summary of 4 hour work week

The 4-Hour Work Week By Tim Ferriss Book Summary 

Turned down by 26 out of 27 publishers, The 4-Hour Work Week nearly didn’t become the No.1 New York Times Bestseller it went on to be. Tim Ferriss wrote ‘The 4-Hour Work Week’ for all those tired of postponing their life until retirement, who instead want to live life large and in the moment, right now.

In The 4-Hour Work Week, Ferriss promises a way to get all the rewards of working without having to wait until the end of your career. As a testament to his strategies, Ferriss has used them to become (amongst many other things):

  • A guest lecturer at Princeton University
  • The first America Guinness World Record holder in tango
  • The advisor to over 30 world-record holders in both professional and Olympic sports
  • A national Chinese kickboxing champion
  • An MTV breakdancer in Taiwan

Post Contents

What is The 4-Hour Work Week about?

How ‘the 4-hour work week’ review is structured, rules that change the rules , dodging bullets, system reset, the low-information diet, interrupting interruption and the art of refusal, how to work 4 hours a week , beyond repair – killing your job, mini-retirements—embracing the mobile lifestyle, filling the void—adding life after subtracting work, the last chapter, want to learn more.

summary of 4 hour work week

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summary of 4 hour work week

The 4-Hour Work Week aims to give you more time and more mobility. These are two of the defining attributes of what Ferriss refers to as the “New Rich.” The New Rich have abandoned the deferred-life plan to create luxury lifestyles in the here and now, and Ferriss argues that you can too.

Ferriss states that people don’t want to be millionaires; they want to experience what they think only millionaires can buy. The question, therefore, is how can you achieve the lifestyle of a millionaire, without having a million dollars in the bank? Over five years, Ferriss set out to answer this question and has laid out the key to separating income from time. Consequently, ‘The 4-Hour Work Week’ is not about how to save, or about finding your dream job; it’s about how to free up the most time, and automate your income.

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To become part of the New Rich, Ferriss puts forward a set of strategies to follow that spell out the acronym, DEAL. The book looks at each of the following in turn:

  • D for ‘Definition:’ Turns misguided common sense on its head, and instead introduces new rules and objectives.
  • E for ‘Elimination:’ This step argues for the elimination of the concept of time management.
  • A for ‘Automation:’ Looks at putting your cash flow on autopilot.
  • L for ‘Liberation:’ Liberation is not necessarily about cheap travel; it’s about being free from the binds that keep you tied to a single location.

The 4-Hour Work Week summary will look at each feature of Ferriss’ DEAL acronym, extracting the key points so that you can learn how to become a member of the New Rich. 

Step 1: D is for Definition

Ferriss argues that the defining feature separating the New Rich from what he refers to as the ‘deferrers’ (i.e., those saving up all of their money for retirement), is their goals and their philosophies. He lists a few of the distinctions between these two modes of thinking as follows:

  • Deferrer = I want to work for myself
  • New Rich = I want to have others to work for me
  • Deferrer = I want to work whenever I want to 
  • New Rich = I prevent work for work’s sake and do the minimum to get the maximum
  • Deferrer = I want to retire young
  • New Rich = I want to regularly distribute adventures and recovery periods throughout my life. Inactivity is not the goal, but doing what is exciting is
  • Deferrer = I want to buy all the things I want
  • New Rich = I want to do all the things I want to do
  • Deferrer = I want to have a lot of money
  • New Rich = I want to make a lot of money for specific reasons with defined dreams
  • Deferrer = I want to have more
  • New Rich = I want to have more quality and less clutter

new rich

Ferriss states that the deferrer’s desire to chase money blindly is foolish. If you can free up your time and your location, your money is automatically worth three to ten times more, as you are no longer paying rent. Ferriss chartered private planes over the Andes, enjoyed the finest wines in the world, and lived like a king in a private villa, which all cost less than paying rent in the U.S. Consequently, Ferriss states that money is multiplied in practical value according to the four W’s:

  • What you do
  • When you do it
  • Where you do it
  • Whom you do it with

This means that an investment banker making $500,000 a year for 80 hours a week, is less “powerful” than a member of the New Rich working 20 hours a week for $40,000, but who has complete freedom over the when, whom, where, and what of their lives. It’s the ability to choose that is our true power. The 4-Hour Work Week is all about identifying and creating these options so that you can make more money while working less.

When the world seems to be defining or solving a problem in a way that continuously creates subpar results, you need to ask yourself: What if you did the opposite? For example, when Ferriss was working in a sales department, he realized that most cold calls didn’t get through to their intended recipient. So, he decided to only call businesses between 8:00 a.m. – 8:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. By doing so, he avoided the secretaries. He also got twice as many meetings as his colleagues who were calling from 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., for an eighth of the time.

To be a part of the New Rich, Ferriss offers ten rules that are fundamental to your success:

  • Retirement is the worst-case-scenario insurance. It rests on the assumption that you are doing something you dislike for the ablest years of your life rather than enjoying those years now.
  • Interest and energy are cyclical. Alternating between periods of rest and activity is essential. The New Rich distribute ‘mini-retirements’ throughout their life, instead of hoarding it all for retirement.
  • Less is not laziness. Despite spending fewer hours in the office, the New Rich produce more meaningful results than a dozen deferrers combined.
  • The timing is never right. Holding out for the perfect moment to make a decision will rarely come to fruition. Waiting for ‘someday’ means that you will take your dreams to the grave.
  • Ask for forgiveness, not permission. People deny things according to their emotions, but they can learn to accept them after the fact.
  • Emphasize strengths. Don’t fix weaknesses. By improving your strengths over your weaknesses, you focus on multiplying the results as opposed to incrementally fixing your flaws.
  • When things are done to excess, they often take on the characteristics of their opposites. Too much and too often of what you want will soon become what you don’t want.
  • Money alone is not the solution. We often use not having enough money as a scapegoat for not self-reflecting and working out what we want out of life.
  • Relative income is more important than absolute income. Relative income looks at both money and time, whereas absolute income only looks at money. The former is how the New Rich assesses their current worth.
  • Distress is bad, eustress is good. Distress refers to harmful stress that makes you weaker. Eustress refers to the type of stress that helps you grow. The New Rich seek out eustress and reject distress.

Uncertainty and the prospect of failure prevent people from trying new things. Most will choose unhappiness over uncertainty. Ferriss suggests that if fear is preventing you from making a choice, imagine the worst-case scenario in detail. Then, work out how you could salvage your life if the worst came to pass. 

This is a technique he used when he was unhappily working 15-hour days to run his company and was debating whether he could take a holiday or not. In the end, he realized that if the worst happened, it wouldn’t be fatal, he would survive, and he would be able to get back on track. 

Ferriss offers seven questions to ask yourself to help you overcome your fears:

  • What is your absolute worst-case scenario?
  • What could you do to repair the damage if this came to pass?
  • What are the temporary and permanent outcomes and benefits of more probable scenarios?
  • If you were fired today, how could you take care of your finances?
  • What are you putting off due to fear?
  • What is the cost (emotionally, financially, and physically) of postponing action?
  • What are you waiting for?

Ferriss states that doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic. As 99 percent of the world believes they are incapable of achieving greatness, they aim for a mediocre life. The problem? The level of competition is fiercest amongst those battling to achieve “realistic” goals. Therefore, there is less competition for bigger goals. The real challenge is to work out what you want.

However, the questions ‘what do you want?’ and ‘what are your goals?’ are flawed, they need to be rephrased. Ferriss argues that, generally, we make goals because we believe we are chasing happiness. He thinks this is wrong. Happiness has become ambiguous through overuse, and while most believe sadness to be the opposite of happiness, Ferriss posits that they are two sides of the same coin. The real antithesis to happiness is boredom. Consequently, Ferriss concludes that it’s excitement, which is a better synonym for happiness, and it’s an excitement that you should strive to chase.

Thus, the question shouldn’t be ‘what do you want?’ or ‘what are your goals?’ but ‘what excites you?’ To make what excites you your focus, follow this 3-fold process:

  • Shift your goals from ambiguous wants to defined steps
  • Make your goals unrealistic so that they can be effective
  • Focus on activities to fill the vacuum of work once it’s removed, living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things, not just owning things

Step 2: E is for Elimination

Ferriss claims that we should forget about time management. It’s a trap. You shouldn’t be trying to fill every second with work. Now that you’ve thought about what you want to do with your time, you’ve got to find a way to create more free time while maintaining or increasing your income. The key is to remember that what you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. While efficiency is essential, it’s redundant unless it’s being applied to the right things.

tim ferriss quotes

Ferriss utilizes Pareto’s 80/20 Principle. The idea is that 80 percent of output will result from 20 percent of input. This can be applied everywhere, from wealth distribution in society to company profits relative to their products and customers. With this in mind, Ferriss suggests slowing down and remembering that often, being busy is a form of laziness as it prevents you from thinking. 

Being selective in what you do, and even doing less is the path to being productive. By working out which 20 percent of your sources are causing 80 percent of your problems, and vice versa, you can adjust your life accordingly.

In addition to the 80/20 principle, Ferriss utilizes Parkinson’s Law. This states that the perceived importance of a task will increase in correlation with how much time has been allotted for its completion. Therefore, you should shorten your work time and limit your projects only to those that are important. How does this work in combination with the 80/20 Principle? By first identifying the few critical tasks that create the most income (80/20), and then scheduling them in with very short, clear deadlines (Parkinson’s Law).

Ferriss suggests that to move forward as part of the New Rich, you must learn to be selectively ignorant. It’s essential to ignore all information that is irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable. Most information is time-consuming and redundant. You should critically assess what you look at, read, or watch daily and establish whether it’s contributing to your goals.

Ferriss offers a 3-step procedure to help you eradicate useless information from your life:

  • Go on a one-week media fast immediately. This means, no newspapers, magazines, news websites, television, non-fiction books, and unnecessary web surfing.
  • Develop the habit of asking yourself if you will use this information for something that is both immediate and important.
  • Learn when to stop absorbing. If you’re reading a poorly written article, don’t continue to read it.

Ferriss defines an interruption as anything that prevents the completion of a critical task, in which there are three principal offenders:

  • Time wasters
  • Time consumers
  • Empowerment failures

To prevent interruption from these sources, consider taking the following steps:

  • Create systems that limit your availability and deflect inappropriate interruptions. This could mean replacing a meeting with a concise email.
  • Batch activities to limit costs and to create more time. 
  • Set autonomous rules with regular reviews of results. This prevents creating a decision bottleneck.

Step 3: A is for Automation

Some of the most critical skills necessary for becoming a member of the New Rich are learning how to communicate and to manage remotely. To get used to this idea, Ferriss suggests hiring a digital assistant to practice giving other people orders. An essential facet of being a member of the New Rich is learning how to replace yourself within a system. 

However, Ferriss is also keen to highlight the dark side of delegation. Unless a task is well-defined and vital, he states that no one should do it. Eliminate before you delegate. This means never automating something that could otherwise be eliminated, and never delegate something that could be automated. To get to grips with the idea of automating your life, Ferriss suggests the following:

  • Hire an assistant—even if you don’t need one
  • Start small but think big. This means looking at what’s been on your to-do list for the longest time, examining what causes you the most frustration or boredom, and delegating these tasks
  • Identify your five top time-consuming, non-work tasks, and five personal tasks you could assign, just for the fun of it
  • Keep in sync by using scheduling and calendars

four hour work week quotes

To only work 4 hours a week and to become a member of the New Rich, the key isn’t to run a business. It’s to own a business and spend no time on it. How to do that? Outsourcing. To get the ball rolling, Ferriss states that your business should adhere to the following:

– The target product can’t cost more than $500 to test

– It must be able to be automatized within four weeks

– When established, it can’t require more than one day per week of management

From here, Ferriss provides a step-by-step process for identifying a potential business model that could work for you:

  • Pick an affordable niche market. Don’t create a product then go looking for your customers. First, find a market and identify your customers, then develop a product for them. To be successful, you should be a member of your target market. This makes the process significantly easier.
  • Brainstorm (and don’t invest in) products. Choose two industries that you’re familiar with that both have their own magazines where a full-page advert costs $5000 or less. Now brainstorm ideas for products that could be effectively advertised in both these magazines. The product should cost between $50 and $200, shouldn’t take more than three to four weeks to produce, and should come accompanied with a thorough online FAQ. Then choose whether you want to either resell a product, license a product, or create a product.
  • Then micro-test your products. Micro-testing uses cheap advertisements to test if there is a demand for your product before manufacturing it. Do this by assessing the competition and creating a more engaging offer than them. Then test the offer using short advertising campaigns before deciding which of your potential product ideas to back.
  • Once you have a product that sells, it’s time to automate it. The architecture of your business needs to ensure that you’re out of the information flow, instead of at the top of it. To do this, contract outsourcing companies as opposed to freelancers and ensure that all of your outsourcers communicate with each other to solve problems.
  • Assess the value of each customer. Identify those customers who spend the least and yet ask for the most (i.e., adhering to the 80/20 rule) and cut them out. They cost far more time than they are worth. Those customers you do keep on, treat well, as if they were in an exclusive club.

four hour work week book

Step 4: L is for Liberation

If you are currently an employee for a company and you want to enjoy the unrestricted remote living of the New Rich, there are a few things you can do:

  • Increase your employer’s investment in you. This could mean asking for the company to fund you through a training course. The psychology behind this is that the more a company invests in you, the greater the loss if you quit.
  • Prove increased output when out of office. You could call in sick for two days but then work from home, doubling your work output and creating tangible proof of your efforts to show your employers how well you work when not in the office.
  • Prepare the quantifiable business benefit. This means creating a bullet point list that showcases how much more you achieve when not in the office.
  • Propose a remote working trial period. This could start at one-day-per-week.
  • From here, gradually increase your remote working time. Do so by ensuring that your remote working days are your most productive then set a meeting with your employer to discuss the results.

Some jobs, however, are simply not worth salvaging. Just because you may have invested a lot of time into a job, doesn’t make it a worthwhile venture. However, as discussed earlier, it’s fear that prevents people from making the leap. Here are four of the most common fears when thinking about quitting a job, and Ferriss’ rebuff to each of them:

  • Quitting is permanent: This is a lie. It’s always possible to pick up your chosen career path with a different company at a later date.
  • I won’t be able to pay the bills: Yes, you will. If you can get a new stream of income before you quit your job, great, if you don’t, it isn’t hard to eliminate most of your expenses temporarily and live off your savings for a short while. 
  • Health insurance and retirement funds will cease if I quit: This is false. Do some research and transfer your 401(k) or similar to another company.
  • It will ruin my resume: False. Just get creative with your CV. Plus, if you quit to do something interesting, this will often make you more attractive to employers in the long run.

After turning a three-month vacation into a 15-month trip, Ferriss asked himself, “why not take the usual 20-30 year retirement and redistribute it throughout life instead of saving it all for the end?” Consequently, Ferriss suggests that instead of engaging in binge travel (which most people working 40-hour a week jobs do when they get vacation time), that you go on several mini-retirements, which means relocating to another place for six months. By doing so, you will not escape your life as such but will re-examine it.

To get used to the idea of a mini-retirement, you first need to unshackle yourself from the materialism and comparative mindset that is integral to a speed- and size-obsessed culture. In his experience, Ferriss says that it takes around three months to unplug from these obsolete ways of thinking before becoming aware of just how much time is spent distracting yourself by being in constant motion.

When it comes to financing your mini-retirements, your level of luxury is limited only by your level of creativity. When you compare living expenses in a different country to the amount you are currently paying, like Ferriss, you may realize that living abroad could save you money. What’s more, before going away, it’s an excellent excuse to declutter your life from all its unnecessary belongings. This is the perfect time to use the 80/20 rule to ask yourself: What are the 20 percent of your belongings that you use 80 percent of the time, and vice versa? Then get rid of the excess.

mini-retirement tim ferriss

It’s not uncommon that once you arrive on your mini-retirement, a gaping void engulfs you where you would otherwise have been busy distracting yourself with work. This frequently happens to those who retire, and it is what happened to Ferriss on his inaugural mini-retirement. The first thing to do is not to freak out as this is normal. The more goal-orientated you are, the more challenging this transition is going to be. In addition, you may also find yourself suffering from social-isolation.

In the absence of an external focus, the mind turns inwards and can create more problems to solve than necessary. However, if you find a focus or a goal, these problems can dissipate. If you find yourself mulling over existential questions without being able to get yourself out of a rut, Ferriss suggests asking yourself two things:

  • Have you given each term in this question a specific definition and meaning?
  • Will the answer to this question be acted upon to improve your life?

Consequently, if you can neither define it or act upon it, you should forget about it.

Overall, the most important things in life are to enjoy yourself and to feel good about yourself. While he cannot offer a single answer to the question of how to enjoy life and feel good about yourself, Ferriss does state that two components are fundamental to the New Rich: service and continual learning. 

Ferriss suggests that one of the best things you can do when on a mini-retirement is to learn a language. According to him, it hones your clear thinking while allowing you to get to grips with the culture you are immersed in. Further, Ferriss defines service as doing something that improves life beyond your own. It’s an attitude, and it’s up to you to find the area that most appeals to you and to do your part.

To help you to prepare for your mini-retirement, Ferriss suggests the following:

  • Revisit ground zero: Do nothing. You cannot escape your inner demons before you face them. Consider attending a short (three – seven day) silence retreat in which all media and speaking are prohibited.
  • Anonymously donate to a service organization of your choice. This can help give you ideas of what type of service you’d like to contribute to in the world.
  • Combine a learning mini-retirement with local volunteering. While on the trip, note any self-critical or negative self-talk in a journal, and if you get upset or anxious, ask yourself why.
  • Revisit and reset your dream lines. Your mini-retirement may have given you a greater perspective on what you want to get out of life.
  • Based on the results of steps one to four, consider trying out a new part- or full-time vocation. A vocation is different from work. A vocation is a true calling or a dream occupation.

Once you discover that life is not a problem to be solved or a game to be won, a real world of opportunities opens up. By mindlessly chasing an ideal of success, you miss out on all of the fun, especially when you recognize that the only rules and limits that exist are those that you set for yourself. You can recapture the magic of your childhood. Indeed, this is required. When you do so, you will realize that there are no more chains, or excuses, holding you back from living the exciting, fulfilling life you previously could only ever have dreamed of.

You can buy ‘The 4-Hour Work Week’ by Tim Ferriss on Amazon .

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The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss: Summary and Lessons

4 hour work week summary

“The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”

Rating:  9/10

Related: The E-Myth Revisited , Zero to One , ReWork , Essentialism , Eat That Frog

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Table of Contents

The 4 Hour Workweek Short Summary

The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss is the ultimate blueprint on lifestyle design. Follow a simple step-by-step process to reinvent yourself, work better, create a business, and live a luxury lifestyle that favors time and mobility.

Executive Summary

The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles using time and mobility .

People don’t want to be millionaires—they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy. The fantasy is the lifestyle of complete freedom it allows.

So the question becomes: “How can one achieve the millionaire lifestyle of complete freedom without first having $1,000,000?”

The step-by-step process you’ll use to reinvent yourself:

  • D is for Definition. Introductions to the rules and objectives of the new game. This section explains the lifestyle design recipe and fundamentals .
  • E is for Elimination. Kills the obsolete notion of time management once and for all. How to increase your per-hour results ten times or more by cultivating selective ignorance, developing a low-information diet, and ignoring the unimportant. This section provides the first of the three luxury lifestyle design ingredients: time .
  • A is for Automation. Puts cash flow on autopilot using geographic arbitrage, outsourcing, and rules of nondecision. Provides the second ingredient of luxury lifestyle design: income .
  • L is for Liberation. The mobile manifesto for the globally inclined. Covers how to break the bonds that confine you to a single location. This section delivers the third and final ingredient for luxury lifestyle design: mobility .

Step I: D is for Definition

Chapter 1 – cautions and comparisons: how to burn $1,000,000 a night.

The New Rich (NR) can be separated from the crowd based on their goals , which reflect very distinct priorities and life philosophies.

If you can free your time and location, your money is automatically worth 3–10 times as much.

Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life:

  • What you do
  • When you do it
  • Where you do it
  • With whom you do it

To become a NR, you start by replacing assumptions.

Chapter 2 – Rules That Change the Rules: Everything Popular is Wrong

  • Retirement Is Worst-Case-Scenario Insurance. Retirement planning is like life insurance. Your retirement is not the goal.
  • Interest and Energy Are Cyclical. Work only when you are most effective and life is both more productive and enjoyable .
  • Less Is Not Laziness. Despite working fewer hours, the NR produce more meaningful results than other people. Focus on being productive instead of busy .
  • The Timing Is Never Right. “ Someday ” is a disease that takes your dreams to the grave with you. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “ eventually ,” just do it and correct course along the way.
  • Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission. Try it and then justify it. Get good at being a troublemaker and saying sorry when you screw up.
  • Emphasize Strengths, Don’t Fix Weaknesses. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.
  • Things in Excess Become Their Opposite. Do what you want as opposed to what you feel obligated to do.
  • Money Alone Is Not the Solution. The routine of the money wheel is a constant distraction that prevents you from seeing how pointless it is. The problem is more than money.
  • Relative Income Is More Important Than Absolute Income. Relative income is the real measurement of wealth for the New Rich.
  • Distress Is Bad, Eustress Is Good. Eustress is the stimulus for growth. Be equally aggressive in removing distress and finding eustress.

Chapter 3 – Dodging Bullets: Fear-Setting and Escaping Paralysis

Most intelligent people in the world dress up fear as optimistic denial . 

Define your fears by writing down your answer to each step:

  • Define Your Fear. What’s the worst that could happen? What would be the permanent impact on a scale of 1–10? How likely do you think it is that they would actually happen?
  • Damage Control. What steps could you take to repair the damage? How could you get things back under control?
  • Consider the Upside. What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probable scenarios?
  • Repair the Missteps. If you were fired today, what would you do to get things under financial control? If you quit your job to test other options, how could you later get back on the same career track?
  • Define Action. What are you putting off out of fear? What we most fear doing is what we most need to do. Define the worst case, accept it, and do it. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear.
  • Know the Costs. What is it costing you—financially, emotionally, and physically—to postpone action? Don’t only evaluate the potential downside of action. It is equally important to measure the cost of inaction. If you don’t pursue what excites you, where will you be in one year, five years, and ten years?
  • Understand Your Fear. What are you waiting for? If you can only answer “timing” then you’re afraid, just like the rest of the world. Measure the cost of inaction and realize the unlikelihood and repairability of most missteps. Finally, develop the most important habit of those who excel and enjoy doing so: action.

Chapter 4 – System Reset: Being Unreasonable and Unambiguous

99% of the people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things so they aim for the mediocre. So competition is fiercest for “realistic” goals.

Doing big things begins with asking for them properly.

Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness , and it is precisely what you should strive to chase.

The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”

Boredom is the enemy, not failure.

Apply timelines to dreams by dreamlining (advanced goal-setting ):

  • What would you do if there were no way you could fail? Create two timelines—6 months and 12 months—and list up to five things you dream of having, being, and doing, in that order.
  • What does “being” entail doing? Convert each “being” into a “doing” to make it actionable. For example: Great cook = make Christmas dinner without help.
  • What are the four dreams that would change it all? Highlight the four most exciting and/or important dreams.
  • Determine the cost of these dreams and calculate your Target Monthly Income (TMI) for both timelines. Think of income and expense as a monthly cash flow instead of grand totals. Calculate your Target Monthly Income for your dreamlines.
  • Determine three steps for each of the four dreams in just the 6-month timeline and take the first step now. Set simple well-defined actions for now, tomorrow, and the day after. Once you have three steps for each of the four goals, complete the three actions in the “now” column. Each should be simple enough to do in five minutes or less. The best first step is finding someone who’s done it and asking for advice on how to do the same.

Step II: E is for Elimination

Chapter 5 – the end of time management: illusions and italians.

4 hour work week summary 80 20 rule

Don’t try to do more each day. Being busy is used as a guide for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. 

Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.

Two truisms to keep in mind:

  • Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
  • Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.

Pareto’s Law ( 80/20 Rule ): 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs

Parkinson’s Law : tasks will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion

To be productive:

  • Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income (80/20)
  • Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law)

3 times per day, at scheduled times, ask yourself:

  • Am I being productive or just active?
  • Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?

How to have more time and do less:

  • Define a to-do list
  • Define a not-to-do list

How to 80/20 your work:

  • If you had a heart attack and had to work two hours per day, what would you do? 
  • If you had a second heart attack and had to work two hours per week, what would you do?
  • If you had a gun to your head and had to stop doing 4/5 of different time-consuming activities, what would you remove ?
  • What are the top 3 activities that I use to fill time to feel as though I’ve been productive?
  • Who are the people who produce the most of your enjoyment and propel you forward, and which cause most of your depression, anger, and second-guessing? 
  • If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?

There should never be more than two mission-critical items to complete each day. Do them separately from start to finish without distraction.

Chapter 6 – The Low-Information Diet: Cultivating Selective Ignorance

Problems solve themselves or disappear if you remove yourself as an information bottleneck and empower others.

To be selectively ignorant , learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable.

Lifestyle design is based on massive action—output. Increased output necessitates decreased input.

Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence.

The Low-Information Diet: 

  • Go on an immediate one-week media fast. No newspapers, magazines, and audiobooks. Music is permitted at all times. No news websites whatsoever No television at all, except for one hour of pleasure viewing each evening. No web surfing at the desk unless it is necessary to complete a work task for that day.
  • Only consume information for something immediate and important . Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it. Focus on “just-in-time” information instead of “just-in-case” information.
  • Practice the art of nonfinishing. Develop the habit of nonfinishing that which is boring or unproductive if a boss isn’t demanding it.

Chapter 7 – Interrupting Interruption and the Art of Refusal

4 hour work week summary time wasters

Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.

An interruption is anything that prevents the start-to-finish completion of a critical task.

