P.G. Snacks Personal Growth in bitesize chunks

The 4-hour workweek: Thoughts after reading

As you may have seen on twitter, I’ve been reading the famous (maybe close to legendary) “The 4-Hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferriss. I won’t turn this post into a book review so I’ll just keep it short: It’s a truly inspiring book that changes the way you look at jobs, making money, vacations and retirements and pretty much the entire way you live your life. I truly recommend reading this to broaden your horizon and give yourself a glimpse of how great your life could be. Just go read it and convince yourself.

Now back on topic; what did it leave me with after reading?
Even while reading it I noticed myself getting inspired and fired up to take inventory of my life. I started examining the things I was doing that I never really questioned. Naturally there were some that I already noticed before but it got them back in the spotlight.

Cultural Malware
For example; something that I spoke to Toomas about at our Dutch/Belgian bloggers “meetup” a few weeks back. People seem to have a cultural program running that makes them feel obligated to work their asses off for about 40-to-50 years in order to be finally retire when they reach the age of 65. Actually, I wouldn’t even call this a program that we’re running. A program is something that enables us to do something-, that adds some form of value. Now that I’m thinking about this, it’s probably call this a piece of “cultural walware”. (Malicious software that enables other “evil” people to take advantage and-/or control of your computer to use it for their own advantage)
Isn’t that strangely close to the truth? Going to work every day, performing tasks appointed to you by your direct supervisor. Of course you’re getting paid for it, but essentially you’re working to increase your boss’s income. Someone is (ab)using and-/or controlling your time to their own advantage.

The 4-hour workweek brought back to my attention that it’s perfectly okay to question the concept of a job as a whole. A job is not an obligation, it’s a choice! Just like everything else in life, it’s a choice and you are completely free to pick the answer. If you feel fine with the concept of a 9-to-5, providing you with the money and stability you crave, that’s perfectly fine. But it’s just as fine to feel confined by the 9-to-5 concept and crave more freedom to choose how you spend your day.

Passive income & outsourcing
Something that Steve Pavlina has written out plenty of times before is the concept of passive income. Essentially it is the idea of receiving money for value that you provide, but that is no longer directly tied to time you put in. Things like royalties on books or music that you’ve created for example. The same goes for ad-revenues if you run a successful website. I’ve always been fascinated by this concept because, if arranged well enough, it completely eliminates the need for location dependant work. It provides a state where your financial state is no longer directly tied to the maximum of 24 hours that you have to spend per day.
Timothy Ferriss introduces “Muses”, companies that you set up to run as automated as possible, generating income for you. He provides several real-world examples of these and gives tips on how to create your own. A large part of these muses revolves around stripping things down to the bare essentials and then outsourcing the remaining work as much as possible. This really got me thinking about the things I do on a weekly basis. Which parts of my work do really rely on my personal unique qualities to get done and which parts could I potentially get someone else to do? The internet really enables miraculous things for those that are willing (and perhaps daring) to dive into them. 4 euro’s an hour might not great pay in The Netherlands or Belgium, but people on the other side of the world would gladly work for that reward. Why would you do the same work for i.e. 15 euro’s an hour if you can get yourself a virtual personal assistant to do it for you for 5 euro’s an hour? The results: Either you do nothing and still get the 10 euro premium each hour or you decide to focus on other tasks to increase the value you provide to your company. (Yes, you can even do this is you have a boss)

I’m currently exploring the possibilities the many concepts in this book can provide me with, since I touched only a few in this post. Without a doubt there’s more to come!