Posts Tagged ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’

The Best of Tim Ferriss

Posted By damien on December 15th, 2010

Tim Ferris

(image courtesy of The Next Web)

Ever heard of the term “lifestyle design”? How about the “deferred-lifestyle plan“? These are both terms coined by Tim Ferriss, a man on a mission to upend the way we look at work and life in general.

Tim Ferriss is the prolific author of the The 4-Hour Workweek, a #1 bestseller on The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek book lists. The book challenged the way I look at work-life balance and entrepreneurship. I have written about it a few times previously.

Tim runs a blog at fourhourworkweek.com/blog/ which showcases his “experiments in lifestyle design”. His posts are always interesting and often applicable. Many are written by Tim himself, but he also has a wide array of guests post on their areas of expertise.

Here are 6 of my favorite posts, either from Tim or his guests. Each one of these has challenged my assumptions about the status quo and made me reevaluate the way I live my life.

How It Works: Clinton’s “Reality Distortion Field” Charisma

Super-insightful post about interpersonal skills, specifically the power of eye contact. The guest author presents Bill Clinton as the master of eye contact and uses a clip from the 1992 presidential debates to make his point.

Watch the video on mute and you’ll see how much Clinton owned that debate by using eye contact and charisma.

From CEOs to Opera Singers – How to Harness the “Superstar Effect”

Tim’s guest in this post uses Pavarotti to illustrate the outsized gains that can be realized when one is recognized as the best in their field. He also shows how a high-school graduate with mediocre grades and test scores got into Stanford by using the superstar effect.

Read the post and look for areas at your workplace or in your social circles where you can stand out as the superstar.

The Psychology of Automation: Building a Bulletproof Personal-Finance System

Ramit Sethi, one of my favorite personal-finance authors, makes a guest appearance on Tim’s blog with this massive, informative post. Ramit unpacks the psychology behind personal finance and ways to trick our brains into winning with money.

Its full of sweet diagrams and the best part comes at the end: a 12-minute video outlining exactly how to automate your finances by circumventing your behavior. A must-read.

Cold Remedy: 18 Real-World Lifestyle Design Case Studies (Now It’s Your Turn)

Tim sent out a request for videos from anyone who had used principles from his book to create a small business, free up their time, and live a fuller life. He received tons of submissions and posted 18 of his favorites on his blog.

I like the guy who combines investing in gold bullion with fashionable belts. Fun idea.

Engineering a “Muse”: Case Studies of Successful Cash-Flow Businesses

Tim showcases 4 entrepreneurs that created their “muses” using the principles from The 4-Hour Workweek. A muse, in Tim’s words is “a low-maintenance business that generates significant income.”

The products are high-fidelity ear protection, foldable pedicure sandals, shampoo for thin hair, and snowboarding-specific boot insoles.

I love these posts because they give an inside view of running a very small business.

Engineering a “Muse” – Volume 2: Case Studies of Successful Cash-Flow Businesses

Edition two of Tim showcasing of successful entrepreneurs who followed his model.  The products shown are a laptop stand, butterfly repellent (funny idea), and a time-tracking service.

In addition to Tim’s awesome blog and book The 4-Hour Workweek, he just released a new book titled The 4-Hour Body. I can’t wait to read it.

Posted in Business, Interpersonal Skills, Selp Improvement
Comments (0)

Extreme Productivity: The Low-Information Diet

Posted By damien on July 23rd, 2009

newspaperThe 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss is a manifesto for the “New Rich”, as the author calls them, “those who abandon the deferred life plan [see my post here] and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.”  Tim spends much of the book telling us how to leverage those two (time and mobility).  In a previous post, I discussed two tactics for increasing time, the 80/20 rule and Parkinson’s Law.

This post will discuss another productivity tactic; what Tim calls the “Low-Information Diet”:

Just as modern man consumes both too many calories and calories of no nutritional value, information workers eat data both in excess and from the wrong sources.

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.  I challenge you to look at whatever you read or watched today and tell me that it wasn’t at least two of the four.

Tim encourages readers to go on a one-week media fast.  Avoid any media that falls into at least two of the categories above.  Limit information consumption to data that is needed to accomplish your goals.  So, how does Tim stay a responsible citizen if he doesn’t read the news?

His idea here is truly brilliant.  He says to ask others to inform him on the news.  To learn about day-to-day news, use it as an ice-breaker with strangers. It’s a great conversation starter.  Say to someone, “I wasn’t able to read the paper this morning, what’s happening in the world today?”

