Book Review – The 4-Hour Work Week
This month, I read another great money book by Tim Ferriss titled: The 4-Hour Workweek
Book Review – The 4-Hour Work Week – What I didn’t like about this book
Let’s start out with what I didn’t like about The 4-Hour Workweek (not that there is very much to talk about in this section). The first thing that threw me a little off was the wide discussion of traveling the world. If you didn’t have to worry about money, what would your passion be? Well, it is obvious that Tim’s passion is world travel, and that’s great. It’s just that there were several sections of the book that seemed to transform into a travel tips discussion versus how to actually only work 4-hours per week. I caught myself several times saying “OK, enough of these travel details, let’s get back to the good stuff!”
I’ve come to realize through writing several of the book review that I like things pretty nice and neatly laid out. I’m a real analytic “show me” kind of a guy. Well, I was hoping for a little more details or examples around creating your own “muse”. A “muse” is the semi-automated business you’ll setup to generate the cash you need to follow your dreams. I recognize that the whole point of the book is that you have to find out for yourself what will work and what won’t. I guess I’m just saying that a little more hand holding in this area would have been appreciated for the folks like me that have a little more trouble getting their “plane off the ground.”
Book Review – The 4-Hour Work Week – What I Loved About This Book
I really liked the setup and intro of The 4-Hour Workweek. You really got a flavor of who Tim is and his views on life. He seems like a really amazing guy, and this shows through as you read through the book. Going through his personal history at the beginning of the book was interesting and really gave a lot of credibility to the rest of the book. I appreciated this!
As far as the advice of automating your business as much as possible, the book takes this concept and idea to entirely new levels that I doubt many of us have ever even considered. This is going to sound corny, but the book really did reshape my whole view and outlook on life and what it means to be successful. I used to consider success as having lots of material things, working long hours, and gaining the respect of co-workers. This book really helps one to put things in perspective and realize that time is truly our most valuable asset! Learn to work smarter, not harder is Tim’s main theme throughout the entire book.
The 4-Hour Work Week flips conventional wisdom and planning on its head. The exercises throughout the book force you to question and ask yourself what you really want out of life. From here, you determine how much money you’ll need weekly/monthly to make these dreams a reality. From here, you’ll develop both short term and long term goals to get jump started. Then, you develop your muse (automated income generating business) to meet your goal.
Planning out our lives using this approach is obvious once you stop to think about it, but many of us have it backwards! Most of us slave away at our 9-5 jobs (7am-5pm for me), make some money, spend it with little thought, and mostly wander through life without really engineering our life to help us achieve our dreams.
This is pretty close to what happened for me. I went straight from high school to college to the work force without thinking through too much about what I really wanted my normal day to look like. The 4-hour Work Week serves as a wake-up call and will show you how to create a different life path for yourself if you step back and don’t like what you see.
Book Review – The 4-Hour Work Week – Rating
5/5 Stars – I would recommend this book to just about anyone!
Book Review – The 4-Hour Work Week – Final Thoughts
The 4-Hour Workweek is fantastic and really a must read for anyone that wants more out of life than just the humdrum of the 9-5 routine. Tim is a master at questioning your assumptions of what you can and cannot achieve. The book is very inspirational and paints the broad brush strokes for showing you how to truly achieve a 4-hour work week for yourself. One change I’d make to the book is to remove some of the travel detailed information and include a little more info/help on how to actually go about creating your own muse. Even just a couple more examples would have been helpful to me. That being said, if you’ve read all the way to the end of this review and haven’t yet read The 4-Hour Workweek, then stop what you’re doing and go get it 🙂 I’ve already begun to recognize small changes in my life from implementing some on Tim’s principles!
The thing about books like this, and similar philosophies is the assumption that a career and a job are things to get away from at all costs – that we should all strive for having to do as little work as possible to make a ton of money and then do something else. Well…to that I say, you have chosen the wrong career path. I’m an engineer, and LOVE waking up and going to work and exercising my brain with what I do all day. Why in the world would I want to reduce that to 4 hours a week so I can lay on a beach somewhere and be bored out of my mind?? Just my two cents… 🙂
Brock @cleverdude recently posted…Shocking Teenager Moment: My Son Doesn’t Care About Brand Names
Brock,
Thanks for commenting! I think there’s a whole gamut of folks that are perfectly happy in their jobs all the way to folks who wish they could kill themselves because they hate their jobs so much. If your one of the lucky ones to actually LOVE what you do, then that’s awesome 🙂
The whole book is written for folks that have aspirations to do something different with their lives. It isn’t really about sitting on the beach all day. He goes to random countries, learns a new skill, and a new language. That really isn’t my cup of tea either.
If I had a business that generated enough money such that I didn’t have to work more than 4 hours per week I think I would probably hike the world with my family 🙂
Thanks for the review. Another book to add to my list. You are not alone as being someone who went from high school, to college, to work. That is what this society expects from us. I feel similar to you, in that I didn’t realize that there could be another way. I wish I would have realized it 10 years ago, but at least I’m here now. It’s not that I don’t enjoy work, but I don’t want to do it 40+ hours a week and that is basically the option I have since not many employers in my field would offer part time work. I’m always amazed at folks who don’t know what they’d do if they weren’t working or would be bored. I know that I have plenty of interests and resources to fill up my time!
Green Money Stream recently posted…Can’t Keep Up? Save Time and Money With Once A Month Cooking
GMS,
Thanks for stopping by again 🙂 I’m glad you enjoyed the review. I’m in the same exact boat as you. I don’t want to spend 40 hours doing work for someone else and letting them reap the benefits. I’ve saved the company I’ve worked for more than $15 million dollars over the past several years, and I don’t have much other than my normal salary to show for it 🙂
Great review! I also really enjoyed this book. I think the biggest thing I took from it is Tim’s way of thinking. Even if I don’t have the exact same goals as he does, it was really valuable to learn his process. I’m not interested in leaving my career, but this book helped me remove limits from my goals, and realize there is a lot out there for us if we want it!
Michael@Save-Invest-Grow recently posted…My Experience With a Gluten-Free Diet
Michael,
Thanks for stopping by! I agree with your thoughts, the biggest thing I took away is not to place artificial limits on what you think you can believe. Also, to change your mind at the outset and create systems that are more efficient and remove you from the equation.
Derek,
I enjoyed this review – thanks for writing. I re-read the book in 2014 and found that it added a lot to my life. Quite a few of my bucket list goals involve travel so that part of the book certainly resonated with me.
Regarding the Muse business building, it’s true that the book describes the process at a very high level. Specifically, I think it underestimates the difficulty of learning how to effectively use Google AdWords.
I’m currently running a survey for readers of “The 4-Hour Work Week” so I’m curious to know what you meant by this: “I’ve already begun to recognize small changes in my life from implementing some on Tim’s principles!” What kind of changes?
Bruce recently posted…How To Start A Low Information Diet in 24 Hours
Bruce,
Sorry about that – that is pretty vague 🙂 What I meant was implementing changes to automate my life more vs. making everything manual (which requires more of my time).
Tim’s whole philosophy is to automate stuff as much as possible so that you can check in for 5-6 minutes vs. spending hours on a routine task.
Does that make sense?