The Four-Hour Workweek Review
Under-promise and over-deliver is a good way to operate, I’ve found. Manage the expectations of your customers, so that when things go wrong you’ll be okay and when they go right you’ll get the credit.
Tim Ferris disagrees.
Or at least his book does. The Four-Hour Workweek begins with tales of dancing in Argentina and winning Chinese martial arts tournaments through loopholes and quickly promises its readers: you too can have adventures, glitz, and glamour; you too can live the lifestyle of the newly-named New Rich and escape the trap of the 9-5 drudgery.
And Tim Ferris will be here to show you how.
Part self-help book, part business advice book, and part ‘lifestyle design’ handbook, The Four-Hour Workweek offers its readers a chance to make their lives extraordinary.
“Carpe Diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary.”
Motivation
In David Attenborough voice:
The standard life plan of the American human is straightforward. First, we see their childhood, their early years spent in the institution they call ‘school’ learning to interact with the other humans. Occasionally other things are learned as well, but the primary education seems to be in social dynamics - see how the cliques form?
After school comes ‘college’, a kind of chrysalis into which larval humans enter and adult humans leave. In college students are prepared for adulthood and a ‘career’ via the carefully planned application of ‘core requirements’, a series of classes the student will take by ignoring them for most of the semester and then cramming for the final.
Once the human emerges from the ‘college’ chrysalis, they embark on a 40-year long journey called ‘career’, in which they will spend a third of their time - half of their waking hours - trapped in a building with other humans they don’t like doing things they don’t care about.
If the human has offered sufficient time and labor on this altar, they are rewarded for their sacrifice with the status of ‘retired’, wherein they will be granted a freedom they are too old to enjoy and all the time they could ask for to sink into decrepitude. Thus decayed, the human spends the last years of their life being ‘medi-cared for’ and eventually passes away.
If you were to ask Tim Ferriss about what life is like for most people, I think he’d respond with something like the above. Maybe not with quite the same amount of snark, but I think that’s how he sees the ‘standard’ life plan: a dismal, soul-draining prison where dreams go to die.
The biggest flaw, he argues, is that retirement comes at the end of one’s life, precisely the period where one is too old to do half the things that make up any ambitious bucket list.
Instead, he argues, why not just ‘retire’ now? Then, if you need money, go do some more work after. The point is that life is too short and too precious to waste it on not doing what makes you happy and excited, right now.
Granted, there are some logistical problems to solve (like making enough money to go do those things), but those are easy, Ferriss argues. You’ve just got to be willing to take the first step.
Key Concepts
There are a few key concepts and terms Ferriss uses throughout the book that we’ll cover here for ease of reference:
New Rich: The people like Ferriss, who live like million/billionaires (travel, luxury, adventure, etc.) without actually having that kind of money.
Mini-retirement: A one-to-six month period wherein one travels to a distant location and enjoys oneself, as free as possible from the constraints and stresses of modern work. Defined in opposition to a Binge Vacation, a one-to-two week whirlwind of travel in which one exhausts oneself trying to make the most of their PTO (Paid Time Off, e.g. vacation days).
Muse: The product one sells as an entrepreneur to fund one’s adventures.
Dreamline: A timeline of the next six months, focused on what you dream of doing, how much it costs, and how much money it’ll take you to accomplish it.
Geoarbitrage: Using currency, time zones, and other differences between global locations to achieve one’s goals cheaply.
What’s the Deal?
Ferriss frames the book around the acronym DEAL - Definition, Elimination, Automation, Liberation, although the order of implementation is acknowledged to sometimes be DELA.
Definition
What makes a good life?
What would you be doing, if you didn’t have to worry about monetary cost or social convention?
Ferriss makes the case that most people are sleepwalking through life. They’ve looked around at what everyone else is doing, at the standard middle-class lifestyle pattern in America, and unconsciously decided to follow the same path.
He names several traps people fall into:
Work for work (W4W): working for the sake of being busy, rather than actually accomplishing important goals.
