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How To Read the Four-Hour Workweek

Note: If this post seems out-of-date, it's because it was actually written on November 30th, 2009, but I forgot about it until the 4-Hour Body was released.

Tim Ferriss has received a hailstorm of praise and criticism alike since his release of the Four-Hour Workweek and subsequent rise to fame. There are people that believe Tim Ferriss is full of shit. I find the man fascinating.

Clearly a man who can work four hour workweeks inspires both envy and jealousy. I recently finished the 4HWW and it's clear that this isn't the case at all. He has simply re-defined his career so that "work" involves fun activities. He's also been able to maximize productivity by aggressively delegating time-consuming tasks. It's pretty clear that he used the techniques he advocates, like hiring a personal assistant, to write the book itself. 

Reading between the lines, I found three main takeaways:

1. Ignore cultural norms and be realistic about your productivity.

Corporate America has become so wealthy that it has become bloated with fluff. An employee's role in an organization is to increase company's value by a greater amount than he or she is being paid. Often, this isn't the case. I don't have hard stats to make this case, but I know from first-hand experience that it's quite easy to fly under the radar at a large company. It's also true that companies assign work that isn't truly productive, often for bureaucratic reasons. 

Questions to ask yourself are: 
  • How much time do I spend truly creating value?
  • How much money is that time worth?

By positioning yourself such that you can create a direct path from work to revenue, you can double, triple or quadruple your earnings. Or you can simply work less.

2. Know how good is "good enough" and know that you can outsource routine work.

Once you're in control of your time and productivity, it's important that you find ways to maximize that productivity. While many people might have the propensity to deliver "perfect" work, perfection is rarely necessary. Additionally, many tasks, especially menial, time-consuming tasks, like e-mail, can be outsourced. Ferriss encourages readers to take a leap of faith and put somebody else in charge, thereby freeing your time to do what's important.

3. Maximize your mobility.

Ferriss lays out a complete guide for how to develop a high-margin, outsource-able business to give you the freedom of unlimited travel. The first two steps are sufficient but not necessary for this to be possible. I have friends who travel very frequently in spite of having 9-5 jobs. The desire to travel or live abroad may vary on a personal basis. A wide variety of professions allow frequent travel, such as consulting. You may also have career-oriented goals, or otherwise, that discourage from being abroad all the time. The point being that you can design your life around mobility if you choose to take control of your situation. 

My Conclusion

The 4HWW is a myth. My advice is to find the overlap between what you love and what pays you.

I love building software, and would inevitably spend a lot of time programming if I didn't have a job. I might as well do it with smart people and get paid at the same time.

This applies to nearly anything you might enjoy. Find the right community of people and form strong relationships based on what you love. There may or may not be overlap between what you love and a job market but that's up to you figure out.

Goals, Revised

Short-term

  • Become a significantly faster reader. Like proper sex education, reading is one of the core skills that permeates a central aspect of your life. Unfortunately, neither culture nor the education system in the United States dictates the importance of these crucial life skills.

    I recently came across Spreeder, which is a nifty Web application that could potentially help improve reading speed and comprehension. It emphasizes subvocalization elimination, and although it has an option for chunking, I suspect it doesn't help with chunking in practice, due to the way lines are actually laid out and scanned.

  • Reach prescribed weight levels (also known as "Rx") in Crossfit. I joined a local Crossfit gym nearly six months ago and I feel in better shape than I've felt in a long time. Regardless, it's highly intense, and I've barely reached the prescribed weight levels for women. Achieving men's Rx entails many things: 
    1. I'll be stronger than ever before.
    2. I'll have to maintain high levels of discipline.
    3. I'll have to maintain a better diet.
    4. I'll generally be pushing myself beyond my limits. 
  • Research and follow a more Paleo-style diet. True Paleo is somewhat absurd. The diet disadvocates salt, for christ's sake! It's quite trendy as well, and I more or less believe that everything popular is wrong. Regardless, there are sound principles underlying the diet that have led to rave reviews among its followers. It's also the de facto diet of Crossfitters, so I'm inclined to follow it to keep up with the better athletes in the program. Additionally, following a diet is a great test of discipline.
  • Solidify political viewpoints. I've made an effort to read a lot about economics and politics for the last two years, but I've barely touched the tip of the iceberg. On one hand, I've subconsciously sought to maintain a small identity to broadly consume facts and knowledge in an unbiased way, but on the other hand, people dish out respect based on how you to take a stance and defend it. 
  • Volunteer regularly. As a child of Mexican immigrants, engineering and technology has been incredibly empowering for my family. It has truly given us access to the spoils of the wealthy world, whereas much of my extended family is without them. More families can gain control of their own destiny if they happen to encounter the right passion and learning tools in their lifetime. My ideal volunteer job would involve the HIspanic population and technology. I nearly achieved this at the National Hispanic University but due to last-minute changes in their curriculum I wasn't able to help out.
  • Perfect my Spanish. Spanish is my first language, but it's pretty weak right now. It can be perfected in only a few months in a native Spanish-speaking country. 

Long-term

  • Take a transcontinental trip. I'd like to take a trip worth blogging about. I've taken a few epic trips--namely, to Japan and Colombia--but they have only lasted 2-3 weeks.I only saw a single country both times. There are 227 countries (I think) in the world, and that's a huge amount of unique cultures, places and people to see before I die. I can cover more ground by taking long and infrequent trips. The natural breakdown of regions is by continent, more or less, and I can cover the small ones in one trip. South America is the ideal choice: it has thirteen countries, and most countries speak Spanish, which will help me work toward my goal of perfecting the language.
  • Perfect my French. I took nearly six years of French in school. This clearly has to be utilized at some point. I'm not sure I'm a big fan of France, as a country, but fortunately there are plenty of French-speaking African countries. 
  • Get a Master's degree. Ideally, I'd like to go to Stanford for a degree in Symbolic Systems, or something similarly unconventional. I'm not sure I like the traditional university model, that is, paying tens of thousands of dollars for a fancy name on your resume. Traditional education systems will see a collapse in the next 10-20 years and it'd be good to be on the cutting edge of whatever alternatives arise.
Ongoing
  • Be a good friend. One unfortunate aspect of entrepreneurship is that you are forced to seek out the help of acquiantances to push your mission along. Pushing a startup forward also requires a solipsistic focus on your venture. It also takes a lot of hard work, and it's easy to neglect important relationships in one's life. This is a trade-off I don't want to make, and I'd like to take advantage of my time having a "normal" job to re-focus on what's truly important in life: the relationships in my life.
  • Stay hungry. I don't think this will be difficult to do. Comfortable is boring.
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