The 3 principal offenders:

  • Time Wasters. Things that can be ignored with little or no consequence
  • Time Consumers. Repetitive tasks or requests that need to be completed but often interrupt high-level work
  • Empowerment Failures. When someone needs approval to make something small happen

How to Fix Interruptions

  • Limit email consumption and production
  • Never check email first thing in the morning
  • Check email twice per day. Create an email autoresponse so people respect your new rule
  • Screen incoming and limit outgoing phone calls
  • Use two numbers: one office line (non-urgent) and one cellular (urgent). Answer the cell and let the office go to voicemail
  • Don’t let people chitchat. Get them to the point immediately
  • Avoid all meetings that do not have clear objectives
  • If someone proposes a meeting, request an email instead and then use the phone as your fallback offer
  • Respond to voicemail via email whenever possible. This trains people to be concise
  • Meetings should only be held to make decisions about a predefined situation, not to define the problem. Ask people to send you an email with an agenda to define the purpose
  • Have an end time for your meeting (aim for 30 minutes)
  • Don’t permit casual visitors. Use headphones , even if you aren’t listening to anything 
  • Work smarter by batching tasks like email
  • Empower others to act without interrupting you
  • Force people to define their requests before spending time with them
  • Use Evernote to capture information and make it findable

Step III: A is for Automation

Chapter 8 – outsourcing life: offloading the rest and a taste of geoarbitrage.

Get a remote personal assistant to learn how to give orders. It is small-scale training wheels for the most critical of NR skills: remote management and communication.

Eliminate before you delegate .

Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. 

Refine rules and processes before adding people. Using people to leverage a refined process multiplies production; using people as a solution to a poor process multiplies problems.

Only delegate time-consuming and well-defined tasks . 

To find the right assistant, you need to test with a trial. To improve your odds, hire a VA firm instead of a solo operator.

How to minimize damage and allow for fast repair:

  • Never use debit cards for online transactions or with remote assistants
  • If your VA will be accessing websites on your behalf, create a new unique login and password to be used on those sites

How to delegate:

  • Request someone who has “excellent” English and indicate that phone calls will be required (even if not). Be fast to request a replacement if there are repeated communication issues
  • Give precise directions. Ask VAs to rephrase tasks to confirm understanding before getting started
  • Request a status update after a few hours of work on a task to ensure that the task is both understood and achievable. Some tasks are, after initial attempts, impossible
  • Assign tasks that are to be completed within 24-72 hours. Break larger tasks into smaller milestones that can be completed in shorter time frames
  • Send one task at a time whenever possible (and no more than two)

Chapter 9 – Income Autopilot I: Finding the Muse

The goal is to create an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.

It’s easier to fill demand than to create it. Find a market—define your customers—then find or develop a product for them.

How to find profitable niches:

  • Which social, industry, and professional groups do you belong to, have you belonged to, or do you understand? Compile a list of all the groups, past and present, that you can associate yourself with.
  • Which of the groups you identified have their own magazines? Narrow the groups from question 1 above to those that are reachable through one or two small magazines.

How to brainstorm products:

  • The main benefit of your product should be explainable in one sentence or phrase
  • It should cost $50–200 since that price range provides the most profit for the least customer service hassle. Price high and then justify
  • It should take less than 4 weeks to manufacture
  • It should be fully explainable in a good online FAQ

The 3 recommended options:

  • Resell. The easiest route but also the least profitable. It is the fastest to set up but the fastest to die off due to price competition with other resellers
  • License. Two options: invent and let someone else do the rest or manufacture and sell someone else’s idea
  • Create. Information products are low-cost, fast to manufacture, and time-consuming for competitors to duplicate

3 options to create information products:

  • Create the content yourself, often via paraphrasing and combining points from several books on a topic
  • Repurpose content that is in the public domain and not subject to copyright protection
  • License content or compensate an expert to help create content

Chapter 10 – Income Autopilot II: Testing the Muse

To get an accurate indicator of commercial viability, don’t ask people if they would buy— ask them to buy .

Micro-testing involves using inexpensive advertisements to test consumer response to a product prior to manufacturing.

Test your product ideas using PPC in five days for $500 or less.

The 3 parts of the basic test process:

  • Best. Look at the competition and create a more-compelling offer on a basic 1-3 page website
  • Test. Test your offer using PPC advertising campaigns
  • Divest or Invest. Cut losses with losers and manufacture the winner(s) for sales rollout

Chapter 11 – Income Autopilot III: MBA-Management By Absence

Once you have a product that sells, it’s time to design a self-correcting business architecture that runs itself.

How to build a scalable business:

  • Phase I: 0–50 Total Units of Product Shipped. Do it all yourself. Take customer calls to determine common questions that you will answer later in an online FAQ
  • Phase II: >10 Units Shipped Per Week. Find local fulfillment companies
  • Phase III: >20 Units Shipped Per Week. Find end-to-end fulfillment houses that handle it all—from order status to returns and refunds

The Art of Undecision: Fewer Options = More Revenue

How to reduce service overhead by 20–80%:

  • Offer one or two purchase options
  • Offer only one fast shipping method and charge a premium
  • Do not offer overnight or expedited shipping
  • Eliminate phone orders and direct prospects to online ordering
  • Do not offer international shipments

The biggest time-saver of all is customer filtering .

Instead of dealing with problem customers, prevent them from ordering in the first place.

How to attract high-profit and low-maintenance customers:

  • Do not accept payment via Western Union, checks, or money order
  • Raise wholesale minimums to 12–100 units and require a tax ID number to qualify resellers
  • Refer all potential resellers to an online order form that must be printed, filled out, and faxed in
  • Offer low-priced products instead of free products to capture contact information for follow-up sales
  • Offer a lose-win guarantee instead of free trials
  • Do not accept orders from common mail fraud countries

How to look Fortune 500 in 45 minutes:

  • Don’t be the CEO. Give yourself a mid-level title, such as VP or Director of Sales
  • Put multiple emails and phone contacts on the website
  • Set up an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) remote receptionist

Go forth and project professionalism with a well-designed image. Perceived size does matter.

Step IV: L is for Liberation

Chapter 12 – disappearing act: how to escape the office.

To escape the office:

  • Increase Investment. Convince your company to invest in training so that the loss is greater if you quit
  • Prove Increased Output Offsite. Call in sick for two days mid-week and double your work output on those days
  • Prepare the Quantifiable Business Benefit. Create a bullet-point list of how much more you achieved outside the office with explanations
  • Propose a Revocable Trial Period. Propose a one-day-per-week remote work trial period for two weeks
  • Expand Remote Time. Make your remote working days the most productive to date. Up the ante to four days per week remote for a two-week trial

The hourglass approach:

  • Use a pre-planned project or emergency and take two weeks out of the office
  • Propose how you can work remotely
  • Make those two weeks the most productive at work
  • Show your boss the quantifiable results upon returning. Suggest two or three days at home per week as a trial for two weeks. Make them ultra-productive
  • Suggest only one day in the office per week. Make those days the least productive of the week
  • Suggest complete mobility

How to replace presence-based work with performance-based freedom:

  • Practice environment-free productivity. Attempt to work for two hours in a café prior to proposing a remote trial
  • Quantify current productivity. Document your work efforts
  • Demonstrate remote work productivity. Rack up some proof that you can kick ass without constant supervision
  • Practice the art of getting past “no”. “What would I need to do to [desired outcome]?”
  • Put your employer on remote training wheels. Propose Monday or Friday at home
  • Ask for more. Extend each successful trial period until you reach full-time or your desired level of mobility

Chapter 13 – Beyond Repair: Killing Your Job

Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.

Rebuttals for the most common phobias of quitting:

  • Quitting is permanent. Use fear-setting to examine how you could pick up your chosen career track or start another company at a later point.
  • I won’t be able to pay the bills. It isn’t hard to eliminate most expenses temporarily and live on savings for a brief period.
  • Health insurance and retirement accounts will disappear. You can have identical medical coverage for a few hundred dollars per month. It’s easy to transfer your 401(k).
  • It will ruin my resume. Do something interesting and make them jealous

Answer to why you took a break or left your previous job: “I had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do [exotic and envy-producing experience] and couldn’t turn it down. I figured that, with [20–40] years of work to go, what’s the rush?”

Exercises to help you realize just how natural job changes are and how simple the transition can be:

  • Are you more likely to find what you want in your current job or somewhere else?
  • If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control?
  • Take a sick day and post your resume on the major job sites. The person who has more options has more power. Don’t wait until you need options to search for them. Take a sneak peek at the future now and it will make both action and being assertive easier.
  • If you run or own a company, imagine that you have just been sued and must declare bankruptcy. How would you survive?

Chapter 14 – Mini-Retirements: Embracing the Mobile Lifestyle

The alternative to binge travel—the mini-retirement—entails relocating to one place for one to six months before going home or moving to another locale.

How to save money when traveling:

  • Use credit cards with reward points for large muse-related advertising and manufacturing expenses
  • Purchase tickets far in advance (three months or more) or last minute, and aim for both departure and return between Tuesday and Thursday
  • Consider buying one ticket to an international hub and then an ongoing ticket with a cheap local airline

How to pack:

  • One week of clothing appropriate to the season, including one semi formal shirt and pair of pants or skirt for customs. Think T-shirts, one pair of shorts, and a multipurpose pair of jeans.
  • Backup photocopies or scanned copies of all important documents: health insurance, passport/visa, credit cards, debit cards, etc.
  • Debit cards, credit cards, and $200 worth of small bills in local currency
  • Small cable bike lock for securing luggage while in transit or in hostels; a small padlock for lockers if needed

Chapter 15 – Filling the Void: Adding Life After Subtracting Work

Subtracting the bad does not create the good. It leaves a vacuum. Decreasing income-driven work isn’t the end goal. Living more—and becoming more—is.

 Common doubts and self-flagellation of the NR:

  • Am I really doing this to be more free and lead a better life, or am I just lazy?
  • Did I quit the rat race because it’s bad, or just because I couldn’t hack it?
  • Is this as good as it gets?
  • Am I really successful or just kidding myself?
  • Have I lowered my standards to make myself a winner? Are my friends, who are now making twice as much as three years ago, really on the right track?
  • Why am I not happy? I can do anything and I’m still not happy. Do I even deserve it?

These are outdated comparisons using the more-is-better and money-as-success mind-sets that got us into trouble to begin with.

Before spending time on a stress-inducing question, big or otherwise, ensure that the answer is “yes” to the following two questions:

  • Have I decided on a single meaning for each term in this question?
  • Can an answer to this question be acted upon to improve things?

If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.

The two fundamental components to enjoy life:

  • Continual Learning. Transport skills that you practice domestically to other countries, like sports. Instant social life and camaraderie. Or pick skills that you can practice there, like learning a language
  • Service. Doing something that improves life besides your own.

Chapter 16 – The Top 13 New Rich Mistakes

  • Losing sight of dreams and falling into work for work’s sake
  • Micromanaging and emailing to fill time
  • Handling problems your outsourcers or co-workers can handle
  • Helping outsourcers or co-workers with the same problem more than once, or with noncrisis problems
  • Chasing customers, particularly unqualified or international prospects, when you have sufficient cash flow to finance your nonfinancial pursuits
  • Answering email that will not result in a sale or that can be answered by a FAQ or auto-responder
  • Working where you live, sleep, or should relax
  • Not performing a thorough 80/20 analysis every two to four weeks for your business and personal life  
  • Striving for endless perfection rather than great or simply good enough, whether in your personal or professional life
  • Blowing minutiae and small problems out of proportion as an excuse to work
  • Making non-time-sensitive issues urgent in order to justify work
  • Viewing one product, job, or project as the end-all and be-all of your existence
  • Ignoring the social rewards of life

The Best of the 4 Hour Work Week Blog

Questions to put things in perspective.

  • What is the one goal, if completed, that could change everything?
  • What is the most urgent thing right now that you feel you “must” or “should” do?
  • Can you let the urgent “fail”—even for a day—to get to the next milestone for your potential life-changing tasks?
  • What’s been on your to-do list the longest?

The choice-minimal lifestyle becomes an attractive tool when we consider two truths. Considering options costs attention that then can’t be spent on action or present-state awareness. Attention is necessary for not only productivity but appreciation. Therefore: Too many choices = less or no productivity Too many choices = less or no appreciation Too many choices = sense of overwhelm What to do?

The 6 Basic Rules of the Choice-Minimal Lifestyle

  • Set rules for yourself so you can automate as much decision making as possible
  • Don’t provoke deliberation before you can take action
  • Don’t postpone decisions just to avoid uncomfortable conversations
  • Learn to make nonfatal or reversible decisions as quickly as possible
  • Don’t strive for variation—and thus increase option consideration—when it’s not needed
  • Regret is past-tense decision making. Eliminate complaining to minimize regret

The Not-To-Do List: 9 Habits to Stop Now

  • Do not answer calls from unrecognized phone numbers
  • Do not email first thing in the morning or last thing at night
  • Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time
  • Do not let people ramble
  • Do not check email constantly—“batch” and check at set times only
  • Do not over-communicate with low-profit, high-maintenance customers
  • Do not work more to fix overwhelmingness—prioritize
  • Do not carry a cell phone 24/7
  • Do not expect work to fill a void that non-work relationships and activities should
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The 4-Hour Workweek Summary

1-Sentence-Summary:   The 4-Hour Workweek is the step-by-step blueprint to free yourself from the shackles of a corporate job, create a business to fund the lifestyle of your dreams, and live life like a millionaire, without actually having to be one.

Favorite quote from the author:

the-4-hour-workweek-summary

Table of Contents

Video Summary

The 4-hour workweek review, audio summary, who would i recommend the 4-hour workweek summary to.

Was I late to the party because I read this book in 2013? Sure. About 6 years late, to be exact. But that didn’t make it any less of an eye-opener to me.

Tim Ferriss needs no introduction. He’s like a digital Indiana Jones, and this was the book that brought him on to our screens.

Written more out of frustration, much less than for the love of writing, this book is Tim’s documentation of how he removed himself from his own company, in order to do what he loves: learn and travel.

It’s almost impossible to pull out just 3 things from this book, but I’ll do it anyway:

  • Be effective, not efficient.
  • Validate all of your business ideas.
  • Charge a premium to make your life easier.

Let’s dig a bit deeper.

If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.

Lesson 1: Be effective, not efficient.

If Tim’s life was designed around one rule, it would be the 80/20 rule or Pareto principle . Most people measure productivity by the time spent working , but that’s a bad indicator, because we waste so much time at work.

Tim suggests to spend your time effectively: on the 20% of things that get you 80% of the results, and not vice versa.

A famous quote of his is this: “Doing something unimportant well does not make it important” . So instead of focusing on doing as much as you can as best as you can, just focus on doing the few things that will lead to the biggest progress .

This is one of Tim’s major mantras in life and something you can adopt today that will make every single day of your life from here on out slightly better and easier.

Lesson 2: Always validate your business ideas.

Funny I mentioned him yesterday , but this lesson really sank in when I read Noah Kagan’s guest post on Tim’s blog . Before you go out and build any product or service,  make sure people give you money for it.

Will your idea for knitted coffee cosies be a hit? I don’t know, so go ask people to buy from you! This is more of a comfort zone challenge  than anything else, and it’s scary – which is a good indicator that it’s important .

2 personal examples from 2015: First, a friend approached me with an idea for a shoe business. We would solve the following problem:  People have different sized feet. They need one shoe in one size, and the other in another size.

Our idea was to go to shoe manufacturers, collect all the leftovers in different sizes, pair them up and sell them for cheap. To validate, we asked all of our friends and family, who had this problem, whether they’d pay for odd-sized shoes.

What’s more, we went into 10+ shoe stores and asked them if people approach them with this problem.

The answer:  no. No one cares, people just take the bigger pair and live with it, it’s not big enough of an issue .

Late in 2015 I wanted to create my first proper digital product. A course. So to test the idea, I created a landing page , held a webinar, and tried to pre-sell it. I sold 0 copies of the course, but that was no problem, because I hadn’t even built it yet .

Remember: ABV – always be validating!

Lesson 3: Charge a premium to need less clients and make your life easier.

Once you have validated your product and are set to start production, the next big question often is: Do I want to be high quality or the cheapest guy around?

Answer: You want to be high quality. Always.

Imagine you want to make $4,000/month, and are selling a nutritional supplement, like this one . If you charge $10 per bottle, you need to generate 400 sales per month.

If you charge $40 per bottle, you only have to make 100 sales.  The hardest part of making a sale is moving people from not giving you money to giving you money .

The amount of money is very negotiable once they’ve made the decision to purchase from you. I bet you can find 100 people who are willing to give you 4x the money much faster than you can get an extra 300 people to buy from you in the first place.

Note:  You can easily do this pricing math for any potential product with Neville Medhora’s cool pricing calculator.

That’s the first reason you should shoot for high quality and charge a premium. The second reason is that the people that are willing to pay a premium are low-hassle clients .

You will get a lot less complaints, returns and angry phone calls. Even if they don’t like it, chances are they won’t bother returning it, because they don’t have to turn every cent twice before spending it.

So promise high quality and deliver!

I read the entire book in a few sittings. I can’t believe someone compiled all the information in it in such an encompassing way back in 2007. That’s what has most shocked me about it.

Blinkist’s summary is crammed with insights, but is still only an excerpt of the plethora of great info in the book. Tim created a great step-by-step structure with lots of resources, links and tools, like the dreamline worksheet or the comfort challenges at the end of each chapter.

If you’ve entertained the idea of what your life could look like if you didn’t have to work, or could be a lot more picky about the projects you do take on, because you rest comfortably on a big, financial cushion, this is a must read.

Listen to the audio of this summary with a free reading.fm account:

The 17 year old who has a tough time to make up her mind about taking a year off before college to travel and explore, the 31 year old graduate who’s a few years into his corporate career and starts to question whether this is what he wanted, and anyone who’s ever tried to sell something that was a flop.

Last Updated on July 27, 2022

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Niklas Göke

Niklas Göke is an author and writer whose work has attracted tens of millions of readers to date. He is also the founder and CEO of Four Minute Books, a collection of over 1,000 free book summaries teaching readers 3 valuable lessons in just 4 minutes each. Born and raised in Germany, Nik also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration & Engineering from KIT Karlsruhe and a Master’s Degree in Management & Technology from the Technical University of Munich. He lives in Munich and enjoys a great slice of salami pizza almost as much as reading — or writing — the next book — or book summary, of course!

*Four Minute Books participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising commissions by linking to Amazon. We also participate in other affiliate programs, such as Blinkist, MindValley, Audible, Audiobooks, Reading.FM, and others. Our referral links allow us to earn commissions (at no extra cost to you) and keep the site running. Thank you for your support.

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Book Summary The 4-Hour Workweek , by Tim Ferriss

Many people want to retire as millionaires so that they have the time and money to travel, buy luxury cars and homes, or visit with their friends and families. However, you don’t need to be a millionaire to do all these things. You don’t even need to retire.

In The 4-Hour Workweek , entrepreneur, consultant, and life coach Tim Ferriss explains how anyone can live the retired millionaire lifestyle by building their own business, automating it, and then collecting the income while they go off to live their dreams. In this guide, we’ll describe each of Ferriss’s steps to creating this life. We’ll also examine why some of his recommendations are particularly effective and explore alternatives and counterarguments to other suggestions.

The 4-Hour Workweek

1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of The 4-Hour Workweek

Most people want to be millionaires so they can quit their day jobs, travel, buy nice things, spend time with the people they care about, and pursue a hobby or a passion. However, in The 4-Hour Workweek , entrepreneur, consultant, and life coach Tim Ferriss argues that you don’t need a million dollars to have a millionaire lifestyle. We’ll describe each of his steps to creating this life, examine why some of his recommendations are particularly effective, and explore alternatives and counterarguments to other suggestions.

Ferriss says there are two ways non-millionaires attempt to live the retired millionaire lifestyle:

1. Postponers follow the conventional system of working for 30-40 years and then retiring. However, they use up the prime physical years of their life working, then either run out of money or lose the ability to enjoy their money while they’re traditionally retired.

(Shortform note: The average age of retirement is trending up , so postponers might find themselves delaying retirement even longer than expected. A Gallup poll from 2021 found that the average retirement age was 62—Gallup’s 2020 poll reported that the average retirement age was 61, and its 1991 poll reported the average retirement age was 57 .)

2. Lifelong retirees live the millionaire lifestyle throughout their lives, alternating brief periods of work with lengthy pseudo-retirements. Their goal is to spend as little effort and time to make as much money as possible. The 4-Hour Workweek teaches you how to become a lifelong retiree by building a business that makes you enough money to live on, while not taking much of your time.

What if You Don’t Want Your Own Business? Ferriss’s advice in this book is, essentially, to create a strong source of passive income so that you can afford to quit your day job. He suggests doing so by creating your own company and then automating it, but there are other methods for earning money without having to work continuously. For example, in Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant , Robert Kiyosaki says that financial independence comes from investing: In other words, putting your money into things that you expect to provide ongoing returns . Common examples of investments include retirement accounts, stocks, and rental properties. According to Kiyosaki, the goal of investing is to eventually live entirely on those returns so that you’re never forced to work again.

Ferriss says that you can achieve a millionaire lifestyle by following a four-step process, which he illustrates with the acronym DEAL: Define, Eliminate, Automate, Liberate. Each section of this guide will explore one of those four steps.

First, we’ll discuss how to decide what you want to do. In other words, if you were freed from your time-consuming obligations, what would you do with your time? Next, we’ll explore how you can streamline your schedule— figure out which time-consuming activities you can get rid of now to make your day job less onerous. Third, we’ll show how to use your newfound time to create your own business (what Ferriss calls your “muse”). It’ll be a lot of work at first, but eventually you can automate that business to provide passive income. Finally, once your business is earning enough money and no longer needs much input from you, you can retire and start living like a millionaire.

Step 1: Decide What You Want to Do

The first step in Ferriss’s process is to identify what you would do if you didn’t have to spend your time working. This step also involves identifying—and overcoming—the fears that hold you back from living your dreams.

Envision Your New Lifestyle

To begin, picture what your new lifestyle will look like. Ferriss says you should imagine your dream lifestyle, then put those dreams on a timeline of three, six, or 12 months. He calls this process dreamlining.

First, list five items for each of the following: things you want to have , things you want to do , and things you want to be . Make these as specific as possible. For example, don’t say that you want to “travel”—write down the actual places you’d like to visit and what you want to do there. Once you have your 15 dreams written down, go back over the list and choose your top four.

(Shortform note: As Richard Rumelt explains in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy , having a limited number of clear and specific goals narrows your focus , which helps you direct your attention and resources effectively. If you have too many goals, or if your goals are too vague, then your efforts to reach those goals will be unfocused and ineffective—it would be like trying to get stronger by doing a dozen different exercises one time each. While Good Strategy/Bad Strategy is a business guide rather than a lifestyle guide, the principle of focusing your efforts applies whether you’re trying to build a business or improve your personal life.)

Next, calculate how much money you’d need per month in order to do all four things you chose, then increase that number by 30%. This will give you your target monthly income, with a built-in buffer against unexpected expenses.

How Much Do You Really Need? Ferriss is urging you to live a balanced life: Instead of pushing to make as much money as possible, figure out how much money you need and how you’ll enjoy your life once you have it. Robin Sharma’s fable The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari ...

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The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Part 1: D: Define Your Dreams | Chapter 1: Choose Your Lifestyle

Most people think they want to be millionaires so they can stop doing a job they don’t like, travel, buy nice cars, spend time with the people they care about, or practice a passion or vocation. However, there isn’t a direct relationship between money and lifestyle. If you have a lot of money but don’t have any control over your time or who you spend it with, you probably won’t be happy.

For example, an investment banker might work 80-hour weeks and make a lot of money but never have any time to use it. A freelancer might work 20 hours a week for a fifth of the banker’s salary, but while she might have less money, the money she does have has more practical value. She’ll be able to use it to do w hatever she wants, with w homever she wants, and w henever and w herever she wants (4Ws). You don’t need to be a millionaire to live your dreams—you only need the amount of money they require.

Paradoxically, you can increase your income by decreasing whatever it is you’re doing now. Day jobs and conventional businesses are set up to funnel everyone through the traditional lifestyle—work for three or four decades straight, and then retire for the rest of the...

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The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Chapter 2: Break the Rules

Why does everyone follow the conventions and “rules” of life when they push us towards an inefficient system (the rat race) and something (deferred retirement) that isn’t actually going to make us happy? If the “way it’s done” isn’t working for you, do it differently. For example, for a long time, high-jumpers jumped over the bar using a straddle technique. Dick Fosbury came up with a new technique of going backwards over the bar. Using this technique, he won the event in the 1968 Olympics. The technique was effective, and eventually, all high-jumpers started doing it. The 4HWW lifestyle may currently be uncommon, but that’s no reflection on its value or effectiveness.

Note, however, that you can take this concept too far. Being different just for the sake of being different isn’t useful. For example, only wearing clothes that are different shades of red isn’t going to achieve anything. You want to look for a new solution only when the current practice isn’t working.

Ten Rules for Breaking the Rules

There are ten rules for breaking the rules:

1. Treat traditional retirement as a back-up plan. Instead of working towards retirement as an end goal, work...

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The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Chapter 3: Face Your Fears

The main thing that stops people from living the 4HWW lifestyle is fear. Fear of failure and the unknown are paralyzing, and facing these fears is so intimidating that most people would rather be unhappy.

Additionally, there’s a less-recognizable subset of fear of the unknown that affects many of us—optimistic denial. If your job isn’t absolutely awful, then you pretend it’ll get better or pretend you’ll get a raise and the money will make everything better. You’ll keep on pretending instead of doing something life-changing that would actually make you happier. To figure out if you’ve fallen prey to optimistic denial, think back to a month or a year ago. Are things better now than they were then? If they’re not, there’s no reason to expect them to improve over another year.

“Fear-Setting”

The best way to work through your fears is to define them, or “fear-set.” Once you have a better handle on what exactly you’re worried about, it becomes less frightening. Also, once you’ve quantified your fears into specific scenarios, you’ll be able to see ways to avoid negative consequences.

There are six questions to ask yourself when fear-setting. They aren’t simply a...

Shortform Exercise: Start to Fear-Set

Once we articulate and define our fears, they’re less frightening.

Think of something you want to do but are scared to. If you do this thing, what’s the worst possible outcome?

