4-Hour Workweek Review

This is my full review of this amazingly popular book on how to live the lifestyle you want.

I must say this is one the rare books that I have re-read multiple times. I have highlighted the important keywords of some paragraphs in the book for easy re-reading and I have re-read the book a minimum of 3 times. I have even listened to the audio book once.

I have completed the exercises in the book and I have also implemented some of the ideas I learnt in the book.

The 4-Hour Workweek contains great information on how to work less and enjoy your life more but information alone is useless unless you apply it. Amazingly, not everyone wants to work less or maybe they are not ready to work less.

The Good…

Tim Ferris advocates a “low information diet”. That is, don’t watch the television (except for a few hours of leisure programs per week), don’t read newspapers, don’t read magazines that you are not part of your business niche or hobbies and don’t read books that contain information you don’t need to use right now.

To me this is not a radical shift. I personally do not watch television programs except for the occasional Taiwanese variety show when I visit my Uncle at his place. I prefer to rent or borrow free DVDs from the library to watch documentaries and other educational material. I have not read newspapers but I get my news from friends and the internet via RSS feeds. Therefore, I do not need to read about people getting murdered, robbed or raped when I flip the newspapers or get my fingers dirty with blank ink. Furthermore, I save money, space and lots of paper by not buying newspapers. You should try it and experience the difference it makes to your mental clarity.

Tim literally rattled me out of my delusion that I had to be a super-rich multi-millionaire to live in multiple countries for months at a time and work very little. You don’t have to be rich to live in places with lower cost of living. Tim is writing in his perspective. Since he is an American, I suppose most of the readers of his book would be people living in First World countries. Therefore, it would be feasible for us to outsource our work to people who work in Third World countries due to the huge difference in our currencies. Everywhere seems cheap once you get out of an expensive place like London, New York or Singapore. Take the same amount of money you are paying to keep yourself afloat in your country and you should be able to live a very niche lifestyle in a less expensive country.

I did that math and Tim is right. I can eliminate a lot of junk from my room to clear up space and raise some cash to fund my “mini-retirements”. Once you have very little stuff, it makes it easier for you to move freely. I am in the process of eliminating most of my junk and storing whatever that is left at my parents’ place in a few boxes when I move out of my country.

One of my biggest mistakes was to keep putting off my enjoyment activities to “some day”. Tim advises us not to do that but instead try “mini-retirements” to experience a glimpse of retirement. This is crucial because a lot of people never retire and for the lucky ones that do, they realise that their retirement idea was not so fun after all. We do not want to be part of these 2 groups of people. Let’s be the ones who really enjoy our retirements.

Tim also has great advice on how to keep time wasting people out of sight and out of mind. You will discover what to say and what to write in emails to avoid time wasting phone calls and meetings, which I hate a lot!

The Bad…

Although there a lot of things that I find agreeable in the book, there are a few things that I don’t quite agree with due to practical reasons.

  1. I don’t think it would be easy for an employee to convince his boss for him/her to work at home.
  2. I don’t think the examples in the book were 100% real. I think they might have been made up by Tim just like Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad.
  3. I don’t think it would be easy for families to try this lifestyle when you have kids. You have to consider the age of your kids and your spouse’s opinion too.
  4. Tim over simplifies the process of accessing a remote computer. Tim recommends using GoToMyPC to access your office computer from anywhere in the world. However, did you know not all computers can be turned on remotely? What if the computer crashes? How are you going to restart it? There are hardware devices that can do this for you but they aren’t cheap and you will have to call your office number and enter a certain code to turn on/restart your computer.The recent developments made my Intel with the AMT-enabled mainboards should fix these limitations but this technology is still not mainstream enough. Unlesss you have someone in the office to turn on your PC for you when you need to use it, then it isn’t that convenient to do. Furthermore, remote access software can be slow.Tim talks about running expensive graphical software remotely but it will not be as fast as using it in front of the actual computer. There will be some lag time and it is very frustrating to use a computer when it lags, let alone be productive with it. I personally recommend Radmin to access your computers remotely for simple computer work like data entry, emails, internet and other non-intensive work.
  5. It is going to be hard to eliminate yourself from your business if your business is a service-based business and you are the number 1 person your customers look for. If you have a business like “John’s Consulting Services”, then good luck on convincing people that they no longer need to look for John. Maybe you might need to change your business operations and name to not be the sole focus of your business or you might want to consider a product-based business instead.

There might be some other things in the book that you might find inapplicable for you. I think this book is best for a self-employed single man/woman or newly-married couple who are both committed to such a lifestyle.

Conclusion

Apart from the bad things I pointed out, I still learnt a lot from this book and I highly recommend it to anyone thinking of embarking on a similar journey of living a fun and meaningful life with little or no work.