For more important issues, like presidential elections and other things that you have a responsibility for and will affect you, Tim says to have a network of trusted information providers:

I let other dependable people synthesize hundreds of hours and thousands of pages of media for me.  It [is] like having dozens of personal information assistants, and I [don't] have to pay them a single cent.

Remember, the goal with lifestyle design is to increase your productive output.  One of the best ways to increase output is by decreasing useless inputs.  I know I use the media to waste time every day.  I’ll check my feed reader and Drudge Report every few hours, just to see what’s new.  After reading this book, I limit it to mornings and evenings, never during the day.  I’m sure Tim would prefer that I read the news even less.  But it’s a hard addiction to break!

Posted in Business, Selp Improvement
Comments (0)

Retirement Reconsidered

Posted By damien on July 20th, 2009

retirementMore from Timothy Ferriss and The 4-Hour Workweek.  Tim is pretty averse to the idea of retirement at the end of your life.  He calls it the “deferred life plan”, with derision.  His alternative is mini-retirements throughout life.  I’ll let him explain:

If I offered you $10,000,000 to work 24 hours a day for 15 years and then retire, would you do it?  Of course not–you could’t.  It is unsustainable, just as what most define as a career: doing the same thing for 8+ hours per day until you break down or have enough cash to permanently stop.

How else can my 30-year-old friends all look like a cross between Donald Trump and Joan Rivers?  It’s horrendous–premature aging fueled by triple bypass frappucinos and impossible workloads.

Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to survive, let alone thrive.  Capacity, interest, and mental endurance all wax and wane.  Plan accordingly.

Tim advocates mini-retirements, short (1-3 month) periods of rest and personal pursuits to break up your work.  Why wait until you’re old and crusty to enjoy life?  Tim spends much of the rest of the book explaining how to make these mini-retirements work.

The New Rich aims to distribute “mini-retirements” throughout life instead of hoarding the recovery and enjoyment for the fool’s gold of retirement.  By working only when you are most effective, life is both more producitve and more enjoyable.  It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it too.

I would love to make these mini-retirements a part of my life–who wouldn’t!  I know that, like Tim says, my interests and passions wax and wane.  By working around those fluctuating energies, I am able to be more productive in life and not force unnatural activities.  Read the book to find out how to make these mini-retirements a reality for you.

Posted in Business
Comments (0)

Don’t Manage Time, Eliminate It

Posted By damien on July 18th, 2009

hourglassTimothy Ferriss is the MAN.  Just finished The 4-Hour Workweek for the second time. Yes, it’s so good that I read it twice. Tim is a proponent of what he calls Lifestyle Design, which in a nutshell means:
Defining the life you want to have
Eliminating the excess
Automating your moneymaking operations
Liberating yourself from geographic barriers; having the freedom to travel as you please

There are loads of good ideas in this book, and in this post I’ll focus on what Tim says about eliminating the excess by doing two things: following the 80/20 rule and obeying Parkinson’s Law.

The 80/20 Rule

This rule is also known as Pareto’s Law, as it was researched and coined by Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian sociologist. He noticed that often in life, be it economics, plant production, or human interactions, that 20% of the inputs made 80% of the results.  For example, he observed that 20% of his bean plants produced 80% of the beans.

Pareto’s Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs.  Alternative ways to phrase this, depending on the context, include:
80% of the results come from 20% of the effort and time.
80% of the company profits come from 20% of the products and customers.
80% of all stock market gains are realized by 20% of the investors and 20% of an individual portfolio.

So, what does this have to do with you and me? Tim gives us some questions to apply the principle to ourselves:

1. Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?
2. Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?

Here’s the idea: cut the 20% that cause the most problems and focus on the 20% that give the most benefit.

Parkinson’s Law

Tim says, referring to work:

Since we have 8 hours to fill, we fill 8 hours.  If we had 15, we would fill 15.  If we had an emergency and need to suddenly leave work in 2 hours but have pending deadlines, we miraculously complete those assignments in 2 hours.

What Tim is saying here is that we fill out the time we are given to accomplish a task.  Parkinson’s law states just that: a task swells in “importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.”  In fact, the longer we give ourselves for a task, the more time we have to stress over it and make it a bigger deal in our minds.  This, in turn, takes a toll on performance.  Tim sums it up like this:

The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.

So, to increase productivity, a mix of the two laws is in order.  Focus on the fewest tasks that produce the greatest results and set short, clear deadlines to accomplish them.  This stuff really works, I’ve been implementing it the past week and have been much more productive.

Posted in Business, Selp Improvement
Comments (0)
Get Adobe Flash playerPlugin by wpburn.com wordpress themes