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summary of 4 hour work week

The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Chapter 4: Sketch Your Dreamlines

To fully embrace the 4HWW lifestyle, you need to find something to do with all your upcoming free time. When brainstorming ideas, don’t ask yourself what you want or what your goals are. Instead, ask yourself what you find exciting. The first two questions are too vague and don’t steer you toward the right course of action. You probably want something, or want to achieve a goal, because it will make you happy. But happiness is a vague concept—at different times in your life happiness might be as simple as having a good meal. After a while, happiness can morph into boredom, and boredom is even worse than failure. Excitement is a much more precise objective.

Don’t restrict yourself to what seems reasonable or realistic. Interestingly, it’s actually easier to do really big things than moderate things. First, there’s less competition. Most people don’t think they can do big things, so they aim lower, creating a lot of competition in the low arenas. Second, a big goal with a big payoff gives you more energy and adrenaline. Small goals aren’t very exciting, so you’re not as inclined to put in enormous effort.

For example, when the author gave a lecture at...

Shortform Exercise: Brainstorm Dreams

The first step of dreamlining is to brainstorm.

What are some things you’ve always wanted to have?

The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Part 2: E: Eliminate Activities That Waste Your Time | Chapter 5: Learn the Laws

Part 1 covered step D (Define) of the DEAL process and Part 2 will cover step E: Eliminate activities that waste your time. Step E explains how to start making the time to achieve the dreamlines you set in step D.

The 4HWW lifestyle requires you to reevaluate your ideas about time. First, note that unproductive busyness is bad. Busyness takes up a lot of time and it’s a form of procrastination. Doing unimportant things gets in the way of doing things that would actually have a high impact but are uncomfortable.

Second, abandon time management. Time management implies that you have so many things to do in a limited amount of time that you have to tetris things into your schedule. This isn’t a situation you want to be in.

Instead of being so busy you have to manage your time, decrease the number of things you have to do and decrease the amount of time you spend on them. If you want to get more done, you have to do less.

The Difference Between Effectiveness and Efficiency

Effectiveness is doing important things that help you achieve results. Efficiency is doing things (regardless of whether or not they’re important) in the fastest way possible.

The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Chapter 6: Ignore Unimportant or Unactionable Information

Reading and informing yourself takes up a lot of time. If you want more free time, you need to drastically cut down on the amount of time you spend consuming information. Do this by ignoring anything that’s not important or that you can’t do anything about. For example, the author only reads newspaper headlines as he walks to lunch. He spends only four hours a month reading Inc. magazine and about ⅓ of Response magazine. He assumes that if anything really important happens that he has to do something about, he’ll hear about it from someone. In five years, his “ignorance” has never caused a problem.

The key to this ignorance is that it’s selective. Ignore whatever the world throws at you. When you do need information, seek it out, ideally in a more digestible format than the original. For example, Ferriss learned enough to vote in the last federal election by doing the following:

  • He asked smart American friends with similar values to his how they were going to vote.
  • He was living in Berlin at the time and asked his friends there for an outside perspective.
  • He watched the presidential debates.

Not only was this an efficient way to get all this...

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Shortform Exercise: Learn Selectively

Step E (Eliminate) of the DEAL process involves learning to ignore any unimportant or unactionable information.

Think of the last time you needed to learn something. For example, perhaps you were trying to decide which kind of credit card to sign up for. How did you learn? How long did it take you?

The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Chapter 7: Minimize Interruptions

An interruption is something that prevents you from finishing a task all in one go. The easiest way to deal with interruptions is to come up with a set of rules for yourself and others. Once you’ve set a precedent for not letting people waste your time and everyone understands the rules, you have a self-enforcing system that you never need to spend brain power on again. Your system will not only save you time—it’ll train everyone involved to be more efficient.

Three Types of Interruptions

This chapter will cover three types of interruptions: those that waste time, those that take time, and those that require outside help or approval.

Interruptions That Waste Time

Interruptions that waste time aren’t important and can be completely ignored. Often, the time-wasting interruption is a person wanting to talk to you via email, phone, or in person. To deal with these interruptions, limit people’s access to you, and when you do allow people to access you, make sure the interaction is as efficient and action-focused as possible. Make it known that email is your preferred method of communication, then phone, then as a last resort, in person. There are some steps to...

Shortform Exercise: Batch Monthly

“Batching” involves saving up a bunch of routine tasks to do all at once.

What is a routine task that you have to do every week? You can choose either a personal or professional task.

The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Chapter 8: Take Control of Your Schedule: Work Remotely

A conventional 9-5 job takes up a lot of time. If you want more free time—and you’ll need free time to start your “muse” business in step A (Automate)—you’re going to have to reduce the hours you spend on your rat race job.

If you’re an employee, you’ll do this by transitioning to remote work. When you’re working remotely, no one knows how long you actually spend working; they only know if you finish all your work. Now that you know how to eliminate, you’ll be able to do your job in far less than eight hours a day.

If you’re an entrepreneur and you control your own schedule, no one’s holding you to 40 hours a week except yourself. However, entrepreneurs can still benefit from learning how to work remotely so that they can travel while working.

This tends to be the hardest part of the process for employees. You take control and have potentially uncomfortable conversations.

To transition to remote work, first you’re going to figure out how to do it, and then you’re going to convince your boss to let you.

How to Succeed at Remote Work

There are some logistics to iron out when transitioning to remote work:

  • **Figure out how to do all aspects of your job...

Shortform Exercise: Transition to Remote Work

There are two methods for transitioning to remote work: the five-step method and the hourglass method.

What are some logistical problems you might encounter if you transitioned to remote work? Are there parts of your job that would be hard to do remotely?

The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Part 3: A: Automate Time-Consuming Activities | Chapter 9: Get a Virtual Assistant (VA)

Part 3 will cover step A: Automate Time-Consuming Activities of the DEAL process. Step A, like step E (Eliminate), explains how to make the time to achieve the dreamlines you set in step D (Define). This step tends to be the most difficult part of the process for entrepreneurs because they tend to like having control, and in this step, they have to give it up.

To achieve the 4HWW lifestyle, find a way to replace yourself. Almost anything and everything you do could be done by someone else.

The first step to automation is to hire a virtual assistant (VA). You should do this regardless of whether you’re an employee or entrepreneur, and even if you have enough time to do everything yourself. There are a few reasons:

  • VAs teach you to manage. Having a VA teaches you how to communicate, how to lead from a distance, how to give directions, and how to deal with people who don’t follow them. If you get a VA for between two weeks and a month, it should only cost between $100-400, and the experience should pay for itself within another two weeks.
  • VAs reinforce step E (Eliminate) of DEAL. Once you have to pay someone to do something, it’s going to be easier and more...

Shortform Exercise: Delegate to a Virtual Assistant (VA)

You can save yourself a lot of time by hiring a VA to do tasks for you.

What are some specific, time-consuming, remote-friendly tasks that you do in your personal or professional life?

The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Chapter 10: Find a “Muse”

To get the time and money to have a lifestyle you want, you don’t want to run a business, you want to own a business. You want the business to run itself. The author calls this type of self-sustaining business your “muse.” Note—you’re not trying to create a business that will make a difference to the world or that you can sell for a lot of money. You’re just trying to build something that makes you money without taking up your time.

Muses must:

  • Sell a product, whether physical or digital. Other types of businesses, such as customer service or anything that runs on a pay-per-hour system, take up too much time to be muses.
  • Be cheap to test. It must cost less than $500 to test the product.
  • Lend themselves to automation. You should be able to start stepping away within a month.
  • Require little maintenance. Once the business is running, you shouldn’t have to spend any more than a single day a week managing it.

There are three steps to choosing a muse. Don’t manufacture anything until you’ve completed all three steps.

Step #1: Pick a Niche Market With Affordable Built-in Advertising

**It’s best to choose a market that you’re a part...

Shortform Exercise: Find Your “Muse”

A “muse” is a self-sustaining business that sells a product.

The first step to finding your muse is coming up with a niche market you could sell a product to. What markets are you a part of? Consider your job and hobbies. How could you narrow these markets to come up with a niche market?

The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Chapter 11: Automate Your Muse

From the moment you start planning your muse, imagine how it’s going to run itself without you. Your systems need to be scalable, i.e., when your business starts getting more orders, it must be able to handle the demand. Most entrepreneurs start out by doing most of the work themselves, which is what you’re going to do, too, but the key to automation is knowing when to tap out.

Phases of Automation

There are three phases of automation, determined by the amount of product shipped:

Phase #1: 0-50 Units Total

Initially, you’ll do everything yourself. As you work through this phase:

  • Take orders and answer questions. This will help you figure out the most common questions so you can put together a FAQ and create training materials for others once you bring them on.
  • Revise your ads and website if necessary. If you’re getting orders or questions from customers who don’t actually want what you’re selling or are taking up a lot of your time, be clearer about what you’re selling and they won’t approach you in the first place.
  • Pack and ship all the products. Figure out how to do both most economically.
  • Research opening a merchant account from your local...

The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Part 4: L: Liberate Yourself from the Rat Race | Chapter 12: How to Leave Your Rat Race Job

Part 4 will cover step L: Liberate Yourself from the Rat Race of the DEAL process. Step L explains how to quit the rat race and live the dreamlines you came up with in step D (Define). If you’re an employee, your job is your day job. If you’re an entrepreneur, your job is your conventional company.

Once your muse is established, it’ll be earning you enough money that you no longer need to work a 9-5 job to bring in income. Quit your 9-5 job to give yourself more time to pursue your dreamlines.

You probably have reservations about leaving your job or company. You might think that it’s complicated. Most likely, you’re simply scared. To get past your fears, recall the fear-setting exercise in Chapter 3. Note and remember:

The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Chapter 13: Mini-Retirements

The goal of the DEAL process is to gain ourselves enough time to do the things we’ve come up with in our dreamlines. The best way to live out a dream is to take a mini-retirement. A mini-retirement is a months-long hiatus from work during which you live one of your dreams. Unlike traditional retirement, you can have many periods of mini-retirement throughout your life.

The author spends most of his mini-retirements traveling, so from now on, the term “mini-retirement” will specifically refer to relocating to a new place for several months.

A mini-retirement is a better way to travel than a vacation or sabbatical because when you’re mini-retired you have enough time to truly experience a place. Vacations are so short they’re exhausting—to see a lot, you have to binge it. Sabbaticals are longer, but they only happen once or twice. Another advantage of mini-retirements is that they can be more affordable than vacation. Hotels and hostels are a lot more expensive than renting an apartment, so spending a month living somewhere else may not be any more expensive than a week-long vacation.

(Shortform note: The author both recommends that you disengage from work and gives...

Shortform Exercise: Apply the 80/20 Rule to Your Belongings

Having a lot of material possessions creates a lot of mental clutter.

Think about the material possessions that you own. What possessions fall into the top 20%? Consider which possessions make you happy, are useful, or allow you to do things you want to. For example, if you love to play the guitar, your guitar would be in your top 20%.

The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Chapter 14: What to Do With All Your Newfound Time

Congratulations! You’ve now significantly decreased your working hours and earned yourself lots of free time. To get started on living the 4HWW lifestyle, the author recommends you try:

  • Doing nothing. Take a total break from being efficient, rushed, and productive. You might try a silence retreat.
  • Donating anonymously to an organization. This helps you separate getting credit for your actions from the act of doing them.
  • Using your mini-retirement to learn and volunteer. The longer the better so you can focus on learning the local language.
  • Reviewing and tweaking your dreamlines after each mini-retirement. Come up with new dreamlines as you discover new interests.
  • Considering a vocation. A vocation can be full or part-time, just like work, but unlike work, it’s something that you really want to be doing.

Initially, you won’t have trouble living the 4HWW lifestyle. You’ll be doing all the things you’ve always want to that you’d been putting off. After a while, however, you’ll have more time than you know what to do with. You might feel bored or unhappy. This is normal. The author went through this period too—he had to make a to-do list...

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4-Hour Work Week

Tim Ferriss

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007

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The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss | Book Summary

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The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss has revolutionized how we think about work and life. The book offers practical advice on how to create a lifestyle career or business that allows for more flexibility, freedom, and overall satisfaction with one’s life.

The concept of the 4-Hour Workweek has inspired people all over the world to break free from the standard 9-to-5 lifestyle and make a living while doing something they enjoy. Whether you are an entrepreneur, remote worker, or just an individual looking for a change, The 4-Hour Workweek can be powerful.

Download The PDF Book Summary For The 4-Hour Workweek By Tim Ferriss

It is an excellent source of information for creating an ideal work schedule that perfectly combines money, time, and freedom for maximum progress and fulfillment.

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summary of 4 hour work week

The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss

Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

First and Foremost

In this section, Tim Ferriss introduces his life philosophies and concept of lifestyle design with the goals of gaining more time, income, and mobility for yourself.

FAQs – Doubters Read This

Lifestyle design may very well be for you. If you have any doubts, here are some of the most common concerns that people have before making the decision to join the New Rich:

  • Do I have to quit or hate my job? Do I have to be a risk-taker? No.
  • Do I have to be a single twenty-something? No.
  • Do I have to travel? No.
  • Do I need to be born rich? No.
  • Do I need to be an Ivy League graduate? No.

My Story and Why You Need This Book

Tim Ferris tells you his story involving a quiet subculture of people, called the New Rich: 

New Rich (NR) – those who abandon the deferred-life plan and use “Lifestyle Design” to create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of time and mobility

It starts by understanding that people do not want the fantasy of having a million dollars in the bank. Rather, they want the fantasy of the lifestyle of complete freedom that money allows.

You can achieve this lifestyle and join the New Rich by becoming a “dealmaker,” whose manifesto is that “reality is negotiable.” The acronym DEAL outlines the process

  • Definition – “turns misguided common sense upside down and introduces the rules” of Lifestyle Design and its objectives of gaining more time, income, and mobility
  • Elimination – provides time by “increasing your per-hour results ten times or more with counterintuitive NR techniques for cultivating selective ignorance, developing a low-information diet, and otherwise ignoring the unimportant”
  • Automation – provides income by putting income on autopilot using geographic arbitrage, outsourcing, and rules of nondecision”
  • Liberation – provides mobility by “breaking the bonds that confine you to a single location” by escaping the boss, controlling your location, and taking mini-retirements

Note that the DEAL order is suited for entrepreneurs. Instead, employees should implement the steps as DELA to first achieve freedom of location before reducing working hours.

“Take a deep breath, and let me show you my world. And remember—tranquilo. It’s time to have fun and let the rest follow.”

Step I: D is for Definition

In Step 1 of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss defines the fundamentals of lifestyle design and its goals of gaining more time, income, and mobility.

Chapter 1: Cautions and Comparisons: How to Burn $1,000,000 a Night

In Chapter 1 of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss illustrates the difference in priorities between the Deferrers (D) and the New Rich (NR):

  • The Deferrers (D) focus on working for themselves, retiring early, buying things they want, being the boss, making a ton of money, and having more.
  • The New Rich (NR) focus on having others work for them, preventing work for work’s sake, having mini-retirements, doing things they want to do and being who they want to be, owning instead of being the boss or employee, making a ton of money with defined dreams and specific timelines, having more quality and less clutter, thinking big but ensuring consistent income every day, and having freedom from doing things they dislike while pursuing their dreams.

Chapter 2: Rules That Change the Rules: Everything Popular Is Wrong

In Chapter 2 of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss provides the rules of the successful NR.

Retirement Is The Worst-Case Scenario Insurance : Retirement is flawed for three reasons:

  • It incorrectly assumes that you dislike your work during the most capable years of life.
  • Most people can never retire due to inflation and the variable amount they may need.
  • If you do save enough, you may get bored during retirement and return to work.

Interest And Energy Are Cyclical : Thus, you should alternate between activity and rest to thrive:

  • Activity : Work when you are more effective and productive.
  • Rest : Enjoy “mini-retirements” throughout life instead of waiting until the end.

Less Is Not Laziness : “Focus on being productive instead of busy.” Thus, you should do less meaningless work, so that you can focus and produce more meaningful results.

The Timing is Never Right : Therefore, if something is important to you and you want to do it “someday,” just do it now and correct course along the way.

Ask For Forgiveness, Not Permission : It is better to act decisively and apologize for it later than to seek approval to act and risk delays, objections, etc.

Emphasize Strengths, Don’t Fix Weaknesses : “The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre.”

Things In Excess Become Their Opposite : “Too much, too many, and too often of what you want becomes what you don’t want.” Thus, spend your free time doing what you want to do instead of doing what you feel obligated to do.

Money Alone Is Not The Solution : “If only I had more money” is the easiest way to defer the necessary self-reflection and decision-making to build an enjoyable life.

Relative Income Is More Important Than Absolute Income :

  • Absolute Income = Measured In Dollars, which is the measurement of the Deferrers 
  • Relative Income = Measured In Dollars Per Hour, which is the measurement of the NR

Distress Is Bad, Eustress Is Good : Remove distress and find eustress in your life:

  • Distress : “The harmful stimuli that make you weaker, less confident, and less able.” 
  • Eustress : “The stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth” and progress.

Chapter 3: Dodging Bullets: Fear-Setting and Escaping Paralysis

In Chapter 3 of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss helps you define your nightmare scenario and understand your fears to change your situation.

“To do or not to do? To try or not to try? Most people will vote no, whether they consider themselves brave or not. Uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noises in the shadows. Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.”

If you are miserable in your career or business, you need to define your nightmare scenario:

Nightmare Scenario – “the absolute worst-case scenario that could happen if you did what you are considering” with:

  • the steps to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if temporarily;
  • the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probable scenarios;
  • the actions to get things under financial control if you were fired from your job today

On a scale from 1 to 10, Tim Ferriss determined that his nightmare might only temporarily be a 3 or 4, and the best-case scenario would be a positive change to achieve a permanent 9 or 10. Thus, he realized that “There was practically no risk, only huge life-changing upside potential, and I could resume my previous course without any more effort than I was already putting forth.”

“What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. As I have heard said, a person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear.” Many people avoid calling fear by its name as it is typically disguised as optimistic denial:

Optimistic Denial – the belief that one’s current situation will improve with time or money, while the fear of the unknown prevents one from choosing an alternative path

Your situation will not improve on its own, so pause, cut your losses, and change course. Thus, you should ask yourself:

  • What are you putting off out of fear?
  • What is it costing you—financially, emotionally, and physically—to postpone action?
  • What are you waiting for?

Chapter 4: System Reset: Being Unreasonable and Unambiguous

In Chapter 4 of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss claims that doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic:

“If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.”

The potential payoff of a goal affects the level of effort one is willing to put in. Thus, having an exciting goal can provide the motivation and endurance to overcome obstacles that come with achieving any goal. Realistic goals, on the other hand, are often uninspiring and may only keep you motivated through the initial stages.

“Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all. When people suggest you follow your “passion” or your “bliss,” I propose that they are, in fact, referring to the same singular concept: excitement. This brings us full circle. The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”

Dreamlining

After college, society often discourages people from pursuing their dreams and instead advises them to be realistic, which can lead to unfulfillment and boredom. However, pursuing dreams may lead to getting stuck in unproductive patterns. “Remember, boredom is the enemy, not some abstract failure,” and avoid this using the Dreamlining technique:

Dreamlining – applies timelines to your dreams by creating SMART goals that are defined, unrealistic, interesting, and focused on activities that filled the vacuum when work is removed

Use dreamlining to decide on four exciting dreams in as much detail for the next six months. Then, estimate the cost of your dreams by calculating your Target Monthly Income. After, determine the few critical tasks that will help you chase them and live life.

Samuel Beckett created this maxim: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.”

Step II: E is for Elimination

In Step II of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss helps you eliminate distractions, so you can chase your dreams and live a fulfilling life.

Chapter 5: The End of Time Management: Illusions and Italians

In Chapter 5 of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss tells you to forget about time management and being busy when pursuing your dreams. Whether you are an employee or a business owner, you have to increase personal productivity while maintaining or increasing income. Being effective is much more important than being efficient:

  • Effectiveness – doing the things that get you closer to your goals
  • Efficiency – performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible

Remember that either doing something unimportant well or spending a lot of time on something does not make a task important. So to work on the right things in the right amount of time, we need to use Pareto’s Law and Parkinson’s Law:

Pareto’s Law

Pareto’s Law (80/20 Rule) – “80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs:”

The way to get more time is through defining a “to-do list” and “not-to-do list” in tandem. And then ask yourself the following:

  • Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?
  • Which 20% of sources resulted in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?

Parkinson’s Law

Parkinson’s Law – “dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion”

Remember that “being busy is a form of laziness or lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Further, “a lack of time is actually a lack of priorities.” Therefore, to increase productivity, follow these two synergistic methods:

  • Pareto’s Law: Limit tasks to the important ones to shorten work time.
  • Parkinson’s Law: Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important.

Chapter 6: The Low-Information Diet: Cultivating Selective Ignorance

In Chapter 6 of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss claims that you should develop a focused ability to cultivate selective ignorance.

Most people consume too much information from sources that are time-consuming, negative, and irreverent to their dreams, goals, and to-do list. Therefore, do the following Tim Ferriss experiment to follow and maintain a low-information diet:

  • Immediately, start with a one-week media fast of no news, social media, books, web browsing, TV, etc.
  • Built the habit of asking yourself, “Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?”
  • Practice the art of non-finishing as if you are consuming information that is bad; put it down and move on!

In this chapter, the author provides a step-by-step process on how to speed read:

  • Trace under each line during reading using a utensil or your finger.
  • For each line, focus your vision from the third word from the start through the third word from the end.
  • Then, take two snapshots or fixations per line on the first and last indented words.
  • After, increase the reading speed with the above tips until you can’t adequately comprehend for at least five pages.
  • Lastly, start speed reading at a comfortable speed for comprehension.

Chapter 7: Interrupting Interruption and the Art of Refusal

In Chapter 7 of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss shows you a few critical skills to help you prevent interruptions and make it easy to say “no.”

“Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.”

For our purposes, an interruption is anything that prevents the start-to-finish completion of a critical task, and there are three principal offenders: time wasters, time consumers, and empowerment failures.

Time Wasters

Time Wasters are those things that can be ignored with little or no consequence, which include discussions, meetings, phone calls, browsing, email, etc. Limit your email checking by doing the following:

  • Turn off the audible alerts and automatic email delivery feature.
  • Batch your email checking to two optimal times per day, preferably in the middle and end of the day. Start your day working on your most important tasks.
  • Apply batching to other activities to limit setup costs and provide more time for achieving your dreamline milestones.

Time Consumers

Time Consumers are repetitive tasks that need to be completed but often disrupt high-level deep work , which includes checking email, taking phone calls, answering customer support tickets, metrics financial or sales reporting, errands, etc. You can mitigate all necessary repeated actions and tasks by doing the following:

  • Use two separate phone numbers for non-urgent work (office line) and urgent, important work (cell phone). See the Eisenhower matrix for more.
  • If someone calls your cell phone, great, and handle the request as urgent without having your time wasted.

Empowerment Failures

Empowerment Failures are occurrences where someone requires approval to take a small action, which includes consumer response, supplier contact, and minor company expenditures. You can train your team to be effective with a few concepts:

  • Prioritize team and customer communication in this order: e-mail, phone, and in-person meetings. For requests to meetings, propose an email instead.
  • Limit your availabilities and train your team to be concise. For example, use email responses to voicemails.
  • Hold meetings only to make decisions about a predefined situation, not to define the problem. Ask for an agenda in an e-mail to define the purpose.
  • Keep meetings short, have an agenda, and define the end time (30 minutes or one hour).
  • Do not allow for casual visitors in your cubicle or office by having a “Do Not Disturb” sign or wearing headphones.
  • Use the Puppy Dog Close by suggesting, “Let’s just try it once,” to encourage others to take action and avoid meetings.

To best empower your team, create autonomous rules and guidelines and occasionally review the results. You tend to be the bottleneck in decision-making, so allow for small failures and eliminate employees coming to you for lower-level decisions.

Step III: A is for Automation

In Step III of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss shows you how to automate your business, work, and cash flow using arbitrate, outsourcing, and effective rules.

Chapter 8: Outsourcing Life: Off-loading the Rest and a Taste of Geoarbitrage

“Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees, but that’s just the beginning.”

In this chapter, Tim shows why you need to hire a personal assistant to learn how to manage and communicate remotely, as well as a litmus test for entrepreneurship. The investment in a virtual assistant is low-cost and low-risk and can lead to significant time savings and profits.

“Eliminate before you delegate.” First, define rules and streamline processes before adding people, as using people to solve poor processes can lead to more problems. Then, use delegation as a further step in reduction and elimination, not as an excuse to add unnecessary tasks.

Ultimately, preparing someone to replace you can result in a more refined schedule and effectiveness. Follow the two Golden rules to do so:

  • Each delegated task must be both time-consuming and well-defined.
  • Have fun and be less serious when you have to delegate time-consuming tasks.

Further, there are some considerations for having a personal or virtual assistant:

  • Hiring a local or remote personal assistant depends on the needs of your work.
  • Scrutinize in the hiring process to interview and test skill competency with a small-scale training wheels exercise.
  • Avoid using debit cards for online transactions as they are not reversible.
  • Create unique accounts or logins for your assistant to protect security.
  • Be precise in your directions and provide deadlines and time blocks.
  • Set an order of importance for your business and personal tasks.

Here is a flowchart showing how to make faster decisions and get more free time with fewer hours of work:

Decision-Making Flowchart from The 4-Hour Workweek

Chapter 9: Income Autopilot I: Finding the Muse

“There are a million and one ways to make a million dollars.” Even though you may want to operate your own business, this chapter shows you how to find a business muse that you will eventually spend no time on.

Step One: Pick an Affordably Reachable Niche Market

“Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is much easier. Don’t create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market—define your customers—then find or develop a product for them.” You can find profitable niches by asking the following:

  • Which social, industry, and professional groups do you belong to, have you belonged to, or do you understand?
  • Which of the groups you identified have their own magazines?

