- Posted by liammclennan on June 15, 2009
After my earlier attempt to achieve a four-hour work week failed I decided to actually read Timothy Ferriss's book.
Firstly, I have to say that the book's goal is ambitions. The reader is asked to re-evaluate her life and confirm that her goals match her actions. Is the relentless accumulation of money, to finance acquisitions we don't need (or really want), the best use of our time?
The book is full of wise quotations such as this one from Thoreau:
"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone."
Mr Ferriss would have made a great hippy. His advice is to define your goals and pursue them, at the expense of wealth accumulation and career progression. In fact he advocates not having a career at all, but rather a semi-automatic, location-independent source of cash flow. In other words, build a business that does not require you to work on it and spend the profits doing whatever excites you.
I have three criticisms: a lot of the author's advice is immoral, the book completely lacks focus and a lot of difficult steps are implied to be trivial. When I say that the author's advice is immoral I am referring largely to his advice to employees, which is to negotiate an offsite working arrangement, become more efficient to achieve more in less time and then work as little as you can get away with without telling your boss. There are perhaps a dozen other places in the book where the author recommends blatant dishonesty as the fastest means to achieving your goals.
The book lacks focus because it is Mr Ferriss's advice on what to do with your life. It covers: deciding what you should really be doing with your time, building a business that does not require you to run it, outsourcing your life and low cost travel. It is the chapters on outsourcing where I really felt that the author was making a difficult thing trivial. As someone with a lot of experience outsourcing I believe that it is hard, so hard that I don't do it anymore. As an independent software developer with more work that I can comfortable manage I should be the perfect candidate to outsource my work and take a permanent vacation. However finding a competent provider and managing their work has repeatedly been a nightmare more trouble than worth. I am not saying it is impossible, just that it is much harder than Timothy Ferriss suggests and if people take his advice without understanding the challenges they will get burned.
Having said all that, I love the book. I like it so much that I will soon read it again, just to pickup all the bits that I feel like I missed on the first reading. The author's call to re-evaluate our priorities in the light of our mortality is just what I needed. This was the right book at the right time for me. I could feel myself slipping into what he calls the 'bald man in a red BMW syndrome', meaning one who accumulates for the sake of accumulation, stuck in a cycle of perpetually escalating consumerism.
I shall end this as I began, with one of the book's quotes from Thoreau:
"I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters."