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| The 4 Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Unabridged) | 
 enlarge | Author: Timothy Ferriss
Publisher: audible.com
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $13.10
You Save: $11.85 (47%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  749 reviews
Media: Audio Download
ASIN: B000PKG4DM
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| • | Hardcover - The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich | | • | Audio CD - The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich | | • | Kindle Edition - The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich | | • | Audio Cassette - The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich | | • | Audio Cassette - The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich | | • | Audio CD - The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich | | • | CD-ROM - The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich |
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Product Description
What do you do? Tim Ferriss has trouble answering the question. Depending on when you ask this
controversial Princeton University guest lecturer, he might answer:
“I race motorcycles in Europe.”
“I ski in the Andes.”
“I scuba dive in Panama.”
“I dance tango in Buenos Aires.”
He has spent more than five years learning the secrets of the New Rich, a fast-growing subculture who has abandoned the “deferred-life plan” and instead mastered the new currencies—time and mobility—to create luxury lifestyles in the here and now.
Whether you are an overworked employee or an entrepreneur trapped in your own business, this book is the compass for a new and revolutionary world. Join Tim Ferriss as he teaches you:
• How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want
• How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs
• How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist
• How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and freuent "mini-retirements"
• What the crucial difference is between absolute and relative income
• How to train your boss to value performance over presence, or kill your job (or company) if it’s beyond repair
• What automated cash-flow “muses” are and how to create one in 2 to 4 weeks
• How to cultivate selective ignorance—and create time—with a low-information diet
• What the management secrets of Remote Control CEOs are
• How to get free housing worldwide and airfare at 50–80% off
• How to fill the void and create a meaningful life after removing work and the office
You can have it all—really.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 744 more reviews...
 Get-rich-quick guide for the shallow May 11, 2007
2861 out of 3391 found this review helpful
Reading this book is not a total waste of time and money, but pretty close. If you must, I recommend getting this one from the local library to at least eliminate the financial loss.
To be fair, the first 100 pages is a readable autobiographical reminder of an often preached but rarely practiced warning. Life is short. Do not spend every day in a job you hate to buy things you do not need. The author recommends reading Walden. Thoreau, the classic American minimalist, covered all the same material far more eloquently 150 years ago. So why not read Thoreau instead? Good question.
The rest of the book is essentially a money making plan for white collar workers who hate their jobs. If Mr. Ferriss had restricted this book to a discussion of how to eliminate unproductive efforts from the workplace and shorten the workweek for everyone, he could have written a much briefer and significant book. Instead, he starts with the premise that regular jobs are bad and instead you should start an online company that sells anything that will make money and then outsource every function so that you, as the owner, will not have to do anything.
I have two major concerns at this point:
1.If you are as smart and well-prepared as Mr. Ferris, there is money to be made using his strategy. But the same could be said for the stock market, real estate, or various other methods by which many people lose their shirts.
2.If everyone outsources their work, who is left to do the work? If all the farmers, doctors, and garbage collectors followed the advice in this book, eventually, we would all be starving, sick, and sitting in our own waste. The jet-set lifestyle enjoyed by the author only works because others are actually willing to work. Until robots can run the world, the ethical implication is that it is OK for some people to work, just not Mr. Ferriss or his readers.
Finally, throughout the book Mr. Ferris keeps referring to the New Rich. Despite all his attempts at creating a new paradigm, it appears that the only difference between the New Rich and the Old Rich is that the old rich are capitalists that actually produce things that society needs, such as railroads and software, while the new rich sell things like unregulated nutritional supplements.
Hypocritical May 4, 2007
1271 out of 2063 found this review helpful
There's a lot of hypocritical advice and false values being promoted in this book. For example, the author advises you demand to get paid for the quality of your work, not the time spent on doing it, but then he suggests you outsource your labor overseas, paying somebody else $5 an hour to do it. If somebody actually has to do the work, then the "solution" he is promoting is false, because it's simply masking the fact that the work has to be done by somebody, somewhere. Worse, that "somebody"--most likely a poor person in the developing world--is actaully being exploited for another person's benefit. Similarly, the author lists ways you can live and travel for free. Again, these are what I would call false values. They promote a greedy ethic of something-for-nothing, an idea that will appeal to people who want others to work so that they can live the good life.
 Highly recommended! May 2, 2007
710 out of 986 found this review helpful
I don't often write reviews on Amazon.com but I felt compelled to write one for this book because the author has convinced me to change my assumptions about worklife and personal goals. This is an easy read. Althought I am a slooooow and easily distracted reader, I finished the book from cover-to-cover in a few sittings. I even spent some time researching the weblinks but didn't do all the challenges because I was eager to absorb all the ideas first.
It is probably best to read the book one time through quickly to grasp his point of view (the author even gives a brief blurb on how to speed read). Then after you "get it" take some time doing the challenges if you feel so compelled.