Step: Two: Brainstorm (Do Not Invest In) Products

Start with two niche markets that have dedicated magazines (social media channels) offering cheaper ads under $5,000 with a decent number of followers. Brainstorm product ideas tailored to these markets and test tailored ads to gauge customer responses before investing in production. Lastly, ensure the final product aligns with an automated architecture using the following criteria:

  • The main benefit should be encapsulated in one sentence to keep it simple and not confuse your target audience.
  • It should cost the customer $50-200. Position yourself to charge more than your competition to get less high-maintenance customers and fewer, better customers with higher profit margins.
  • It should take no more than 3 to 4 weeks to manufacture to keep your costs low and allow you to adapt to changing sales demand.
  • It should be fully explainable in a good online FAQ to minimize customer service requirements.

Three Options to Consider for Your Muse

“How does one obtain a good muse product that satisfies them?” There are three options we’ll cover in ascending order of recommendation:

  • Resell a Product : Reselling wholesale products is the easiest, but the least profitable route, with a short profitable lifespan due to price competition. Confirm profit margins and acquire product photos and sales literature before proceeding.
  • License a Product : Many well-known brands and products have borrowed ideas from elsewhere, with licensing being vital in their success. In a licensing deal, the “licensor” (inventor) grants others the right to manufacture, use, or sell their product for a percentage of the wholesale price. The “licensee” is the party interested in manufacturing and selling the product for the majority of the profit. Even though licensing requires creative and intensive contract negotiation, the deal can lead to substantial profits.
  • Create a Product : Launching a product is not as complex as you can hire professionals to develop prototypes or use private labeling to repurpose existing products. Specifically, information products are very appealing as they are low-cost, fast to manufacture, and harder for competitors to duplicate. Unlike other products that can be easily replicated, information products have a competitive advantage due to the time-consuming nature of reproducing content, resulting in better profit margins and success.

How to Become an Expert

But I’m not an expert:

  • Create the content yourself, often via paraphrasing and combining points from several books on a topic.
  • Repurpose content that is in the public domain and not subject to copyright protection, such as government documents and material that predates modern copyright law.
  • License content or compensate an expert to help create content. Fees can be one-time and paid upfront or royalty-based (5–10% of net revenue, for example).

Chapter 10: Income Autopilot II: Testing the Muse

To determine if your muse is commercially viable, ask people to buy your product or service. In Chapter 10 of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss shows you how to test your muse and get sales.

Step Three: Micro-Test Your Products

Micro-testing is presenting inexpensive ads to test whether protesters are willing to buy. There are three steps to this process:

  • Best : Study the competition and design an irresistible offer on a simple one-to-four page website (one to three hours to set up)
  • Test : Create a brief Google or social media ad campaign to test engagement (three hours to set up and about a week of observation).
  • Divest or Invest : Either cut losses with losing campaigns or create/manufacture the winning product or service for sales rollout.

Chapter 11: Income Autopilot III: MBA—Management by Absence

Chapter 11 shows you how to fully automate your muse, so it can run on autopilot. However, you need to make this a goal when you get started with the venture.

Entrepreneurs often start with inexpensive tools, and DIY approaches to save money. This is essential for training outsourcers later, but the challenge lies in knowing when and how to transition to a scalable business model. A scalable model can handle a wide range of order volumes with ease.

To achieve this, entrepreneurs should minimize their decision-making responsibilities, enabling time freedom and increased income. It’s important to research costs, plan, and budget for infrastructure upgrades at specific milestones based on units of products shipped:

Phase I: 0–50 Total Units of Product Shipped

In the beginning, handle all tasks yourself, including providing your phone number for customer inquiries and order-taking. Use customer calls and emails to create an FAQ sheet, sales script, and email template bank for training future sales and support staff.

Ensure your marketing isn’t vague or misleading to avoid unqualified consumers. Personally pack and ship products to determine the most cost-effective options. Consider opening a local bank account to outsource your credit card processing as the business grows.

Phase II: >10 Units Shipped Per Week

Search for local companies to handle your product fulfillment. Limit your search to those who can handle customer support inquiries and do not have setup fees and monthly minimums. Ask for client references and inquire about potential weaknesses.

Next, negotiate lower fees by mentioning your start-up status, advertising budget, and competitor offers. Request net-30 payment terms after a month of prompt payments.

Once you choose a fulfillment company, have your manufacturer ship products directly to them and provide their contact information for order status inquiries on your website’s “thank you” page and online order form.

Phase III: >20 Units Shipped Per Week

With increased cash flow, consider larger, end-to-end fulfillment houses that handle everything from order status to refunds. Interview them about costs and ask for referrals to call centers and credit card processors they’ve worked with.

Set up an account with a credit card processor first, as it’s needed to accept payment, handle refunds, and declined cards. Optionally, set up an account with a recommended call center, which may provide toll-free numbers.

Analyze the revenue from free trials and phone orders and determine if it’s worth the effort. Test call centers by making calls at different times and evaluating wait times, as long wait times can result in abandoned calls and wasted advertising dollars.

Notes on Optionality and Customers

Keep things similar and minimize the number of decisions that your customers have to make. Present the more compelling offer in lieu of many different offers. With payment, we offer very few options and do not accept orders from common mail fraud countries. Lastly, reevaluate your customers and decide to cater your business to low-maintenance customers.

Step IV: L is for Liberation

In Step IV of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss shows you how to get mobility by removing permanent ties to a place by going remote, becoming location-independent, and taking mini-retirements.

Chapter 12: Disappearing Act: How to Escape the Office

“Ask for forgiveness, not permission.” In Chapter 12 of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss shows you how to remove yourself from an office and become remote.

The shift to mobility is transforming the perception of wealth and class, while being tied to one location, becoming a defining characteristic of the middle class. The old upper class, known for settling in one location, is being replaced by the New Rich, who are characterized by their unrestricted mobility.

This trend is not just for start-up owners or freelancers, but also employees and those in a mid-level title. Today, many companies are embracing remote work, resulting in reduced costs and increased productivity.

“Work wherever and whenever you want, but get your work done.” Here’s the step-by-step process to implement a disappearing act from your employer:

  • Increase Investment : Find ways for your company to invest in you as much as possible to increase the potential loss of one leaving.
  • Prove Increased Output Offsite : Call in sick, create an emergency, or ask to be remote for a few days of the week, and greatly increase your output for those days with records.
  • Prepare the Quantifiable Business Benefit : Present your successful output as a good business decision and not as a personal employee benefit.
  • Propose a Revocable Trial Period : Ask for a two-day-a-week reversible trial period to make this proposal appealing and allow you to hone your remote work habits , so you practice environment-free productivity .
  • Expand Remote Time : Ensure that your remote days are very productive. Then, set up a meeting to discuss the results with your boss and expand to more days or weeks out of the office.

Chapter 13: Beyond Repair: Killing Your Job

In Chapter 13 of The 4 Hr Work Week, Tim Ferriss provides the most common objections to leaving your job for the life of the New Rich:

  • Are you more likely to find what you want in your current job or somewhere else?
  • If you got fired from your work today, what would you do to get financial stability?
  • What if you tried posting your resume on major job sites to see your other options?
  • If you run or own a company, imagine that your company goes under and you lose it all; what would you do to survive?
  • I won’t be able to pay the bill : Yes, take inventory of your current financial situation and bank balances. Then ensure that you have a new job or source of income lined up before quitting your current company.
  • Health insurance and retirement accounts disappear if I quit : This is not true as you can get medical coverage and move your retirement to another company.
  • It will ruin my resume : As long as you keep your life interesting, you will stand out in job interviews and get many interested interviewers.

Chapter 14: Mini-Retirements: Embracing the Mobile Lifestyle

In Chapter 14 of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss encourages you to explore the world and indulge in life-changing experiences. Also, you can take the 20-30 year end-of-life retirement and redistribute it throughout your life. Lastly, he recommends an alternative to binge traveling call the “Mini-Retirement:”

Mini Retirement – “entails relocating to one place for one to six months before going home or moving to another locale”

This lifestyle can help you see the world in a more relaxed, slowed-down way to rediscover yourself and get lost internationally. Further, the expenses around can be much cheaper than experiences at home, with Tim providing Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Berlin, Germany as examples of potential destinations.

How to Do a Mini-Retirement

First, take a snapshot of your finances. Record all assets in your accounts (checking, savings, retirement, investment, etc.). Calculate your incoming cash flow (salary, rental, investments, etc.) and expenses (mortgage, rent, utilities, car payments, etc.). What can you eliminate from the above to remove costs and stress?

Second, create a one-year plan to do a mini-retirement in a dream location. Eventually, choose a location overseas that is safe and cost-effective.

Finally, prepare for your trip with this countdown timeline:

  • Three months out (eliminate) : Eliminate the excess by asking yourself: What is the 20% of my belongings that I use 80% of the time? Which belongings create stress in my life?
  • Two months out (automate) : Automate bills and monthly payments by contacting your credit card, subscription, and utility companies. Have a trusted family member and accountant have power of attorney.
  • One month out : Get all required and recommended immunizations and vaccinations for your destination. Set up remote access software to allow yourself to work remotely.
  • Two weeks out : Scan all identification, health insurance, and credit cards and save all passwords into a secure cloud system to be easily accessible. Switch to an overseas phone plan, and book your apartment or temporary lodging in your destination.
  • One week out : Create a schedule for routine batched tasks (email, financials, etc.) to ensure productivity. Move out of your home or apartment into storage, and pack lightly for your trip.
  • Two days out : Put the remaining cars into storage or at a friend’s place and cancel your car insurance .
  • First morning and afternoon after check-in : Take a city tour (bus, walking, or bike) to get a feel for potential neighborhoods.
  • First afternoon or evening : Purchase a SIM card and message apartment owners or brokers to view apartments.
  • Second and third days : Decide and book an apartment for one month to ensure that you enjoy staying there.
  • Move-in day : Get settled and purchase travel health insurance. Avoid buying souvenirs until close to your departure.
  • One week later : Eliminate the excess stuff you bought but won’t use by throwing it out or giving it away.

Chapter 15: Filling the Void: Adding Life After Subtracting Work

In Chapter 15 of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss shows you how to live life after removing the work off your plate. It’s common to think:

  • “I’ve got more money and time than I ever dreamed possible… Why am I depressed.”
  • “But this is what I always wanted! How can I be bored?”

There is no right answer to “What should I do with my life?” Forget the “should,” and pursue something that matters, is fun, or rewarding. Here are some common ways to do so:

  • Revisit ground zero and do nothing . Appreciate the silence, slow down, and remove the distractions.
  • Make an anonymous donation to the service organization of your choice . This allows you to feel good about serving others without taking credit for it.
  • Take a learning mini-retirement in combination with local volunteering . Embrace continual learning of a language or skill in a destination while giving back to make it more meaningful.
  • Revisit and reset dreamlines . Go back to the Definition section, and ask yourself what are you good at, what makes you happy, what excites you, and more.
  • Based on the outcomes of steps 1-4, consider testing new part- or full-time vocations . Revisit the excitement of childhood, and find a new muse or hobby.

Chapter 16: The Top 13 New Rich Mistakes

In Chapter 16 of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss presents the common mistakes of lifestyle design:

  • Losing sight of your dreams and simply working for work’s sake (W4W).
  • Micromanaging your business and sending emails and messages to fill time.
  • Handling issues that your outsourcers, employees, or coworkers can handle.
  • Helping outsourcers, employees, or coworkers with the same problem again and again or dealing with non-vital issues. Instead, provide explicit rules and processes to follow.
  • Chasing prospects that may be unqualified, difficult, or international, when you have sufficient cash flow to finance your lifestyle.
  • Answering unnecessary emails that do not result in sales or are answerable using a FAQ list, employee, or auto-responder.
  • Working where you live, sleep, or should relax. Instead, separate your environments to allow for escape.
  • Not performing a thorough Parento or 80/20 analysis at least once a month for your professional and personal life.
  • Striving for perfection rather than great or simply good enough, whether in your professional or personal life. Remember perfection is an impossible goal.
  • Making small and minute issues much bigger than they are as an excuse to work.
  • Making non-time-sensitive issues urgent also as an excuse to work.
  • Viewing one product, career, or project as the identity of your existence. Simply, life is too short for that type of thinking.
  • Ignoring the social fruits of a fulfilling life. Rather, build and maintain positive relationships with people that are not related to work.

Tim Ferriss

Final Thoughts: Check Out the Book and Tim’s Blog

Due to the revolutionary thinking presented in The 4-Hour Workweek , Tim Ferriss has changed the way I view how to live an extraordinary life. From leveraging your time to the importance of the Pareto Principle and even where to find sources of passive income, this book has something for everyone looking to create a work-life balance.

Ferriss shook up today’s traditional corporate culture and presented a radical, but completely different approach – a 4-hour workweek! It encourages readers to rethink their preconceived notions about work and challenges them to strive for success in an entirely new way.

If you’re ready to seek out an improved quality of life, then take the advice from one of the world’s leading experts on lifestyle design and learn from him yourself. Check out the Tim Ferriss blog and The 4-Hour Workweek today, as it will change your life!

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The 4-Hour Workweek Summary 📕 7 lessons that changed my life The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss: 7 key takeaways --> The 4-Hour Workweek Summary: 7 best lessons from Tim Ferriss --> The 4-Hour Workweek Summary: 7 Life-Changing Tips For Passive Income--> The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss - Summary (2024) --> The 4-Hour Workweek Summary: 7 Best Lessons from Tim Ferriss -->

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What is the book about?

What are the key takeaways?

🌍 1. Escape the Ordinary: For a more fulfilling life, challenge social conventions that usually go unquestioned

✍️ 2. write down your fears: this simple writing exercise can relieve your hesitation, self-doubt, or procrastination, 🎯 3. leverage the 80/20 rule: you can work less and accomplish more—by removing low-value work, 💸 4. create passive income: building an online business that provides extraordinary freedom, 🧪 5. validate your ideas: test if people want to buy your product, before you develop it, 📺 6. eliminate distractions: become twice as productive by cutting out unnecessary noise and content, 🎉 7. pursue excitement: keeping life vibrant with engaging projects, adventures, and hobbies.

Is it worth reading?

The 4-Hour Workweek is rated 4.5 on Amazon and 3.9 on Goodreads .

Positive reviews say: Innovative ideas — Motivational to pursue dreams — Practical productivity hacks

Criticism: Self promotion — Overly optimistic — Not realistic for everyone

What is The 4-Hour Workweek about?

“Haha, yeah right,” laughed my close family member when they saw me reading The 4-Hour Workweek at the age of 17. It just seems hard to believe, like a scam promise. Most people work at least 40 hours per week. Both my parents are small business owners who worked 80+ hours per week.

But fast forward 3 years later, and I’m traveling around Southeast Asia. I have a website that provides a full-time income, even while I’m traveling. And I can manage it from my Macbook Pro, anywhere in the world.

And yeah, sometimes I was working 4 hours a week. Because when you’re staying near a beautiful tropical beach in Southern Thailand (for $15 a night!), then you want to make the most of that time. Drink some mango smoothies. Go snorkelling. Meet other backpackers. Have some fun.

So when I say this book changed my life, I’m not exaggerating.

But can it do the same for other people, like you?

Many people hate their jobs. If they won the lottery, they would never come to work again. But it feels like we have no other choice. After all, isn’t everyone trapped in the same 9-5 rat race?

The 4-Hour Workweek explains an alternative path, a path you can take to design your own lifestyle rather than follow social norms. Is everyone going to be as successful as Tim? Definitely not. Business is always risky. But we can all learn how to:

  • Improve our odds of success in online business, by following Tim’s tips for market research, product testing, and online sales.
  • Become more productive in our career or side-hustle, by learning how to eliminate, automate and outsource much of our work.
  • Think unconventionally about our future, because the first step to designing our ideal lifestyle is hearing stories from others who have done it successfully. Then it stops feeling impossible.

Are you excited to get started? I sure am! So let’s go!

Who is Tim Ferriss?

Tim Ferriss (official website) is a serial entrepreneur, top podcaster, and New York Times bestselling author. He was also an early investor in startups like Uber, Shopify, Facebook, and Twitter.

But when Tim first graduated university (at Princeton), his life was pretty depressing. He spent months looking for a job, finally landing a sales position at a startup, where he spent 12 miserable hours every day.

He launched his first business, a sports nutrition supplement called BrainQUICKEN, with a few thousand dollars and months of extensive study of business. Luckily, that business took off in a big way, allowing him to quit his job and travel the world.

I’ve always found it fascinating that we live in a society with so many strange conventions that people never question. Like, why do almost all university degrees need exactly 4 years to learn the knowledge? Why not 2 years for some degrees, 5 years for others? How can it be possible that you need exactly the same number of hours to learn history as you do physics or literature or engineering?

Or, why do almost all jobs require exactly 40 hours every week?

This book begins with the surprising title “The 4-Hour Workweek” because Tim Ferriss wants us to re-examine the hidden social rules that we are following. What invisible assumptions do we live by, without even realizing it?

Robert Cialdini is a Professor of Psychology and author of the famous book Influence. He says one of the most powerful methods of interpersonal influence is called “social proof.” That simply means that when we see other people doing something, especially high-status people, then we automatically want to copy them. We assume that if many other people are doing something, then it must be right.

Social proof is why some marketing techniques are effective, like celebrity endorsements, customer testimonials, and positive online reviews. It’s why when a star basketball player wears certain shoes, then everyone seems to want them. And it’s why we tend to wear the same clothes as other people in our social groups, and follow the career paths that are shown to us by authorities in schools.

Learn more in our summary of Influence by Robert Cialdini

To overcome the pressure to follow the crowd, we must practice “Lifestyle Design”—that is Tim’s name for writing down exactly what we want our life to look like in the future.

Although this sounds obvious, most of us never take the time to clarify: what do we really want our typical day to look like in 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years? When we are clear on what we want, then we can make decisions that move us towards our desired lifestyle.

Like I wanted to have the freedom to travel the world for months at a time as a digital nomad (Wikipedia) , so I chose to research online business opportunities, and found ways of making money from my laptop. Other people may want to be deeply involved in their local community, so they actually want a business or career that keeps them firmly rooted in one place. So it’s very important to know what kind of lifestyle you desire.

Tim’s goal-setting tips are quite simple to follow:

  • Write down several things you want in the next 2 years. He recommends thinking about our goals in three different categories: what we want to be (skills), do (experiences), and have (possessions). Like you may want to become great at cooking Indian food, visit the Grand Canyon, and buy a lakefront home.
  • Calculate exactly how much that would cost per month. Add up all that you want, figure out what each thing would cost you monthly. Don’t start to get intimidated, we’re just dreaming at this point! This number is your TMI, or Target Monthly Income. That’s your dream, transformed into a concrete and definite number.

We can escape social conformity through Lifestyle Design, that is, writing down exactly what we want our life to look like 2 years in the future. Make a list of what you want to be, do, and have. Then calculate how much it will cost per month to achieve your dream.

I have a question for you: What stops us from going after the life we really want?

Some people do have real responsibilities, so they can’t just quit their job today. Like a mother and father need to provide for their child. That’s their most important obligation.

But, more often than not, fear is the most powerful reason for our hesitation. We’re afraid of failing. We’re afraid of looking stupid. We’re afraid of wasting our time and energy on something that doesn’t work. We’re afraid to lose what we have and all that we have built so far, a life that provides security and comfort. We’re afraid to step into the unknown.

Perhaps my favorite book ever is The Prophet by Khalil Gibran , which is really a book of poetry. In it, the character playing the wise prophet asks a crowd of listeners, “Tell me, have you [peace, memories, and beauty] in your houses? Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master? […] [Truly] the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.”

Read our summary of The Prophet by Khalil Gilbran (coming in the future)

The good news is, Tim Ferris accidentally found a way to decrease fears. His method is to write down fears in very clear detail. The clarity of knowing exactly what the worst thing that could happen might be, seems to reduce the size of our fears. It worked for him, so maybe it can work for us, too.

To understand this technique, it’s useful to understand more of Tim’s story. You see, many years ago his first online business had taken off, the sports supplement company. He was getting tons of sales, but he was also working 12 hours a day to keep everything running, afraid it would all collapse without his micromanagement.

One day, feeling overwhelmed with stress, Tim was inspired to actually write down his worst fears, which included lawsuits and bankruptcy. But then a strange thing happened—he started feeling better! With his fears clarified on paper, Tim’s brain saw that he would survive even the worst situations.

So he immediately bought a one-way plane ticket and took off on a worldwide adventure, which eventually lasted 15 months! His business was just fine and he felt amazing. That’s why Tim recommends we all stop waiting for “someday” to live our dreams and says “just do it and correct course along the way.”

Speaking of fear, let me share with you a story that really changed my life as a young man. I grew up with crippling social anxiety. Like I couldn’t even look any person in the eyes, and my armpits would be drenched in nervous sweat just going to a convenience store. It was that bad.

Then I stumbled into an incredible idea: That courage is not a lack of fear, but it’s about feeling afraid and then taking action anyway. So instead of avoiding social interactions because of my anxiety, I began going towards my fears. I made myself look people in the eye. I practiced talking for longer with kids at school, instead of running away. And over time, my anxiety dissolved.

(In fact, pretty much ALL of the official psychotherapies for anxiety disorders follow this principle, the principle of voluntary exposure to what one fears. Emotionally, it’s incredibly difficult to do, but it works and transforms you. Take action despite the fear.)

Our fears, doubts and hesitations can often be dissolved by writing down clearly what are the worst things that could happen. On paper, our fears lose their power because we see that we’ll survive. Ferriss used this technique to relieve his extreme stress about his business failing.

The 80/20 Rule says that 80% of results in almost anything come from 20% of the inputs. It’s also called “The Pareto Principle” (Asana.com) because it was an Italian scientists named Pareto who first observed this rule in his garden plants. He saw that 20% of his pea plants produced 80% of the peas. Later people were surprised to discover the rule applies to almost anything in nature and life.

This idea is very useful for businesses and most careers, because generally speaking:

  • 80% of profits come from 20% of customers.
  • 80% of sales come from the top 20% of salespeople.
  • 80% of our productivity happens during 20% of our work time.
  • And so on…

Tim Ferriss was able to transform his supplement business from a prison to a source of freedom, simply by understanding and applying the 80/20 rule. First he found 80% of profits were coming from a handful of large wholesale customers, so he got rid of his “bad” customers, then focused on finding more of the “good” profitable big customers. And in just a few weeks, his income doubled to an incredible $60,000 per month.

Most of us wrongly believe that in order to be more successful and productive, we must work harder. But Ferriss says it’s more important that we do the right things—the 20% of activities that cause 80% of results. Then we can both work less and earn more.

In my own online business experience, I’ve always followed a similar idea: I find what is working well, then focus on that and nothing else. Let’s say I launch a new website to get traffic from Google. My first 10-20 articles will have a lot of variety because I am still finding out what works. But once I have written a couple of winners, articles that receive lots of traffic from Google, then I analyze why those worked and make more articles similar to those. Perhaps I chose the right topic for the article, or I picked the right headline to get clicks. The most successful content creators spend all their time thinking about stuff like this.

Investors also follow the 80/20 rule. I’m sure you’ve heard of the book Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki . It’s a mega-bestselling book on finance and investing. Kiyosaki tells the story of how he learned to become wealthy from his friend’s father, a successful business owner nicknamed “Rich Dad.”

The most important lesson he learned from Rich Dad is that “The poor and middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.” This comes back to working harder versus doing the right things. Rich people don’t work harder than middle-class people, but they take the right actions. And that is having their money work for them, through buying assets that will produce more money, like public stocks and real estate. It’s like buying trees that will provide fruits long into the future.

Learn more in our summary of Rich Dad Poor Dad

The 80/20 Rule says 80% of our results come from 20% of our work time, or customers, or employees. So find what is working best, focus on that exclusively, then get rid of everything else. Your results will shoot up without you needing to work harder. (Just like Tim “fired” the majority of his customers, but then doubled his income.)

Want to start your own online business, especially one that provides passive income? Then keep reading! Tim’s classic book contains some of the best advice I’ve ever read for new entrepreneurs.

The first thing to understand is that most businesses DO NOT provide freedom. In fact, many entrepreneurs become trapped by their own creation. They end up needing to work much longer hours than a 9-5 job and feeling a lot more stressed than ever before.

How can we avoid that happening to us? We need to pick a type of business that CAN lead to a “4-hour workweek.”

Here are 4 businesses Ferriss recommends:

  • Information products. Such as courses, books, membership sites, live webinars, and many others. (ActiveCampaign.com) Even if you’re not an expert on any subject right now, with a few weeks or months of dedicated study, you can probably create a course that is valuable to people. The secret is to make something for beginners or specialize in a very specific topic that nobody has covered before. Tim recommends this kind of business most because it doesn’t require a lot of money to start. In fact, this was my first online business, with courses teaching people communication and social skills.
  • Physical products. This is about having an idea for a product, then getting in touch with manufacturers to create it. I know what we’re all thinking: that sounds too complicated and probably expensive! But it doesn’t need to be. For Tim’s first business, he paid just $5,000 to produce his first order of supplement bottles. He told them what ingredients to put in, the company did everything else and mailed the bottles to America.
  • Reselling. This is selling the products of other companies. For example, there’s something called “drop shipping” where you set up a website that takes orders, and when you make a sale on your website, the order is automatically sent to the company to fulfill. It can be the fastest business to set up, but it’s also usually hyper-competitive with low profit margins. Related to this is affiliate marketing, where you can make sales commissions by sending people directly to a company’s website through your unique link.
  • Licensing. Some people earn royalties by giving companies permission to use their intellectual property. These include book authors, music artists, and product inventors. Or, on the other hand, you could find people who have a good brand, then pay them a royalty to create products with a built-in demand. I think Masterclass.com has done this wonderfully—they have courses with Gordon Ramsey teaching cooking, Bill Clinton teaching leadership, and Tony Hawk teaching skateboarding.

Another critical decision you’ll need to make is what topic to focus on with your business.

Aspiring entrepreneurs often hear they should “follow your passion” and “do what you love.” Tim Ferris doesn’t say those cliches, but he does recommend choosing a topic you’re very familiar with. The best way to create a product other people want to buy… is to be a member of the target market yourself!

That’s why Tim’s first business was a supplement that improves mental focus, targeted towards students and athletes. He was part of both those groups, so he knew exactly what ingredients they would look for in a supplement, he knew what magazines they would be reading that he should advertise in, and so on.

