The book I just finished reading for my 8 Week Book Reading Challenge is called The 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss.
I originally learned about it from my roommate and then later by people I’ve met. It’s been getting a lot of hype and publicity, being a New York Times bestseller. I had heard a lot of great things about the book, so I decided to check it out.
And after thoroughly going through the book, I am happy to say that it is an amazing book and I’m glad I picked it up. It really opened my eyes to a lot of great ideas and a new way of looking at things in life.
The book is all about how to “escape the 9 to 5, live anywhere, and join the new rich.”
Most people spend their entire lives WORKING and looking forward to retirement, which is when they’ll finally get the opportunity to travel and be free to do the things they really want in life. Whereas Timothy believes that retirement isn’t the goal, but rather we should LIVE and ENJOY our lives today.
That’d be great, except most people live in the cultural hypnosis that we need to work 40+ hours per week to be successful and wealthy. Or that we need to go to college or university and then afterwards find a job and work until we’re 60 until retirement.
Instead, Timothy Ferriss proposes that “the New Rich aims to distribute ‘mini-retirements’ throughout life instead of hoarding the recovery and enjoyment for the fool’s gold of retirement.” When he says “mini-retirements”, he means taking the time to do the things that are IMPORTANT to you — whether it be travel or learning a new skill or hobby (tango, fighting, whatever).
Less Is Not Laziness.
Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.
He talks a lot about focusing on being productive instead of busy. Most people allow meaningless tasks and chores consume all of their time and energy. Instead, there’s a better solution: Outsourcing.
The concept of Outsourcing, which is talked about in the chapter “Outsourcing Life” was an intriguing one to me. Instead of doing all of those time-consuming tasks yourself, what if you could get someone else to do them for you? Wouldn’t that be nice. The idea of outsourcing is to hire other people to take care of those things for you, so that you have more FREE time. And who doesn’t want more free time?
Hiring a virtual assistant from India or anywhere else in the world for as little as $4/hour, can do the following for you:
And basically whatever else you can possibly think of. In fact, Timothy Ferriss even outsourced his dating life and has different assistants to handle practically every aspect of his business. To me, this is fascinating.
There are tons of things that I do for business that isn’t directly related to making profit, but has to get done. What if I could focus my time and attention on the things that MATTER and are IMPORTANT to be, and the things that actually produce the RESULTS, rather than consuming all my time with all this other nonsense? That makes a lot more sense.
What I really liked about the book is the “How To” approach with everything. Almost every chapter of the book is concluded with a “Comfort Challenge” or “Questions & Actions”, or a variety of different Resources. This makes the advice and information easily applicable and very practical. You can put things into action immediately.
In fact, he tells you in-detail almost how to do everything.
An important section of the book is on creating Automated Income, which is how to create and set up a product to sell online which can generate passive income while you’re asleep. Brilliant idea. And Timothy actually goes through the simple process with you, showing you how you can do it for yourself.
Imagine being able to quit your job, have an automated income and cashflow managed by virtual assistants, giving you the freedom and time to do whatever it is that you want in life. Sounds really cool, huh?
That’s the life of Timothy Ferriss. He travels the world, is a New York Times bestselling author, speaks six languages, runs a multinational firm from wireless locations worldwide, and has been a world record holder in tango, a national champion in Chinese kickboxing, and an actor on a hit television series in Hong Kong. And he’s only thirty years old.
Outstanding book. There’s a lot of ideas and aspects that I got from the book that I am able to apply to my own life that has already made me more effective and productive, freeing up a lot more time and also ways to generate automated income for myself.
Here is a cool summary of The Four Hour Work Week with Timothy Ferriss that I found on YouTube:
If you’re interested in checking it out or purchasing it from Amazon, then you can find The 4 Hour Work Week here.
Stefan
Executive Coach
Lifestyle Transformations
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Thanks for the easy to read ideas. Very nicely done.