Review: The 4-Hour Workweek (Part 2)
Let’s continue our review of The 4-Hour Workweek. I’m doing this review in parts so I get everything right, so bear with me on this one…
D Is For Definition
The first few chapters of the book concern themselves with the “D” part of the “New Rich” DEAL (Definition, Elimination, Automation, Liberation). Here’s my two-sentence summary of what he’s saying:
The point of life shouldn’t be to work hard so you can eventually retire. In fact, what you should do is minimize the work you do today so you can enjoy your life now.
When I started reading the book I immediately thought of my father-in-law, now deceased over a year. He worked most of his adult life as a baker in someone else’s employ, until a change in ownership at the bakery and the incompetent new owners caused the business to fail and put him unexpectedly out of a job at 62. He didn’t have a pension, just his own savings and the government pension plan.
Now Bob was a very frugal guy who knew how to manage money. But he didn’t have a lot of money, certainly not enough to do much more than pay the bills. And that’s the way it stayed, until he died last year of lung cancer. He should have been enjoying his retirement, but he couldn’t, because he was worried about money and then he got sick.
The point of the book is to not end up in this kind of situation. Which means you need money, right?
Money Does Not Equal Power
But it’s not a book about money. As Tim says:
“Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it. I call this the ‘freedom multipler.’”
In Tim’s view of the world, someone who is working just a few hours a week but has the freedom to kick back and really enjoy life is more “powerful” than someone who makes 20 times as much money but has no time to do anything with that money. Remember how everyone on Northern Exposure seemed to have so much fun? Same basic principle.
Changing the Rules
Tim then goes on to discuss how he managed to win a gold medal in Chinese kickboxing, by closely analyzing the rules of the championship and figuring out how we could win using technical knock-outs instead of hard work. From a purist’s point of view, he cheated. But he stayed within the rules and got his gold medal.
Many readers will object to this story, and it won’t be the last story of his they’ll object to. In fact, Tim has a very impersonal take on things throughout the book. If you think about it, though, it makes sense. Tim treats his life as a business.
Let’s fact it, there are things that businesses do that individuals wouldn’t necessarily do. The ends often justify the means. Or “all’s fair in business”. Most people keep their home and work personas separate. But I don’t think Tim does. Which is why he’s able to do the kinds of things that he discusses. And which is why a lot of people are going to have trouble following along because they can’t do a Vulcan mindmeld on themselves.
Gotta run, so let’s continue this later…
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Eric Giguere is the author of the AdSense book “Uncommon AdSense” and the award-nominated AdSense blog “Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense”. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!
PLRSiteBuilder News
Yesterday I mentioned that I’d been quiet recently because I was working on improvements to PLRSiteBuilder. Today I just released version 1.0.6 to the prelaunch customers who’ve been helping me shake down the bugs and stuff. The major new feature is the automatic splitting of articles across multiple pages based on minimum and maximum word counts. For example of what I mean, see The Thyroid’s Role In Weight Loss, a longish article of about 700 words that has been automatically split into three pages from a single input file, complete with page-to-page navigation. I’m trying to make site construction as effortless as possible so that you can focus on writing (or editing) good content.
If PLRSiteBuilder is of interest, please sign up for my mailing list so you can be notified of when it goes live. The plan was to start selling it this week, but that may be delayed as I keep adding new features to it.
OK, end of advertisement. In the next post we’ll return to our review of The 4-Hour Workweek.
Sponsored Link: Looking to quickly build good-looking, well-linked, AdSense-ready sites? Check out my PLRSiteBuilder tool.
Eric Giguere is the author of the AdSense book “Uncommon AdSense” and the award-nominated AdSense blog “Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense”. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!
Review: The 4-Hour Workweek (Part 1)
If you’re wondering why I’ve been so quiet lately, it’s partly because I’ve been working on PLRSiteBuilder. But it’s mainly because I had to move memwg.com to a different host, which took a few days to do properly. Everything seems to have gone well except for a couple of comments that were lost after the site was migrated but before the name servers (the computer servers that map memwg.com to a geeky numerical address) were updated. So, back to the fun. Today we start the week with a long-overdue book review.
The 4-Hour Workweek
I picked up a copy of Tim Ferriss’ book The 4-Hour Workweek in August while I was vacationing with my family in New York. We were visiting the Hamptons, actually, that famous enclave of the rich, which seems somehow appropriate, since the point of the book is to make enough money to escape the daily grind of work and give yourself lots of time to do the things you really want to do instead. But it’s not about becoming rich, at least not in the traditional sense.
The book starts with a discussion of what Tim refers to as the “New Rich”:
The New Rich are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as Lifestyle Design.
So in Tim’s parlance being “rich” isn’t about money, it’s about time. You only need enough money to do what interests you. Tim goes away for months at a time and stays in new places, learns new languages, generally has fun. Sounds pretty good, I must admit. But how do you get there?
DEAL: Definition, Elimination, Automation, Liberation
To become a member of the New Rich you must use the DEAL process. DEAL is an acronym for the four steps required to live the life of the New Rich:
- Definition is about understanding what being a member of the New Rich entails.
- Elimination is about ruthlessly eliminating useless, unecessary, and/or unwanted distractions in order to free up time.
- Automation is about making money on “autopilot”.
- Liberation is about getting away from your day job and living a truly mobile lifestyle.
It sounds simple enough, and I’m sure many AdSense publishers are interested in having the kind of lifestyle Tim has, but the devil’s in the details. So how does this really work? Stay tuned for Part 2…
Sponsored Link: Looking to quickly build good-looking, well-linked, AdSense-ready sites? Check out my PLRSiteBuilder tool.
Eric Giguere is the author of the AdSense book “Uncommon AdSense” and the award-nominated AdSense blog “Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense”. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!