Another great book for people wanting to launch an online business is The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco . That author was working a job as a limousine driver, he had no money and was trying to invent a business idea. Then one day a customer asked him how to book a limousine in a different city they were traveling to. That gave him the idea to create a website that helped people easily book limousine rentals all over the country, and it made him wealthy.

DeMarco totally rejects the idea that we need to be passionate about the topic of our business. Instead, he tells us to: “Stop thinking about business in terms of your selfish desires, whether it’s money, dreams or ‘do what you love.’ Instead, chase needs, problems, pain points, service deficiencies, and emotions.”

In other words, you can often get the best business ideas not by dreaming about “what you love,” but by doing detailed market research, whether that is talking to people in person or reading what they are complaining about online. Check online forums, social media groups, Amazon reviews of existing products, etc.

Learn more in our summary of The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco

Some of the best types of business for passive income include selling information products, getting a physical product manufactured, reselling other companies’ products, or licensing your intellectual property. Choose a market that you are part of, then do a lot of research on what people in the market need.

Ever seen the TV show Shark Tank? Entrepreneurs come and show their new business ideas to a panel of experienced investors. They always look confident their idea is sure to be a success, but most often leave disappointed with the harsh feedback they received.

Entrepreneurs tend to be overoptimistic. If they weren’t, then they would never try to be an entrepreneur, the riskiest of all professions. They’d just go be an accountant or something.

The truth is, no matter how we feel, we never know if our product idea is really good… until we try to sell it. Tim writes “don’t ask people if they would buy—ask them to buy.”

That means we don’t ask our friends and family if our product idea is good, we go out to our target customer and ask them to buy. And it’s possible to do this before you’ve made your actual product! Tim Ferriss learned this lesson the hard way: In university he created an audiobook and paid for 500 copies of it to be made, but then he couldn’t sell it.

To test your idea, here is a super-short overview of Tim’s method:

  • Create your own sales page in 1-3 hours, after researching similar existing websites.
  • Send visitors to your page, paying no more than $500-1000 for Google Ads.
  • Measure the response. You can use the free app Google Analytics to measure your website traffic and how many people are clicking the buy button to visit the checkout page.
  • Put a “product out of stock” notice on the checkout page, since you don’t actually have the product yet. But you can assume most people who tried to fill out the checkout form were serious about buying.

The book most often recommended to aspiring startup founders is The Lean Startup by Eric Ries . That author failed in business twice, before launching a popular 3d messaging app called IMVU. Eric Ries says startups usually fail because they waste a lot of time creating a product, only to later find out nobody wants it!

His solution is to create a very basic version of our product idea as fast as possible, which is called a “minimum viable product.” Then we improve the product rapidly, based on real world testing, user feedback, and product metrics. It’s about learning as we go, learning what our target customers really want in the product based on their actions.

Learn more in our summary of The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

You must first try to sell your product idea, before you really know if it’s viable. Tim’s method is to quickly create a basic sales page, then send targeted visitors to it, spending no more than $1000 on advertising. If a lot of visitors make it to the checkout page, then your idea shows promise.

In the technology industry, the magic word is “engagement.”

Some of the smartest people in the world spend their days trying to keep people as “engaged” on their apps as possible. What that really means is making us spend maximum hours per week using their product, whether that is Youtube, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Playstation, or even The New York Times.

Why? Because they make most of their profits from advertising, so the longer our eyeballs stay on their platform, the more dollars they make. As a very smart person once said, “If it’s free, then you’re not the customer. You’re the product.” But the real cost is our attention, our productivity, our mental well-being, and—in the long-term—our dreams.

Tim Ferris says to go on a “low-information diet,” which means cutting out any unnecessary consumption of content. A few general guidelines include:

  • Cut back on email. Most jobs don’t require us to be always connected. Switch to checking email twice per day, then once per day.
  • Don’t watch the news. If something truly important happens, you’ll hear about it from people around you anyway.
  • Learn how-to information as you need it. Learning endlessly “just in case” we will someday need the knowledge is a common way to avoid real action.

Another amazing book on productivity is Deep Work by Cal Newport , a computer science professor and researcher. He also says the modern world is pushing us toward constant distraction, nonstop notifications, and shallow emptiness.

And his solution is “deep work.” That means setting aside large blocks of time every day, free of interruptions, to do work that requires deep focus and mental effort. As Newport says, “Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.” If we set aside time for our most important, meaningful, and productive work, then we can escape the digital noise that causes so many problems for people today.

Read more in our summary of Deep Work

Going on a “low-information diet” means eliminating the distractions that are useless and irrelevant to our future dreams. Check email once per day, don’t consume news, learn how-to info only as you need it, and set aside time blocks for “deep work.”

To me, the words “passive income” brings up an image of someone lying on a beach, lazily sipping an alcoholic drink. But for most of us, a life like that will get boring very fast.

Tim Ferriss aims for excitement, that is essentially his life philosophy. He believes people feel best when they are engaged with life and moving towards meaningful goals. And that is why he is always actively working on new projects, despite the orange palm trees on the cover of his own book. Tim has written multiple books with 400+ pages each, he’s interviewed hundreds of people on his podcast, and he’s been involved in over 50 startups.

As someone who founded a business called “Growth.me,” I fully agree with Tim here. I’ve always felt best when I was growing towards the direction of my goals. The great psychologist Viktor Frankl also said , “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”

Here are 3 of Tim’s favourite ways to aim for excitement:

  • Continuous learning. Always be learning some new skill, hobby, or language. Tim has been involved in countless sports and hobbies, like wresting, dancing, hunting, etc.
  • A full-time vocation. Working on what you find really interesting or fulfilling. Today, Ferris admits he often works longer than 40 hours per week, but the difference is he’s doing what he wants.
  • Mini-retirements. Taking 1-6 months off, to do something you’ve always dreamed of. Ride a boat down the Amazon, visit cathedrals in France, take courses in a local cooking school. It’s like spacing your retirement over your whole life, rather than waiting until we’re 65 years old.

Despite the title of this book, Ferriss says being passive is a sure road to discontent. The best aim is excitement, and that comes from always learning new things, being involved in fulfilling work, and taking time off to cross items off our bucket list.

  • Calculate your TMI—Target Monthly Income. Write down a list of what you want in the next 3-5 years, then find out how much that would all cost? Perhaps it will cost $10,000 per month, or $20,000 per month or more. Don’t worry about how you’ll achieve that yet, just get a concrete number down on paper. That’s your aim.
  • Write down your top 3 interests, and 1 information product idea for each. (You can find this by looking at what arrives in your email inbox, or what you spend the most money on in your credit card statement.) Can you research what people need related to those topics? Check Reddit and other online forums, see what products or books are already selling on Amazon.
  • Create a sales page for one of your ideas. Okay, this one may take an afternoon at least, but it’s a lot faster than making the product and later finding out nobody wants it! The respected online marketing technology company LeadPages says a good sales/landing page contains 5 major elements: a unique selling proposition, a call to action, an offer, strong visuals, and supporting evidence. There is a fantastic free guide published by Leadpages that explains the details of how to write a sales page or landing page. They say the 5 essential elements include: a unique selling proposition, an offer, a call to action, strong visuals, and supporting evidence. Today a lack of tech skills shouldn’t hold anyone back, because there are countless drag-and-drop platforms we can use to publish a simple web page online fast, such as Unbounce, LeadPages, Instapage, etc. And the next step is sending targeted visitors to that page, for which you’ll want to research tutorials and courses on Google Ads or Facebook Ads.

Update Dec 2023: meta fields and subheading titles

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  • The 4-Hour Workweek Summary

by Timothy Ferriss

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

The 4-Hour Workweek is a non-fiction book written by entrepreneur and writer Timothy Ferriss. When Ferriss began his career, he started at a technology company, where he would, presumably, be working full time. Ferriss eventually realized that full time was true to its name - he spent most of his once "free-time" at this job, that he didn't really enjoy.

To try to improve his living conditions, Ferriss began his own company. Free of the strains of working for someone, he could now do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted - or so he thought. As it turns out, running your own business takes a major life commitment, and Ferriss ended up spending even more time running his own business than working for someone else. There had to be another way - right?

Well, actually, yes. If you look hard enough for something, you can find it, and that is what Ferriss did. The 4-Hour Workweek describes how Ferriss learned of Pareto Principle, which states that, if you put in a 20% amount of effort, you will get 80% of results.

Just out of college, Ferriss didn't need 100% results in his own business, so he decided to try it out. By eliminating the other 80% of his "productivity" by computerizing or automating it, he found that you could do and get a lot more with a lot less. Ferriss argues that many people simply don't realize this because they are the ones putting in the effort that people like him are living off of.

In this context, The 4-Hour Workweek as a title doesn't really make much sense. A typically workweek is 40 hours, and 20% of that is 8 hours. But, presumably, Ferriss is just trying to emphasize that he now has to do little to no work, hence the title.

In writing his book, Timothy Ferriss made four key points that one must follow to achieve a "new realm of productivity". The first step, of course, is outlining what you want in yourself. By asking yourself what you want to achieve and how you are going to do it, things will be much easier for you in the long run.

The second step is one of the most important - that is, eliminating from your life what it is that distracts you. Many people easily get caught up in a web of communication, and once they do, it is hard to get out of. But, to be completely productive, you need to get rid of distraction and temptation of distraction.

The third step is only relevant in today's modern environment. Ferriss advises you to "automate" your cash flow. This step was for sure taken directly out of Ferriss' learning experience, as he outsourced much of his business so he didn't have to put much in. In essence, this is a good plan - letting the virtual world take over most of your work - but never let yourself become too distant from the excellent customer care that makes a good business worthwhile.

Lastly, Ferriss tells readers that you should become more mobile in the world. This doesn't necessarily mean that you have to move around the country, but allow yourself to have the time to do things when you want to do them. Many people get stuck going to school or working jobs where they simply don't have the time to do anything else - this was, of course, Ferriss' original scenario. However, in order to live a relaxing life, you need to have the freedom from your schedule.

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The 4-Hour Workweek Questions and Answers

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Study Guide for The 4-Hour Workweek

The 4-Hour Workweek study guide contains a biography of Timothy Ferris, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

  • About The 4-Hour Workweek
  • Character List

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The 4-Hour Work Week is all about how to change the way readers look at how they live and work and why they should challenge old assumptions.

The author writes from a unique vantage point. He created a life and a career he chose out of consistently questioning the traditional assumptions about life and work. He writes in detail about his challenges, failures, and successes candidly and readers can see in detail his transformation using this new life view. His emphasis is on viewing time and mobility as the ultimate currency. It's not about how much money can be made; it's about how having the time and the freedom to live a good life without being broke is possible.

25 questions and answers

What are some other books that write about viewing time and mobility as the ultimate currency?

Some other books that discuss the concept of time and mobility as the ultimate currency include 'The 4-Hour Workweek' by Timothy Ferriss, 'Vagabonding' by Rolf Potts, and 'The Art of Non-Conformity' by Chris Guillebeau. These books explore the idea of valuing time and freedom over traditional measures of wealth.

What are some other ways to achieve time and mobility as the ultimate currency?

There are several ways to achieve time and mobility as the ultimate currency. One could be to adopt a minimalist lifestyle, reducing material possessions and thus the need for a high income. Another could be to pursue a career that allows for remote work, providing the freedom to live and work from anywhere. Additionally, prioritizing experiences over possessions, investing in personal development, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance can also contribute to this goal.

What are some other books that write about creating a life and career of choice?

Some other books that discuss creating a life and career of choice include 'Designing Your Life' by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, 'The Art of Non-Conformity' by Chris Guillebeau, and 'So Good They Can't Ignore You' by Cal Newport. These books provide different perspectives and practical advice on how to build a fulfilling career and life.

"The question you should be asking isn't, "What do I want?" or "What are my goals?" but "What would excite me?"

The framework for the book is built with the acronym "DEAL," providing a step-by-step plan for readers to learn how to take back control of their lives.

  • Definition : Replace self-defeating assumptions.
  • Elimination : Forget time management; learn to ignore the unimportant.
  • Elimination : Learn to put cash flow on autopilot.
  • Liberation : Create freedom of location.

The first few chapters help readers redefine what is possible by thinking differently. Readers learn that being financially rich and being able to live like a millionaire are quite different. Money combined with the value of time and mobility takes on a whole new value. It isn't the money that is so important; it's the ability to live life on our own terms.

26 questions and answers

What are some other ways to challenge the traditional concept of a 9-5 job?

Some ways to challenge the traditional concept of a 9-5 job include adopting flexible working hours, working remotely, job sharing, compressed work weeks, and pursuing entrepreneurial ventures. It's also about redefining success not just in terms of financial wealth, but in terms of time and mobility as well.

What are some other perspectives on the concept of time, mobility and money?

Other perspectives on the concept of time, mobility, and money could include viewing them as interconnected resources that can be leveraged to achieve personal freedom and fulfillment. Time can be seen as a non-renewable resource that should be used wisely. Mobility can be viewed as the freedom to move and live anywhere, which can enhance one's quality of life. Money, while often seen as a goal in itself, can be viewed as a tool that, when used effectively, can provide the means to enjoy time and mobility.

What are some other ways to redefine the concept of wealth?

Wealth can be redefined in several ways beyond just financial richness. It can be viewed in terms of time and mobility, as the ability to live life on our own terms. It can also be seen as the accumulation of experiences, knowledge, or personal growth. Additionally, wealth can be defined by the quality of relationships and social connections one has, or the positive impact one can make on others' lives.

Thinking differently means questioning accepted methods and ideas. The book gives readers ten ways that old assumptions are wrong.

  • Retirement is worst-case scenario insurance.
  • Interest and energy are cyclical.
  • Less is not laziness.
  • The timing is never right.
  • Ask for forgiveness, not permission.
  • Emphasize strengths, don't fix weaknesses.
  • Things in excess become their opposite.
  • Money alone is not the solution.
  • Relative income is more important than absolute income.
  • Distress is bad, eustress is good.

What are some scenarios where money alone can be the solution?

Money alone can be the solution in scenarios where the problem is purely financial. For example, if a person is in debt, having enough money to pay off the debt would solve the problem. Similarly, if a business is facing bankruptcy due to lack of funds, injecting money into the business would solve the problem. However, it's important to note that while money can solve these problems in the short term, it may not be a sustainable solution in the long term if the underlying issues that led to the financial problems are not addressed.

What are some examples of the timing being right?

The phrase 'the timing being right' is subjective and can vary based on the context. However, in general, it refers to situations where events align in such a way that a desired outcome is achieved. For example, launching a product when the market demand is high, asking for a promotion when the company is doing well, or investing in stocks when the market is favorable. These are all examples of the timing being right.

What are some strategies to turn weaknesses into strengths?

Some strategies to turn weaknesses into strengths include self-awareness, understanding your weaknesses, learning new skills, seeking feedback, setting personal goals, and focusing on positive thinking. It's also important to view weaknesses as opportunities for growth rather than as personal deficiencies.

"What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do."

Readers won't be surprised to see that fear is one of the biggest obstacles to changing their life and the book talks about this throughout. By acknowledging that fear and recognizing the very worst outcome, readers can map out steps to recover if the worst does happen. On the flip side, the same approach should be taken with the potential benefit also.

What are some other books that discuss the concept of fear as a major obstacle to change?

Some other books that discuss the concept of fear as a major obstacle to change include 'Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway' by Susan Jeffers, 'Daring Greatly' by Brené Brown, and 'The War of Art' by Steven Pressfield.

What are some other strategies to deal with fear?

Other strategies to deal with fear include practicing mindfulness and meditation, seeking professional help such as therapy or counseling, maintaining a healthy lifestyle with regular exercise and a balanced diet, and staying connected with supportive friends and family. It's also beneficial to educate oneself about the nature of fear and anxiety, as understanding can often help in managing these feelings.

How does the author suggest we should approach potential benefits?

The author suggests that we should approach potential benefits in the same way we approach our fears. By acknowledging them and mapping out steps to achieve them, we can effectively pursue these benefits.

Elimination

This is all about how to get rid of obstacles. Readers will find that once they define what they want to do with their time, they have to learn how to free up the time to do it. One lesson taught here is that by using the Pareto principle, time management becomes less of a factor. The Pareto principle states that 80% of results come from 20% of actions and readers will learn how to make the best of that 20% in this section. The goal of elimination is to free up time, from working remotely to working more productively.

This may be hard to swallow for many readers, but elimination also includes limiting or even eliminating things like reading or watching the news. The book recommends taking five days off from television and web surfing and other time wasters. By removing obstacles that don't contribute to the ultimate goal, readers will find that they have much more time than they thought possible.

"By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It's the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too."

Readers will find even more time to live the life they want by stopping interruptions and refusing to waste time. The book outlines three major categories:

  • Time wasters. Readers will learn how to eliminate all the wasted time that goes into unimportant emails, phone calls, and meetings.
  • Time consumers. These are all the things that just have to be done. Customer service, reports, and other necessary tasks can be batched together creating a single interruption instead of multiple ones.
  • Empowerment failures. The lesson learned here is to establish clear guidelines up front for delegates to avoid having to stop and approve decisions.

Successfully defining the life they want to live and eliminating obstacles, readers are ready to put some automation in place to make things easier. While many of the lessons here are about creating a product and starting a business, they apply to most business situations. Readers will learn the importance of building systems to replace themselves if they want to break free. From hiring a virtual assistant to handle less important tasks to learning what can be delegated, readers will find ways to automate much of their work.

"Being able to quit things that don't work is integral to being a winner"

Once the automation is put into motion, the challenge for readers will be to remove themselves from the equation as much as possible. By being able to teach a task and then outsource or delegate it, readers will find that they may not be so busy after all. More automation equals more time.

The fourth step readers will learn is how to liberate themselves from the traditional office environment. The book outlines five steps to convince the boss that working remotely is a good idea. Pulling this one off is possible and will free up big chunks of time to live more and work less.

  • Increase investment . Readers will learn how to get their employer to invest in them to increase the cost of losing them.
  • Prove increased output off-site . The book teaches specific steps to find the opportunities to show that remote work can be more productive.
  • Show the business benefit . By presenting the remote work as a business benefit instead of a personal one, readers will be able to better convince their employer.
  • Propose a trial period . Starting small, with maybe a day or two to test out the idea, readers will find that their idea will go over better.
  • Expand remote time . Assuming all goes well, the lesson here is to slowly increase the remote time to make it more acceptable and, eventually, a permanent solution.

"The goal is not to simply eliminate the bad, which does nothing more than leave you with a vacuum, but to pursue and experience the best in the world."

The book finishes up with advice and guidelines for readers on how to eventually eliminate their job altogether by changing how they view their work and life balance. Readers will ultimately learn that the goal of having time and freedom to live the life they choose has a specific game-plan that has been proven to work.

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Book Summary – The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Home > Business & Management > Entrepreneurship > Book Summary - The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

The 4-Hour Workweek - Book summary

Step 1: DEFINITION

To redesign your life, you need to break free from norms, create an automated income stream, and liberate yourself from unproductive tasks. Only then will you have the time and resources to focus on truly meaningful things in life. This starts with an understanding of the rules and objectives of the new game.

The 4-Hour Workweek_Define

Define the New Game (and Beat the Rules)

The goal is not to stop work or do nothing, nor is it to work hard now to enjoy life later. It’s about creating the freedom of time, money and location, so you can design and live the life you want, now . In fact, time, lifestyle and freedom of choice are probably worth more than the paper value of money. Ferriss explains this in detail, along with 10 Commandments of the New Rich Lifestyle, covered in greater detail in our complete 14-page summary.

Define (and Overcome) your Fears

Most of us are held back by our fear of the unknown. To conquer your fears, start by defining them with questions like: – What’s your worst fear and what’s the worst thing that could happen if it’s realized? – If you were fired from your job today, what would you have done to manage your financial situation? – What’s the cost of your inaction – financial, emotional, physical – relative to the cost of action?

Define your Dreams (with Dream-lining)

The 4-Hour Work Week summary_Dreamlining

Step 2: ELIMINATION

The 4-Hour Work Week summary_eliminate-simplify

Be Effective: Free up your Time

Busyness is often an excuse to avoid doing what we should. The book contains many powerful tips to help you improve personal productivity and achieve “fat-free performance”.

Adopt a Low-Information Diet

We are surrounded by too much (and often wrong) information which hinders productive action. Ferriss manages to keep abreast of what’s going on, without reading the news and with only an hour on his business emails each week – the key is to focus only on information that’s relevant, important and actionable.

Learn to Say No

Constant interruptions are a major time-waster. The book lists several tips on how to master your time and set the rules in your favour e.g. how to limit your accessibility, reduce unnecessary time on emails/ phone-calls, meetings, and batching repetitive activities.

Step 3: AUTOMATION

To design your New Rich lifestyle, you’ll need a steady source of income. The conventional approach is to find a well-paying job (even if it takes up the bulk of your time). A better way is to build a “ muse” – an automated revenue-generator that brings in cash without your hands-on involvement. Unlike a conventional business, a muse is in line with what you really want to do, and is less business-like.

The 4-Hour Work Week summary_automate

Learn to Outsource and Work with Virtual Assistants

If you recall, our goal is be able to run a business from anywhere in the world (ideally without your direct involvement). To do so, you must learn to outsource effectively. The key is to refine your rules and processes, so you can automate the process, delegate low-value tasks to focus on the high-value ones. Get practical outsourcing tips from our full version of  The 4-Hour Workweek summary, to avoid potential pitfalls and get the best results.

Build your Muse

There are 4 key steps to finding and building your muse , which is broken down in detail in our complete book summary: (i) Market Selection (ii) Product Brainstorm (know the criteria for good products, and 3 ways to get them) (iii) Micro-Testing your products (using the 3-part strategy provided), and (iv) Roll-out and Automation (over 3 recommended phases).

Step 4: LIBERATION

Liberation means having the mobility to run your business from anywhere in the world. This involves 3 key components or phases: to free yourself geographically, take mini-retirements, and focus on something meaningful. Do get more details on how to liberate yourself from the full 14-page version of The 4-Hour Workweek summary.

The 4-Hour Workweek_Liberate

Get the Most from The 4 Hour Workweek

This is essentially a workbook to help you think about, and more importantly, take action toward your dream lifestyle. Although there are enough “how-to” tips to guide you through the process step-by-step, the biggest takeaway is probably the message that, by learning to think for yourself and break free from widely-accepted rules, you can create new options for yourself, and live an exceptional life. To get more details, do get a copy of our complete book summary bundle , which includes an infographic, a 14-page text summary, and a 28-minute audio summary.

The 4-Hour Workweek summary - book summary bundle

Loved the ideas in the book? You can purchase the book here or visit fourhourblog for more information.

Get more insights on remote work from our Remote summary , or find out how you can start a micro-business with The $100 Startup summary with minimal capital!

About the Author of The 4 Hour Workweek

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich is written by Timothy “Tim” Ferriss –an American author, serial entrepreneur and public speaker. In addition to speaking six languages, Ferriss runs a multinational firm from wireless locations worldwide. His eclectic passions include being a world record holder in tango, a national champion in Chinese kickboxing and a guest lecturer at Princeton University in high-tech entrepreneurship and electrical engineering. He has been profiled by The New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, NBC and Maxim. Ferriss is a graduate of Princeton University.

The 4 Hour Workweek Quotes

“Options – the ability to choose – is real power.”

“Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness.”

“What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.”

“Tomorrow becomes never. No matter how small the task, take the first step now!”

“Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.”

“Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.”

“More is not better, and stopping something is often 10 times better than finishing it.”

“People are smarter than you think. Give them a chance to prove themselves.”

“Find your focus and you’ll find your lifestyle.”

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Home » The 4-Hour Workweek Summary

The 4-Hour Workweek Summary

Emir Zecovic | Posted on October 15, 2018 |

16 min read ⌚ 

MicroSummary: “ The 4-Hour Workweek : Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich” by entrepreneur and educationalist Timothy Ferriss is a self-help book that purports to be a lifestyle game-changer. Inspired by the Pareto 80/20 principle, the book suggests that working more means living less and that happiness means doing the exact opposite.

… escape 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich – The 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss

Sound like a promise of heaven on earth. Real music to my ears. Is that just another hoax? Or perhaps it is exactly what it seems to be… Maybe it’s time to discover for yourself what lies behind this title.

IMPROVEMENT/ The 4 Hour Work Week  by Timothy Ferriss

Optimize your work so you can have the life you want.

This book was challenging for me starting with the title: The 4-Hour Workweek.

So, I dared to search beyond it. I started to read like I always do when I get a new book which is entirely unknown to me, and yet impressive in many aspects. This one comes structured in 4 significant steps.

Each step comes with its own subtitles and a summary at the end in order to help you extract the best ideas of the book. The idea is to make the readers feel like their story is being heard because the author broadens his horizons stretching beyond the fundamental personal perspective.

This might be one of those that you don’t want to end. According to many people “The 4-Hour Workweek” definitely deserves a place on your bookshelf. In fact, it is probably one of the most inspiring books you will ever hold in your hands.

Its impartial ideas shared honestly and transparently represent that this book carries the fragrance of hope. Timothy Ferriss displays in the most real sense of the word, a new method, supported by step-by-step instructions.

New information. New Perspectives. New approaches. Sounded like a great reading deal for me. After the very first pages, I found out that this book was also an expected DEAL for the writer.

  • D is for Definition – Define  your objectives. Decide what’s important. Set goals. Ask yourself, “What do I really want?”
  • E is for Elimination – Eliminate  distractions to free up time . Learn to be effective, not efficient. Focus on the 20% of the stuff that’s important and ignore the 80% that isn’t. Put yourself on a low-information diet. Learn to shunt aside interruptions, and learn to say “no”.
  • A is for Automation – Automate  your cash flow to increase income. Outsource your life — hire a virtual assistant to handle menial tasks. Develop a business that can run on auto-pilot. (This is the weakest section of the book.)
  • L is for Liberation – Liberate  yourself from traditional expectations. Design your job to increase mobility. This could mean working from home, or it could mean using geographic arbitrage to take mini-retirements in countries with favorable exchange rates .

So far so good I thought.  Let`s get to the business.

My story and why do you need this book.

