Review: The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss

In the last few years, I’ve sold all my possessions; lived in three different countries and traveled through a half dozen others; took a year off as a “mini retirement”; started my own company; worked completely remotely; and wrote two books. In short, I’ve done most of the stuff Ferriss recommends in this book, long before I actually read this book. I bring this up because I feel like I am uniquely qualified to make the following statement: Tim Ferriss’ book does a great job of showing you the value of this sort of lifestyle, but it VASTLY understates the costs.

Examples:

• Starting a company is a massive amount of work. Figuring out the legal details is hard (and lawyers are expensive). Figuring out the tax and accounting details is hard (and accountants are expensive). Figuring out a product that people want to pay money for and is profitable is hard. Hiring people is hard. Marketing is hard. Sales is hard. And despite all of this hard work, the vast majority of new companies fail. Don’t take my word for it. Go speak with 100 small business owners in any industry and find out how many of them found it “quick” or “easy”. Ask how many of them work just 4 hours per week. Ask how many of them live worry-free and don’t bring their work home with them.

• Moving around the world is a massive amount of work. Selling everything you own is hard. Finding a safe and comfortable place to live in a foreign place is hard. Making friends in a new place where you don’t speak the language is hard. Learning a new language is hard. Figuring out health insurance, local laws, and taxes–especially if you are running your own company while living abroad–is hard. Figuring out visas and work permits is brutally hard. In fact, in most countries around the world, unless you take a full-time (40h/week) job with a local company, and that company secures a work permit for you, you won’t be able to legally stay more than ~90 days. That’s enough for a vacation, but not to move somewhere.

Perhaps most importantly, despite all of this hard work, most people that try to achieve this lifestyle… Will fail. Ferriss succeeded not because everyone else is an idiot or because he has discovered a secret formula, but because a) he’s a white, privileged, American male, b) he got lucky, c) he’s willing to use shitty, unsustainable practices to make it happen.

In fact, I’d even go further and say that if everyone could achieve his lifestyle, it would be a disaster. Examples:

• He recommends starting shitty little companies to make passive income (e.g. he sells some snake oil supplement called BrainQuicken) and working only 4 hours per week; if everyone did that, no one would ever create any thing meaningful in the world. No great company, product, or innovation has ever been built the way Ferris describes. Also, he contradicts himself repeatedly: if you do the math on all the work activities he says he does per week, it adds up to VASTLY more than 4 hours. And that doesn’t even take into account a) the learning curve to get good at those activities, and b) all the activities that he doesn’t mention, such as taking the time to write a 400+ page book.

• He recommends checking email exactly once per week; if everyone did that, the smallest email exchange would take months. He contradicts himself repeatedly on this point too, at times saying he checks email 3 times per day, at other times saying he checks email from his virtual assistant nightly, and at still other times, talks about using phone calls instead, which in my experience, are VASTLY more distracting.

• He recommends that everyone tries to work remotely; if everyone did that, you’d quickly realize that it takes more than an occasional Skype call to make it effective. If 99% of the company is in an office but one or two people are remotely, those two remote works become outsiders. They are never part of the lunch time discussions, the hallway chats, the impromptu meetings, and all the other in-person interactions where the real business gets done. In most cases, they become isolated, irrelevant, and ultimately leave or get fired. Building a distributed company requires changing the culture to focus around writing everything down and async communication. It’s hard to get right and it doesn’t work in all industries. Moreover, while I love remote work and have built a completely distributed company, it’s not without its downsides. Face-to-face conversations are fundamentally different than Skype calls and while remote work gives you the ability to focus and avoid distractions, you lose the serendipitous interactions which lead to some of your most important ideas.

• He recommends not checking the news and just relying on your friends to tell you what’s important; if everyone did that, we’d all be totally ignorant. And guess what, he contradicts himself here too, as Ferriss posts on Twitter multiple times per day, which means he spends quite a bit of time every single day staring at a newsfeed.

