the 9 to 5 alternative

This is a review of Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek. I am participating in the Personal MBA project, and this is the fifth book that I have completed and compiled notes for. To read more about my involvement with PMBA, click here.

Book Details
Title: The 4-Hour Workweek
Author: Timothy Ferriss
Page Count: 308
First Published: 2007

People can’t believe that most of the ultrasuccessful companies in the world do not manufacture their own products, answer their own phones, ship their own products, or service their own customers.

I was happy to see this book on the PMBA list. Not only had I read it a couple of years ago through the recommendation of a friend, but I also remember liking it. A lot. It’s fun to reread a book you like.

The 4-Hour Workweek, broadly speaking, is about lifestyle design. What is lifestyle design? It’s a “quiet subculture of people…who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.”

A powerful philosophy if you think about it. People optimizing their lives through two tactics; 1) clever application of technology and 2) strict discipline. Tim Ferriss guides us through this discipline in chapters brimming with detail. Personal experiences and case-studies reveal strategies that Tim and others have used to generate income and free up time, strategies like geo-arbitrage, the 80/20 principle and keeping a low-information diet. If you’re interested in lifestyle design, they say that The 4-Hour Workweek is your bible. Would I recommend it to everyone? No, probably not. But if you’re like me and interested in pursuing an unconventional and exciting lifestyle, this book is a good exercise in lateral thinking.

Read For Free: Introduction to The 4-Hour Workweek

What I Learned

This book is chock-full of wisdom. Sweeping philosophies like, “the opposite of happiness is…boredom,” and calculated strategies like “How to Get $700,000 of Advertising for $10,000.” The most important lesson I took from reading this book, though, is this: anything can be measured/tracked/analyzed. If you have a goal, for example, of improving your health, you can quantify it. Does good health mean being able to run six miles without stopping? Does it mean bench pressing your own weight? Anything can be deconstructed into small, quantifiable tasks, whether its improving your own health or building an international business.

Notable Quotations

Retirement planning is like life insurance. It should be viewed as nothing more than a hedge against the absolute worst-case scenario: in this case, becoming physically incapable of working and needing a reservoir of capital to survive.

Lifestyle Design is thus not interested in creating an excess of idle time, which is poisonous, but the positive use of free time, defined simply as doing what you want as opposed to what you feel obligated to do.

The most important actions are never comfortable…To have an uncommon lifestyle, you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decision, both for yourself and for others.

Principle number one is to refine rules and processes before adding people. Using people to leverage a refined process multiplies the production; using people as a solution to a poor process multiplies problems.

Miscellaneous Notes

-step outside your comfort zone every once in a while (comfort challenges on pg. 60,81,89,109,137, etc.)

-explore drop-shipping relationships with manufacturers

-can anything in your life be delegated to virtual assistant? think outside the box, technology makes almost anything possible

Have you read this book? What are your thoughts?