After reading The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
As capo pointed out in a comment in an earlier, unrelated post, the title of this book would make one think it is just another of the millions of get-rich-quick recipes that work only for the authors of those recipes. But, this book is absolutely not like that. It is filled with solid and valuable life management principles, including:
- How to really set goals (Mr. Ferriss talks about setting Exciting Goals, and gives us methods of working through the identification and implementation of those goals).
- Eliminating tasks and activities that do not serve you well.
- Using the Pareto Principle (the 80-20 Rule) to focus on the 20% of the tasks and clients (and …) that give you 80% of your profits/benefits, and to eliminate or downplay the 20% that give you 80% of the headaches without corresponding gains.
- Sensibly outsourcing things you don’t want to do and that suck up your time (or things that have been on your To Do list forever).
- Avoiding the wasting of your time from soaking up so much information that does not serve you well. He notes that so many of us spend so very much time checking out news sources on the internet, reading books that are not worth our time, and filling our heads with useless information. This sounds somewhat at odds with my post on Being a Continuous Learner, which describes how leaders like Jeff Immelt and Steve Jobs are voracious readers and how they benefit from that. But, Ferriss is very much pro-learning, just anti-wasting-time. After reading his thoughts on this, I have killed off half a dozen blog feeds in my Google Reader to sites that posted tons of posts but delivered little direct value to me. I am simply not going to waste my time looking at their posts again. One of these sites was in the links section on this blog’s sidebar, but it ain’t there now. I may kill off another couple for the same reason.
- Using automation to reduce time spent on tasks.
The first half or so of the book contains this type of information, while the latter parts of the book describe how to make money to support a new lifestyle, if desired. (There are some really good tips in there, and I may well try some of them out at some point.)
On top of all the great, well-written detail that Ferriss provides, he throws in neat unrelated freebies as well, such as how to speed read. But, if you pay no attention to the latter part of the book, you will still get more than your money’s worth from the first half of the book. By the way, if you are a retiree, like I am, you may be interested in a chapter he sneaks in near the end of the book: “Filling The Void.” I personally don’t have a void to fill, but this chapter was still a great read.
I am not alone in being impressed with this book. It is getting great reviews from all over the web. The reviews on the Amazon site are pretty spectacular, too. Jack Canfield says “This will be huge.” Dr. Stewart Friedman, adviser to Jack Welch, says “This is a whole new ballgame.”
A while back I wrote a post entitled Is GTD a dying trend? I didn’t know anything about Ferriss’ book at the time, but my sense was that something like it is needed. My sense was, and is, that millions have implemented GTD, have found it to be helpful, but still feel that their lives are crammed with too much crap and unimportant stuff. I have been a huge fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
I am grateful to Tim Ferriss for making this phenomenal book available. I expect I will read it several times, and I am ready to start my second reading of it now, this time taking a lot of notes and working through all of the exercises.