<aside> đź’ The life you dream about is closer than you think.
Money and Confidence are Interchangeable
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THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK BY TIM FERRISS - BEST ANIMATED BOOK SUMMARY
The Book That MOST Changed My Life
Imagine I come to you and say, "Hey, I make $30,000 a year. Here's my friend John. He makes $150,000 a year. Who's richer?" You'll say, "Well, of course, John's richer. I mean, he's five times richer than you are." But is that true? What if I told you, "I work 10 hours a week, and John works 80 hours a week." Ooh, what is it now? Turns out that John actually makes about $36 an hour, and I make $58 an hour. Starting to get interesting. Well, what if I tell you John lives in New York City and that's where his job is? He can't live anywhere else because then he won't be able to make that money. But me, I don't have to live anywhere. I could be anywhere around the world and still be making that money. Well, guess what, John's in New York now and he wants to take his girlfriend out to a fine dining place. He's going to pay $200. But, in the country that I'm in when I take my girlfriend out, that's only going to cost $20. Who's richer now? Well, in this case, I'm richer than John is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JHnukkbRq4
17-Questions-That-Changed-My-Life.pdf
What if I did the opposite for 48 hours?
e.g.
What’s the least crowded channel?
“Dec 26, 2006, I had finished writing The 4-Hour Workweek — so I tracked down best-selling authors and asked them questions like, “What were the biggest wastes of time and money for your last book launch? What would you never do again? What would you do more of? If you had to choose on place to focus $10,000, where would you focus?” I heard one word repeatedly: blogs. My next questions were “How are people currently trying to reach bloggers?” “What’s the least crowded channel?” The people were pitching bloggers via email and phone. Even though those were my strengths, I decided to experiment with in-person meetings at conferences because I felt my odds would be better as one out of five people in a lounge than one email out of 500 in an overflowing inbox. I packed my bags, headed to an event, and parked myself at the BlogHaus lounge where bloggers were invited to relax, recharge their laptops, and drink free booze. I fipped alcohol, asked a lot of dumb questions, and never overtly pitched. I only mentioned the book if someone asked me why I was there (answer: “I just finished my first book, and I’m really nervous about the launch. I’m here to learn more about blogs and technology.”) It worked surprisingly well.
Am I hunting antelope or field mice?
“I often approach this to look at my to-do list and ask “Which one of these, if done, would render all the rest either easier or completely irrelevant?””
What would this look like if it were easy?
No hurry, no pause.
“Derek Sivers 45-minute versus 43-minute bike ride story—you don’t need to go through life huffing and pussing, straining and red-faced; you can get 95% of the results you want by calmly putting one foot in front of the other. “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast””
“Perhaps I’m just getting old, but my definition of luxury has changed over time. Now, it’s not about owning a lot of stuff. Luxury, to me, is feeling unrushed.”
Revisiting “The 4-Hour Workweek”
In March, 2007, the attendees of South by Southwest Interactive, a technology conference held in Austin, Texas, had reason to be energized. The Silicon Valley startups celebrated by this gathering were on a roll. In 2004, Google’s twenty-three-billion-dollar I.P.O. had marked the end of the Internet-business malaise brought on by the original dot-com bust. In 2006, Facebook opened its network beyond university students and was closing in on a hundred million active users, while a new, competing service named Twitter went live. And just two months before the conference, Steve Jobs had stood on a stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center to announce Apple’s latest product: the iPhone.
The culture emerging from Silicon Valley during this period celebrated overly caffeinated young hackers who were staying up into the night, moving fast and breaking stuff—all in the service of building companies that could make them sudden millionaires. In this environment, work ethic became as celebrated as vision or innovation. It was a high compliment to be dubbed a “10x engineer,” meaning that you had the kind of brain that could produce computer code ten times faster than the average programmer. At M.I.T., where I was studying for a doctorate in computer science, the undergraduates I knew used “hard-core” as a term of admiration for those able to push through overwhelming loads of school work. (Partly in response to this valorization of overwork, M.I.T. banned triple majors.)
It was against this backdrop that an unlikely speaker, a twenty-nine-year-old Princeton graduate named Tim Ferriss, was preparing to take the stage in Austin to deliver a contrary message. After college, Ferriss had moved West to take a sales job at a Bay Area digital-storage business named TrueSAN. He eventually quit to start his own company, which sold a neurotropic nutritional supplement popular among athletes. Inspired by the Silicon Valley culture that surrounded him, Ferriss worked extremely long hours. At one point, he went on a vacation to Florence with his family and ended up spending ten hours a day working out of an Internet cafe.
Ferriss became dispirited when he realized that his one-man company was never going to be sold for millions: he was stuck with it and the grind that it demanded. In response, he launched a series of nothing-left-to-lose experiments to drastically reduce the time he spent working. He culled his client list: instead of trying to maximize the number of accounts he served, he focussed on the smaller number of customers who generated the bulk of his revenue. He then built elaborate systems that allowed teams of far-flung contractors, coördinated using newly emerged Internet services, to handle most of the details of his company’s operation without his involvement.
Soon, he was checking e-mail only once every ten to fourteen days. With his streamlined schedule, he made extended visits to cities like Buenos Aires, in Argentina, where the American dollar was strong, leveraging the insight that when it comes to maximizing autonomy, it’s often better to live more cheaply than to make more money. He took intensive Spanish classes to learn the language quickly, and began dancing the tango, eventually competing at high-level contests. After delivering a series of guest lectures about these experiments to an entrepreneurship class at Princeton, Ferriss refined the lessons learned into a book titled, “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich,” a book scheduled to be published the same spring that he arrived in Austin to tell a room full of hard-charging, aspiring 10x engineers that their professional lives were unsustainable, and that they should consider doing something more interesting with their time.
I recently called Ferriss to ask him about that speech. His memory was that the event organizer gave him a slot at the last minute after a cancellation. “I did not have a proper room,” he said. “The talk was given in an overflow room, I want to say, that also acted as a mini-cafeteria.” Ferriss says that he was calm about the risk in delivering a message about downshifting at a conference celebrating hard-core culture: “If it works, great; if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.” His calmness was justified: the talk did work. The room filled past capacity, and the audience connected with the young entrepreneur’s call to work less. Almost immediately, Ferriss began to hear from attendees who were putting his advice into practice. Influential tech bloggers who heard about the talk wrote about Ferriss and his boldly titled book, which put it on the radar of bigger media outlets. “The 4-Hour Workweek” made it onto the Times best-seller list, where it stayed, more or less, for the next seven years. The book went on to sell millions of copies, reaching its apex of cultural relevance when it was mentioned by the character of Darryl Philbin in a 2011 episode of “The Office.”