life as a series of distributed “mini-retirements,” enjoying life while we still have our health and energy. He advocates what he calls “lifestyle design,” determining what we really want out of life, and finding creative ways to make it happen.

Ferriss’s plan is built around the 80/20 principle, discovered by the economist Vilfredo Pareto. Simply put, the 80/20 principle asserts that 20 percent of our actions lead to 80 percent of our desired results. The other 80 percent of what we do is wasted time.

Ferriss advocates a methodical withdrawal from the office by negotiating remote work agreements, then using the 80/20 principle and outsourcing to increase productivity and free up your time. He also outlines a step-by-step plan for creating “automated cash-flow muses,” or businesses that are set up to provide value and make money with very little involvement from the owner. Ferriss’s own “muse” is a nutritional supplement company whose manufacturing, advertising, shipping, and customer service channels are all outsourced. He makes over $40,000 per month from this company working only a few hours per week.

Ferriss provides specific examples every step of the way, from strategies for persuading your boss to let you work at home, to finding your niche market and developing a product for your own “muse.” He gives detailed instructions and a list of resources in each chapter, and provides useful bonus material on his website.

The Four Hour Workweek also details a method for “dreamlining,” determining what you really want out of life, finding out how much income you need to achieve it, setting specific, measurable goals, and determining specific, actionable steps to take right now to make it happen. For example, if you want to learn German, Ferriss suggests setting a benchmark of a 15-minute conversation with a native speaker 6 months from now. If you want the car of your dreams, determine how much it would cost per month to have, set that as one of your financial goals, and go test drive the car right now.

My Thoughts:

The Four Hour Workweek is both a how-to guide and entertaining and compelling story. I thoroughly enjoyed the story, and appreciated Ferriss’s candor in detailing both his mistakes and his successes. His writing style is succinct and energetic – there is no fluff.

Ferriss’s instructions for freeing your life are specific and easy to understand. They make perfect sense on paper. The real test of a self-improvement book is how well its principles work when applied in the real world. I am trying some of them out right now, including working to build my own cash flow “muse,” and will post periodic updates on what works for me and what doesn’t. Additionally, I invite anyone who has read The Four Hour Work Week to comment on their experience implementing Ferriss’s suggestions. You can comment directly on this post, or email your story to me.