When I picked up The 4-Hour Workweek, I was worried it was some sort of “get rich quick” book. The first few pages didn’t do much to change my mind. The author, Timothy Ferriss, makes a lot of , such as: “How do you crebold claimsate a hands-off business that generates $80,000 per month with no management? It’s all here.”
But something happened during the first few chapters. When I read a book, I use small sticky notes to mark interesting passages. After the first 100 pages of The 4-Hour Workweek, the book was thick with stickies. By the time I was finished, I had used an entire pad!
Ferriss does make a lot of bold promises, and some of the details along the way do read like the confessions of a get-rich-quick scammer. But I believe that an intelligent reader can easily extract a wealth of useful ideas from the book. For me, it’s a keeper. I’ve read it three times already, and will probably read it again before the end of the year.
Let’s Make a Deal
After college, Ferriss took a soul-sucking sales job at a tech firm. He left to start a soul-sucking business of his own. He went from working 40 hours a week for somebody else to working 80 hours a week for himself. He hated it. The pay was good, but the business left him drained.
After learning about the Pareto Principle (more commonly known as the 80-20 Principle), Ferriss had a revelation: he streamlined his business, eliminating distractions and automating systems until it was not only more profitable, but also took less of his time. Much less. He took a “mini-retirement”, and then decided to write a book about “lifestyle design”, about creating a life that balances work and play, maximizing the positives of both.
The 4-Hour Workweek is divided into four sections, each of which explores one of the components to lifestyle design:
  • Define your objectives. Decide what’s important. Set goals. Ask yourself, “What do I really want?”
  • Eliminate distractions to free up time. Learn to be effective, not efficient. Focus on the 20% of stuff that’s important and ignore the 80% that isn’t. Put yourself on a low-information diet. Learn to shunt aside interruptions, and learn to say “no”.
  • Automate your cash flow to increase income. Outsource your life — hire a virtual assistant to handle menial tasks. Develop a business that can run on auto-pilot. (This is the weakest section of the book.)
  • Liberate yourself from traditional expectations. Design your job to increase mobility. This could mean working from home, or it could mean using geographic arbitrage to take mini-retirements in countries with favorable exchange rates.
The 4-Hour Workweek describes the specific actions Ferriss took to implement these steps. Sometimes these specifics aren’t particularly useful. However, I think it’s a mistake to let the details get in the way of his broader message. If you’re able to look past the details, to look at their meaning, you may discover principles that can change your life. For example, I don’t like much of what Ferriss has to say about automation. I question the virtue of virtual assistants, and I think that his business model works for his business but probably isn’t applicable to most others.
However, it was while re-reading this section the other night that I began to think about automating my personal finances, about making them paperless. By absorbing Ferriss’ ideas and not his specific details, I was able to apply this to my life.
A Kick in the Head
Most of the time, The 4-Hour Workweek is like a kick in the head. The flow of ideas is relentless. Here’s one of my favorites:
Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses. Most people are good at a handful of things and utterly miserable at most. [...] It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.
Maybe this is obvious to most of you, but it’s a revelation to me. I spend a lot of time worrying about my weaknesses. Yet when I look at my life, it’s clear that everything rewarding and profitable comes from enhancing my strengths. Here’s another example:
Relative income is more important than absolute income. Absolute income is measured using one holy and inalterable variable: the raw and almighty dollar. Jane Doe makes $100,000 per year and is thus twice as rich as John Doe, who makes $50,000 per year.
Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours. The whole “per year” concept is arbitrary and makes it easy to trick yourself. Let’s look at the real trade. Jane Doe makes $100,000 per year, $2,000 for each of 50 weeks per year, and works 80 hours per week. Jane Doe thus makes $25 per hour. John Doe makes $50,000 per year, $1,000 for each of 50 weeks per year, but works 10 hours per week and hence makes $100 per hour. In relative income, John is four times richer.
Of course, relative income has to add up to the minimum amount necessary to actualize your goals…
I want to believe that if I had to choose between $70,000 per year earned with 70 hard hours per week, or $42,000 per year earned with 37 easy hours per week, I’d choose the latter. I’m not there yet.
A Garden of Tips
I don’t buy into everything that Ferriss writes, but I love how he shatters conventional wisdom. I love that he makes me think. Even if you reject his central thesis, there are dozens of tips and tricks here that can be extracted and used to optimize your life. Here are a few:
  • Ask yourself, “If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?”
  • How to double your reading speed in ten minutes.
  • Why it’s more productive to carry around a written to-do list than to keep one on your computer.
  • Learn the art of non-finishing. This is all about the sunk cost fallacy: just because you paid $10 to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3 doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to watch the entire thing.
  • How to be more efficient with e-mail.
  • How to reduce clutter from your life.
  • If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.
  • Life exists to be enjoyed — the most important thing is to feel good about yourself.
  • Why geographic arbitrage is a great way to enhance your relative income.
  • The value of a virtual assistant.
My Recommendation
Despite its flaws, The 4-Hour Workweek is a great book. I think that most people can draw something useful from it. Borrow it from your public library. If you like it and think you’ll re-read it, then wait for it to come out in paperback. I’ve already read my copy three times, but that’s because it’s perfect for when I am in life; I’m not convinced that others will extract the same value.
To learn more about The 4-Hour Workweek:
A final note: perhaps best of all, this book has a ten-page index. Why don’t more books do this?
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THE 4HB

The 4 Hour Body Review – What Is It All About?