I have already implemented one of the author's recommendations in my daily life....check email only twice per day: right before lunch then again an hour before the end of the day. Process every email at the time you read it. Seems a simple challenge but I did suffer "withdrawal symptoms" from not constantly checking email. And you know what? Because I stayed focus on the task at hand and not constantly checking email I left work last Thursday (April 27) feeling less stressed and more accomplished. This is only a brief part of the book but to me was impactful.
Ferriss gives some great ideas about starting your own business even if you don't have or desire an MBA (like me). He provides lists of free and paid resources to help you along the way.
There is a simple roadmap for freeing yourself from the 9-5 grind. Is it attainable? I hope so. Maybe I'm just being an optimist but yesterday I took the day off from my "cube job" and spent part of my day setting up an online business following his "case studies".
The downside is that the book is provides a cursory glance at some topics that need to be expanded. However, I think he did a good job at presenting his view of how life can be. He's also opened himself up to "The 4 Hour Workweek 2.0" when he can go in more depth.
In all I found it an enjoyable read. I plan to follow his "roadmap" and see where it takes me. I already recommended it to two other friends.
Now, to the naysayers writing "reviews" about this book. First, Read the book. Second, write a review of the book not a review about other reviews. You are undermining your "cause" as Review Police by giving a 1-star without first reading the book and "just to balance the scales". In short you're being hypocritical. I think if you take your own advice and read the book you will "get it". Is there marketing going on here? DUH! Of course there is marketing! Ferriss is selling a product. Simply put, he practices what he preaches!
Read the book and find out!
Imagine my surprise! June 12, 2007
214 out of 249 found this review helpful
I've been checking my email not more than twice a day ever since email was invented. This practice has not contributed to my success; in fact, it bothers many people, just as it bothers them that I often don't return phone calls quickly.
These people decide from my brilliant, Four Hour Work Week practices, that I and my time are more important to me than they are. They have a point.
As Tim recommends, I've outsourced significant parts of my work for 25 years. Like my email reply and phone reply "system," it never occured to me that these practices were noteworthy, or even significant to my success. There's a good reason: they weren't noteworthy and they didn't contribute. They just saved time.
What has worked well for me is work--hard, persistent, and passionate work. Work heals. You never feel more alive than when you are using all your skills in the pursuit of excellence.
My work is not work because I love it. Four hours a day would not be enough; I want more.
What works for everyone is responding immediately to people. People love to feel valued and important, and they reciprocate. People love it when you, instead of spending four hours a week at work and the rest of your day learning how to tango or hit a knockdown eight iron, spend it in service to them, their community, or their country.
What might work is Tim's big but borrowed Idea: Encourage 200 friends to write five star reviews of your books on Amazon. I may try this!
But wait! It's immoral, isn't it?
PS:
Jim Collins's Good to Great continues to sell more books than this every day. It has sold over 5 million copies over its five plus years on the best seller seller list. Jim gets eight Amazon reviews a month--a huge number by Amazon standards. This book, which doesn't approach Jim's for sales or reviews or general acclaim, gets seven reviews on June 13 alone, and is averaging 15 times more reviews per month than Good to Great.
Fifteen times!
 21st Century Snake-Oil Salesman May 16, 2007
137 out of 152 found this review helpful
First, I have to say that I was very enthusiastic about the first part of this book, as Tim suggests that people should consider other ways of living their life instead of working hard toward an eventual retirement. But later I realized after reading the book that the "live your life now, don't wait until later" concept is not new, and has been preached by everyone from philosophers to life coaches for decades now. [...].
Second, while the advice he has for people who already have a business is good (automating certain administrative tasks, checking e-mail less frequently even if you think your world might end if you do that), the ideas he dishes out to would-be entrepreneurs is much more troubling. Specifically product development, which he labels "finding a muse", could mislead some people into believing that you can make an instant-business every month with the help of affiliate marketers, drop shippers, and faking credibility (just check the forums on the book's website). Many things he suggests doing just contributes to the amount of crap we see every day on the internet and in infomercials, and probably isn't a very rewarding way for an entrepreneur to live their life or make their money. It's the equivalent of a how-to-become a 21st century snake oil salesman.
Finally, I know there is a lot of criticism about his ideas on outsourcing tasks, but we live in an outsourced world. The shirt your wearing was made in Indonesia, your fruits and vegetables were picked by migrant workers from Mexico, and your computer that you're reading this from right now was manufactured in China. Adjusted for the cost of living, the Indonesians, Chinese, and Indians make a good amount of money doing what they do to live the "middle-class" versions of their lives in their respective countries, just as you do mundane tasks and get paid much less than corporate shareholders to live the middle-class life in your own country. So don't talk about outsourcing as if it's a bad thing, cause if I can pay Jimmy down the street to mow my lawn for less than a landscaping service, he's gonna get that ten dollars so I can have the extra cash to buy Tim's book and waste time writing a bad review of it on Amazon.
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