At this point, I’ve met the author. After college, Tim Ferriss took a soul-sucking sales job at a tech firm. He left to start a soul-sucking business of his own. He went from working 40 hours a week for somebody else to working 80 hours a week for himself. He hated it. The pay was good, but the business left him drained.

The 4-Hour Workweek Summary

I bet you recognize yourself in this story. I know I did.

So, after a great moment of empathy, my curiosity struck again: how did he overcome this situation?

After learning about the Pareto Principle (more commonly known as the 80-20 Principle), Ferriss had a revelation: he streamlined his business, eliminating distractions and automating systems until it was not only more profitable but also consumed less of his time.

He took a break for a while and then decided to write a book about “lifestyle design”. A book about creating a life that balances work and plays, maximizing the positives of both.

I don’t know if this is the right time to say it, but what I liked the most about this book was the fact that it’s strongly connected to reality. Provides you plenty of interesting ideas, that are useful to be remembered and applied in our daily life. I’ll underline below some of these.

Postponing seems to be in our nature. The fragility of a lifetime is an impalpable truism: the more we know about it, the harder we ignore it. Today. Tomorrow. Someday. When it comes about changes, we seem to relate to a time horizon Unlimited.

“<Someday> is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.”  

Experiencing comes from curiosity. When it comes to money, everybody wants to be rich. Which is our alibi for a craving for this?  

The 4-Hour Workweek PDF

Challenging moments define our future. Being mixed with the background will definitely bring us a comfortable routine but less joy. Swimming in the murky waters of an awkward conversation may draw our energy, but also teaches us a valuable lesson:

“A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.”  

Extravagance is a luxury. This is a lesson taught to any of us by our parents, our friends, life experiences, etc. What if this is a myth? What if we learned the wrong definition of what extravaganza really means?

“Living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things and not just owning enviable things.” 

Emphasize. Should we be focused on strengths? Should we fix weaknesses ? From  Tim Ferriss’s point of view, it is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.

So, the choice seems to be between multiplication  of results using strengths or  incremental  improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre.

“Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.”

And starting with my favorite nugget, my curiosity grew more and more – like the Fahrenheit degrees in a thermometer.

So, I couldn’t help myself and I’ve done some research about the writer . This is how I found out how he managed to create this lifestyle that now most people envy (me included). But I won’t tell you more. I leave you to discover it here.

I left The 4-Hour Workweek with my brain caffeinated with all kinds of new and bold ideas , and my pockets full of great and inspirational nuggets. If you want to visualize more about what this book is, don’t waste any more time. Check our nuggets and subscribe for more.

Until then, I leave you in the company of some memorable ideas like the following one:

Timothy Ferriss – The 4-Hour Workweek —- Book Summary

“Get good at being a troublemaker and saying sorry when you really screw up.”

Tim Ferris is one of our favorite writers and bloggers here at 12′. And his first book, “4-Hour Work Week” brings a new perspective on how to face work in our lives and the future. The book tells us about Tim’s experiments, his results, and his progress.

In 4-Hour Work Week, Tim coined the term lifestyle design, to state that you have the ability to design your own lifestyle.

Tim questions the traditional model of retirement and believes that you do not have to wait to retire to create your lifestyle.

Whether it’s to travel the world, get away from a monotonous job , make big bucks or just work less and live better, there are more efficient ways to handle your work and your productivity.

Time + Mobility = New Wealth

True wealth comes from time, from mobility and not just from money. Those who are able to understand this and master the two new currencies of wealth are called by Tim as the “new rich.” A dream life is often much cheaper than you think.

Your dreams can be things like traveling around the world, learning something incredible or taking time for your hobbies and they are not things that only millionaires do.

These things are also available to the new rich, and it does not cost millions to enjoy them. This is one of the main truths of the book: people do not necessarily want to be millionaires but to experience things that only millions can buy.

The book is focused on having a “new rich” lifestyle, without having a million dollars and with time and mobility.

Of course, you probably will not be able to replicate each of the practices he recommends to have the same results, but he proposes that instead of waiting passively for things to happen, you become a dealmaker, a person capable of creating new opportunities .

You need to write your own rules and always dream high.

To become a dealmaker, you need to understand the framework proposed by Tim. It is based on the acronym “DEAL”. The four pillars of the DEAL are:

  • Definition:  Replace the premises that block you;
  • Elimination:  Forget time management. Learn to ignore what does not matter and save time doing it;
  • Automation:  Learn how to make money on autopilot.
  • Liberation:  Create your independence of location and work from anywhere; Often people stop to think how the rich and successful have arrived there but the full stories are not always told.

People like to believe that the ladder to success is long and slow, but that is just the reality that the world expects. For Tim, people do not become successful by luck or by having a repeatable formula but by having a DEAL attitude.

D for Definition

Being the new rich is the exact opposite of what many people think. Being rich new does not mean working to buy things you do not need.

It means not delaying your dreams by a potential barrier. The new rich man has a mindset to accomplish, now. And DEAL’s first step is Definition.

It is based on reprogramming your way of facing life and having a new self-image and attitude. In order to define yourself, you will need to develop new approaches to your life. Here they are:

He never allows himself to leave for tomorrow what he can do today. He does the right things now, always coming out of his comfort zone. The new rich man has the courage to take action quickly and overcome his limitations, leaving aside the well-adjusted mindset.

If a well-to-do person dreams of working when they want, the new rich person dreams of having people working for him.

While the pensioner dreams of retiring young, the new rich think of having constant adventures and mini-retirements planned during their lifetime, but their focus is never on the idea of doing nothing.

He is motivated by the idea of doing something. If the affluent think of selling the company and thus making hefty cash, the new rich think of having money constantly and leave the idea of a major liquidity event in the background.

For Tim, being financially wealthy and living like a millionaire are very different things.

The value of money should be weighed with your ability to choose what you want to do when you want to do it, where to do it, and with whom to do it. Often, freedom is worth more than the financial asset itself.

You do not want just the money. You want to be able to control your destiny in the first place.

Flee from the Conventional

Most people opt for conventional solutions to solve a problem . But to have different results than 99% of people have, you have to do differently from them. For this, you need to rethink some aspects of life and develop this opposite approach. Some of the aspects cited by Tim are:

  • Understand the Myth of Retirement:  The idea of retiring pretty much reinforces that people do not like what they do and want to stop it. If people dream about retirement, it says they are spending their youth and their most valuable years doing something they do not like.
  • Doing less is different from being lazy:  Contemporary society tends to value sacrifices, in many cases, more than results. The new rich are measured only by their results and if a great result can be achieved with less effort, why not.
  • Permission is not required:  You should not expect people’s approval to start something new and challenging. As long as you do not cause significant problems, it is better to do something and ask for forgiveness, than to ask permission for everything you are going to do.
  • Focus on your strengths:  Developing what you are already good at creates a multiplying effect on your results. Spending your time just trying to improve your weaknesses yields small, incremental results. Play to develop your best sides.
  • Make time to do what you want:  Tim’s idea at Work 4 hours a week is not that you have more time to rest, but more active time to do what you love, want and dream about.
  • Money alone does not solve all:  More money does not always improve your life. We tend to believe we do not do things for money, but the great truth is we want to avoid the real cause of our attitude.
  • Understand your relative income:  How much you earn does not matter. What really matters is your relationship between your time and your money. If you work 4 hours a month and earn $ 4,000, you’re twice as rich as the guy who works 240 hours a month and earns $120,000.
  • Stress can be a good thing: If it takes you out of your comfort zone and causes you to grow and develop, embrace stress instead of avoiding it.

Overcome Your Fears

To have a clear definition, you need to overcome your fears and move on. Many people become paralyzed when they encounter their fears, and this leaves them stagnant.

You need to understand what your biggest fears are and ask yourself: What’s the worst thing that could happen? With a tip-of-the-tongue answer, it’s time to create a plan to recover if the fears materialize.

For each fear, it is also important to list the benefit of overcoming it. With this plan in hand, you understand the impacts that moving can have on your life and then it’s time to ask yourself: what result would I have if I had been doing the exact same thing for 50 years as I do today?

Define Your New Reality

The way we define ourselves is treacherous and leads us to believe that we can only have one part, not the whole.

Most people look for mediocre results, which curiously increases competition for mediocre things and creates the opportunity for those who want to do incredible things.

Therefore, there is less competition to do amazing things than mediocre things. Most people fall into the trap of “I’m going to raise $ 1 million, and after that, I’ll do what I want.” You do not want to be one of them, and so you need to know what you really want.

You have to dream and create daring, unreal goals that go against the grain of what you do now.

In this new reality, you need to plan where you will be in the next 6 and 12 months.

Take two sheets of paper, one where you map out your 6-month plans and one where you map out your 12-month plans. In each of them, write down the 5 things you dream to have, 5 things you dream to be and 5 things you dream to do.

When you have all 15, check the 4 that would change everything.

Calculate the monthly cost of each of these things. Add up all the expenses and take a 30% slack up to avoid surprises.

Now that you know the monthly cost of these 4 things, divide the result by 30.

That’s your daily revenue goal. From it, you know how much money you need to make per day to be able to realize them.

Now write the first 3 steps for each of the 4 dreams of your 6-month plan and make the first step for each of them now. Now. Without thinking, just do it. Begin your plan to conquer your dreams.

“E” for Elimination

To take full advantage of your time and channel it in pursuit of your dreams and thus become a new rich, the next step is to focus on eliminating waste.

Being efficient is not the most important.

Being able to get things done as quickly as possible is not an advantage because unimportant tasks take time even if you are efficient at accomplishing them. It is important to have focus.

Focus on What Matters

Your time is best spent on important tasks, tasks that will bring you closer to your goals. To focus on the important things, use the Pareto Principle, also called the 80/20 rule: In most situations, 20% of the work produces 80% of the results .

The rest of the work tends to have very few results. Focus on tasks that have the greatest impact. Ask yourself: What are the 20% of things that cause 80% of my problems? What are the 20% of things that result in 80% of my results?

This focus is so important in the choice of tasks that you will use it in relation to the sources of information that you consume.

Tim recommends that you never see the news, if something is important, people will tell you and you will find out for yourself.

You need to redefine your brain to get used to it, and it suggests that you take a few days without any contact with television, books or surfing the internet. Focus on a consumption of small amount information that is really relevant to you.

Avoid Time Wasters

You need to get rid of silly emails, unnecessary phone calls, meetings, etc. Turn off your notifications and check email a few times a day. Meetings, for example, are black holes where time and energy disappear, and most of them are completely unnecessary.

A meeting is only appropriate when a decision needs to be made, and many people have to participate. If this is the case, set a fixed time and start the meeting reminding everyone of the reason for it. Also, never go to meetings where you do not need to.

And if the meeting succeeds without you, skip all the next ones on the same subject. In the office, the same goes for hallway conversations with colleagues. Focus on the necessary subject.

Every time someone approaches you, do not ask, “How are you?” And “What can I do for you?”. It is also worth telling people in advance that you are in a hurry.

“A” for Automation

If you seek to earn a living by working just a few hours a week, you need an automatic source of income. You have to make other people work for you and get them to invest their time and not you to invest yours.

Outsource Your Life

Today, it is fairly easy to set up a business that can run without much involvement from you. Hence, you can use outsourcing companies to scale up your operational capability.

There are many companies that specialize in manufacturing products for resale, shipping products to customers, packaging customization, technical support, customer service, sales, among other things.

But even more complex and evolving tasks can be outsourced. Virtual assistants from India, for example, are extremely inexpensive and offer high-quality services.

A virtual assistant can do almost everything you normally would do yourself. By creating a business in which each task is outsourced to a specialist, you can make your involvement almost completely unnecessary.

However, before hiring an assistant, keep in mind that you should first try to eliminate, then try to automate. Only the remainder should be delegated, otherwise, you waste your time and money .

Also, delegated tasks need to be time-consuming tasks that you can define with extreme clarity. If the task is too short or you can not pinpoint the expected results, it might be best not to delegate.

To hire an assistant, also make sure he communicates well, ask for constant updates at the beginning to know how things are going, have clear timelines and priorities.

Find New Ideas and Opportunities

With more time on the agenda, it’s time to try out new ideas and create new revenue streams.

For this, the first thing you need is a product. You can also sell a product that is already on the market, and this is very easy, but the potential profits are much smaller.

Creating your own product is much easier than most people think. But before you choose a product and start making it, you need to know if your potential customer base is large enough for you to actually earn money.

To test the marketplace, offer your hypothetical product to real customers. The easiest way to do this test is to create a virtual store in which, when people click to buy, it shows a message that the product is out of stock and an apology.

This serves to mark out people’s interest in the product. It is also important to get the email from all interested parties because when the product is available, you can try to sell to them again. You can also test a product by buying ad campaigns on Google .

Create multiple ads for your product, see which leads more people to buy and so you discover how much you would need to spend on marketing to sell a unit of your product.

“L” for Liberation

Once you have a lucrative product, the challenge is to get out of the equation. This will give you the independence to live the life you dreamed with mobility.

Manage Through Absence

To achieve this liberation, you need to learn how to do each business process in detail so that you can later hire outsourcing companies that can assimilate your knowledge and execute it.

This will give you redundancy, and you will not depend solely on your suppliers. In addition, you need to ensure communication between all your virtual employees.

You need to give them the autonomy to make low-risk decisions without consulting you for maximum automation .

Run From the Office

If you still have a job and want to do remote work , you need to be able to plan your new work model.

And that may mean resigning, and you can not be afraid. So, know that: A resignation is not permanent.

There are always other options if you change your mind; Paying the bills is not that difficult.

Even if it is, there is always a way for you to reduce your fixed costs; Your resume will not get any worse.

If you are resigning to do something you believe, your resume will become more interesting (you probably will not need it, though).

Travel the World

The concept of holidays for people is usually a short trip, one or two weeks to an exotic place.

For Tim, you should think about the 20 to 30 years of retirement that you would have and divide them throughout our lives at 6-month intervals.

The idea of a vacation is not to get away from your life but rather to have a lifestyle where you have small retirements and really know the world, contrary to the traditional view of just visiting cities and leaving.

More Life With Less Work

If you can overcome your personal settings, eliminate the unnecessary, put your revenues on autopilot and create the freedom to work from wherever you want, you can get lost. You might be asking “why did I do this?”

The more time you have, the more introspective you become, and the more you turn to yourself. Do not let the extra time in your life become just free time, but rather time in which you do something that fulfils you and brings you closer to your dreams.

summary of 4 hour work week

Final Notes:

Forget the conventional, the work routine from 9-am to 5-pm and its long career toward retirement.

You need to redefine yourself to live the now, to know that it is possible to draw from scratch the lifestyle you want to live.

Escape from mediocrity if you do not want to have a mediocre life, focus on doing amazing things, after all, there is less competition at the top.

12min tip:  If you liked this microbook, you will also like our microbook of The Secrets of the Millionaire Mind! Check it!

Emir Zecovic

Emir is the Head of Marketing  at 12min . In his spare time, he loves to meditate and play soccer.

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summary of 4 hour work week

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The 4-Hour Workweek Summary

  • Last updated on March 25, 2021

After college, Ferriss took a soul-sucking sales job at a tech firm. He left to start a soul-sucking business of his own. He went from working 40 hours a week for somebody else to working 80 hours a week for himself. He hated it. The pay was good, but the business left him drained.

After learning about the Pareto Principle (more commonly known as the 80-20 Principle), Ferriss had a revelation: he streamlined his business, eliminating distractions and automating systems until it was not only more profitable, but also took less of his time. Much less. He took a “mini-retirement”, and then decided to write a book about “lifestyle design”, about creating a life that balances work and play, maximizing the positives of both.

Ferriss argues that by eliminating that 20% of productivity that eats up most of your time, you can live in a much more efficient fashion, and the entire book revolves around that concept in various ways, hence the title The 4-Hour Workweek. In some ways, the book itself reads like a blog, as it’s broken down into lots of little pieces: some of them step-by-step advice, some of them anecdotal, and some of them philosophical.

  • Define your objectives. Decide what’s important. Set goals. Ask yourself, “What do I really want?”
  • Eliminate distractions to free up time. Learn to be effective, not efficient. Focus on the 20% of stuff that’s important and ignore the 80% that isn’t. Put yourself on a low-information diet. Learn to shunt aside interruptions, and learn to say “no”.
  • Automate your cash flow to increase income. Outsource your life — hire a virtual assistant to handle menial tasks. Develop a business that can run on auto-pilot.
  • Liberate yourself from traditional expectations. Design your job to increase mobility. This could mean working from home, or it could mean using geographic arbitrage to take mini-retirements in countries with favorable exchange rates.

Right off the bat, the book makes it clear that you should pick and choose from the material presented within, and that’s a vital caveat for any personal productivity book - but especially this one.

Step I: D is for Definition

Here’s one key exercise from this section that really shows what he’s talking about. Spend about five minutes and define your dream. If it wasn’t for the things you had to do, what would you be doing with your life right now?

Now, spend another five minutes and define your nightmare in as much detail as possible. What is the absolute worst thing that could happen if you followed that dream?

If you take the dream and compare it to the nightmare, is that possible nightmare really bad enough to abandon your dream?

From there, the book goes into a very detailed process of breaking down that dream into tangibles and seeing how close you really are to that dream - and sets up the remainder of the book, which identifies things you can do to reach that dream.

Step II: E is for Elimination

In terms of techniques that you can really use to improve your day to day life, this section has the best advice. It focuses on some very straightforward techniques for eliminating most of the regular mundane activities that fill our professional lives. Here are seven examples:

2. Stop all multitasking immediately. This means when you’re trying to write, close your email program and your instant messenger program and your web browser and just focus on writing, nothing else. This allows you to churn out the task way faster.

3. Force yourself to end your day at 4 PM or end your week on Thursday. Even if you have to come in on Friday, do nothing (or, even better, focus on something to develop yourself). The goal here is to learn to compress your productive time.

4. Go on a one week media fast. Basically, avoid television (other than one hour a day for enjoyment/relaxation) and nonfiction reading of any kind (including news, newspapers, magazines, the web, etc.). By the end of it, you’ll discover that the media and information overload was giving you a mild attention deficit.

5. Check email only twice a day. Combining this with the “no multitasking” principle enables email to only eat up a sliver of my time when it used to seemingly bog down everything.

6. Never, ever have a meeting without a clear agenda. If someone suggests a meeting, request the specific agenda of the meeting. If there isn’t one, ask why you’re meeting at all. Often, meetings will become more productive or, if they were really time wasters to begin with, they’ll vanish into thin air.

Step III: A is for Automation

This section is a lengthy description of how to become a little or no-value-added entrepreneur - in other words, a middleman. The idea is that if you set up being a middleman appropriately, you can create a stream of passive income that permits you to make money with very little effort.

While this is interesting to some people, the truth is that it’s not quite as easy as the author makes it out to be. It relies heavily on salesmanship (the ability to convince people you have a product that they want) and luck (stumbling into a market). If you have both (and the examples he uses have both), you can do quite well, but such things are never a guarantee.

Step IV: L is for Liberation

The final section ties the pieces of the puzzle together into an overall picture. In essence, it takes the dreams defined in the first part, the enhanced productivity of the second part, and the passive income of the third part and creates that titular four hour workweek.

The first step is to change your job so that you can work remotely. You can do this by getting efficient (as described in the second step), then demonstrating your efficiency during sick or vacation leave, then requesting some time away from the office as part of your routine, then gradually shifting to an all-remote life. This way, you can tackle the work from anywhere on your own terms. Of course, this may also lead you to quit your job if you are able to build up new opportunities (like those from the third section).

What do you do with the free time? That’s the entire point of this book, that time is the really valuable asset we have in our lives, not money. Time allows you to follow your dreams, and this entire book’s purpose (at least steps two and three) has been about moving more and more time into your own personal life so you can do these things.

Other key concepts

  • Ask yourself, “If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?”
  • How to double your reading speed in ten minutes.
  • Why it’s more productive to carry around a written to-do list than to keep one on your computer.
  • Learn the art of non-finishing. This is all about the sunk cost fallacy: just because you paid $10 to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3 doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to watch the entire thing.
  • How to be more efficient with e-mail.
  • How to reduce clutter from your life.
  • If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.
  • Life exists to be enjoyed — the most important thing is to feel good about yourself.
  • Why geographic arbitrage is a great way to enhance your relative income.
  • The value of a virtual assistant.

Source 1: http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2007/04/29/review-the-4-hour-workweek/

Source 2: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/08/28/book-review-the-4-hour-workweek/

Purchase: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307353133?tag=onejourney-20

Tim Ferriss

The 4 hour work week.

the 4 hour work week summary

15 minute read    Audio Available

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The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss is a revolutionary guide to transforming your life and redefining the idea of retirement. Forget waiting until your later years to enjoy the sweeter parts of life – this book offers practical tips and case studies from people who have already implemented successful strategies to double their income, overcome common obstacles, and reinvent themselves.

Meet the author

Tim Ferriss is a well-known author, podcaster, and entrepreneur who has built a reputation for himself in the world of personal development. His ability to distill complex ideas and strategies into actionable advice has made him a sought-after speaker and consultant for businesses of all sizes. Whether you’re looking to improve your productivity, optimize your health, or build a successful business, Tim Ferriss has the insights and experience to help you succeed.

The 4 Hour Work Week Summary

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Are you tired of the daily grind? Dreaming of a life where you can work on your own terms and have the freedom to do what you love? Look no further than “The 4-Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferriss.

In this groundbreaking book, Ferriss shares his secrets to escaping the 9-5 grind and living life on your own terms. Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, a freelancer, or simply someone who wants to create a better work-life balance, this book is your ultimate guide to achieving the lifestyle of your dreams.

Ferriss introduces unconventional strategies that will help you streamline your work, automate your tasks, and eliminate unnecessary distractions. From outsourcing to remote work, from passive income streams to mini-retirements, he provides practical advice and actionable tips to help you escape the traditional work model and embrace a life of freedom and fulfillment.

So, if you’re ready to break free from the chains of the 9-5 grind, join me as we dive into the transformative world of “The 4-Hour Work Week.”

Understanding the 9-5 grind and its limitations

The 9-5 grind has become synonymous with the traditional work model that most people are stuck in. It’s the routine of waking up early, commuting to work, spending long hours in the office, and then coming home exhausted, only to repeat the cycle the next day.

This lifestyle often leaves little time for personal pursuits, hobbies, and quality time with loved ones. Moreover, it can be mentally and emotionally draining, leading to burnout and a lack of fulfillment.

“The 4-Hour Work Week” challenges this conventional way of thinking and offers a new perspective on work and life. Ferriss argues that the 9-5 grind is not the only path to success and happiness. He believes in working smarter, not harder, and finding ways to maximize productivity while minimizing the time spent on tasks that don’t contribute to your goals.

By questioning the status quo and reevaluating our priorities, we can break free from the limitations of the 9-5 grind and create a life that aligns with our values and passions.

Key principles and concepts from the book

In “The 4-Hour Work Week,” Ferriss introduces several key principles and concepts that are essential to escaping the 9-5 grind. One of the central ideas is the concept of lifestyle design, which involves designing your life in a way that allows you to do what you love, have more free time, and experience greater fulfillment. This involves setting clear goals and defining your ideal lifestyle, which serves as the foundation for the actions you’ll take to achieve it.

Another important concept is the idea of outsourcing and automation. Ferriss advocates for delegating tasks that are time-consuming or don’t require your direct involvement, allowing you to focus on the activities that truly matter. By leveraging virtual assistants, freelancers, and technology, you can offload repetitive or low-value tasks, freeing up your time and energy for more important endeavors.

Setting goals and defining your ideal lifestyle

Before you can escape the 9-5 grind, it’s crucial to have a clear vision of what you want your life to look like. In “The 4-Hour Work Week,” Ferriss emphasizes the importance of setting goals and defining your ideal lifestyle. This involves identifying your values, passions, and priorities and determining how work fits into the bigger picture.

To set effective goals, Ferriss suggests using the SMART framework – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. By setting specific and measurable goals, you’ll have a clear target to work towards. Additionally, it’s important to ensure that your goals are relevant to your overall vision and that they are achievable within a realistic timeframe.

Time management techniques for increased productivity

One of the key challenges in escaping the 9-5 grind is managing your time effectively. In “The 4-Hour Work Week,” Ferriss provides several time management techniques that can help you become more productive and efficient. One of the strategies he recommends is the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. This principle states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. By identifying the most critical 20% of tasks that contribute to your goals, you can prioritize them and focus your time and energy on what truly matters.

Another time management technique Ferriss suggests is the use of batching and time blocking. Batching involves grouping similar tasks together and completing them in a concentrated period, which can help minimize distractions and improve productivity. Time blocking, on the other hand, involves scheduling specific blocks of time for different activities, ensuring that you allocate enough time for your most important tasks while also allowing for breaks and personal time.

Outsourcing and automation strategies

Outsourcing and automation are key strategies in escaping the 9-5 grind and reclaiming your time. Ferriss encourages readers to identify tasks that can be outsourced or automated, freeing up their time for more important activities. Whether it’s hiring virtual assistants, using freelancers, or leveraging technology, there are numerous opportunities to delegate low-value tasks and focus on high-impact work.

When it comes to outsourcing, Ferriss advises being clear about your expectations, setting up systems and processes, and effectively communicating with your team. By establishing clear guidelines and providing feedback, you can ensure that tasks are completed to your satisfaction, allowing you to focus on the bigger picture.

Building passive income streams

Passive income is a central theme in “The 4-Hour Work Week.” Ferriss introduces various strategies to generate passive income, which can provide financial security and freedom. Passive income refers to income that is earned with minimal effort or ongoing involvement. It’s about creating systems and assets that generate income while you focus on other activities or enjoy your free time.

There are numerous ways to build passive income streams, including creating and selling digital products, investing in real estate, building an online business, or licensing your intellectual property. The key is to identify opportunities that align with your skills, interests, and resources, and to invest time upfront to set up the systems that will generate income in the long run.

Steps to escape the 9-5 grind and achieve a more flexible lifestyle

Escaping the 9-5 grind requires a deliberate and strategic approach. In “The 4-Hour Work Week,” Ferriss outlines several steps to help you transition to a more flexible lifestyle.