Consumerism: believing that having things will make you happy; Ferriss is big on experiences as being the primary driver of happiness.
Holding back out of fear: being afraid is natural, Ferriss argues, but letting that fear stop you from achieving your dreams will impoverish your life.
What he advises you do instead is Define what you actually want your life to look like. This is the brainstorming part of lifestyle design - if you could live the way you want, what does that look like? Is it a life of travel and adventure, or one of quiet contemplation in a cabin in the woods?
No matter what it is, Ferriss urges you to actually think it through - and it’s okay if you don’t know! Just think about the next six months, to start with. This will be the foundation of your dreamline - your concrete plan to live your dream over the next six months. A sample one can be found in the book and on Ferriss’s blog.
The dreamline is a way to map dreams into logistics - what would it actually cost to backpack through Europe or race in the Iditarod? What are the concrete next steps you need to take to move towards that dream?
Once you’ve defined what you want out of life, you can move on to Elimination.
Elimination
Ferriss comes from a business background, and it shows. His advice on how to eliminate stress and busywork from one’s life tends to center around spending less time on email and zero time on meetings.
He distinguishes between being effective - doing things that get one closer to one’s goals - and being efficient - “performing a task in the most economical manner possible.”
Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.
Tim Ferriss, The Four Hour Workweek, p.69
Instead of efficiently completing a lot of meaningless busywork, Ferriss tells you to ruthlessly apply the Pareto Principle (also called the 80/20 rule) to every aspect of your life. The principle specifies that 80% of effects tend to come from 20% of causes, which means that you can safely eliminate the remaining 80% of causes without affecting your life too much.
Examples:
80% of sales come from 20% of customers; eliminate the rest and focus on the big buyers
80% of your problems come from 20% of your life; eliminate that part of your life
80% of your happiness comes from 20% of your life; focus on the that 20% and eliminate as much of the rest as you can
Ferriss also highlights Parkinson’s Law, which is that work expands to fill the time allotted to it.
Combining the Pareto principle with Parkinson’s law by eliminating the least impactful parts of your work and setting harsh deadlines for the rest will allow you to accomplish the same amount (or more) of work in far less time than others, freeing up that time for pursuing your own dreams.
Automation
Alright, say that I pick up what Ferriss is putting down. I shouldn’t wait for retirement to live out my dreams. I should escape the 9-5 drudgery and go live in Patagonia for the next six months.
How on Earth am I supposed to actually do that?
Ferriss covers two paths to freeing one’s time and location from corporate overlords: one for employees and one for entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneur
Ferriss offers a specific formula for what he calls ‘income automation’, or creating an income stream to fund one’s dreamline that basically runs itself.
Put simply, it is:
Come up with an idea for a product (or license one) in a niche market in which you are a customer, called a muse.
Test your muse by advertising on google/in a magazine, directing buyers to a website where they can enter their information to buy (although not actually buy, since you don’t have anything yet) - if you find it would be profitable, move forward, if not, go back to step 1. An idea is profitable if:
You have enough ‘sales’, where ‘sales’ means ‘people clicked on buy’ even though you haven’t enabled that functionality yet, such that
The equation
profit per item * items ‘sold’ > advertising costwhere
profit per item = sell price - cost to manufactureis true.
If your idea tests well, go ahead and implement it: pay a contract manufacturer to make the product and sell it on your website. Given the online tools available today, this has to be even easier than it was when Ferriss wrote the book.
It should be possible to automate this process, such that when a user places an order, the product is manufactured, shipped, and delivered, all without you having to do more than send an email or two, if that.
According to Ferriss, this is how he financed his own dreams: he created a supplement called BrainQUICKEN, automated the process of manufacturing and selling it, and started raking in the cash. And you, the reader, can do it too!
Employee
What if you don’t want to start a business? What if you’re just not that entrepreneurial, or you actually happen to like your job (just not being forced to be at the office from 9-5 five days a week)?
