Quote: (03-29-2013 05:53 AM)Hooligan Harry Wrote:
People miss the point with Tim Ferris. I read his 4 hour workweek book as a curiosity and the methods he puts forward actually make a lot of sense for certain types of businesses. Its not business as I would consider a real business, more the online marketing and product sales type thing or one man shows, but its a nice earner for an individual looking for a lifestyle business. I would think a lot of the guys here would take some real merit in it because the vast majority of guys here are looking for lifestyle businesses with some cash flow.
I seriously doubt anyone is looking to build some corporate monstrosity using 4 hour workweek principles. If you went into the book expecting something like that, then I dunno hey.
People always seem to go into these things expecting a blue print, when all he provided was a model of sorts. Its simple outsource to free up time. Like a company outsources production, you outsource chores or wasteful time wasting projects. Thats it. He is basically preaching the merits of an outsourced assistant and better use of your time.
And it does have merit. Look at this guy for example. Cant believe they fired him instead of promoting him. This dude right here pulled off some of the 4 hour workweek principle.
Agreed, I had the same exact reaction when I read this article. This guy should have gotten a promotion and the company should have looked deeper into how to improve their operations and lower costs through outsourcing. This kind of reaction, and the fact that the mainstream media is taking the side of the company, is indicative of a nation stuck in industrial-age work culture.
(There could have been legitimate other reasons why he got fired - such as security issues - which would have been a solid reason to fire someone. However, since the article highlights the fact that his primary offense was outsourcing, we'll assume that was the main infraction in question.)
All comments hereafter are specific to Four Hour Work Week, I have not read his latest two books.
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PROBLEMS WITH 4HWW
I also have my reservations about Mr. Ferriss.
He is clearly, above all, an internet marketer and his claims are often wildly misleading.
My goal in this long and rambling post is to primarily identify and share the glaring flaws that I found as I was experimenting with the concepts and blueprints he laid out in his book.
I will then identify and share how the 4HWW, while not really a practical business guide and often misleading, was ultimately a very strong red pill influence on my life.
4HWW didn't fill me with dreams about living on beaches and working four hours a week. If the only message that a person got out of the book is to be lazy and only work four hours a week, and that launching any kind of business is easy, I think that person severely misinterpreted the book.
Yes, Tim Ferriss, as an internet marketer, definitely made all of this seem way easier than it actually is.
You have to work a lot of 100 hour work weeks before getting to a four hour work week.
A massive flaw in his system is the assumption that you throw up a landing page for (French Shirts / Yoga Mats / Ebook / iPad cover) and then it'll just run independently forever with no maintenance. It doesn't really work like that, at least not for most of us.
While he didn't outright
SAY that we'd all be sipping mai-tais in Koh Samui in a week after throwing up a PPC campaign, he definitely did
NOT stress how difficult it is to actually reach the point where you can be comfortable enough to do that.
The biggest issue I had with the book is that he made virtual assistants seem WAY more intelligent, diligent, trustworthy, and English-language-capable than they are in reality. Especially at the prices he was quoting. I feel like everyone learns outsourcing the difficult and expensive way - or if you have learned it the easy and cheap way, I'd love to hear from you.
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BENEFITS OF FOUR HOUR WORK WEEK
However, what I ultimately got from Tim Ferriss is a lot of inspiration, ideas, and courage to
BEGIN FAILING in entrepreneurship and testing out ideas.
I can say without a doubt that reading the Four Hour Work Week changed my life dramatically for the better.
Many of the concepts he introduced to us are things that I utilize in my life, career, and business ventures currently, such as:
1.
Geoarbitrage
-living in cost effective locations like Thailand while bootstrapping a business.
-Having a passport country in US/UK/CAN/AUS, basing your company in HK/BVI, sourcing all of your income from non-HK/BVI countries so that you can take advantage of the territorial tax law
-Staying out of the US for 330+ days a year, keeping your salary out of your corporation under 93K annually as per expatriate taxation laws
-Managing your banking/finance out of HK/SG
-Living in Bangkok/Saigon/Bali and taking trips around Asia on the cheap.
By utilizing geoarbitrage and diversifying one's interests abroad, one can turn himself into an internationalist who can shop the world for services and find business opportunities that might not have otherwise been possible if one were location dependent......tied down by one's career or material possessions.
After quite some time being mobile, a guy will start to ruthlessly cut down what he views as necessary. It starts off being simply impractical to lug around all the possessions that the US media brainwashes you into thinking you need.
Ultimately, though, one begins to adopt the mindset that nothing is permanent, the only constant is change, and material possessions are fleeting. A man becomes forced into a more minimalist mindset and lifestyle and this, ultimately, is liberating.
Geoarbitrage as a concept and a way of living has revolutionized my life, opportunities, and philosophy.
2.
Lifestyle Design - I despise this term now because it's so overused by travel bloggers, but when he introduced this concept it was a powerful red pill for me. The idea that I could, for lack of a better term,
design my lifestyle to be
young, mobile, and global - outside of the confines of the traditional career templates in a system that had screwed my generation.
3.
Automation/Outsourcing - while his actual instructions in the book for this were not great, it inspired me to go binge-read tons of material about this and start testing it all out. "Work the System" is probably the best book I've read about the automation topic post-4hww.
I still have not found a good resource to "learn" outsourcing. I feel like the only way to really learn it is to do it.
4.
Digital Products and Internet Marketing
This is similar to the automation/outsourcing thing - Tim Ferriss hits on lots of topics and ideas in little details and wildly misleads us into thinking that it'll be incredibly easy and profitable. While his optimism for newbies reading his book is a bit misguided, it did inspire me to start searching for other resources about product design, marketing, SEO, social media marketing, etc etc.
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My two cents and conclusion about 4HWW is that it is not a business guide, it should not be treated as a business guide, and everyone is really taking it too seriously.
In the end I did not learn any practical skills directly from 4HWW.
However, besides studying abroad in university, 4HWW (and Ferriss by extension) was a major red pill influence in my life that sent me down the path I'm currently on.
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