Answers
May 24, 2022 - 08:13 PM
I enjoy Tim's podcast and he has succeeded phenomenally in personal branding and then angel investing but the venture (BrainQuicken) that the book is about was not particularly successful. Concoct some supplement of questionable value, hype it up using pseudoscience, generate high but unsustainable sales (80k a month briefly) then sell the website and brand assets for a pittance when sales plummet precipitously.
The reality is there is no 4 hour work week for anything of lasting value. All those peddling passive income online haven't achieved it but are hustling really hard to sell their money making schemes.
May 25, 2022 - 10:29 PM
Jun 07, 2022 - 07:12 PM
Courtesy: Unsplash
Tim Ferriss’s ‘4-Hour Work Week’ was a sensational hit back in 2007. As we all know, the book rose to the top of The New York Times Bestseller List and remained there for four solid years.
The ‘4-Hour Work Week’ sold over 2 million copies, was translated into 40 languages, and contributed significantly to the cultural shift we experienced during the rise of digital nomads and the FIRE—Financial Independence, Retire Early—movement.
Undoubtedly, Ferriss’s book was massively influential and successful, but the critical question remains: is it still relevant?
Yes, some lessons from the book are like timeless diamonds, but several outdated lessons are really close to—for lack of a better word—trash.
Want to know why? Come with us.
The Short Answer: Core Ideas Still Relevant
The short answer is YES. Some core ideas from the book were validated during the pandemic, whose effect is still being felt today.
For example, The ‘4-Hour Work Week’ teaches its readers to maximize their free time (like the one we got during the pandemic), address job dissatisfaction, convince you to rethink their careers, pursue their passion and long-term goals, and show you the importance of deriving joy from your work.
The book makes a compelling case for setting out more time for family and leveraging technology to help you work from anywhere in the world.
Some people believe that the book played a significant role in inspiring companies and employees to start opting for remote working, normalizing digital nomadism, something that contributed to the great resignation of 2021. And yes, it inspired everyday folks to pursue their dream and launch their business.
The book, in many ways, is still relevant because it outlined a rough blueprint of how to work less and live the dream life.
The book’s ideas may work short term, but long term, the answer is NO, and here’s why.
The Long Answer: Half Baked Ideas
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Aside from the eCommerce and artistic industry, Ferriss's idea of the newly rich, meaning people who recently made money, earns passive income, and are free to travel, wouldn’t work in every industry for obvious reasons.
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His quick and easy mentality, as captured in the ‘How to Become a Top Expert in 4 Weeks,’ undercuts the hard work that goes into building success and could lead to fake gurus and snake-oil merchants desperate for quick, easy wins. Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule is more the norm if you want to master a field. Sorry, but there are simply no shortcuts to true mastery!
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Ferriss’s recommendation of selective ignorance, or low information diet, as an approach to freeing more time, is a recipe for disaster. You actually need to consume lots of information in disparate fields to have any chance of developing great ideas. Great ideas are rare and you only get them by generating lots of ideas. And to generate lots of ideas, you need to know a lot about at least one domain and a little about many others. In other words, you need to be a T-shaped person, both broad and deep–in at least one field.
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There’s also the cost of automating your small business and the risk of leaving it in the hands of assistants with very little supervision and interest in seeing your business succeed. Imagine if your employees also decide to join you on the four-hour work week journey.
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Passive income is in most cases a mirage and even when attainable usually requires a lot of upfront work–and often capital–before the ‘passivity’ kicks in e.g. building a real estate portfolio over a decade or two, or a website that gets a lot of traffic than can then be monetized passively. Most people who try to create passive income quickly forget that you need to first create and serve a customer–and it is highly unlikely you can serve a customer passively without serious skill or resources.
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His idea of mini-vacations already exists. In the business world, they’re called paid leave.
Great Lessons From the Book We Hope You Don’t Already Know
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People don’t want to be millionaires; they only want to experience what millionaires experience.
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Retirement is the worst type of insurance.
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Less isn’t laziness if you get more done.
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Waiting for the perfect moment to carry out your dreams means you’ll take your dreams to your grave. Yes, you read that right.
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Relative income is more important than absolute income.
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Negative stress—distress—is terrible, but positive stress—eustress—is good.
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Forget about time management and focus on time maximization while maintaining or increasing your income.
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Utilize Pareto 80/20 rule and Parkinson’s law to help your business grow.
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Automating your work is the best way to get the best.
Jun 08, 2022 - 12:39 PM
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