The 4-Hour Workweek
April 26th, 2007This book seemed ridiculous, at first glance, but as I read more, uhh… My wife and I seem to have implemented at least some of this, more out necessity and common sense than anything else.
So, how much of this is really useful? Or is it more of that frightening Kiyosaki/Robbins/”Secret” clap trap KoolAid?
The 4-Hour Workweek is within the top ten best selling books on Amazon right now. At a minimum, this is interesting because it shows the desperation and hunger of people to escape the rat race. While several of those Amazon reviews seem fake to me, I’ve never read a self-help book. Maybe the tone of that crowd is just, different, if you know what I mean.
Have any of you read this? What do you think? I’d believe you guys over the Amazon reviews.
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss:
What do you do? Tim Ferriss has trouble answering the question. Depending on when you ask this controversial Princeton University guest lecturer, he might answer:
“I race motorcycles in Europe.â€
“I ski in the Andes.â€
“I scuba dive in Panama.â€
“I dance tango in Buenos Aires.â€
He has spent more than five years learning the secrets of the New Rich, a fast-growing subculture who has abandoned the “deferred-life plan†and instead mastered the new currencies—time and mobility—to create luxury lifestyles in the here and now.
UPDATE: High Quality Review of The 4-Hour Workweek Over at David Seah
Thanks to commenter “peter” for that.
“I race motorcycles in Europe.â€
“I ski in the Andes.â€
“I scuba dive in Panama.â€
“I dance tango in Buenos Aires.â€
Kevin, I’m sure many of your long-time readers respect you because you have never associated yourself with such disingenuous rhetoric.
I’ll wait for your book.
Like all these books: “Hey, I realized that my bullshit papershuffling job [‘book proposal writer in NYC ‘ according to one Amazon reviewer: fuck you]
could be digitized/outsourced to underpaid 3rd world servants so now I can dive from Aztec cliffs and so can you.”.
Come the revolution/apocalypse, these guys will be the first to be hanged.
Notice, by the way, how trivial their ‘lifestyles” are. In 5 or 6 years [lest the revolution come] they’ll be blowing their brains out.
Take a gander at this: http://tinyurl.com/2bwjtf
a review. comment #7 seems to rip into the hype. #15 as well. Of course TIm chimes in at #17.
I think it’s both useful info and Kool aid. No doubt, you can implement some of the stuff in your life and have it become more fullfilling. But there will come a point of diminishing returns and also you have to realize the amount of work you have to do to get to that 4-hour week milestone. Like most of this kind of stuff, it’s not a quick fix nor will you get a rapid return on investment.
The thing that most of these guys have stumbled upon is passing old common sense as new, radical ideas. Kyosaki, Robbins, Pavlina, you name them, they are just peddling stuff that has been around and scattered through the ages. The real money maker is the book they write to expound this knowledge. Once you have the populace hooked, just write meaningless regurgitations of what you’ve already
stolenwritten…Hmmm…sounds dodgy but I am tempted to order it anyway and give it a read since I am dying to escape the rat race…
>>>disingenuous rhetoric
>>>Come the revolution/apocalypse, these guys will be the first to be hanged.
>>>I think it’s both useful info and Kool aid.
>>>sounds dodgy but I am tempted to order it anyway
HAHA
We all have the same basic take on it!
I thought long and hard about posting this information. It is certainly not the usual fare around here.
On the one hand, it made me laugh, but on the other hand, I was curious! Of course, that’s the point, to make people want to buy the book.
“Useful info and Kool aid” is probably right.
The key to true prosperity in these times is to figure out what the wealthiest 1% of people want and sell it to them at ridiculously marked up prices. Use the Andy Warhol approach, or whatever approach allowed that one artist to sell his own excrement.
I went to order the book on Amazons site but theres a 1-3 week waiting period so I guess I will have to wait a bit until I receive the book and then I can report back to you all if you interested.
I think chancing the £9 for the book is worth it even if its useless! 😉
Aaaah, to be financially free. Let me continue dreaming and working towards that goal…
I wouldn’t dismiss this book as pure crap; as someone who left the rat race 2 years ago, currently pursuing the ever-elusive goal of financial freedom – I can say that reading the Kiyosaki books and others might not spell out what you need to do, but they certainly have helped me. The books help you to think different and they take your mind on a separate track. When you’re on the corporate hamster mill you seldom see other opportunities and things around you.
So although 99% of the intent of this book is probably for the author to self-fulfill his claim of “hey look at me, I’m financially free, you can be it too!” by selling millions of copies to dreamers, I would give the book a shot simply because similiar books have helped me in some way to think different, inspire me, and bring me to where I am today.
