The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
I had heard a lot about this book before I read it. My first exposure to Tim Ferris was through Penelope Trunk’s blog. Penelope Trunk hates him, so I admit that prejudiced me.
This is the third “How to change your career path” type book that I read in the past couple of months. The first was WHAT COLOR IS YOUR PARACHUTE by Richard Bolles, and the second was SO GOOD THEY CAN’T IGNORE YOU by Cal Newport. Bolles’ theory is that you should figure out what you’re passionate about and find a job in that field. Newport says you should just work hard to build valuable skills, “career capital” so that you have more control over your career. Ferris says basically that jobs are for chumps, and you should just make a lot of money without working so that you can travel the world and do exciting things that will impress people.
While the jacket purports to tell you about a group of people called “The New Rich,” this is in no way a sociological exposition. It’s part memoir, part how-to guide for being more like Timothy Ferriss. Ferriss has made a lot of money by selling some herbal snake oil on the internet. Like Bob Ross, he makes it look enticingly easy, but anyone who reads Ferriss’ short bio at the beginning of this book, littered with false starts and failures, will recognize that his skills are hard won through hard work and experience. Not everyone who starts their own mail-order business on the internet becomes successful, just as not everyone who publishes their own kindle novel becomes successful (but you can help with that!www.katercheek.com/fiction) He has a lot of resources to help, and a nice step-by-step guide.
After you start your “expert” dvd self-help or licensed reseller empire and make a lot of money, you can use the rest of the guide to become the New Rich. He tells you how to live anywhere you want in the world, and has links to where he tells you how to learn a language in record time. He also has baffling instructions, such as “lie down in a crowded space” or “ask strangers for their phone number,” or the most perverse and horrifying “don’t read any non-fiction for at least a week” like some kind of ignorance-diet. I honestly don’t know why he included these things.
There are a couple good tidbits of useful information in here. For one, if you do non-essential things (laundry, email) less often, you’ll save time. That was probably the best thing I got from this book. The rest of the advice is mostly for how to be more like Tim Ferris. I don’t really want to be more like Tim Ferris. We have vastly different values in life. I think the only overlap is that both of us speak German and study martial arts. In my life, I want to create many beautiful things and have meaningful relationships founded on honesty. Tim seems to want independence and status, and he (at least in this book) sees friendship as a timesink. (“Do you want to see a movie” is a request Ferriss tells you to say no to.)
Frankly, I take a lot of his advice with a grain of salt not just because we seem to be aiming for different points, but because I don’t trust his honesty. The story about how he won the kickboxing tournament (finding a loophole and cheating his way into a different weight class) seemed extremely distasteful to me. If I won a martial arts tournament through a loophole, I wouldn’t brag about it. I’d be ashamed. I’ve had victory feel like ashes in my mouth just because there weren’t enough competitors in my rank/weight class. To seek it out seems unsporting, to say the least. The story about how he got As in college (bullying teachers by wasting their time as punishment for giving him anything less than an A) revolted me.
One of the get-rich-quick methods Tim suggests is selling books or videos of “expert” advice. He suggests that all you need to call yourself an expert is to read the top three books on a subject, then give some lectures and maybe publish some articles, using one to leverage the other. After you’re an “expert” you make a cheap DVD and sell it at a huge markup. Not only do I find this dishonest, the fact that he espouses this makes me doubt his self-assessment of his own expertise.
This book might be a nice call to arms for very independent, very ambitious people who seek status and independence above all else. You probably know who you are. Don’t expect the Tim Ferriss lifestyle to bring you happiness or life satisfaction, (if you don’t like yourself in the cubicle, you will probably not like yourself in an internet cafe in Berlin either) but it might help you figure out how to be a more efficient entrepreneur.
