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If you’re tired of someone else mandating when and where you work and working grueling hours, or just want to transition to remote work, this The 4-Hour Workweek summary, exploring the book by author Tim Ferriss, is the place to start.
The book summary covers the main takeaways, including how to join the ranks of the “new rich” by accumulating more wealth in less effort and time.
The 4-Hour Workweek summary
- Welcome to the new rich, where your wealth goes beyond the numbers in your bank account to the ability to have complete freedom over what you do, when you do it, and who you do it with
- Eliminate what doesn’t serve you
- Prioritize effectiveness in your work, not efficiency
- You don’t want a business; you want a passive income stream that is sufficient to cover your desired lifestyle with little to no effort
- Live your dream life now. Don’t defer it
How long is The 4-Hour Workweek?
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, by Tim Ferriss, is roughly 300 pages long, or about an 8.5-hour read.
3 crucial takeaways from The 4-Hour Workweek
The array of inspiration, tips, hacks, and guidance you can take away from this The 4-Hour Workweek is vast.
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, and with whom you do it.
To give you a taste of what you can expect, I’ve compiled this The 4-Hour Workweek summary to highlight what I found to be the three most valuable pieces of information.
1. Detail your lifestyle design…
Throw away the phrase “one day.”
Define the life you want to live and start living it today. Ferriss calls this “dreamlining.” The process helps to center your focus on specific desires so you can build an equally specific plan to achieve them.
Here’s how it works.
Take out a notepad, an online journal, or excel and journal through the following prompt:
In the next 6 months:
- I want to have ______
- I want to be ______
- I want to do ______
Having trouble figuring out what to say? Spark your imagination with these statements:
- 1 place to visit is…
- 1 thing I want to do before I die is ______
- 1 thing I want to do every day is ______
- 1 thing I want to do every week is ______
- 1 thing I’ve always wanted to learn is ______
Now pick the four that you desire the most and complete the following prompts for each:
- What can I do right now to achieve this dream?
- Tomorrow?
- Two days from now?
And then do it!
Repeat the same exercise but with a timeline of 12 months.
Note Ferris suggests pricing out each dream so you can determine your Target Monthly Income, which you can then translate to your Target Daily Income–or the level of cash flow you need to fund your goals. I found that doing so distracted me–but if having the numbers in front of you inspires you, then have at it!
Simplify the whole process using the free tools provided by Ferriss:
2. On fear
If you experience fear around achieving your dreams, what you’re terrified of is the “what ifs?” Of the uncertainty.
What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do
You may be unhappy in your current situation, but at least you know your current situation. So you keep on keeping on because you (and society) have convinced yourself that certainty is more important thing than enjoyment.
A “don’t happy, be worry” mindset.
But you can quickly get ahead of your fears.
If you’re avoiding, out of fear, doing the work to reach your dreams, ask yourself the following questions.
- What are you avoiding doing because of fear?
- What’s the worst thing that could happen if you make a change?
- What’s the worst thing that could happen if it’s realized? What would be the permanent impact on a scale of 1-10.
- How likely is this scenario to actually arise?
- What could you do to regain and maintain financial stability if you were fired today? What skills could you monetize? Could you go back to where you started?
- What’s a more probable scenario of something going wrong?
- What are the positive outcomes if your plan goes right? On a scale of 1-10, how do these positive outcomes change your life?
- What is it costing you to postpone going for your dream life financially, emotionally, and physically?
After you answer these questions, chances are that your worst-case scenario isn’t as horrific as you’ve been telling yourself. And if that worst-case scenario comes to fruition, well, you already have a plan for how to handle it.
For example, the fear I hear about the most concerning self-employment is: “what about health insurance?” Well, the worst-case scenario is that you have to pay $600 a month for a marketplace plan. Is that a lot of money? Yes. But is it so much that it’s worth staying in a job you can’t stand? Probably not.
3. Be effective, not efficient
Efficiency means getting something done right—effective means doing the right thing.
To achieve your desired result, your goal is to be effective, not efficient. This approach, though counterintuitive, will likely lead to better results in fewer hours.
As Peter Drucker put it:
Efficiency attempts to do things right; it deals with the ratio between input and output. Effectiveness is concerned with doing the right things; it deals with the quality rather than the quantity of results and output.
Efficiency is not unimportant. A business can easily die of inefficiency. But no business can survive, let alone grow, because it is efficient.
Practically speaking, this concept can be applied by identifying the core activities that deliver the majority of the desired results and eliminating, as much as possible, anything that doesn’t contribute. According to the Pareto Principle, 20% of your actions drive 80% of your results.
Try this: Every morning right down the four main dreams you identified earlier. Now right down one task you can do that day to work towards each. Prioritize these actions over everything else.
Need help identifying your most important tasks? Imagine you’re leaving for vacation this afternoon and only have two hours to work today. What is the one thing you would want to accomplish to feel satisfied?
And in addition to having a laser-focus focus on your top three goals, Ferris encourages eliminating the distractions that keep you from doing the right things.
He offers the following as ideas of what to remove from your day-to-day for better time management and effectiveness:
- Go on a low information diet; delete the news app on your phone and turn off social media notifications (even in your free time)
- Pause your email inbox so that even if you habitually open your email, there’s nothing to see or attend to (I use Inbox Pause)
- Delegate menial tasks to a virtual assistant
What people are saying about The 4-Hour Workweek
Positive Reviews
The majority of readers that left a positive book review, report that The 4-Hour Workweek is a must-read and that the book:
- Provides a compelling path to early retirement that is easier than FIRE and requires less capital than investing in the stock market
- Offers many actionable insights, and practical tips
Negative Reviews
Some readers indicated that they had a hard time relating to Ferriss as a person, as well as to his way of writing.
Other comments noted that the book is:
- Better for inspiration than implementation and achievement
- A bit outdated post-COVID
Final Thoughts: The 4-Hour Workweek Summary
If you want more control over what you do, when you do it, and how you do it, to join the “new rich,” The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss can help you get there.
At the very least, the book will inspire you to dream big on your way to financial freedom.
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