4 Hour Work Week Review
After moving back to the U.S. for the last time, I started to develop clarity about one of the major issues in our society. One of the major stereotypes of Americans is that they are just too busy. Not just busy, but busy with pointless things. After living in a few other cultures, I experienced this contrast first hand. In many places I lived, there was always time for community and friendship. But in the U.S., sometimes my own family couldn’t spend time with me because their google calendar was full for the next six months.
While it is easy to get frustrated and blame people for their poor prioritization, I found this happening in my own life. I was living 30 minutes down the road from my grandfather, but I would only spend time with him every 3 months because “I was too busy.” It was like the society I was living in was stealing my time for the things that really matter. The culture was squeezing away my precious, non-refundable time.
I even found this happening in the church I was a part of. Everyone’s schedule was so busy with church events and work that there didn’t seem to be time left for the most important, unplanned things in life. Work and living are integral themes throughout the entire bible. A cornerstone relevant verse is 1 Corinthians 10:31, “So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” While I love this verse, it seems to be commonly misapplied. Instead of filling our lives with meaningful work and activities, people fill their lives with the too many activities and call them meaningful. This leads to the obvious question, how would one reverse this?
Enter trailblazer Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss shatters the wall of “you don’t know what you don’t know” when it comes to the 21st century lifestyle. A common fork in the road that many passionate people face is to pursue meaningful work at the cost of financial stability, or pursue financial stability and try to find meaning in other things. Through Tim’s life experiments, he shows us that you can have your cake and eat it too. By using our noggins and capitalizing on globalization, we can pursue meaningful work in our lives and also have stable finances for those depend on us. It will take some work up front though.
While Tim presents his breakthrough method via his D.E.A.L acronym for the MBA audience, I will break it down in 3 main ideas. The first is a call to challenge the Deferred Life Plan (DLP). The second is to dream cast. And the third is to create your muse, the engine that is going to run this machine. All of these steps will vary by person, so it is up to you to apply them in a way that is pertinent to your life.
If you find your plans and life lived so far satisfactory, then just keep doing what you are doing. But if you find yourself wondering if there is a better way (and if it is within your means to achieve it), please read on. I will speak from the perspective of an American, because that is the culture I have grown up in. Most Americans are on the trajectory that Tim calls the deferred life plan. This essentially amounts to going to 18+ years of formal education with little return on the time you invested, then working a 60+ hour 9-5 job, buying a house (read Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad to see how this is not necessarily an asset) and starting a family. Doing all of this will put you on what I call the Stairmaster. To provide for your family and acquire your children the best possible education, you will have to climb the career ladder in your field. It won’t matter if the work actually creates something of lasting significance, because you will need the finances for what your life requires. To acquire these finances may take large amounts of time, which will detract from familial aspirations. You may have to motivate yourself to overwork by longing for the retirement that comes at the arbitrary age of 65. Then you can spend your final years in the weakest, least productive version of yourself doing the things you have always wanted to do. If you are okay crossing the event horizon of this financial black hole, then go ahead.
Or you could just rewrite the playbook. What would you rather be doing with your life? I find that people are very ineffective happiness simulators. What we think will make us happy often leaves us unfulfilled. Hence steps 2 and 3 are iterative. We cast our dream and take aim, letting experience redirect us to the hidden bullseye. We will not have everything right in our first plan, but we will have something to hold on to for when we get our work cut out for us. For me, I want to invest in educational infrastructures in developing countries. For some, they may want to pursue humanitarian work or sustenance farming without sacrificing the things their culture values. The possibilities are endless. Just grab one that is meaningful to you and hold on.
Now is the part where we have to get our hands dirty. This is what Tim calls the muse, the financial machine that will give us our time back for more meaningful pursuits. The principal is that we develop something of value for the economy that eventually requires little time for upkeep. Because we are transitioning to a digital world, many muses can be digital. But they don’t have to be. One could create a brick-and-mortar business and then outsource all the management. This step will depend on your own unique life experiences and creativity. It will take a lot of work upfront. It will likely include mistakes and failure. But you have already found your motivation to keep you on your grind.
The whole process with all of Tim’s tips and tricks are in his book. At the end of each chapter, he shares a list of websites and services he and his readers have relied on. You can hop on over to fiverr.com, a website connecting freelancers to help people build their products or sell their services. This book led me to fiverr.com, which led me to the developer who built the front end for this blog. If the sentiments and experiences I have discussed resonate with you in any way, then this book will be an indispensable resource for your journey.
But what about all the 1-star reviews for this book? They are quite glorious. I often enjoy reading reviews from the 1-star detractors of my favorite products. When I find so much quality in something, but others find it so useless, it often reveals some major disconnect about the nature of the product. This is definitely the case with Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Work Week.
The main complaints on Amazon about this book is that it is a “get-an-easy-life-quick” book, or advocates making money by providing something of little value to the economy to support a selfish lifestyle. While there may be hints of truth in these statements, I think they miss the bigger picture.
Tim Ferriss is much more an entrepreneur than inventor. The point of his book is not to create a useless product and rely on marketing psychology to exploit buyers. Then go live an adventurous life off the back of idiots who are willing to buy useless things. What he is showing us is a method that we can use to achieve something great. If you have a copy of the book, just jump to the back where the testimonials are. One can see that these people understood the message. They used the methods in the book to create a much more meaningful life and escape the constraints of the current arbitrary work structure imposed by society. They often use their bought-back time to pursue altruistic and humanitarian pursuits, without sacrificing financial stability. What will you do with your newfound freedom?