Having been a self help junkie for the better part of my life, I meant to read The 4-Hour Workweek when it first came out, but somehow missed it. So I recently ran across the Expanded and Updated version and I have to admit that I am both excited and skeptical about the whole idea.
First the excited part. Here is the story of a man living his dreams, traveling the world, surfing, doing martial arts, living Like A Millionaire as he likes to put it. He pays for his lifestyle by running a company that only takes four hours a week of his time, and yet still pays him enough to do whatever he wants to do. The Four Hour Workweek says in a nutshell-If I Did It, So Can You!
The Skeptical part. Right, all I need to do is start a business that makes, oh say, $500 a day without my having to do much work. He sold vitamins of some kind and worked 16 hour days until the light went off one day that he didn’t have to do all the work himself. He discovered all these way cool ways to have Other People do most or all of his work for him, and he would just cash the checks.
Like all good Self Help books there are a lot of questions to get you into the proper mindset, and lots of pointing out how Other People have used this system to their advantage. Author Timothy Ferriss talks about starting a business, putting it on autopilot and hopping on a plane for Rio as if deciding which hotel to stay at is the hardest part of equation.
Among the things I like is the Dreamline, which is yet another tool designed to help you choose your goals and decide how much you need to reach them. But for the most part, any veteran of the of Self Help Wars has already seen a good deal of this material elsewhere. He talks about the Rule of 80/20, using PPC to drive traffic to you Information Product, and taking Sabbaticals from work.
He also lists a lot of resources-many of which cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to use. Pocket change for your average Best Selling Author, but I’m not sure that they are really the best use of space here. Only a small part of the book is dedicated to making money, the rest is dedicated to what you might want to do once you have all that free time and all that extra money to spend.
The stories of people setting up turnkey websites and selling tens of thousands of dollars worth of products a week-none of which they pay for until after an order is made and they have the cash in hand-are shockingly good at getting my greed engine going. There are step by step guides to testing the market for real products and info products.
I like The 4-Hour Workweek and I like that nervous little feeling of potential I get while reading about becoming an Expert in Something.
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