These steps include:

  • Defining your ideal lifestyle: Take the time to envision your ideal life, considering factors such as your work, travel, relationships, and personal pursuits.
  • Setting goals and priorities: Determine what you want to achieve and prioritize your goals. Break them down into actionable steps that you can take to move closer to your vision.
  • Outsourcing and automation: Identify tasks that can be delegated or automated, allowing you to focus on higher-value activities.
  • Building passive income streams: Explore opportunities to generate passive income and invest time and resources in creating income-generating assets.
  • Embracing remote work: If possible, explore remote work options that allow you to work from anywhere and have more control over your schedule.
  • Taking mini-retirements: Instead of waiting until retirement age to enjoy life, consider taking mini-retirements throughout your career. These periods of extended time off can provide rejuvenation and new perspectives.

Criticisms and Limitations of the 4-Hour Work Week

While “The 4-Hour Work Week” has garnered immense popularity and praise, it’s not without its criticisms and limitations. Some argue that Ferriss’s strategies are only applicable to certain industries or individuals with specific skills. Others question the feasibility of achieving a four-hour workweek for everyone, pointing out that it may not be realistic in certain professions or stages of life.

Additionally, some critics argue that Ferriss’s emphasis on productivity and efficiency can lead to a neglect of work-life balance and personal well-being. They argue that constantly striving for optimization and hustle can result in burnout and a lack of fulfillment, ultimately contradicting the book’s goal of achieving a more balanced and fulfilling life. Conclusion and final thoughts

“The 4-Hour Work Week” offers a refreshing perspective on work and life, challenging the conventional notion of the 9-5 grind and providing practical strategies to escape it. While not all of Ferriss’s ideas may be applicable to everyone, the book serves as a valuable resource for those seeking a better work-life balance, increased flexibility, and the freedom to pursue their passions.

By embracing the principles and concepts outlined in “The 4-Hour Work Week,” you can take control of your time, define your ideal lifestyle, and create a life that aligns with your values and aspirations. Whether you choose to work remotely, build passive income streams, or take mini-retirements, the key is to be intentional and proactive in designing a life that brings you joy and fulfillment.

So, if you’re ready to break free from the chains of the 9-5 grind and embark on a transformative journey towards a more flexible and fulfilling lifestyle, “The 4-Hour Work Week” is your ultimate guide. Remember, escaping the 9-5 grind is not just a dream but a possibility that can be realized with the right mindset, strategies, and actions.

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The 4-Hour Workweek

Escape 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich, about the summary.

The 4-Hour Workweek introduces the fast-growing subculture of what author Tim Ferriss has dubbed the “New Rich.” Members have mastered the currencies of time and mobility and have reached living a life of luxury way before their traditional retirement age has been reached. Who isn’t lured to follow the book’s subtitle, “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”? Full of actionable advice that continues to resonate, this well-written book deserves its long-standing bestseller rankings. Our look at Ferriss’ book offers a peek into your chance to have it all.

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Home » Business » The 4-Hour Work Week Speed Summary w/ PDF

The 4-Hour Work Week Speed Summary w/ PDF

Tim Ferriss’s groundbreaking book “The 4-Hour Workweek” outlines a new way of living and working by cutting down on wasteful effort focusing your energy on what matters.

A 3 Minute Summary of the 15 Core Lessons

#1 Focus On What Matters Ferriss advises that spending the majority of your efforts on things you’re good at or your best ideas will result in greater proportional returns/rewards than trying to spread yourself thin over too many tasks or business ideas.

#2 Working Less is Better We’re trained from a young age to believe that working fewer hours means that we’re lazy, but the truth is that those who can work less and still succeed are simply smarter.

#3 Don’t Measure Success by Time Spent Working. Time spent worked does not necessarily equal time well spent. It’s better to do good work in one hour than mediocre work over eight hours.

#4 Make Sure Business Ideas are Profitable It doesn’t matter how well you think an idea will work out on the market; always do research and ask potential consumers if they would pay for your efforts before you begin spending time and money on a business venture. The only good ideas are profitable ones.

#5 Fewer Choices is Better Ferriss agrees with the central premise of Barry Schwartz’s “The Paradox of Choice”. Give your customers fewer options and you’ll receive more orders and more satisfaction from them. More options are also usually more costly in terms of both customer service and manufacturing for your part, anyway.

#6 Use Time Smartly The more time we give ourselves to do a task, the longer we’re likely to take to complete it. Be smart with your deadlines and plan ahead to partition and value your time appropriately and your own efficacy and efficiency will skyrocket.

#7 Don’t Accept the Standard Work Week This is arguably the central premise of the book. There’s no reason beyond societal agreement that the typical workday should take eight hours. Ferriss argues that this is not only ineffective for many people but it’s also a waste of the most valuable resource of all: time.

#8 Practice Selective Ignorance Ferriss suggests that focusing your attention on only things that matter will increase your attention span and improve your mood. Since we’re all bombarded with far too many information inputs throughout the day, such a practice is likely to result in a happier lifestyle and a more appropriate focus on the things that are important in our lives. Of course, focusing on what matters will also improve the end results of your work.

#9 Follow the 80/20 Rule Pareto’s Principle states that 80% of output comes from just 20% of input. In business parlance, a small minority of your consumers or product will bring in the majority of your profits. Keeping this in mind can help you effectively focus on the customers who are actually profitable to your business rather than wasting resources and time on a majority of customers that don’t bring in the big bucks.

#10 Don’t Be Afraid to Take Risks It’s human nature to be cautious before taking a leap of faith. But too many people never experience what they want in life and spend too many years languishing in jobs that they hate. It’s always better to take a risk and try for freedom and success than it is to accept mediocrity and boredom. Ferriss states, wisely, that there’s only one life to live; it’s up to us to make the most of it.

#11 Let Go of Material Possessions We live in a consumerist culture, to be sure. But Ferriss argues that allowing yourself to be swept up in the pursuit of more possessions will only cause significant mental and emotional baggage that will lower your quality of life. When taking a trip or purchasing things for a home, make an effort to reduce your material possessions and you’ll feel liberated and end up wasting less time and money on things that don’t really matter.

#12 Don’t Focus on Becoming Rich Becoming rich affords a luxurious lifestyle and plenty of free time, both of which are what people actually want when they imagine having lots of commas in their bank statement. But you can achieve a luxurious lifestyle with lots of free time without having billions in your name. Focus on reaching your ideal lifestyle instead of an arbitrary financial number and you’ll experience happiness that much sooner.

#13 Charge Premiums! Too many freelancers or business owners don’t properly charge for their services or products that they should. They also sometimes focus on the quantity of service or product rather than quality. This is a mistake. Focusing on higher-quality but higher premium products or services will not only result in less work to turn the same amount of money but also more satisfied customers. The 80/20 rule about effort applies here, as well.

#14 Do Not Defer Ferriss laments those that constantly differ their retirement or goals for later in life. You only live once and disaster could strike at any time. Instead, it’s much smarter to pursue your goals now and live the life you want rather than constantly working yourself to the bone and saving for retirement that won’t even be fully appreciable in your twilight years. Pick your goals, develop a strategy, and pursue your dreams today, not tomorrow.

#15 Follow the DEAL Acronym This stands for Definition, Elimination, Automation, and Liberation. This acronym can help you focus on understanding and achieving your goals. Definition will help you define your goals or dreams so you can take proper action. Elimination inspires you to remove material possessions or distractions that don’t matter to your actual goals. Automation is about minimizing the effort you put into your success, related to the 80/20 rule. Liberation refers to the end result: freeing yourself from the monotony of a 9-to-5 office job and reaching the luxury and freedom you’ve always wanted.

Top 10 Quotes from The 4-Hour Workweek

  • “What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.”
  • “People will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.”
  • “A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.”
  • “The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”
  • “Focus on being productive instead of busy.”
  • “Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner”
  • “Poisonous people do not deserve your time. To think otherwise is masochistic.”
  • “Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it.”
  • “The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is boredom.”
  • “If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.”

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Tim’s 10 Rules for Success

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summary of 4 hour work week

4 Hour Work Week Summary – Tim Ferris (My Review of Top Lessons from the Book)

August 10, 2020

summary of 4 hour work week

Wonderin' about Tim & his 4 Hour Work Week?

Yeah, me too. 

Here's the short on what I figured out.  Tim's 4 Hour Work Week has some things going for it, but hypes other things up too much.

I broke down his 400 pg book broke down into pieces,  so you can get his gist super quick.

Here you'll learn whether this book is worth it's popularity, 'cause I analyze whether it's just a bunch of hippy hoppin' hype or if there's  bunny to pull out of the 4 Hour Work Week after all.

But you are probably wondering if Tim's 4 Hour WW will help you

It certainly helped me

Tim helped me optimize my time by thinking about hours differently. 

But before we dive into the good, the bad and the ugly of the 4 Hour Work Week,

A lil about me...

(just so you know who's behind the scenes)

summary of 4 hour work week

From 2014 to now, I went from living in a studio apartment in Detroit to living in a nice apartment in San Fran by building and ranking simple websites that generate customers for small businesses, like the tree service site next to me. 

Look: If you combine this online passive income business model with Tim's automation and outsourcing tactics and you've got the structure for a lifestyle of freedom. 

Want proof? 

Check this out:

Fact: 7 months after I went all into this lead generation coaching program , I left my 9-5 job for good.

Learn how I did it via the "Show Me How" below.

summary of 4 hour work week

Let's get into the meat of the 4 Hour Work Week

tim-ferriss-4-hour-work-week

About Tim Ferriss

Do you know where Tim grew up or where he graduated from? 

summary of 4 hour work week

Quick Stats

Get the basic info like how many copies have sold, how much does the 4 Hour WW cost and more.

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Key Concepts of Tim's 4 Hour WW

Get the Meat of the Four Hour Work Week via this summary of the 4 Steps 

summary of 4 hour work week

4 Hour Work Week Video Summary

Listen to a 6 minute summary of the 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss himself . 

Four Hour Work Week Book in PDF Form

Read this New York Times Best Seller Book via your computer or phone with this free pdf. 

Quick Stats on the Four Hour Work Week

Who is tim ferriss.

summary of 4 hour work week

Tim grew up in East Hampton, New York. 

After graduating from a catholic high school, Tim went on to Princeton to study East Asia, ultimately writing his thesis about a practice in Japanese culture. 

Upon completing his Bachelors degree he worked sales at a data storage business. 

While working this job, he began developing his own business, BrainQuick , which was bought by a UK investment firm in 2010 and is now being sold on Vitamin Planet . 

Following the sale of his business, Tim began investing in other startups, such as Evernote and Shopify. 

In addition to enjoying the sales of his 5 books (the 4 Hour series, Tools for Titans, and Tribe of Mentors), Tim has his own podcast ( The Tim Ferris Show ) and briefly had his own television shows, including " Trial by Fire ."

Tim Ferriss's 4 Hour Work Week: 4 Part Summary

part 1 of timothy ferriss' four hr work week

Part 1: Distinguish What You Want From Where You Are

Tim begins the book by reframing the common duality of the rich and the poor, indicating that today's comparison is between the "New Rich" vs. "Deferrers" (aka "Slow Laners," according to MJ Demarco, author of The Millionaire Fastlane )

  • Ambition : To Have Others Work for You
  • Labor : To prevent work for work's sake, using the 80-20 Rule
  • Goal : to do that which excites you. 
  • Desired Position : To be neither the boss nor the employee, but the owner.
  • Possessions : To have more quality and less clutter. 
  • Freedom : Having the ability to pursue your dreams
  • Ambition : To Work For Yourself    
  • Labor : To Work WHEN You want to
  • Goal : to retire early or young. 
  • Desired Position : To be the boss, not the employee. 
  • Possessions : To have more. 
  • Freedom : To not have to do that which you don't like to do.  

This "recalibration" is the first step in the mindset change that Tim outlines in the 4 Hour Work Week. 

Throughout the rest of part 1, Tim upsets the traditional middle-class paradigm of working a job to obtain the goal of retirement, and redefines "laziness" as you allowing yourself to be directed by external forces, like your parents and the rules of your culture embed commandments by saying things like:

  • you must go to college
  • then you must get married
  • and then you must work 40 hours per week for the next 40 years
  • then you can retire in your twilight years

Traditional education teaches us to be " jacks of all trades ," whereas Tim supports the now common idea of "building on your strengths" and "hiring your weaknesses," saying that to try to become perfect in everything is worthless in comparison to taking your in-born talents and practiced skills and running with them. 

That's not to say that Tim's saying not to do things that make you uncomfortable. 

One common mistake of society, says Tim, is saying 'all stress is bad.'

Tim scopes in on this "stressful topic" (catch the pun?), and makes a distinction between 2 kinds of stress: Distress (bad) and Eustress (good). 

You might be asking

"What, exactly is the difference?"

"Distress refers to harmful stimuli that make you weaker, less confident and less able. 

Examples of Distress are:

  • Destructive Criticism
  • Abusive Bosses
  • Smashing Your Face on a Curb

(T4HWW, p.37)

"Eustress...is a word most of you have probably never heard. Eu- , a Greek prefix for 'healthy,' is used in the same sense in the word 'euphoria.'"

Examples of Eustress are:

  • Role Models who push us to exceed our limits
  • Physical training that removes our spare tires
  • Risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action

part 2 of timothy ferriss' four hr work week

Part 2: Eliminate the Crap to Get to the Core

Key distinction: effective vs efficiency

pareto principle

goal: maximum income from minimum necessary effort (how tim weeded out his customer base)

"Being busy is a form of laziness-lazy thinking and indiscriminate action" p.75 - Tim Ferriss 

Refuse to be interrupted

Funnel all communication toward immediate action

Tim's Strategies for Eliminating Crap

-Use an email auto responder to notify collegues and customers that you only check email 2x per day, noon and 4pm. Do the same with your office phone. 

Tim's Advice: Move to once per day ASAP!

-Be Polite, yet Direct in conversation

Tim tells the story of when the data storage company hired a new sales manager who prioritized  production over catching up at the water cooler. 

summary of 4 hour work week

Part 3:  Automate the Basics

Income Auto Pilot 1: Finding the Muse (the Inspiration)

"This chapter is for those who want to own businessses and spend little to no time on them."

"Our goal is simple: to create an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time. 

One aspect of this chapter that I especially enjoyed was Tim's multiplicity of examples:

He tells the story of someone's dream business that didn't work and then explained why it didn't work (they didn't know their market well enough). 

Then Tim shares the success of another person who, by doing their due diligence and laying a strong foundation for their business, developed a 7 figure business that required little time, but took about 4 years to set up. 

Towards the end of this section, Tim details the structure of what MJ DeMarco (author of The Millionaire Fastlane ) calls "the Fastlane" to financial freedom.

Tim walks through, step-by-step, showing how you can build a profitable income stream starting with niche research all the way through to retailing your newly manufactured product. 

summary of 4 hour work week

I wouldn't call it a complete guide though, because as it's a book, there's no ongoing mentorship , no Q & A for when you hit obstacles (which is inevitable when you are starting a business).   

But Tim's instructions are sound. 

In fact, that's how he build his supplement company " BrainQuicken ," which made him millions when European investors bought it in 2010. 

part 4 of timothy ferriss' four hr work week

Part 4: Reinventing Your Lifestyle

This section is for employees who like what they do, but would like more flexibility in their hours/location. 

Tim shows how to migrate from needing to be in the office 40 hours each week to working remotely with higher productivity in less time. 

Let's face it

Remote working is on the rise and will only become more popular

Especially due to the reality of Covid-19 lockdowns . 

So how does Tim say to start?

Here's the process he lays out in the 4th section the 4 Hour Work Week:

part 4a of timothy ferriss' four hr work week

Many companies don't like change.

So when you decide you want to suggest your working remote, you'd better make sure that the company values you enough to not just fire you on the spot. 

part 4b of timothy ferriss' four hr work week

After you've become a valuable asset to the company, take some time off by either taking a sick day or using some vacation time. 

And in that time away from the office, focus on being way more productive than you've ever been before. 

part 4c of timothy ferriss' four hr work week

When you go back to your work after having your uber-productive time at home, make sure you drop a report on your manager's desk, showing, in quantifiable metrics, how much you got done while at home when you were "sick."

5 Key Concepts of the 4 Hour Work Week

key concept 1 of timothy ferriss' four hr work week

1. Mini-Retirements

Another extremely valuable lesson that you’ll find in  The Four-Hour Workweek  is the concept of mini-retirements.

 One of the most tragic things about most people’s careers is that by the time they’re retired, they’re too old to be able to make their dreams come true.

It’s a fate that many retirees are realizing every single day, and Timothy Ferriss does us all a favor by suggesting mini-retirements.

His line of thinking is basically: 

"Why not tick things off your bucket list while you’re still young and healthy?" 

If you’re a freelancer or a “digital nomad,” you can take holidays whenever you please, and it’s a very healthy habit to get into.

 It can leave you feeling refreshed and more enthusiastic about your career.

key concept 2 of timothy ferriss' four hr work week

2. Low Information Diet

This is another lesson you’ll find within the pages of  The Four-Hour Workweek , and it’s a little confusing.

But the general concept of a Low Information Diet is simple – don’t spend too much time keeping up on current events.

Remember, Timothy Ferriss defines wealth as free time, so he’s very serious about not  wasting  this valuable resource.

He believes that watching news and reading articles online is one of the best ways to waste your time, and he’s right.

It can be tempting to let your workday drain away by watching YouTube and reading viral articles – especially if you’re working online.

All of these temptations are just one click away, and all online entrepreneurs know that this can be a very dangerous thing. Timothy Ferriss argues that people can easily absorb all necessary information about the world by simply interacting with other people. If it’s a major world event, you’re going to hear about it. There’s no need to constantly refresh the homepage of your favorite news site.

But there is one area where some people think Ferriss goes too far. One of the exercises outlined in this book is actually one where you don’t read any books – not even non-fiction novels. Reading is always useful, and it can be peaceful and meditative. It can also be a great way to give our eyes a break from being in front of the computer screen all day long.

key concept 3 of timothy ferriss' four hr work week

3. Geoarbitrage

No, this isn’t the name of some fancy new garbage compactor.

Geoarbitrage is actually one of the most attractive features of a digitally nomadic lifestyle.

We all know that living in certain countries can be a lot cheaper – especially if you’re earning American dollars online.

This is why so many digital nomads are attracted to Southeast Asian nations such as Vietnam and Thailand.

summary of 4 hour work week

If your expenses are low, that means that your earning potential goes through the roof.

But as Timothy Ferriss points out, this beneficial exchange rate gives you quite a few options.

You might choose not to save money, but to spend  more money than ever before.

Extravagant, luxurious lifestyles are possible when the exchange rate is stacked in your favor.

Then again, you might also choose to simply work much less than you usually would, giving you much more free time to do whatever you want.

Of course, you can always take the slow lane and simply save/invest your money!

summary of 4 hour work week

Whatever you choose to do, there’s no denying that this one of the main reasons why people get so obsessed with a digitally nomadic lifestyle.

Timothy Ferriss knows this, and he makes sure to get his readers excited about it in The Four-Hour Workweek .

It’s yet another inspiring section of the book, and every part of this particular fantasy is 100% true.

key concept 4 of timothy ferriss' four hr work week

4. Passive Income

Another one of the benefits of being a digital nomad is having Passive Income, and this is something that Timothy Ferriss makes sure to mention in  The Four-Hour Workweek .

For many people, this is the ideal business.

And it doesn’t take a genius to find out why so many people desperately want to establish sources of passive income.

Once you’ve set these assets up, they require little to no actual work to maintain – and yet the money keeps on pouring in.

summary of 4 hour work week

In the eyes of Timothy Ferriss, this is the ideal source of income for a digital nomad, because it requires less time than any other business.

Remember, free time is the real source of wealth according to this book.

 There is nothing inherently wrong with passive income, and it’s generally a great business to get into.

The problems start when you start dealing with scams, pyramid schemes, and other things of that nature.

There’s also the fact that earning an income in a more traditional way (by putting in hours of work) is almost always more reliable.

key concept 5 of timothy ferriss' four hr work week

5. Increasing Productivity

If you’re going to reduce your workload to just four hours per week, you’re going to need maximize your productivity.

This is something that Tim Ferriss is very much aware of, and he gives the reader quite a few tips on working much more efficiently.

After all, his definition of wealth is having lots of free time.

It makes sense to use valuable techniques to ensure we’re getting the most free time possible.

A lot of this revolves around the Pareto Principle, which states that 20 percent of the inputs should be responsible for 80 percent of the outputs.

key concept 5a of timothy ferriss' four hr work week

In other words you should be putting way less into your business than what you’re getting out of it.

Another interesting concept discussed in  The Four-Hour Workweek  is Parkinson’s Law.

key concept 5b of timothy ferriss' four hr work week

This states that tasks seem more important if we give ourselves a long period of time do complete that task.

By establishing clear deadlines, we ensure that no task becomes too important and time consuming.

This is something every good digital nomad knows, as you simply cannot let one project drain attention from everything else you’ve got going in your business.

“Batching” is another interesting technique that saves a lot of time.

Batching is simply doing tasks one at a time until they are complete – especially if they’re boring and unenjoyable.

Getting things out of the way as quickly as possible is very important, and it’s something that Timothy Ferriss relies heavily on.

Half finishing tasks before moving on to something else is very inefficient, and it lengthens your workday considerably.

Social Commentary

social commentary on the 4 hour work week from quora and reddit

What Are People on Reddit & Quora Saying About the 4 Hour Work Week?

Reddit Member kelly_wood commented saying the "book really did help me learn to streamline and delegrate things..."

summary of 4 hour work week

Reddit Member magictravelblog commented saying "we've had some success although  I'm not sure it's textbook 4 Hour Work Week ..."

summary of 4 hour work week

Quora Member Jim Reggie commented saying "It was a pretty fun read..."

summary of 4 hour work week

How the 4 Hour Work Week Helped Me Quit My 9-5 & Build My Money Tree

summary of 4 hour work week

Having read the 4 Hour Work Week in 2013, it's easy to see the impact that Tim's thoughts have helped me scale my business and move from the rat race into the New Rich. 

Tim Ferriss moved my focus from getting a higher paying job to building an online scalable business that is almost completely passive (after initial set up) and very easy to scale.

Although I didn't have any prior experience on making money on the internet, the coaching program I bumped into was geared to help motivated people like me get started building and ranking simple websites, that are then rented to local service providers, such as tree service businesses. 

summary of 4 hour work week

Each month, since 2015, I've been paid for the phone calls that this top ranking website.

Here's a few of the checks I've received. 

summary of 4 hour work week

The great part about this business is you can scale it to the moon!

summary of 4 hour work week

You can go into 10 or even 100 different niches (tree service, limo rental, HVAC, etc.) in a single city and then rinse and repeat to cover multiple cities.

Imagine after you've put together a dozen of these sites, and you're banking 10k a month. 

How does your life change? 

How would  you spend your time?

I spent a few months traveling in Europe and then relocated from Michigan to California. 

summary of 4 hour work week

Traveling Europe with Friends

summary of 4 hour work week

After you've ranked these websites, they don't require much upkeep to stay parked at the top of the page. You can just let it do its thing and they'll keep bringing in monthly mailbox money. 

I became a part of this  lead generation coaching program 6 years ago, and today I control over 70 of these virtual rental properties.

Every year, I keep adding more, so my income is growing without me trading my time for dollars anymore . 

I simply focus on making more of these digital assets and my income continues to go up. 

summary of 4 hour work week

Each month, money is delivered to my mail box because of work I did 6 years ago. 

Getting paid over and over again reminds me of the value I bring to small businesses, and that feeling is irreplaceable. 

But how many more businesses need help getting more customers? 

Thousands! What kind of value can you create?!

The potential is unlimited.

Next time you are driving to work, look at the businesses that line the sides of the street, see the value that learning local lead generation can bring to them. 

An especially relevant opportunity because of  Covid-19 is providing restaurants with take out customers, since most dine-in locations are either closed or restricted to a fraction of capacity. 

Become skilled in lead generation and you'll be able to create value for hundreds of other business owners and their employees, as I have and many in our community of 5,700 entrepreneurially-minded people have as well.

Patric recently posted in our group, sharing his story:

summary of 4 hour work week

Patric has created lead gen sites that supply leads for over 4 dozen businesses throughout the United States, freeing himself from his day job as well as providing him with a positive, like-minded community. 

Local Lead Generation is the business model for those wanting to join the New Rich in 2020. 

If you'd like to learn more, click on the button below to learn how to  get started building your digital assets today .

summary of 4 hour work week

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summary of 4 hour work week

How I implemented the 4-Hour Workweek methodology and doubled my results

the 4-hour workweek

Imagine one thing for a minute: a working week of only four hours. Don’t worry; the idea is that you’d still be making enough money. You’ll be working less, but you’ll be more productive.

What would you do with the time you have left? Movies. A book. Maintaining friendships and family values. Every day would be like a mini vacation if you followed the 4-hour workweek.

Timothy Ferriss, an American author and entrepreneur, says that is possible. His book, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich , changed many people’s lives. At least that’s what some of the readers claim: a complete life makeover… to the better. Well, Tim Ferriss is an advisor to Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Evernote, StumbleUpon, and other big-name companies. He must know what he’s talking about, right?

In its basis, The 4-Hour Workweek is a productivity concept. The author himself tested it. He went from making $40,000 per year on an 80-hour workweek to making $40,000 per month on a 4-hour workweek. How is that even possible? If it was a 4-hour workday, the concept would be believable. This way, it seems out of reason. I thought that, too. When I read the book, I realized it was more realistic and actionable than I expected.

I changed my lifestyle thanks to this book.

I would love to share that experience with you.

Let Me Briefly Explain the Concept of the 4-Hour Workweek

(if you have read the book, you may want to skip this part of the post)

This book is meant to be the Bible of entrepreneurs and definitely one of the top business books .

If you think about it, you surely know someone who owns a company and is absolutely consumed by it. Tim Ferriss is convincing entrepreneurs that there’s a better way to live: work less and make more money.

I find that this book is not only the Bible of entrepreneurs, but it’s also the Bible of remote workers.

Being in the freelance industry, I can divide most of the freelancers I know in two categories:

  • Those who work too much and have no time to enjoy life, and
  • Those who are too literate about the term “flexible” in their job description, so they rarely work and don’t make enough money to pay the bills.

