Timothy Ferris – The 4-Hour Work Week
Timothy Ferris – The 4-Hour Work Week
‘Escape The 9-5, Live Anywhere And Join The New Rich’
My utterly biased take on this book:
AMAZING 5 stars, 10 out of 10. I can’t praise it highly enough. Whatever your situation, business owner, entrepreneur, employee in a large corporation, if you want to change your life this book is for you!
What is The Book About?
The book is about getting more out of life and working less. Tim Ferris weaves an amazing tale around his personal story including recommendations for following a similar path. He runs a successful company providing vitamin supplements to niche markets (mostly sport, martial arts niches). His company had grown to be quite successful but he found himself working longer and longer hours and was increasingly unsatisfied. Then he took the radical step of sacking customers! He took Pareto’s 80 / 20 rule to heart and realised where he made most of his money and wasted most of his time. And actually his most profitable customers didn’t take up a lot of his time. It was his least profitable customers that were asking lots of questions, returning product etc and generally giving him lots of trouble.
He takes this idea to the extreme in the book and thus keeps the bulk of his profits and cuts down his working hours by applying this thinking and outsourcing large portions of the operations of his business. Ultimately he even outsources parts of his life as well (all those dull, day to day activities like paying bills that you hate doing but have to get on with).
Some of it is just common sense. Some of it is really quite radical . All in all, this is AMAZING stuff. He makes it sound OK to be successful and not want to work 100 hr weeks. And he shares some very useful ideas about getting the most out of life.
Quoting from the book ‘Be a ‘dealmaker’. The manifesto of the dealmaker is simple: Reality is negotiable. Outside of science and law, all rules can be bent or broken, and it doesn’t require being unethical’.
He talks about becoming a member of the ‘New Rich’, how to double your income, cut your hours in half, and ultimately extract yourself from the successfull running of your life so you can devote only a tiny amount of time (e.g. 4 hours) to the really difficult decisions and to do some strategic thinking.
He has great tips for how to get the most out of life by defining ‘Dreamlines’ and explains that most dreamlines are actually eminently affordable.
The message is ‘Get The Most Out Of Life’ with lots of interesting, quirky practical ways to do it.
Buy this book!