Well, assuming that you have a job that can be done remotely - sorry, cashiers and waiters - Ferriss has a whole chapter guiding you to do just that.
He takes you step by step through various strategies to get more remote work, including outlined conversations to have with your boss at each stage.
It boils down to:
Find an excuse to work from home one day (sick, vacation, weekend, whatever). Be more productive than you usually are that day, and document it.
Bring the documentation to your boss, suggesting that you work from home one day a week as a trial, making sure to
justify it from the perspective of the business (you provide more value to the company from home than you do from the office), and
approach the whole thing like a sale, and go for the sell
Once you’ve got one day a week remote, make sure to keep the productivity differential high and documented, up to and including being less productive while in the office to highlight the difference.
Repeat steps 2-3, but for more days each time, until you’re fully remote (except for possible exceptional circumstances, which are fine).
And voila! Before you know it you’re admiring the cherry blossoms in Osaka or teleworking from the Bahamas, living your best life long before retirement.
Liberation
It’s interesting reading this section of the book in 2024, given that it was written in 2007, because telework is the basis for a lot of Ferriss’s lifestyle, and telework is a lot more common (and salient in our culture) after COVID. In the end, though, I think the message still holds: if you have a job that you can do remotely, whether it’s because you own the business or because your boss is fine with it, you are technically free to live (almost) wherever you want.
Granted, you might want to live near family and/or friends - something Ferriss doesn’t address at all, presumably too caught up in having the next adventure - but there’s nothing requiring you to live in a specific place, if your job isn’t.
Once you’ve finally gone fully remote, or finally have enough automated income to pursue your dreamline, just pull the plug, Ferriss argues. It’s hard and scary, but the reward is a life you get to define and live the way you want, where you want.
Breaking away from ‘acceptable’ or ‘stable’ or ‘predictable’ life plans is a massive step, but the juice is worth the squeeze. Being a part of the New Rich is about having the ultimate luxury: the choice to live whatever life you want.
[The New Rich lifestyle!] Take it! It's yours!
- Achilles, Troy (paraphrased)
Does It Work?
The book is speckled with anecdotes and quotes, infomercial-style, of people who have adopted parts or all of Ferriss’s methods. They’ve freed up their time to spend it with their families on month-long boating adventures or outsourced their work to others through geoarbitrage (there’s a whole section on getting a cheap virtual assistant from India, which I don’t know how to feel about, or if it’s still possible).
Assuming these anecdotes are real, then yes, we have an existence proof of the validity of Ferriss’s methods. At the very least, they work for some people in some situations.
But the context in which the book was written is important.
Context
The Four-Hour Workweek was originally published in 2007; I read the updated version published in 2009.
And boy, does it read like it.
The book talks about email, excel, blackberries, the internet, and outsourcing like they’re the new productivity tools that’ll finally give you the life you want. Presumably, if the book was written today, it would refer to LLMs (such as ChatGPT) the same way.
A more charitable interpretation - and one I think is probably accurate - is that Ferriss is enthusiastic about any tool he can use to automate his work, so that he has more time to spend doing other things. The book talks a lot about automation, and the tools it mentions are the ones available at the time of writing.
Ferriss is also serious about suggesting specific tools - the book references multiple websites and blogs, many of which are presumably no longer functional. It has the air of a book that genuinely wants to help its reader by offering concrete resources; it’s just that the choice to do so also dates the book significantly.
A Moral and Practical Review
Ferriss spends some chapters towards the end of the book on convincing you of two important points:
It is morally okay, even good, to adopt his New-Rich lifestyle, and
It is a practical lifestyle to adopt, as in, it’s actually affordable and doable.
So…are his arguments convincing?
Morally
The morality argument in the book is pretty basic. It just says that being happy isn’t morally bad, and that feel-good fuzzies come from helping people or doing good, regardless of the nature of the help or the scale of the good. And Ferriss is in favor of both being happy and doing some good, whatever that happens to look like.