• He recommends against reading too much, suggesting you should read “just in time” rather than “just in case”; if everyone did that, we’d be even more ignorant. What Ferriss forgets is that you don’t know what you don’t know. If you don’t know a piece of information exists, you won’t know to seek it out “just in time.” That’s why reading broadly and gaining exposure to new ways of thinking is essential to success and not something to be avoided. Yet again he contradicts himself, as his own book is full of quotes from a number of other books of all sorts of disciplines, and on top of that, he has a recommended reading list at the end.

OK, obviously the book has a lot of problems, but having gone through all the caveats and warnings above, as much as it hurts me to admit it, I have to say it: most people would benefit from reading this book. Ferriss may hide the costs from you, but he does a superb job of talking about the value of time. This is the one truly non-renewable resource in the world and this book does a superb job of making you appreciate that fact and teaching you how to be more efficient.

Be sure to skip the introductory chapters, which sound like an infomercial, full of boasting, chest thumping, “order now and your life will be changed forever”, self-help book tropes. Get past that, and you’ll discover some real gems, and some serious motivation for changing how you live and work:

• Retirement should be a worst case scenario. Instead of using the best years of your life to work and save money for old age, where you can’t enjoy it, take mini retirements (e.g. 3 - 6 months) on a regular basis. I started doing this a few years ago and it’s life changing.

• The worst-case scenario with most career and lifestyle decisions is not that bad; the risk is not that high; and the timing is never right. In short, shut up and do it.

• Follow the 80/20 rule. Find the 20% of tasks you do that bring 80% of value; alternatively, find the 20% of tasks that eat up 80% of your resources. Eliminate the waste accordingly. As a programmer, I’m always on the search for efficiency, whereas I see many other folks get stuck in the same time-wasting routines just because they’ve always done it that way.

• Batching. As a programmer, I’m keenly aware of the overhead of multi-tasking (i.e. “context switching”) and have been batching my work in years to become vastly more efficient. I check my mail, email, and voicemail at set intervals rather than whenever it happens. I prefer asynchronous communication (e.g. email) for everything so I can respond to multiple messages in batches. I do all my calls and meetings on 1-2 days per week and block out the other days for focused, uninterrupted work (e.g. coding).

• Virtual assistants. This was a new one for me. I’ve always done everything for myself, but I’m realizing now that there is a ton of work I do that could be handled just as well by someone else. For example, scheduling meetings, filling in details in a contract template for a customer or employee, researching simple questions, responding to spammy/marketing emails, and so on. Hiring a full-time assistant for my small company would be too expensive, but a part-time, virtual assistant seems like a fantastic idea.

• Negotiating tips. Ferriss seems to understand human psychology very well and has lots of great tips on negotiating. For example, he recommended steps for asking your boss to allow you to work remotely are brilliant: first, have the company invest in you (e.g. get them to pay for trainings) so you seem more valuable; next, try to work from home without official permission (e.g. stay home sick for a couple days); then, show your boss how productive you happened to be on those days, and ask for a revocable trial period to work from home a couple days per week (this keeps the risk very small from your boss’s perspective); be even more productive when approved; after a little while, show the increased productivity as a reason to expand remote time. What a great approach! He also has wonderful tips on negotiating deals, including a list of simple, but effective questions. Examples: What would I need to do to make XXX happen? Under what circumstances would you do XXX? You must have made some exceptions in the past, right?

• The book contains a huge collection of valuable resources and links for traveling, saving money, working remotely, testing business ideas, and much more. I had heard of many of the tools, but still found quite a few new ones, such as the virtual assistant services and expert services that journalists reach out to for quotes/opinions (e.g. ProfNet). You can find the list here: http://tim.blog/4-hour-workweek-tools

Finally, as always, I’ve saved some of my favorite quotes from the book:

“For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.”

“People will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.”

“The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is boredom.”

“It’s lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for ‘realistic’ goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy-consuming.”

“If we define risk as ‘the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome,’ inaction is the greatest risk of all.”

“The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for base hits.”

Rating: 3 stars