Business Book Review: The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss
Ferriss will have you asking yourself if you want to be a 9-5er most of your life or join the New Rich with unrestricted mobility.
My Rating: ★★★★★
Length: 416 pages
Publisher: VERMILION - MASS MARKET
Released: 2011
Key Takeaways for Personal Branding
It’s easy to see why Timothy Ferriss’ No.1 New York Times best-seller, The 4-hour Work Week, has a cult following. It challenges nearly all conventional norms of working. Ferriss does so from having experienced both the daily grind of a regular 9-5 and becoming a successful entrepreneur earning much more a month than he used to earn annually. And doing it by working less.
Unlike many advocates of minimalism or slow living, Ferriss' goal is both fun and profit. For Ferriss, the less is more mentality is still highly profitable. Yet, he challenges the notion of working for the sake of working (W4W).
Ferriss proposes there is a ‘New Rich’ (NR) - defined by unrestricted mobility. The ‘mobile lifestyle’ is a systems-focused mindset of effectiveness over efficiency.
“The guard is changing. Being bound to one place will be the new defining feature of the middle class. The New Rich are defined by a more elusive power than simple cash - unrestricted mobility.”
To achieve the 4-Hour Work Week Ferriss shares his ‘DEAL’ process:
Define
Eliminate
Automate
Liberate
Fear Setting
If there’s something you want to do, but are nervous about making the jump, Ferriss proposes a process to face the fears holding you back front-on. This includes:
Defining your worst nightmare of what could go wrong?
What steps could you take to repair the damage?
What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of the more probable scenarios?
If you lost your job, what would you do to get things under financial control?
What are you putting off out of fear?
What is it costing you to postpone?
What are you waiting for?
Effectiveness Versus Efficiency
Ferriss offers several practical techniques for daily effectiveness techniques:
Parkinson’s Law
Remember “Parkinson’s Law" suggests that a task will swell in perceived importance and complexity to the amount of time you have allotted for its completion.
Pareto’s Law
“Pareto’s Law” or the 80/20 principle says that 80% of outputs come from 20% of inputs. As an example:
80% of results come from 20% of efforts.
80% of profits come from 20% of customers.
Batching
Some work is distracting, yet also necessary. But, there is a setup time for all tasks no matter what their size. It’s estimated that it takes 45 minutes to resume a major task after an interruption. And more than 28% of each 9-5 is consumed by such interruptions.
Having pre-determined times for which certain tasks accumulate improves effectiveness. This includes, as Ferriss proposes, checking emails just twice a day.
Automation
The mobile lifestyle is underpinned by systems that run themselves. And automating processes so you aren’t working in your business, but rather on your business.
“Being a member of the NR is not about working smarter, it’s about building a system to replace yourself.”
Mini Retirements
While most other financial and development experts promote retiring early, Ferriss proposes an alternative to ever retiring.
What Ferriss calls the ‘deferred-life plan’ is waiting for retirement before you enjoy life. But in a 4-hour Work Week or mobile lifestyle, instead of waiting for your retirement years, take the 20-30 years and distribute them throughout your life instead. Have ‘mini-retirements’. Your highly effective and automated, work-from-anywhere systems will support your income while you do.
Those on the deferred-life plan engage in binge travel on the rare opportunity like a starved dog. For them, holidays are a chance to escape the daily grind. The New Rich, on the other hand, enjoy it regularly, with nothing to ‘escape’ from. They are doing meaningful work that also works for them while they aren’t.
Favourite Quotes
Less is not laziness. Doing less meaningless things so you can focus on things of greater personal importance is NOT laziness. This is hard to accept, as our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.
Most information is time consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals and outside of your influence.
The 4-Hour Work Week is a masterclass in effectiveness. It will teach you to view life through new possibilities. With only one life, Ferriss will have you planning how to double, triple (or more) your life experiences. Anything but a lazy mentality, the 4-Hour Work Week will have you seeing following the norm as the lazy approach. And reimagining the way you work.
The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss: Available on Amazon.