On the one hand, this clashes rather hard with the effective altruist thesis, which is something like: “Distinguish between feel-good fuzzies and actually doing good, and optimize for the latter.”
On the other hand, Ferriss’s advice seems like a better day-to-day life philosophy, especially considering how stressful being an effective altruist can be. “Just try to help people when you can, and don’t worry about saving the world” is a pretty damn decent way to go about living, so long as the world is capable of taking care of itself. Which it is, for the most part.
Ferriss doesn’t want to be part of a crusade. He isn’t asking anyone to save rain forests or stop AI apocalypses.
He’s just living his best life, and suggests you do too.
Practically
Ferriss spends a lot of ink bashing the reader’s head into the idea that his mini-retirements are practical and affordable.
Is he right?
Keeping in mind that the book was written in 2007 (so it uses 2007 prices), Ferriss does some math to calculate the cost of (as an example) having an Aston Martin, getting a personal assistant, and visiting the Croatian coast at $5,937/month. In 2024 that would cost $8,941/month, since there’s been 50.6% cumulative inflation since then. Possible? Sure. Easy? Not exactly.
For traveling cheaply, the book compiles a large number of websites, resources, and pieces of advice, including bits like:
Stay in a hostel for a few days before renting an apartment for a few months, and never rent an apartment for more than a month unless you’ve physically been in it
Pack extremely light and buy whatever you need while there; you often need far fewer physical items than you think you do
Buy flights either months in advance or at the very last minute - the value of an empty seat to an airline is $0, so they often go for cheap at the last second
Broadly speaking, I’d say that Ferriss convinced me that it’s possible - not necessarily easy, but possible - to travel cheaply. Cheap travel is an entire subculture of its own, with a variety of assorted skills to learn. If you’re willing to put in the work, it’s doable.
Who Is The Book For?
As best I can tell, The Four-Hour Workweek is written for people a lot like Tim Ferriss: people with relatively high autonomy who work in business, usually selling or managing products, who find themselves unhappy with how much time they spend at work and want to do other things with their lives.
Is it worth reading if that describes you? Probably.
Is it worth reading if that doesn’t describe you?
That’s a trickier question. There are parts of the book that absolutely apply to everyone. Ferriss spends a lot of time at the beginning writing about ambition - the quality that makes people attempt to do things that seem difficult. In a class Ferriss taught at Princeton, he challenged the students to get in contact with a famous person: a CEO or celebrity of some sort. Most students didn’t even try, but those who did succeeded: as documented in the article Fail Better, a student managed to contact then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a cold call.
I believe that success can be measured in the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have.
- Tim Ferriss
Ferriss makes the point that few people attempt to do truly ambitious things, so there’s often, counterintuitively, less competition for doing them than for more ‘ordinary’ accomplishments. Fifty-seven thousand people applied to Harvard last year - how many tried to get in touch with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft? How many people tried to climb Mt. Everest, or pilot a hot-air balloon around the world?
There are other parts of The Four-Hour Workweek that everyone can learn from, and that I in particular learned from.
What Did I Learn?
There’s an attitude that pervades the entire book. Ferriss’s personality shines through this attitude, which can be summed up (as he puts it) as:
Better to ask forgiveness than permission.
The Four-Hour Workweek practically breathes I dare you to dare on every page. Its every anecdote and story is meant to inspire, to cause the reader to question if the impossible is really all that impossible. Whatever your dreams, the book whispers, the only thing standing between you and them is your own lack of chutzpah.
Chutzpah: Noun. Extreme self-confidence or audacity.
It’s an inspiring sentiment.
Not inspiring enough to immediately change my entire life plan, but certainly enough to take another look at it. How much chutzpah do I have? How can I get more?
(Ferriss offers several ‘comfort exercises’ designed to increase one’s chutzpah, from staring at strangers to asking for phone numbers to laying down in the middle of random sidewalks. I’ll let you know if they work.)
