The Hangover After Reading "The 4-Hour Work Week"
The Hangover After Reading "The 4-Hour Work Week"
Tango, lifestyle design, and an exercise to figure out what you want in life.
In 2007, Tim Ferriss published a book called “The 4-Hour Work Week.” It was written for anyone who wanted to ditch their lousy job and start living life on their own terms. As you might have guessed, it attracted a huge audience.
Ferriss lures in the reader with a story of his current life, dancing in Tango competitions in Argentina and studying Muay Thai in Thailand. To most wage slaves with mediocre jobs, Ferriss seemed like a superhero. He had figured out how to create his own passive income.
The rest of the book covers how Ferriss designed his lifestyle and then designed the systems he needed to transition from employee to totally self-employed. One of the things that readers love is just how tactical Ferriss is. He explains, in great detail, which tools he used, which virtual assistant agency he hired, and how he leveraged credit card points and benefits.
The Hangover
The only problem is that most people, myself included, walked away from the book with a strange fog around our heads. Honestly, it feels like a hangover. You know that vague, cloudy feeling I’m talking about?
I started thinking about what was possible, about how I might start an online supplement business and then use credit card points to travel the world and work from anywhere.
I started thinking “I really think I need to learn how to Tango in Argentina.”
Slowly, over the next few years, I realized that I’m just not the kind of person who can get excited about building an online business that sells widgets and then just retires. I’m the kind of person who needs “purpose” built into my life’s work.
I also realized that starting a business—any business—is way harder than you think. And not like, “just work more hours” hard, it’s more like “do you have the relationships required to present opportunities” hard.
It’s also “are you in the right place at the right time” hard. And “do you have the cash position to withstand the inevitable dip of profitless existence for a completely unknown and unpredictable amount of time” hard.
There are other challenges to starting a business, but these are just a few that stand out and have nothing to do with hard work—the trait we’re wrongly told is the most important factor in our entrepreneurial endeavors.
Lifestyle Design
Don’t get me wrong, I actually loved the book.There are some very important thinking exercises that I feel more people should walk themselves through.
For instance, the whole “lifestyle design” concept. Basically, Ferriss suggests listing out everything you could possibly want in a spreadsheet and calculate your monthly expenses. From there, you can back into what your annual income needs to be to support it.
There are some rough guidelines for this, but in general, it’s up to the reader to realize that material things are less important than the experiences that we each want to have in our lives. Let me explain.
No one really wants to own a Ferrari. People think they do, but most actually don’t. They’re outrageously expensive to begin with, but then they cost even more to maintain. Just think of it this way, if you hit a $1 million lotto ticket and think to yourself, “I’m going to buy a Ferrari,” how many times do you think you’ll have to pay $60,000 on a set of new tires to realize that you’d rather spend the rest of that $1 million on something else? Or would it already be too late?
And that’s the point.
We don’t usually want the Ferrari, we just want the experience of driving the Ferrari. In this way, this thinking exercise helps us realize what’s really important and to focus on pursuing that.
So, yes, I had a strange hangover after reading the 4-Hour Work Week. I don’t think it’s the right book for everyone and I hope that readers get the right message from it.
So, What Do I Do Next?
In the end, I think it was a worthwhile book that I will still recommend to others, but with strong contextual framing.
When you read the title “4-Hour Work Week,” what does it make you think and feel? What do you get excited about?
Chances are, it’s not learning to Tango in Argentina or studying Muay Thai in Thailand. Those are pretty specific and they’re not yours.
Chances are that you’re actually just excited about the possibility of personal development and the freedom to adventure and learn more about the world. Chance are that you’re actually just excited about the possibility of a world where you are working toward your own dreams instead of someone else’s.
. . . or some other fluffy, purposeful thing like that.