Book Review: “The 4-Hour Workweek: Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich”

If you have never heard of this book, or you have heard of the book and yet never read it, you owe it to your­self to pick up a copy at your ear­li­est con­ve­nience.  In “The 4-Hour Work­week: Live Any­where and Join the New Rich” , author and pro­duc­tiv­ity expert Tim­o­thy Fer­riss not only writes about how you can do more in less time, but how to:

1. Reduce the infor­ma­tion over­load in your life
2. Lever­age tech­nol­ogy to truly help you rather than over­whelm you
3. Pay atten­tion to things that really mat­ter and ignore what really doesn’t
4. How to free your­self from your cur­rent job oblig­a­tions and migrate to some­thing more fulfilling

His book has a lot of sug­ges­tions about how to go about wean­ing your­self from clut­ter — such as listening/watching news too much — yet still stay up on cur­rent events.

He pro­poses that “work” should take up less of our time and atten­tion, and debunks the deferred retire­ment notion that we should “work ’til we drop” in old age.  He advo­cates tak­ing mul­ti­ple mini-retirements through­out one’s life and pro­vides advice as to how to go about doing that.

He also explains how to get off “square one” of being par­a­lyzed into try­ing some­thing new because of fears of the unknown.   Many peo­ple have the dream of “doing some­thing some­day” and never really get to it because of fear of:

1. run­ning out of money
2. what oth­ers may think
3. poten­tial failure
4. other sub­con­scious inhibitions

He also thor­oughly dis­cusses how to lever­age del­e­ga­tion, such as out­sourc­ing via the Inter­net your daily tasks, so you have more time to focus on what really mat­ters to you.

Fer­riss illus­trates exam­ples of peo­ple — includ­ing him­self — who were able to dras­ti­cally reduce their bur­den­some work time com­mit­ments by lever­ag­ing con­cepts he calls “income autopi­lot” and “find­ing the muse”.  These terms describe ways of mak­ing money with­out you hav­ing to be present all the time — in fact with­out you hav­ing to be present hardly at all.

I really like all the prac­ti­cal advice about set­ting up a muse/business.  Here are some of the highlights:

• How to Get $700,000 of Adver­tis­ing for $10,000
• Muse Math: Pre­dict­ing the Rev­enue of Any Product
• Real Licens­ing Agree­ment with Real Dollars

His accom­pa­ny­ing web­site, also goes into more detail about points he explains in his book.

The book is now avail­able in:

1. Orig­i­nal hard­cover edi­tion, pub­lished 2007
2. Audio book edi­tion on CD-ROM, pub­lished 2007
3. Expanded hard­cover edi­tion, to be pub­lished 12/2009

This book gets you think­ing “out­side of the box” and should help you get out of the rut you may be in.  It is highly rec­om­mended reading!

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