The 4-hour Workweek: Stop Overwork, Start Living Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferris, a US author, educational speaker, and motivational entrepreneur, is a unique self-help guide written to help you get off the treadmill of daily drudgery and live the life you’ve always dreamed of.
You’ll learn how to set time aside for your own personal business, take care of your family and friends, get more done in less time, earn more money, and get more done with less effort. Many people have failed because they just don’t have time to spend it wisely. In fact, they spend all their time thinking about how they’re going to make more money, or how they’re going to better themselves. With this book, you can start living smarter, enjoying yourself more, and making more money, so you can actually enjoy life and not dread it.
Introduction
The 4-hour Workweek provides simple tips and tricks to help you get rid of your workweek life, including the things you need to know to become a millionaire in less than four years. It also covers the subjects of making money at home and making your own products.
While the topic of making money at home is quite interesting, it’s not what the book is about. In fact, most of the advice on making money at home involves setting up a website, which many people think is a difficult thing to do. However, the real secret to making money at home is using free or low-cost marketing tools and software that are available online. This way, you can get a ton of traffic and sales, because people will know you’re there when they’re searching for a product to buy, or services they need.
What’s really amazing about the book is that it’s not really about making money. It’s more about making a lifestyle change, which requires no additional investment except your time and commitment. You’ll learn that having a lot of money doesn’t always mean having lots of happiness, either. This is why the book is so appealing to me. It gives you practical advice, in the form of a guide, to get you started on the road to becoming rich. And since you’re reading this, you’re probably already rich and successful, so you can see the benefits of being a wealthy entrepreneur!
Summary
The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss clarifies the particular actions required to execute the Pareto Principle measures. This book actually is the absolute embodiment of the 80/20 principle to somebody’s professional life. The 80/20 principle is that the concept that 80 percent of your productivity comes from 20 percent of your time, along with another 20 percent of your activity eats up 80 percent of your time.
Ferriss asserts that by removing that 20 percent of activity that eats up all your time, you are able to live in a more efficient manner. The whole book revolves around this notion in a variety of ways, thus the name The 4-Hour Workweek. In certain ways, the book itself reads like a site, as it has broken down into lots of small bits: a number of them incremental advice, a number of them anecdotal, and a number of them are philosophical.
The 4-Hour Workweek is divided into four sections, each of which explores one of the components to lifestyle design:
- Establish your aims. Decide what is important. Establish goals.
- Remove distractions to spare time. Learn to work smart, not hard. Concentrate on the 20 percent of the stuff that is important and ignore the 80% which is not. Learn how to shunt aside interruptions, and learn how to say “no more”.
- Automate your money flow to boost earnings. Outsource your life– hire a virtual assistant to manage menial tasks. Grow a company that could run on auto-pilot. (This is actually the weakest part of this publication.)
- Liberate yourself from conventional expectations. Layout your job to boost freedom. This may mean working from home, or it may indicate using geographical arbitrage to take mini-retirements in countries with favorable market prices.
Brief Quotes
- “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.” ― Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
- “What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.” ― Timothy Ferriss, The 4 Hour Workweek
- “But you are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.” ―The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
- “People will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.” ― Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
- “A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.” ― Timothy Ferriss, The 4 Hour Workweek
Conclusion
- Work smart, not hard.
If Tim’s lifestyle was created about a principle, it could be the 80/20 principle or Pareto principle. Most folks measure productivity by the time spent working, but that is a terrible index since we waste so much time on the job.
Tim indicates to devote your time efficiently: about 20 percent of items that get you 80 percent of the outcomes, rather than vice versa.
A famous quote of his is this: “Doing something unimportant well does not make it important”. So rather than focusing on doing as much as possible, its best that you just concentrate on doing the few things which will result in the greatest advancement.
- Always validate your business ideas.
Before you go outside and construct some product or service, make certain men and women are willing to give you money for it.
- Charge a premium to lower the need for more clients and make your life easier.
The people who are ready to pay a premium are low-hassle customers. Promise a high quality always and provide!
Similar Books
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey
- Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
- The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
Why We Recommend The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
“The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss” is a strong book on lifestyle for anybody that wishes to place living prior to functioning. Tim’s aim is to demonstrate to the reader not just how to design their own perfect way of life but also the way to achieve that lifestyle. He unites eye-opening opinions and compelling tales with comprehensive guides and source lists. The outcome is a book so filled with practical life-changing advice it is extremely tough to take in on a single reading.
Continue reading this book. Take action on Tim’s tips. They may not make you an overnight millionaire that works four hours per week….
But they’ll most definitely have a positive effect and alter your life.