“The 4-Hour Workweek”, by Timothy Ferriss

Ferriss, Timothy. The 4-hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. New York: Crown, 2007. Print.

I read this book in August, in a hundred-year-old co-op apartment lined with books, on a day when I was too tired to traipse around New York City with my husband and son.  They left me there to flip through the thousands of books on offer in the home of our editor aunt and uncle.  This is the book that I read, practically in one sitting, from 10am to 4pm or so.

My husband and I have been working toward retirement for some time, and we’re down to the point where some smallish amount of work – measured in years rather than decades – is all that’s standing in the way.  While I was staring down a new school year at a new school coming up in a few short weeks, this book promised to answer my prayers.

I’m a big fan of his idea of finding an income stream that will pay the bills, leaving you free to pursue the things that really matter to you.  I’ve thought of it as having a basic pillow of savings to cover me from now until age 95, but I like the way Ferriss approaches it for younger folks – plan out the money you need for living expenses and the stuff you want to do for a few months, then find the money and do it.  He doesn’t let people think small, either – he wants you to think about giving up your apartment and living a dream somewhere else, and crunches some numbers to show that it’s not as far-fetched as you expect.

The second on outsourcing your life didn’t appeal to me, since part of what I want is the time to run my life the way I want.  However, the section on finding a “muse’ – the part that Get Rich Slowly said was the weakest part of the book – was the most relevant.  I needed the details in the book, so upon arriving home I put the book on hold at the local library.  It said “in transit” for a week, which never happens, and I spent that week trying to figure out whether this would be the thing that put me off, or the first in a series of amusing anecdotes in how I finally made it work.  I did finally get the book and review the details, and set up a “muse”.  A “muse”, by the way, is nothing like what you would think – it’s an online business that’s designed to be set up so that the nitty-gritty details like fulfillment and invoicing can be handled by third parties, once you get it set up and running.  My first five-day trial was a resounding failure, with not a single sign-up, but I’m currently one day into my second trial with a different online idea.

The book is organized into four parts, which are meant to flow into each other, but my biggest complaint is that the book is a big compendium of every good idea Ferriss has had in his life, more-or-less shoehorned in together.

I see now that there is an expanded and updated version from 2009, so perhaps I’ll revisit that later.

There is a good annotated bibliography, which he calls “Restricted Reading”, for some reason.

• Bieler, Peter, and Suzanne Costas. “This Business Has Legs”: How I Used Infomercial Marketing to Create the $100,000,000 Thighmaster Craze Exerciser : an Entrepreneurial Adventure Story. New York: John Wiley, 1996. Print.
• Burlingham, Bo. Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. New York: Portfolio, 2005. Print.
• Dawson, Roger. Secrets of Power Negotiating: inside Secrets from a Master Negotiator. Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career, 2001. Print.
• Dlugozima, Hope, James Scott, and David Sharp. Six Months Off: How to Plan, Negotiate, and Take the Break You Need without Burning Bridges or Going Broke. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. Print.
• Gerber, Michael E. The E-myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do about It. New York: CollinsBusiness, 1995. Print.
• Kennedy, Dan S. How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: an Entrepreneur’s Guide. New York: Plume, 1996. Print.
• Koch, Richard. The 80/20 Principle: the Secret of Achieving More with Less. New York: Currency, 1998. Print.
• Komisar, Randy, and Kent L. Lineback. The Monk and the Riddle: the Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 2000. Print.
• Potts, Rolf. Vagabonding: an Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-term World Travel. New York: Villard, 2003. Print.
• Schwartz, David Joseph. The Magic of Thinking Big. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Print.
• Thoreau, Henry David, and J. Lyndon Shanley. Walden. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971. Print.
• VandenBroeck, Goldian. Less Is More: the Art of Voluntary Poverty. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. Print.