My 2 cents
I took a look over at David Seah’s in-depth review site, and the first thing that struck me was the heavy usage of NLP embedded hypnotic commands. The guy isn’t even being subtle about it… he actually upper-cases, bolds, or italicizes the specific commands! BTW, I would strongly, strongly recommend cryptogon readers to learn about NLP – both as a possible tool and to prevent others from getting in your head.
I just finished reading The Long Emergency by James Kunstler.
Basic summary is that our US economy is built and based on huge amounts of cheap oil and natural gas.
Once either oil or gas supplies start to decline, the ship is going to hit the span.
http://www.amazon.com/Long-Emergency-Converging-Catastrophes-Twenty-First/dp/0871138883
I love his epilogue about giving a talk at Google Headquarters where none of the 20 something millionaires believed it because ‘Uh, we have like … technology dude.
Computers make it easy to forget about the second law of Thermodynamics.
So if most of our economy is based on building gas guzzling cars and homes, and selling financial instruments of ever-expanding agribusiness, and most jobs require massive motoring from far-flung suburbs to energy guzzling office buildings, what would you do to best prepare your children for the future?
Send them to an assembly line of Yellow School buses to the 100 year old education factories of the US school system to prepare them for a life of suburban motoring to office buildings and far-flung Walmarts?
Or you you attempt to learn how to live outside that fossil-fuel powered life and teach them how to adapt quickly to change and how to travel the world in search of community, viable ecosystems, agricultural opportunity and be self-sufficient both physically and intellectually?
20 years from now when they get out of ‘college’ do you think the Dow Jones will have compounded at 10% per year (doubling every 7 years) to 104,000?
Do you think oil production will continue growing from 82 Billion barrel per year in 2007 to whatever the world demand the US, China and India have grown to?
Of course thinking you can work 4 hours a day sipping lattes and jumping off cliffs is ridiculous, but what is very serious about the concept is that taking a very different path to survival is mandatory.
But you can use this 4-Hour workday book as a convenient cover story to tell your oil-entranced friends that you are skydiving your way to a 4 hour work week while you are REALLY just getting the F OUT.
Imagine this:
Hey Bob, haven’t seen you at the country club recently!
Yah Tom, The oil is running out so I am leaving the country to go find a safe ecosystem and community before the US implodes into racial/religious resource wars. You are F%*Ked.
or
Yah Tom, I am living the 4 hour work week dream, growing avocados and spearfishing in Costa Rica! Come visit sometime!
the best of this genre is akin to a drink comprised of 50% Kool-Aid with 50% organic wheat grass juice.
You get some really good stuff that has been around forever mixed in with the usual crapola.
I’m just a little spooked that Cryptogon readers are rushing out to buy this book, which (as far as I can tell) just reminds the reader how to ride the same old current of exploitation that has plauged the planet now for about 2500 years. I already *know* that getting rich in the conventional sense of the word is all about figuring out how to exploit other people. What I’m really interested in is how to strengthen lateral social ties to promote a sort of collective wealth.
So how did you get to leave the rat race Mark?
Is this the new Amway?
Enjoy.
Amazon is much better at the Amway-style model than Amway. While Amway is a joke, most of us actually use Amazon.
Enjoy.
SW – I hardened my ba***s to be steel-hard, and took the plunge. Simple as that. Meaning, I quit my $90,000 tax-free job as a Systems Engineer, with the belief that by being pushed up against a wall, by being forced to find a way to make a living on my own, the solution would come quicker than if I were staying at my job just dreaming about leaving it.
2 years later, it’s going ok although I still haven’t realized my goals, it feels much better than being stuck in some office all day
Reading Thoreau’s Walden atm… “But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.”
You too can have a 4 hour work week and live a life of near total leisure. “All” you have to is start a business that gets 100s of suckers working 4000 man hours of work a week to subsidise you. So no change there then.
What if all his workers read his book and quit to do the same? (apart from the money drying up and the leisure time coming to an end) What happens when all their workers read it and do the same too? Oh look its a pyramid scheme.
George keaney, you’re awesome.
Imagine this:
Hey Bob, haven’t seen you at the country club recently!
Yah Tom, The oil is running out so I am leaving the country to go find a safe ecosystem and community before the US implodes into racial/religious resource wars. You are F%*Ked.
being a long time bottom feeder, wait till the hype is over and by July, there will be plenty of copies of the book for a quarter or a dollar or maybe two bucks, read it, glean anything relevant, then pass the book along.thanks for your comments, Mark, because I read all these self-help books and realize the pyramid schemes they are, you can read how to do it in something called the Instant Millionaire, they show the math and have a cutesy pretend story for right brained people to understand it. But still, like you, they have gotten me to think and act differently, Phil Laut’s book Money is My Friend helped me get to where I am today, haven’t worked (much) in 6 years. Though now I avoid his stuff because it is so blatantly MLM or rather, network marketing–BLECH.