It is April 2010, three years after the The 4-Hour Work Week (T4HWW) has been out on the New York best sellers list, and I’m attending a seminar by Mark Hoverson in search of answers, hoping to reinvent myself.  While addressing the issue of how we think of ourselves, and the immediate need to embrace a new paradigm of Leadership Branding for Direct Response Marketing, Mark oh so briefly mentioned Timothy Ferriss and his book as an important source document to read.

Upon review of my notes and the recording of the seminar session, I found the book’s title catchy and intriguing but the last thing I needed to do was buy another book for the shelf about which I was skeptical.  One week later, I was going over the lessons from Mark Hoverson with my business partner and he too was caught by the catchy title.  So, it was decided we should investigate the book and so we got on-line with the San Diego Public library to put a call hold on the book.  And I am glad we did!

The Ferriss book has saved me months this year (2010) of trial-and-error efforts by providing very clear principles and precepts that have guided some of our most recent and successful business decisions.  The lessons are full of insights that I’m sure many of us have independently had, but Mr. Ferriss has been able to envision and describe the logical culmination of change-producing action: the creation of a lifestyle that is both fulfilling and self-sustaining.

The book is remarkable in that it presents a vast array of subjects such as goal setting, time management, business, marketing, and the pursuit of happiness, but squarely within the concept called lifestyle design. It seems these days a predominant theme in our society is custom design solutions, and this is about lifestyle custom design.  Most importantly, why should one burn them self out, deferring their immediate enjoyment of life, when a simple redefinition to the rules of the game can enable one to live the life they want right now?  While this may seem ludicrous, possibly even irresponsible, after reading this book I now agree with Timothy Ferriss that this reaction too is just a product of fear instilled by social conditioning. T4HWW provides enough information to persuade me not to play that old game…but instead beat it with the new rules of the New Rich.

T4HWW is a remarkably transparent guide to achieving that lifestyle you’ve always wanted but didn’t dare admit, rationally presented as a series of steps predicated on a fundamental rule: reality is negotiable…outside of science and law, all rules can be bent or broken.

T4HWW is more than your typical self-help book in that it provides the names of the outsourcers, services and brokers Ferriss used successfully in the past to build the foundation of his automatic income-producing engine.  It’s all part of his meta-approach to planning and getting away with the ideal lifestyle!

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Timothy Ferriss’ D.E.A.L.

A common presentation approach used by self-help books includes: starting off with a good story, followed by the making an incredible-sounding claim, establishing the credibility of the claim maker, tying the claim to the reality of the reader, and then presenting the first of many mnemonic devices.

D.E.A.L. is the mnemonic of T4HWW and stands for:

• Definition: Figure out what you want, get over your fears, see past society’s “expectations”, and figure out what it will really cost to get to where you want. It can be surprisingly cheap, costing less than what you’re paying now. Ferriss also provides a very personally-appealing insight regarding the nature of happiness:

The opposite of happiness isn’t sadness. It’s boredom.

Therefore, the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of excitement. While this sounds irresponsible on the surface, if you can precisely define how you can take care of yourself and your commitments and then create a system to take care of that for you, then WHY NOT? You too can live the “eccentric billionaire lifestyle”.

• Elimination is about Time Management, or rather about NOT managing time.  Instead, apply the 80/20 rule to focus only on those tasks that contribute the majority of benefit. Also apply it ruthlessly to all aspects of your life to eliminate the small minority of factors that waste 80% of your time.  Forget time management;  focus instead on getting the really important and results-producing tasks done.  Mr. Ferriss says there is a difference between efficiency and effectiveness.  Choose to be effective!
• Automation is all about building a sustainable, automatic source of income. This is a section that is, practically speaking, about Business and Business Management. The trick is to avoid is building a business that requires your presence, because that just burns up all your time.  Ferriss made that mistake once, generating lots of monthly revenue but ended up being chained to the machine to keep it working.  Ferriss now has hundreds of people working on his behalf through multiple outsourced vendors, all operating under specific instructions that are designed to not create headaches for him while depositing those lovely monthly checks. This is a fascinating section of the book, and is well worth reading for its pragmatic approach to effective management.  Ferriss also provides many  examples and resource listings which makes this is a mini-book on how to define and operate a profitable business.
• Liberation: Once you’ve successfully automated your lifestyle, liberate yourself from your geographical location and your job. It’s a lot easier than you think, once you’ve gotten through the previous three steps. With mobility comes the ability to leverage economic advantages across the world. Living in a tropical paradise and eating at 5-star restaurants everyday can be cheaper than watching TV in your house back in the States. Incidentally, Ferriss notes that if you’re in a job, your order of steps will be DELA, not DEAL, and he provides specific examples for that case. Like the time his friend spend a month in China getting married, but was just as productive as if he were working remotely so no one was the wiser.