 
Review by Alex
Basically, The 4 Hour Body is a bible for those interested in finding smarter, more effective methods to achieve various health and fitness goals. The 4 Hour Body contains over 600 pages of body “hacks” ranging from muscle gain, great sleep, fat loss and how to run 50K to mention a few.
Essentially The 4 Hour Body is a list of shortcuts, except this is not your usual dubious health book. Each “shortcut” or “hack” as Tim Ferriss likes to call them is based on case studies and years of data accumulated through many controlled tests. It is easy to see that Tim Ferriss knows what he is talking about from the first page, the book is engaging and actionable right from the beginning.

So Who is the 4 Hour Body suitable for?

The 4 Hour Body is perfect for anyone who has struggled with maintaining health goals and juggling a busy lifestyle. Finally this book shows you how to work smarter not harder and achieve various health goals with minimal impact to your lifestyle.
I’m motivated to write this 4 Hour Body review as this book is way different to any health and fitness book I have ever read! It would be foolish to brand this book another hyped health book claiming to reveal the best methods. This book is far more than that! Tim presents his material in a kind of “this is how I did it, and you can too fashion” rather than guaranteeing results or making bold claims, maybe this is why his book”The 4 Hour Work Week” was so popular. The 4 Hour Body contains data that Tim has collected from workouts beginning when he was just 18, which supports the confession made by Tim Ferriss on his website that he is borderline OCD when it comes to data collection.

What has author, Tim Ferriss achieved?


Naturally anyone who is interested in health, fitness and well-being may wonder what the background of the author involves. Well that is a difficult question. Anyone who has read the 4 Hour Work Week will understand that Tim leads a very calculated and designed lifestyle (incidentally, he coined the term Lifestyle Design) and it is difficult to pin down just what exactly Tim Ferriss can be labelled as. Aside from some of his more outlandish accolades, the achievements relevant to the subject of the book are nothing short of impressive. Tim founded his company BrainQuicken some years ago which was essentially a sports supplement designed for athletes to increase awareness and mental focus. The company was hugely successful and sold in 2009. Tim also has participated in Muai Thai Boxing amongst other combat sports and obviously is an avid weight trainer.

How is The 4 Hour Body Different To Other Health/Lifestyle/Fitness Books?


Where the 4 Hour Body really stands out from the other similar books on the market is the way Tim approaches traditional concepts. You can guarantee most of Tim’s methods will force you to go against the grain and unlearn basically everything you have already learnt about a given subject and this book is no different. The material inside the book contains over 50 segments detailing how to achieve amazing results in a variety of areas.

What does the book cover?


Some of the more fascinating “How to’s” that I think should be contained in this 4 Hour Body review:
  • How to lose those last 5-10 pounds (or 100+ pounds) with odd combinations of food and safe chemical cocktails.
  • How to prevent fat gain while binging (X-mas, holidays, weekends)
  • How to increase fat-loss 300% using temperature manipulation
  • How Tim gained 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days, without steroids, and in four hours of total gym time
  • How to sleep 2 hours per day and feel fully rested
  • How to produce 15-minute female orgasms
  • How to triple testosterone and double sperm count
  • How to go from running 5 kilometers to 50 kilometers in 12 weeks
  • How to reverse permanent injuries
  • How to add 150+ pounds to your lifts in 6 months
  • How to pay for a beach vacation with one hospital visit

So Is the 4 Hour Body Worth Buying?


I hope you have found out a little more information in this 4 Hour Body review. In a nutshell this is the must have manual for almost any health related goal. It’s easy to pick up and read and provides small actionable solutions to a vast range of problems you can easily relate to. Even if you cant, some of the methods are mind blowing and Tim Ferriss has really managed flip the health world on it’s head yet again and offer host of counter-intuitive and contrary to conventional wisdom ideas that almost everyone will want to follow!
As you might have figured the book appears to be very practical, almost structured like a how to manual at times. It is difficult to throw this book into the fitness pile especially considering sections such as 15-minute female orgasms and sleeping for 2 hours a day. This book will probably appeal to most people, not just health junkies.
Also with Christmas fast approaching this could make a great stocking