This book was entertaining, provided actionable advice, and was at times bizarre.
The author, Tim Ferriss has been described as a “Lifestyle Designer” and his goal is to help you streamline your life and maximize your ability to live out your dreams before retirement. The way he accomplishes this is by having the reader identify their dreams and then eliminate and automate as many tasks as possible.
I have mixed feelings about the book. There was a lot of great advice and guidance and also a lot of advice that was strange. It has more of a blog feel and at points, it can feel like a mismatch of topics being presented. The title is also somewhat misleading. It’s not really a book about working four hours a week. That fantasy of making tons of money while sitting on the beach doing nothing is a far fetched reality and this book will not get you there. It’s more of a book on getting unstuck from the corporate work life.
The book is divided into four sections to help you help guide you along the journey:
- Define your goals
- Eliminate distractions
- Automate tasks
- Liberate yourself
Section 1: D is for Definition
This section is by far the best of the four. It’s simply because Tim Ferriss helps guide you in defining your dreams. Most of us have this illusion that we need to spend the best years of our lives behind a desk only to enjoy a questionable retirement. We create these fantasies of what retirement is going to be like and think that we need millions of dollars to do all the things we want to do. If you take a moment to actually define your dreams, you will likely discover that most of the things you want to are more attainable than you actually think.
I RECENTLY HAD lunch in San Francisco with a good friend and former college roommate. He will soon graduate from a top business school and return to investment banking. He hates coming home from the office at midnight but explained to me that, if he works 80-hour weeks for nine years, he could become a managing director and make a cool $3–10 million per year. Then he would be successful.
“Dude, what on earth would you do with $3–10 million per year?” I asked.
His answer? “I would take a long trip to Thailand.”
That just about sums up one of the biggest self-deceptions of our modern age: extended world travel as the domain of the ultrarich. I’ve also heard the following: “
I’ll just work in the firm for 15 years. Then I’ll be partner and I can cut back on hours. Once I have a million or two in the bank, I’ll put it in something safe like bonds, take $80,000 a year in interest, and retire to sail in the Caribbean.”
“I’ll only work in consulting until I’m 35, then retire and ride a motorcycle across China.”
If your dream, the pot of gold at the end of the career rainbow, is to live large in Thailand, sail around the Caribbean, or ride a motorcycle across China, guess what? All of them can be done for less than $3,000.
I was caught in this trap when working in investment banking out of college. I was justifying working 80 hours a week because I was making a lot of money and my retirement would be this wonderful life where I can travel the world. Once, I wrote down a few places I wanted to go, I quickly realized that I could travel to these places today. So then, why do I need to spend every hour of the day behind a desk? Couldn’t I find something that better aligns with my dreams and values?
Section 2: E is for Elimination
This section was all about effective time management. There is more actionable than the last section. Without more awareness as to how we spend our time, we end up in meetings that are a waste of time, checking social media constantly, and multitasking on various work projects. There are two principles that guide the discussion in this section:
Parkinson’s Law
Your deadline determines the time needed to finish a project. If your deadline is six months to write a paper, you’ll take the entire six months. One typically waits until the last minute to finish a project and tie up loose ends. How much more do you get finished on Friday afternoon compared to Monday afternoon? How about the day before you are going on vacation? Do we really need to spend nine hours in the office each day?
The takeaway here is to focus on creating the shortest deadline as possible and see you’ll be amazed at how much you can get done.
If you had a heart attack and had to work two hours per day, what would you do? Not five hours, not four hours, not three—two hours. It’s not where I want you to ultimately be, but it’s a start. Besides, I can hear your brain bubbling already: That’s ridiculous. Impossible! I know, I know. If I told you that you could survive for months, functioning quite well, on four hours of sleep per night, would you believe me? Probably not.
Pareto Principle
80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This is probably something most readers have been exposed to. However, Tim guides you through some questions to really make you think about what 20% of sources are really taking up 80% of your time and strategies on how to eliminate them.
Other advice in this section included:
- Stop checking your email throughout the day. It’s better to check it only a few times per day and by doing that, you’ll spend less overall time emailing
- Take a social media hiatus and reclaim a lot of the wasted time you spend scrolling through an endless feed
- The advice I really disliked was when he said that you should stop reading (except for his book, of course). He claimed to read some fiction at night and encouraged the reader to do the same. What terrible advice. Tim Ferriss definitely does not even follow this advice. If you subscribe to his newsletter, you’ll see that he reads a lot.
Section 3: A is for Automation
This section was bizarre and needs to be seriously re-worked or removed. I’m scared for the individual who closely follows the advice here. It’s basically giving you a guide on how to be a middleman entrepreneur.
Hire a virtual assistant from India?
Yes, this is the advice given in this chapter. This virtual assistant lives in a third world country and essentially makes calls, answer emails, and can do research projects. So in theory they can save you time with simple email responses and handling scheduling meetings. That sounds great, in theory. He goes as far as saying they can help with planning a birthday party by making reservations and catering decisions.
I find that hard to believe and it’s not clear if this is just one story that is being used as an example or if it’s the norm. Regardless, it’s becoming outdated as there exists a bunch of technology today that help with things like scheduling. Tools such as Calendly or YouCanBook.me are great ways to save time scheduling meetings.
Another issue with Virtual Assistants, which the author points out, is that you’ll spend a lot of money and waste a lot of time if you are not clear with them. The virtual assistants are paid by the hour and, if you don’t specify how much time you want them to spend on a research project, they could be working around the clock which will cost a fortune. Also if you aren’t clear on your directions to the person, they’ll just end up doing the wrong thing which costs you time and money. I just have a hard time believing the Virtual Assistant will provide the same level of quality of work that you would expect from a typical employee.
After discussions on the virtual assistant, he then goes into a step by step plan on how you can make money as a middleman entrepreneur. He goes into detail about manufacturing and selling things like t-shirts where you’ll eventually make passive income as the distributor. The advice and guide just make no sense to me. Does that author have experience in this realm?
Other terrible advice in this section involved discussion about becoming an ‘expert’ overnight. The author explains that it’s really simple. All you have to do is give one talk at a well-known university and now you can say that you spoke at X university. You do not have to specify that three people were in the audience. If anything, this tells me to what to look out for when people try and pitch me new products.
Section 4: L is for Liberation
Tim’s benchmark for wealth was not measured in money but in having more time. Time for a lot of people means more traveling and that is what Tim focuses on when describing “wealth”. This aligns with me so I found his message relatable. However, I could understand how his message is less impactful for those who desire something else.
Since traveling tends to be the theme of most people’s vision of retirement, Tim coins the idea of the “mini-retirements”. This would typically be a month or more of traveling. Does that concept scare you? You might be saying: “well, my boss would never allow that”. Tim Ferriss would say – have you asked or are you just assuming that? There’s a lot of examples of people who have put together a thought out plan and made working remotely from a different country possible.
Tim challenges you to prove how successfully you can work remotely. Given how many distractions there are in the office, it’s not as difficult as it may sound. However, the idea of Liberating yourself from the office only really applies to people who use a computer for work. Construction workers or someone who works at a restaurant, can’t use the advice in this section.
Summary
Ignoring section three, I thought this was a great read. Tim Ferriss is really changing the status quo and what it means to balance work and life. At the end of each chapter, he includes a section called “Questions and Action” where he asks really good thought-provoking questions and makes the book very actionable. Ultimately, Tim Ferriss has illustrated that we don’t need to wait until retirement to do the things we dream of doing.
Check out the book on Good Reads or Amazon