Book of the Week: The 4-Hour Workweek
17 Feb 2015
The 4-Hour Workweek is one of those well known bestseller type of books. I thought I read it before, but after reading it again, maybe I didn’t read it before. Tim offers a 4-step program (DEAL) to work toward a 4-hour workweek and become one of the new rich (NR) instead of living a deferred (D) life. From previous books on wealth, it looks like I have to save to become wealthy. I know I’ll eventually become wealthy if I save, but then what? Does the knowledge of being financially independent help me sleep better at night? Or would I rather live like a millionaire now?
Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15-30 years of soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path.
There has to be a better way to live your life, doing what you want to do. The only reason why people work 80 hours a week is because they don’t know any better. Why do people work 5 days a week? Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.
This is why it is important to set deadlines. If I tell someone they have a week to finish a task, they’ll take a week. If I tell someone else to finish the same task in 2 days, they will finish it in 2 days. When you start managing people, it is important to keep that in perspective. It also applies to yourself too. If I don’t give myself a deadline to finish my blog post, I’ll take forever to finish it, because I’ll waste my time looking for typos/bugs in other people’s code. If I say, I’m going to finish it tonight, then I will. More Money
In part, it’s laziness, “if only I had more money” is the easiest way to postpone the intense self-examination and decision-making necessary to create a life of enjoyment-now and not later. By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves the time to do otherwise.
You’re never going to have enough money. One problem with amassing a lot of money is that you get afraid of losing it. You should first figure out how much money you need to do the things you need to do. Often you haven’t even thought of things to do with your money or calculated what the cost would be. If you want to drive a Ferrari, you could borrow your friend’s or rent one. That way you don’t have to deal with getting it fixed and the car being in the shop 10 months out of the year. So, you want to travel, then rent our your place on airbnb and use the rental money to rent a place somewhere else.
Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it. I call this the “freedom multiplier”
Most museums in San Francisco have a free day. It costs me $0 to go to those museums if I don’t need to be in the office those days. The less constrained you are, the farther your dollars go. Going to places on off hours means less lines and crowds. Being able to hop on a plane at a moment’s notice means cheap plane tickets. Things to Keep in Mind
- Retirement Is Worst-Case Scenario Insurance.
- Interest and Energy Are Cyclical.
- Less is Not Laziness.
- The Timing Is Never Right.
- Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission.
- Emphasis Strengths, Don’t Fix Weakness.
- Things in Excess Become Their Opposite.
- Money Alone Is Not the Solution.
- Relative Income Is More Important Than Absolute Income.
- Distress Is Bad, Eutress is Good.
Step 1: Define
This brings us full circle. The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals” but What would excite me?”
It is important to figure out what you are going to do with your time now that you don’t have to work 80 hour a week. Tim has an exercise he calls dreamlining where you list up to five things that you dream of having, being and doing in that order. After listing them, he details steps to create actions and calculate the cost to achieve those dreams. Step 2: Eliminate Reduce things from your life before automating. Tim follows the 80/20 Rule. 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. Step 3: Automate Automate the rest. Empower people, so you are not a bottleneck. Step 4: Liberate Reduce the numbers of hours you work and do your work from anywhere on the global. Future You can only have a 4-Hour workweek if your output unit of production is not related to the number of hours you work. Eventually somebody has to be that person. I’d rather not be that person. What’s true is that most people don’t need to work 40 hours a week. Some people have no incentive to work more efficiency, because they get paid by the hour. For them to get their income they need to punch the clock. Is it some societal thing that we fear underemployment? Maybe if people have time when they aren’t working, they will have time to think and rise up and overthrow the government. There is no reason to have a 40-hour workweek from first principles. I need to tackle Step 1, which was also brought up by I Will Teach You To Be Rich. What excites me?