Another point Ferriss makes that I liked is that it’s possible, and desirable, to divorce the how of money from the why of money. The why of money is the point, Ferriss argues, and the whole impetus behind lifestyle design. Start by envisioning the life you want to lead and figuring out how much it costs.
Actually paying those costs is secondary: a necessary chore one should get done as efficiently as possible so that they can move on to the fun parts of life.
Conclusion
There’s an idea in moral philosophy called the Categorical Imperative, so named by Immanuel Kant, which for those of you who missed out on all the fun we had in Philosophy 101 is the idea that the basis for a moral action is that it is Universalizable, i.e. everyone can do it without causing a paradox.
The classic example (not classic in the sense that Kant used it, but classic in the sense that this is how it’s taught now) is traffic law. If one person breaks traffic law, then it’s not a big deal. But if everyone broke traffic law, it would swiftly become impossible to drive anywhere, thus negating anyone’s ability to break traffic law (if you can’t drive somewhere, you can’t break traffic law doing so).
So breaking traffic law isn’t universalizable, and thus it’s immoral.
I find a certain amount of irony in the fact that Ferriss’s four-hour workweek fails the universalizability test. Ferriss spends a lot of time and ink throughout the book convincing you that anyone can do what he did - break the 9-5 chains and live their ideal life.
But if everyone read his book and tried to follow his advice, the economy would disintegrate and Ferriss would rapidly find his workweek becoming an entirely different beast altogether. The book, no matter how egalitarian it tries to sound and no matter how much it helps people from all walks of life, is fundamentally elitist: as in, it depends upon there being a large number of people doing grunt work somewhere.
The book is just about figuring out how to not be one of those people.
The Four-Hour Workweek is not a Utopian dream, nor is it working towards one. It isn’t a self-help book that everyone could benefit from reading.
It’s a guide to leveling up in class from office drone to Nouveau Riche, only without having to make obscene amounts of money.
There’s a parable Ferriss tells towards the end of the book, about a businessman on vacation in Mexico who sees a fisherman come in with his catch, quoted here:
An American businessman took a vacation to a small coastal Mexican village on doctor's orders. Unable to sleep after an urgent phone call from the office the first morning, he walked out to the pier to clear his head. A small boat with just one fisherman had docked, and inside the boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish.
"How long did it take you to catch them?" the American asked.
"Only a little while," the Mexican replied in surprisingly good English.
"Why don't you stay out longer and catch more fish?" the American then asked.
"I have enough to support my family and give a few to friends," the Mexican said as he unloaded them into a basket.
"But... What do you do with the rest of your time?"
The Mexican looked up and smiled. "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Julia, and stroll into the village each evening, where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, senor."
The American laughed and stool tall. "Sir, I'm a Harvard M.B.A. and can help you. You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. In no time, you could buy several boats with the increased haul. Eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing boats."
He continued, "Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution, and move to Mexico City, then to Los Angeles, and eventually New York City, where you could run your expanding enterprise with proper management."
The Mexican fisherman asked, "But senor, how long will all this take?"
To which the American replied, "15-20 years. 25 tops."
"But what then, senor?"
The American laughed and said, "That's the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions."
"Millions, senor? Then what?"
"Then you would retire and move to a small coastal fishing village, where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos..."- Tim Ferriss, The Four Hour Workweek, p.252-253
The point of the parable isn’t - in my eyes - that the businessman is wrong. He’s not.
It’s that you should start your life’s journey by figuring out, not how you’re going to make money, but how you actually want to spend your time on a daily basis. Once you know that, figuring out how to afford that lifestyle becomes a straightforward problem.
Designing your life that way frees you from the pitfalls of climbing the corporate ladder or continuously reaching for ever-higher but meaningless achievements.
If there’s one thing to take away from The Four-Hour Workweek, it’s that life is meant to be lived. Figure out what you actually want your life to look like, and then solve the problem of having enough money to get there. Ferriss has advice and suggestions for you at each step of the process, but ultimately, it’s your decision to make.
As Andy Duffresne said:
I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living, or get busy dying.