The Four Hour Work Week (4HWW for short) has been a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, and isn’t doing too shabby worldwide either. This book was recommended to me by a friend when we were working together for a big project of mine. I remember thinking ‘well, sounds lame’ and actually almost forgetting all about it. But I decided to pick up a copy anyway because he so highly recommended it. Well that turned out to be a total winner of a choice!
DEAL
Tim divides his book into 4 sections: Definition, Elimination, Automation and Liberation. Each of these steps brings you closer to the goal that this book defines: automated income and loads of free time. I like the fact that the book first dives into defining what it actually is that you want in life.
D: Definition
This is the first step in Tim’s DEAL process. The idea of definition is actually very good. It is a simpler way to find your Meaning in Life than is presented in books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. This leads to a slightly shallower method than Covey proposes, but it still a good one. The downside is that it is pretty much focused on materialist things, something that Covey transcends in his book.
Ferriss calls his method ‘Dreamlining’. In short, it is goal-setting combined with cost-analysis. So you define your goals and then determine what the costs would be to make those goals become reality. The key to doing this is to let go off all the prejudices you have about this not being possible. This chapter helps you in getting into the right mindset and complete your dreamline. I still use dreamlining today in a slightly different way to set goals for myself and to determine the cost of those goals, it is very useful.
E: Elimination
In this part Timothy Ferriss shows you different ways to eliminate some things from your life that are keeping you from being effective and efficient. I have described my preferred model for elimination, which relates closely to the methods described in this book. The 4 Hour Work Week just gives you some more practical tips and tricks you can apply to get more time on your hands.
A: Automation
For most people this is the big eye-opener. Basically Tim Ferriss tells you how you can hire people for as little as $4,- an hour (although my experience is that these prices have climbed since this book first went to print). These people can take your calls, handle your e-mail, collect data, write articles, you name it.
There is one small downside to this if you’re not from an English speaking country. They don’t speak anything but English. If you are going to be looking for a similar service in your native language you will probably end up having to pay a lot more. It might be wise to consider really hiring someone then, or working with interns. But this aside, the automation part of the book makes it a great book instead of just an okay book.
L: Liberation
The final part of the book goes into getting free of the burdens of a job or tons of hours of work each week. This sounds too good to be true, I am sure, but if you’ve come this far in the book you’ll have seen how to achieve this insurmountable goal. It is a great addition to what would have been a good book had this part been left out. But this is just the extra icing on the cake.
Critique
There is only one point of critique that I have on this wonderful book. Tim describes how he went from a 9-5 job, which paid $40.000,- a year to a business he operates in a mere 4 hours a week, raking in $40.000,- per month. Now, this sounds great and all, but here’s the caveat: Tim had a product which has customers returning. It is a consumable product which means that if people like it, they’ll return when they’ve run out. This is a very important point that Ferriss doesn’t put too much emphasis on, which I find a fatal flaw in his reasoning.
But fear not, for your fearless reviewer has taken this flaw and found the answer. You see, I figured if it could be done with a consumable, it could be done with information products as well. And I thought that if I was clever enough to think of this, there would have to be some other bloke that had also thought of it. Probably sooner too. And there is, there’s a marketing bloke who has done the whole automation thing with information products. So that puts an end to this otherwise major point of critique.
Go get the book!
I will post a review of a course on doing the whole automation thing with information products soon. In the meanwhile, you can check out Tim’s fantastic book on Amazon:
Sun, Dec 13, 2009
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