Is there a middle ground in between these two extremes?

According to Tim Ferriss, we should make four major steps to make the transition towards the 4-hour workweek. DEAL is the name of this system, meaning Definition, Elimination, Automation, and Liberation.

1. Definition

Define your goal in this life and estimate its cost. In this stage, you will envision the fundamentals of your entirely new lifestyle. Then, you’ll add the remaining three ingredients.

2. Elimination

What do you need to eliminate? Your old mindset about time management. In other words, you should escape the office . Once you define your goal and you understand how much money you need to make it happen, you’ll find the source of that income. The source won’t be the work in the office .

Remember: your goal is not building a multimillion-dollar empire. It’s about living a stress-free life that lets you experience the most of it.

Ferriss recommends techniques for cultivating selective ignorance. You won’t be spending time on processing information you don’t need. You’ll start ignoring things that are not important. You’ll learn how to value your time .

Experts also recommend that changing one’s morning drill can improve your day’s productivity. By following an efficient routine in the morning can save help save entrepreneurs and remote workers more hours.

3. Automation

For this part, the author teaches you how to put cash flow on autopilot. Implementing the previous two steps should provide you with a stable income and tons of free time. What do you do with it? In other words, you get to the tricky what’s next? stage. Tim Ferriss suggests traveling .

4. Liberation

“The mobile manifesto for the globally inclined” – that’s how Tim Ferriss defines liberation. He suggests a concept of mini retirements . The lifestyle of mobility is not about cheap travel. That can get boring. The author recommends you to start thinking about more important things, such as the purpose you have in this life and the value you can bring to other people.

DEAL sounds good on paper, doesn’t it? The author shares his own experience with this lifestyle, and it’s pretty successful. Does it work for others? I’ll tell you how it worked (and didn’t work) for me.

writer

When this book came into my hands, I was working as a writer for a local magazine. I always loved writing. Even essays were an enjoyable assignment if you ask me. I decided to stay on the same track.

My goal was to keep writing, but I finally made the decision: I’ll try freelancing. I will keep doing what I love doing, but I’ll be doing my best to make more money with less work.

Tim Ferriss explains there’s a difference between Deferrers (those who live carefully only to find that life has passed them by) and The New Rich (those who have goals, distinct priorities, and life philosophies). The New Rich have others working for them. They prevent work for work’s sake. They do the minimum necessary for maximum results. That’s the goal I wanted to achieve. My current position wasn’t allowing me to do that, so I had to take the next step:

The elimination

I was on the wrong train. The job in the local magazine brought me a decent income. I could buy all the things I wanted to buy. I could afford a decent vacation on a nearby destination. However, I was working too much. I came down to a moment when I realized that this job got the best of me. I gave what I had to give and I got what I had to get in return. It was a dead end.

I never liked working in an office. Do you know what the worst part was? Waking up early in the morning. Getting dressed up. Putting a happy face on before entering the office. Doing small talk that bored me to death.

Oh wait, those were the minor bummers. Here’s the big one: doing a writing job in an uninspiring office with no privacy . Being a writer in an office. Can you think of an oxymoron bigger than that?

Elimination was a challenge. I had a safe job and I was scared to leave it and head off into the unknown. I did a research on the freelance writing industry and decided to take my chances. There’s no winning without risking.

I started working through Upwork . My experience enabled me to complete the projects well. The income was good, but unstable. I wasn’t able to find one client after another. Still, this job enabled me to work less. I brought down my working hours from eight to six per day. I was far from the 4-hour work week, but I was at a better place than previously.

What happened with the part the New Rich has others working for them ? I wasn’t there yet. That’s when I decided to try editing. It takes less time and effort than writing, and another person is taking care of the main part of the job. When you’re a writer, you can’t exactly take delegation literally. That’s why I had to improvise.

Editing seemed like a nice opportunity, but it doesn’t pay well on platforms like Upwork. This was the turning point.

I didn’t want to keep looking for new clients all the time. I wanted a steady workflow and I wanted to try myself as a professional editor without working for scraps. That’s when I applied for a job at BestDissertation . I got hired.

At first, I was on a test period. I was getting simple papers to edit. It soon got better. I started getting work whenever I asked for it. At one moment, I was overloaded with tasks. That made me realize: wait, I’m making way more money than before, but is this what I was looking for? The point was to reduce the working hours while making a steady, decent income.

How does an entrepreneur automate their income? Here’s an example: a businessman invests in four trucks. He finds drivers to work for him. He finds people to run the business for him. They run the logistics process. The owner of the business is practically earning money with zero management on their part.

For a writer or editor, the process of automation is a bit trickier. As I said this is a book for entrepreneurs, but it’s great for freelancers, too. Freelancers, however, need to improvise a bit.

So how did I implement automation? – I started using various online tools, apps, and productivity systems.

What’s the main method that helped me reduce the working time?

The Pareto Principle (80/20)

According to the Pareto Principle, recommended by Tim Ferriss himself, roughly 20% of your efforts result with roughly 80% of the effects. By doing 20% of the work you’re doing now (of course, you’ll wisely choose those 20%), you’ll achieve 80% of the results you’re reaching at the moment.  

The goal is to observe your entire workload and decide what’s effective and what’s making you waste time. I started assigning “effectivity points” to all my tasks.

As an editor for BestDissertation, I was getting both small and big tasks. The small tasks involved editing essays, articles, PowerPoint presentations, and homework assignments. The big ones were dissertations, theses, case studies, business proposals, and other large projects of great importance.

For starters, I decided to eliminate the small tasks and start taking on large projects exclusively. The best thing about this job is that you can decide what you want to work on. Big projects take more time to edit, but they pay better.

I did my best to establish positive relationships with my customers, so they asked for me when they came back at the website. As it turned out, I was doing less work in volume. However, I was making almost the same amount of money on a weekly basis.

With this method, I managed to reduce my working hours to 3-4 per day.   

Where’s the automation , I hear you ask? Well, first I needed to decide what tasks I would automate. I did that thanks to the Pareto principle. Now, I needed to pick the tools that would help me automate part of my workload.

noplag

Plagiarism in a dissertation? That is a huge no-no. There are several online tools that enable editors to detect plagiarism in a text. I find Noplag to be the best one. It delivers a detailed plagiarism report, which identifies the parts of the text that the author “forgot” to reference.

Now, plagiarism in academic writing is more complex than that. It’s not just about copying someone else’s work, word by word. It’s also about paraphrasing without referencing. This tool is partially effective in identifying that kind of plagiarism, too. When the author copies part of the text, hoping to camouflage the idea with different words, the tool still recognizes that small part coming from a particular online source.

The tool makes an editor’s job much easier, but the results are more reliable at the same time. It saves me a lot of time, since I can identify and add the missing references in few minutes.

grammarly

No, an editor cannot rely on automated editing tools. What’s the point of hiring an editor who’s using software to edit, when you can use that software, too?

I do my job. I read and edit to perfection (well, as close to perfect as it can get). However, I still find Grammarly useful. I use the tool before doing the first reading. It identifies the major issues in the content, such as miswritten or confused words, preposition and verb issues, and even lack of hyphens.

How do I use this? First, I do what an editor does. I edit the client’s content in terms of logical flow, gaps in information, excessiveness, referencing, and every other issue. Finally, I do a final proofreading to make sure everything is fine. After that, I should do another reading of the text. That’s when I use Grammarly. If there’s any issue I neglected, the software will point it out.

AutoCrit

This is manuscript editing software for fiction writers. What does it have to do with editing dissertations? Well, large academic projects have to be well-formatted. Each paragraph has to make sense within the content, but on its own as well. The transitions have to be flawless.

This tool gives you instant feedback. It’s like a fresh set of editing eyes for the manuscript. After going through all stages of the editing process, I use AutoCrit to see if the content needs more polishing. Instead of asking other editors from the team for their opinion, I just automate the process and ask AutoCrit. No waiting, no hassle. Same results.

calibre

This is the tool I use for editing eBooks. I often get orders involving eBook editing. The editing process goes the same way. The formatting process, however, is a bit more complicated when eBooks are in question.

With Calibre, I can see how the work looks like in a comprehensive eBook viewer and I can make the necessary edits along the way.

unroll.me

If you want to see how email overload looks like, check out a freelance editor’s inbox. I used to start each morning with a close examination of the emails. Some of them were super important. Others were important, but didn’t require my immediate attention. Some were completely useless messages, mostly from the newsletters I didn’t even read.

Unroll.Me is a great tool for inbox decluttering . It lets you unsubscribe from all newsletters at once. If you don’t want to do that, you can select the ones you want to unsubscribe from.

The moment I did this, I felt an incredible relief. My inbox got clean and organized. Gmail already gives us a nice message categorization system, so I could finally see its full potential.

As far as email is concerned, I did another important thing. As suggested by Tim Ferriss , I decreased the time I used to spend on checking emails. This is how my work starts: I get my laptop, open my email and answer all important messages. I do not postpone this. When I’m too busy to work on another project, I have a template ready. That practically automates the answering process.

When I’m done answering emails, I start working and I stop thinking about the inbox. Emailing stops being a distraction and becomes a tool that makes communication stress-free.

The Low-Information Diet

This is another important aspect of the decluttering process. Ferriss recommends making the task lists that keep you on track and create a distraction-blocking mindset. He also asks us to set limits on the information we process. If I need to read information about hurricane Irma, I’ll do it after my work is done and I’ll do it at one go. I will not check the news 50 times today, reading the same thing from dozens of different sources.

I used to be one of those information junkies . I had to be aware of the latest trends, tips, and productivity hacks . Instead of choosing a single guide to read on the Pareto principle, I would spend the week exploring different online resources that were repeating the same things. The low-information diet really changed my life. I am still receiving the information I need. However, I pick the right sources to read.

The need for information no longer distracts me from my work.

The results

How did these 4-hour workweek recommendations work out for me?

Thanks to the Pareto principle , I was able to save at least one hour of my daily routine. I needed less time to collect information for a particular project. I decreased the number of projects I was working on. At the moment, I have fewer than 10 regular clients. Thanks to the fact that I’m doing less work, I’m able to complete it more successfully. I am aware of the needs of each and every customer and I’m able to personalize the process. I know what mistakes they usually make and I’m much faster in editing their work.

Thanks to the online tools I use, I’m saving almost 10 minutes per page. Yes, I measure my time. I used to spend about 12-15 minutes editing a single page, and that summed up to 4-5 pages per hour. With the tools and the Pareto method, I am now spending 5-6 minutes per page. The content is still error-free and my editing is just as good as it was.

Thanks to the low-information diet , I became immune to online distractions. I stopped clicking links that appeared on Facebook all the time and seemed like fun. Bored Panda and Distractify? Nevermore. When I sit on the computer to work, I work.

What about the money?

I used to charge $35 per hour of editing work. Now that I’m choosing more complex projects and I found customers who are willing to pay more for good work, I’m charging $55 per hour of content editing.

Let’s do some math, shall we?

A customer asks me to edit a business proposal that’s 36 pages long.

When I used to edit four pages in an hour, this project would take me nine hours to complete. I would charge $35 per hour, so that would be $315. Since I cannot spend nine hours in editing in a single day (that’s impossible, just try it!), I would stretch out the work in three days. In the meantime, I would work on smaller projects, such as essays and homework assignments, just to make more money. I would end up working 6-8 ineffective hours per day.

Now, I can edit approximately 10 pages in a single hour. This kind of project would take me about four hours to complete. I can spend four hours in front of the screen within a day. No problem. I tend to take a longer break in between. So four hours for $55 per hour, that means I’m earning $220 on the same project. However, I am working only three hours in a single day. I’ll take two other projects for the upcoming days, so I’ll earn $660 in three days. You see? Fewer working hours, but better results. More money. No need for smaller projects that take a lot of time and don’t pay enough.

Let’s say I’m working 20 days per month (that’s the usual number of days I work per month). That would take me to $4,400 per month and $52,800 per year. That’s about how much I make with the current workload. For 4 hours a day, I think it’s a pretty good result.

My income is not drastically changed thanks to these principles. However, it’s still higher. The important thing is that I’m working more effectively and spending less time on the job.

No, I’m not working four hours per week. But, four hours per day is pretty good for me. Compared to the office job I had, It’s way better.

What’s with the free time? What’s next?

That’s the big question. I started earning enough money to support a comfortable lifestyle. I didn’t expect so much free time.

I’ll be blunt: I was bored to death . At the start, I was watching more TV shows than I can list. I was getting a lot of sleep and going out all the time. But this life had no purpose. It’s what Ferriss was talking about: I needed true liberation .

The people I knew didn’t have the free time I did, so I was spending most of my time alone. I did a bit of traveling and that was fun, but I was alone all the time.

I was missing a real purpose. I realized: it was writing . That’s how I can give something to society. It’s something that helps me grow and enables me to contribute. As Tony Robbins says , growth and contributions are the core needs of the spirit. They give us fulfillment. I never expected this productivity adventure of mine to lead me to fulfillment, but it did.

Sure, I wasn’t an entrepreneur making millions and changing the world. However, I changed my own life and that was enough.

When I felt the need to be challenged, I started writing again. That’s part of the reason why I decided to write this blog post. The other part is the need to contribute.

Do I recommend it?

The 4-Hour Workweek is a pretty interesting and inspiring book. It helped me a lot. I am not working four hours per week, but I’ll keep taking these principles further and maybe I’ll get there.

I recommend you to try. That’s the least you can do.  

About the Author:

zoe carter

Zoho Projects: An in-depth review

Productivity hacks to improve your remote team today, related posts, sustainable practices to boost operational efficiency, 70% of leaders relate performance issues in businesses to employee skills gap, navigating the data dilemma with workforce analytics, cultivating a culture of efficiency: strategies for management , generational conflicts impacting workplace productivity in the uk and us, work smarter, not harder: how automation can drive workforce efficiency.

A year after the world's biggest 4-day week trial wrapped, the vast majority of companies have kept it in place

  • A year after the world's largest 4-day workweek trial ended, most companies are carrying on with it.
  • 92% of the participant companies are still on the reduced schedule, researchers said Wednesday.
  • "To go back to working on a Friday would feel really wrong. Stupid actually," one CEO said. 

Insider Today

The vast majority of companies that took part in a massive UK trial of a four-day working week are still on the reduced schedule more than a year later, researchers said Wednesday .

Out of 61 companies that took part in the six-month trial in 2022, 54 have continued with the shortened week, with 31 of them — or 51% — saying this is a permanent decision.

The report comes as a follow-up to results published from the largest-ever trial of a four-day working week completed so far.

"It's hard to overstate how good it's been," one of the participants told Business Insider's Beatrice Nolan after the trial's end .

The CEO of one participating consultancy quoted in the study said: "When you realise that day has allowed you to be relaxed and rested, and ready to absolutely go for it on those other four days — you start to realize that to go back to working on a Friday would feel really wrong. Stupid actually."

What's more, the reduced working time didn't cause a loss in company revenue, the researchers said in a summary presented to UK lawmakers in 2023 .

That report said that on average, the companies that shared data saw an average 1.4% revenue increase between the start of the trial and its end.

When looking at a comparable six-month period prior to the trial, that average change increased to 35%, the study said.

The companies involved included online retailers, animation studios, financial service providers, and even a small fish and chip shop.

Workers reported increased work-life balance, a reduction in stress and anxiety, and improved mental and physical health.

The trial involved about 2,900 workers, and took place from June to December 2022, with companies maintaining existing levels of pay.

How the reduced working time was put in place varied from company to company, the study said.

"A range of four-day weeks were therefore developed, from classic 'Friday off' models, to 'staggered,' 'decentralised,' 'annualised,' and 'conditional' structures," the researchers said.

Ahead of the trial, companies committed to a two-month preparation period that included workshops and mentoring, as well as support from companies that had already made the move, the study said.

The study was conducted by researchers at the UK's University of Cambridge, the University of Salford, and independent research organization Autonomy.

The study's results were broadly in line with other flagship experiments in recent years.

Last June, a New Zealand nonprofit released the results of a year-long, 4-day workweek trial that took place across multiple countries, which found that company revenues actually increased by 15%.

summary of 4 hour work week

Watch: 'The 4-Hour Workweek' author Tim Ferriss reveals 2 common principles he's found in successful people

summary of 4 hour work week

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Most UK firms stick with a four-day working week after taking part in world's biggest trial

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  • Of the 61 companies that took part in a six-month four-day working week pilot in 2022, at least 54 (89%) said the policy was still in place, while 31 firms (51%) said they had permanently switched to a shorter working week.

The companies involved were invited to take part in a follow-up study one year on from the world's biggest trial of a shorter working week to date.

Juliet Schor, the report's author and a professor of sociology at Boston College, described the one-year results as "excellent," and said the findings showed the positive effects of shorter working hours were "real and long lasting."

Most companies involved in the world's largest trial of a four-day working week have made the policy permanent, according to a new report.

Of the 61 British companies that took part in a six-month pilot in 2022 , at least 54 (89%) said the policy was still in place, while 31 firms (51%) said they had permanently switched to a four-day working week.

The results, published Wednesday by think tank Autonomy, showed that all the consulted project managers and CEOs said a four-day week had a positive impact on their organization, with more than half (55%) describing the impact as "very positive."

The vast majority (82%) of surveyed companies reported positive impacts on staff wellbeing, while 50% saw positive effects on reducing staff turnover and nearly one-third (32%) said the policy had noticeably improved recruitment.

"Overall results have held and in some cases have even continued to improve," Schor said in a statement.

"Physical and mental health, and work-life balance are significantly better than at six months. Burnout and life satisfaction improvements held steady. Job satisfaction and sleep problems nudged down a bit, but the bulk of the original improvement remains."

Improvements maintained one year on

The report found, however, that staff in firms where the additional day off was only weakly guaranteed, or provided on the condition of meeting certain targets, had some concerns.

For example, four-day working week models that were highly conditional resulted in some staff reporting added stress to meet deadlines, resentment against others and feelings of inequity between employees based on the nature of their role.

The report added that less committed forms of the four-day week policy also left staff less able to plan activities on their day off.

The report said employees tended to use their day off for caring responsibilities, hobbies and chores, with staff keen to prioritize quality time for the weekend.

"One year on from the results of the UK's four-day week pilot, virtually every company we've spoken to has decided to stick with the four-day week," Will Stronge, director of research at Autonomy, said in a statement.

"The improvements in physical and mental health, work-life balance, and general life satisfaction, as well as the reductions in burnout found at the end of the trial have all been maintained one year on," he added.

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IMAGES

  1. The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss: Summary and Lessons

    summary of 4 hour work week

  2. The 4-Hour Workweek

    summary of 4 hour work week

  3. The 4 -Hour Work Week Summary

    summary of 4 hour work week

  4. The 4-Hour Workweek Book Summary by Tim Ferriss

    summary of 4 hour work week

  5. The 4-Hour Work Week Speed Summary w/ PDF

    summary of 4 hour work week

  6. The 4-Hour Workweek Summary (5 Minutes): 20 Lessons Learned & PDF

    summary of 4 hour work week

VIDEO

  1. HOW TO GET MORE DONE IN LESS TIME

  2. "The 4 Hour Work Week"

  3. THE 4 HOUR WORK WEEK !!!1

  4. 4 Hour Work Week Book Summary

  5. 4 Hour Work Week Summary (Tim Ferriss)

  6. 4 Hour Work Week Book Review (IS IT REAL OR BULLSHIT?)

COMMENTS

  1. The 4-Hour Work Week By Tim Ferriss Book Summary

    8 Want to Learn More? Turned down by 26 out of 27 publishers, The 4-Hour Work Week nearly didn't become the No.1 New York Times Bestseller it went on to be. Tim Ferriss wrote 'The 4-Hour Work Week' for all those tired of postponing their life until retirement, who instead want to live life large and in the moment, right now.

  2. The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss: Summary and Lessons

    The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss is the ultimate blueprint on lifestyle design. Follow a simple step-by-step process to reinvent yourself, work better, create a business, and live a luxury lifestyle that favors time and mobility. Executive Summary

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    1-Sentence-Summary: The 4-Hour Workweek is the step-by-step blueprint to free yourself from the shackles of a corporate job, create a business to fund the lifestyle of your dreams, and live life like a millionaire, without actually having to be one. Read in: 4 minutes Favorite quote from the author: Table of Contents Video Summary

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    The 4-Hour Workweek teaches you how to become a lifelong retiree by building a business that makes you enough money to live on, while not taking much of your time. What if You Don't Want Your Own Business? Ferriss's advice in this book is, essentially, to create a strong source of passive income so that you can afford to quit your day job.

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    Motivational speaker, entrepreneur, and self-help author Timothy "Tim" Ferris outlined his popular work philosophy in the bestselling The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (2007). The nonfiction work encourages people to work fewer hours, but with greater efficiency.

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    The 4-Hour Workweek is about building a passive income business so we can escape the usual 40-hour workweek, and design our ideal lifestyle. Tim Ferris also shows how we can improve our productivity by following the 80/20 rule and a 'low information diet.' entrepreneur success productivity startups motivational time management 0% ListenCheatSheet

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    The 4-Hour Workweek describes how Ferriss learned of Pareto Principle, which states that, if you put in a 20% amount of effort, you will get 80% of results. Just out of college, Ferriss didn't need 100% results in his own business, so he decided to try it out.

  9. The 4-Hour Workweek

    The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (2007) is a self-help book by Timothy Ferriss, an American writer, educational activist, and entrepreneur. It deals with what Ferriss refers to as "lifestyle design", and repudiates the traditional "deferred" life plan in which people work grueling hours and take few vacations for decades and save money in order to relax ...

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    The 4-Hour Workweek Summary of Key Ideas and Review | Tim Ferriss - Blinkist Biography & Memoir Religion & Spirituality Biography & Memoir Religion & Spirituality What's in it for me? Learn to make time for the important things in your life. In these blinks, you'll learn A note to readers: this Blink was redone especially for audio.

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    The 4-Hour Work Week is all about how to change the way readers look at how they live and work and why they should challenge old assumptions. The author writes from a unique vantage point. He created a life and a career he chose out of consistently questioning the traditional assumptions about life and work.

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    To free up precious time and resources for what matters, you need to declutter your life, in 3 key ways. You can get a detailed overview from the complete version of The 4-Hour Workweek summary. Be Effective: Free up your Time Busyness is often an excuse to avoid doing what we should.

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    The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Emir Zecovic | Posted on October 15, 2018 16 min read MicroSummary: " The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich" by entrepreneur and educationalist Timothy Ferriss is a self-help book that purports to be a lifestyle game-changer.

  14. The 4-Hour Workweek

    The 4-Hour Workweek Summary Last updated on March 25, 2021 After college, Ferriss took a soul-sucking sales job at a tech firm. He left to start a soul-sucking business of his own. He went from working 40 hours a week for somebody else to working 80 hours a week for himself. He hated it. The pay was good, but the business left him drained.

  15. The 4 Hour Work Week Summary

    Synopsis. The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss is a revolutionary guide to transforming your life and redefining the idea of retirement. Forget waiting until your later years to enjoy the sweeter parts of life - this book offers practical tips and case studies from people who have already implemented successful strategies to double their income, overcome common obstacles, and reinvent themselves.

  16. 4 Hour Week Summary: Main Points, Overview & Highlights

    A Step-By-Step Breakdown on the 4-Hour Work Week. Here's a summary of the steps guiding you to optimize your precious time during working hours and function with a clear agenda when working remotely. The author has bifurcated the 4-hour work week into an acronym: DEAL. Each step and bullet point list below is a product of content from various ...

  17. The 4-Hour Work Week Book Summary in Less Than Five Minutes

    The 4-Hour Work Week Summary: Conclusion. The 4-hour work week contains some of the tallest claims I've ever seen in published work. From bending rules to outright cheating, Ferriss is relentless in quest for attaining independence. There are cases where he seems completely infantile: in chapter 3 he advises having your VAs make pranks calls. ...

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    The 4-Hour Workweek introduces the fast-growing subculture of what author Tim Ferriss has dubbed the "New Rich.". Members have mastered the currencies of time and mobility and have reached living a life of luxury way before their traditional retirement age has been reached. Who isn't lured to follow the book's subtitle, "Escape 9-5 ...

  19. PDF The 4-Hour Workweek

    The 4-hour workweek: escape 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich / Timothy Ferriss—Expanded and updated ed. Includes index. 1. Quality of work life. 2. Part-time self-employment. 3. Self-realization. 4. Self-actualization (Psychology). 5. Quality of life. I. Title. II. Title: Four-hour workweek. hd6955.f435 2009 650.1—dc22 2009021010

  20. The 4-Hour Work Week Speed Summary w/ PDF

    Tim Ferriss's groundbreaking book "The 4-Hour Workweek" outlines a new way of living and working by cutting down on wasteful effort focusing your energy on what matters. A 3 Minute Summary of the 15 Core Lessons #1 Focus On What Matters

  21. 4 Hour Work Week Summary

    Tim Ferriss's 4 Hour Work Week: 4 Part Summary. Part 1: Distinguish What You Want From Where You Are. Part 2: Eliminate the Crap to Get to the Core. Part 3: Automate the Basics. Part 4: Reinventing Your Lifestyle.

  22. The summary of "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferriss

    In conclusion, "The 4-Hour Workweek" is a revolutionary guide that encourages readers to rethink their approach to work and life. Timothy Ferriss challenges the status quo, providing practical ...

  23. How I implemented the 4-Hour Workweek methodology and doubled my results

    Movies. A book. Maintaining friendships and family values. Every day would be like a mini vacation if you followed the 4-hour workweek. Timothy Ferriss, an American author and entrepreneur, says that is possible. His book, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, changed many people's lives.

  24. Watch: 'The 4-Hour Workweek' author Tim Ferriss reveals 2 common

    A year after the world's largest 4-day workweek trial ended, most companies are carrying on with it. ... the researchers said in a summary presented to UK ... 'The 4-Hour Workweek' author Tim ...

  25. Four-day working week: Most firms in world's biggest trial stick ...

    Of the 61 companies that took part in a six-month four-day working week pilot in 2022, at least 54 (89%) said the policy was still in place, while 31 firms (51%) said they had permanently switched ...