Ferriss calls practitioners of DEAL or DELA the “New Rich” (or NR), and practitioners of the more traditional “work really hard, save up and then retire” approach as “Deferrers” (D). He identifies three key ingredients of the NR lifestyle: time, income, and mobility. With them, you can take the time to travel the slow and enjoyable way, learn new languages. Learn how to salsa dance professionally. Live fully! You’ve arranged for the income to manage itself with minimal decision making required from yourself because you’ve built decision making into the system.

Ferriss notes that you’re likely to freak out and get bogged down in a lot of soul searching before you really get settled. Is it somehow wrong to just do this? I liked his method of resolving those big life questions, which he observes tend to generate stress because they’re just poorly worded. His solution:

1. Ask yourself if you have decided on a single meaning for each term in the question.
2. Ask yourself if an answer to this question can be acted on to improve things.

If the answer to either question is NO, then forget about it.  Ferriss says that if you take away just one thing from his book, it’s to follow those two rules; he believes that the top 1% of performers in the world live by them.

Many Insights

While there are many topics that are noteworthy within the book, I’ll just present a few good examples as to encourage you to also check this book out from your local library.

PRINCIPLES

T4HWW is as much a book about the philosophy of life in Timothy Ferriss as it is a guide to personal freedom from over-work. What it recommends is not an easy path to follow in that one must first rise above preconceptions about work, responsibility, and society. Only then is it possible to peek outside our self-made walls that constrict us in order to see what’s really possible.  We must have enough courage to do something about our condition. For many, that alone will be a very tall hurdle to overcome.

With the attitude of an enlightened computer hacker or game designer; Mr. Ferriss is completely aware that a lot of what we accept as rules is merely a benefit-producing mass hallucination.  That is most existing business systems are created by intentional design to benefit the founders who take most of the risk to make a business in which the rest of us work putting in for too many hours in order to bare little risk. (This is also found clearly explained in “The E Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What To To About It” by Michael E. Gerber, and “The Cashflow Quadrant: Rich Dad’s Guide to Financial Freedom” by Robert T. Kiyosaki).

Given the current state of economy in America at 2010, marginalized as a GREAT RECESSION, the real hope for a good future is in individuals creating new, small business using new paradigms for business development, marketing and economic growth.  There is nothing to stop anyone from creating another system that works for them, except their perceived limitations, and (to paraphrase Ferriss) the twin bogies of science and law. However, the existence of applied sciences and political lobbyists bare witness to the fact that even science and law can also be gamed.

Ferriss spends quite a bit of time deconstructing the nature of fear: by defining fear, you create the means to conquer it. A lot of us know that already, but there was one aspect of it that was new to me:  fear disguised as optimism…the belief that things will get better if you keep doing what you are doing now, or don’t do anything. Isn’t that the definition of insanity… to change nothing and still expect things to change?  That is a losing attitude; it is far better to DEFINE and then EXECUTE according to a plan that has measurable mile stones, and tweak the plan for improved results based on measured results before each execution cycle.

TIME MANAGEMENT

I once heard it said, “I do that which I do not want to do, and I do not what I should.”  Many people, like me, spend far too much time doing minutia stuff that is not important or priority to the grand scheme of a DEFINED business plan with its goals.  Most people procrastinate on doing the really important things because they are boring.

T4HWW specifically addresses the method “be more efficient” solution for increased productivity.  Getting Things Done (GTD) fills that need very nicely in terms of a method for processing tasks and information, but I simply do not want to just be faster at information processing in order to have more time “later” to do something. Later never seems to arrive.

T4HWW emphasizes prioritization over faster processing, with an emphasis on working smarter, sometimes through delegation:

• Apply Pareto’s Principle ruthlessly to everything, and eliminate the 20% that is causing 80% of the trouble. That could be troublesome clients, answering email, whatever. Evolve methods for dealing with them.
• Apply Parkinson’s Law to task planning, which is to not let tasks absorb more importance than they merit by swelling to fill all available time. There’s some similarity to 37Signals approach to less leading to more effectiveness, though T4HWW takes it further to its ultimate conclusion. Ferriss also notes how Parkinson’s Law and the Pareto Principle in conjunction form an interesting recursive definition of effectiveness: Limit tasks to just the important ones to shorten your working time, and shorten your working time to limit tasks to the important ones.
• Cultivating selective ignorance means reducing the number of inputs you’re getting. More inputs leads to more distraction, and distraction is the killer of effective action. Most of them don’t add to your immediate goals of getting free; they just trap you where you are by sapping energy. This destroys your ability to effectively act, and Lifestyle Design is impossible.

Ferriss identifies three kinds of interruptions:

1. Time Wasters — things that are unimportant that can be ignored. Ferriss has a lot of interesting ideas about how to get rid of meetings and unnecessary time spent answering email. He also discusses how to train the people around you.  This part of the book is where one realizes that Timothy Ferriss has the mind of a master game designer.
2. Time Consumers — things that must get done, but take a lot of time. Personal errands, laundry, going to the doctor, etc. His solution is essentially that of GTD: batch and do not falter.
3. Empowerment Failures — if someone has to ask you for permission or to get approval before moving forward, you’ve become a bottleneck. It also limits the scalability of your operation. Ferriss’ solution is to analyze the reason for the failure, then come up with a policy to handle it in the future. The example he uses is handling customer service complaints; by empowering the reps to fix the problem if it costs less than a certain amount of money, customer satisfaction went up and the time burden on him was vastly reduced. This is remarkably like the suggestions of Joel Spolsky’s article on customer service and bug fixing.

MANAGING PEOPLE and PROCESSES

For some people, a totally new consideration will be hiring a personal assistant, also known as a virtual assistant (VA) through an outsourcing company.  This book shows that a good VA can cost between $4 and $10 an hour from India, and once you find one that works well with you it is possible to multiply your effectiveness. Ferriss provides two very powerful rules of thumb to make sure that you’re not just adding undue busywork:

• Refine rules & processes before adding people.
• Eliminate before you delegate.

Anything that makes it through that filter then must follow his GOLDEN RULE #1: be both time-consuming and well-defined, otherwise you’re not really doing anything. This presumes one’s ability to “define well” and could be the ultimate challenge to effectively deploy Ferriss’ entire course on Lifestyle Design.  Because of  discomfort with writing, or because they don’t fully understand the nature of what they’re doing in context of other people, many people find it difficult to define things.

However, GOLDEN RULE #2 also dictates have fun with it, as a reminder to not be so dire. So you screwed up the first directive…no big deal since this the manner in how you learn how to succeed. Timothy Ferriss provides a great example of his first failed attempt to delegate a task to his virtual assistant, and in consequence how he cleaned up the mess. As mentioned above about DEFINE and EXECUTE, it all revolves around establishing metrics for success and limits; essentially, you are programming behavior in the most elegant manner possible.

CREATING AN INCOME MACHINE

I believe this section of the book will cause most readers to sit up straight and pay close attention, because it outlines what seems to be an excellent crash course about testing a consumer market on a product or service, outsourcing a product / service, and sales fulfillment

Conclusion

This is one of those rare books you will come across, and after reading (probably more than once as I have, and still use it as a look-up reference guide), you too will be recommending T4HWW to all of your friends. This book is definitely for folks who like to be around empowered, positive-minded individuals who chase their dreams reckless abandonment.

Here are a few things that I believe will challenge people who choose to implement the recommended methods of Timothy Ferris :

1. You must have a clearly defined end game.
2. You must be able to communicate solutions.
3. You must practice self-restraint, self-discipline with steadfast focus, and a strong determined work ethic when confronting essential tasks.
4. You need to be a discerning person in order to know when you’re moving forward and not.

The least you will need is the ability to define a dream, and be able to measure the distance from your starting point, and progress toward the goal of becoming one of the New Rich (NR). By relentlessly practicing the methods of elimination, automation, and liberation you will increase your success.  I believe just getting through a few of the phases needed to make your D.E.A.L. will measurably make your life more productive. And always remember, what you can’t measure, doesn’t count.

Finally, the second edition of T4HWW released in 2009 with the orange-red cover includes expanded and updated, helpful Q&A—Question and Action—sections after each chapter.  The book is filled with great exercises that are designed to jolt you out of nearly any old perspective of fear and complacency. For example, the dreamlining process is particularly insightful which guides you through the difficult part of the Definition phase where there is a moment of: “Duh, what do I want to do”?

You will find a lot of good helpful information in the book, and I know my personal bar of achievement has been significantly raised for the better. You can visit Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week website for more information. I particularly like this web site because it has a “marketing” kind of vibe that I thrive on for new marketing ideas, strategies, and methodology.

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• Too Much Information? Ignore It – New York Times (nytimes.com)
• What is Lifestyle Design (innoforeignland.wordpress.com)