LN#33 || Not relevant Today but a good book nonetheless - The 4 hour workweek - Tim Ferriss - Book Review

The book is way older than I thought it was. I picked it up lately when I heard so many good things about it and so I decided to give it a read.

It was when the word Palmreader came multiple times that I got anxious and checked its release date. It was 2007. 

The book wasn’t too helpful for me because everything in the book was something that I already knew. I think when he released the book it would have been a monster hit because people back in 2007 people still weren’t that serious about the internet and haven’t yet taken it as a serious marketing tool.

Literally half of the book is full of websites and links which were of no use to me. 

At the beginning of the book, he talks about entrepreneurship and using the internet and making work more efficient which I think has become the default. 

Everything is easily available on the phone now and people are on WhatsApp these days which has cut back the Email work. 

After reading the book I realized we take the functions of WhatsApp way too much for granted.

So I take this book as a historical book as in ho people operated before 2007 and what measures they needed to make their work more efficient. 

The book mentions bundles of resources, links and references that could help you in becoming more efficient. 

In the end it all about saving your time and letting others do your work. 

But in my opinion, if you are an entrepreneur who has just started up and who have to be very careful about where you are spending your bucks, this book is not for you.

I mean I don’t think I can hire someone to be my virtual assistant to reply to all my mails and pay them 10$ per hour. 

He says that let Indians and Chinese handle your menial tasks but being an Indian myself that defeats the purpose. 

The book again is very American centric so if you are an entrepreneur in any other country, I reckon the same methods will work for you. 

Tim Ferris believes in the automation of life and liberating yourself from doing menial tasks so that you can concentrate more on the jobs which are your priority. 

He says that if there are tasks which you are doing repeatedly and does not require you to do anything new or learn anything new, then employ someone else to do it because it is just killing your time. That is true. 

Talking about priorities several times he mentions about the Pareto Principle called 80/20 where 80% of your results come from the 20% of things you do. The principle was made famous by the bestselling book by renowned author Robert Koch with the name 80/20 principle. Ferris recommends reading it and I agree with him. 

He also talks about setting goals and deadlines for the things that you want to achieve because it is this and nothing else which will give you a boost to do things faster and make you feel like you are working towards something. 

He tells you that he has left several jobs and he does that on purpose because after he learns something at a job he gets bored and leaves to get another job to learn more. 

On one hand this hustling thing sounds interesting but on the other hand, it is a terrible time waster and in the name of experience, you will end up with nothing. 

There are chances that you will become successful following his methods but there is no guarantee that you definitely becoming successful just because things happened in his favour. 

Again, it is a book that is a dream book for someone who does not want to work hard and concentrate on finding the shortcuts. But any shortcut that you will find will have a cost to pay. 

By the time he finished the book he was already earning a lot of money and that is where the problem comes in.

He talks about travel like it is something that everyone should do and everyone loves to do.

Like me, I don’t like to travel and I don’t know how that advice is useful to me. That was some cruel generalization on his part. 

When he talks about travel he gives you calculations of how cheap it is for a single person to travel in the world. Again his costing is in dollars and converting that it would cost a person from another country a lot. He makes it sound easier than it actually is. I tried calculating and converted them to my currency but the figures that came blew my mind

The book is not completely outdated. 

The good things he talks about in the book are traits which I have seen top CEOs following in their lives, like not wasting time on meetings that do not bring the desired results. People at the top are always very careful about where they are wasting their time. 

Time management is something he talks in length and I agree with him there. You cannot waste your time doing things that do not bring you a result. 

Stop meeting people who will bring negativity to you and stop meeting people with whom you are just killing your time. 

Time is the resource which unlike money is not something you can buy and regain. If it's lost, then it's lost. 

I read the first half voraciously because there were few things I enjoyed reading, although I knew all of it being a sucker for self-help books, as it is always beneficial to revise those things. 

I had to skip most of the second half because it was all about resources which I was not going to use and the testimonials of how his methods worked for other people which was just him promoting himself. 

I don’t know whether I got an original version or whether there is an updated version too but I would prefer to listen to his podcasts, which by the way at the top in the podcasting world, rather than read this book. 

Skip this book if you listen to his podcasts and had already listened to Gary Vaynerchuk and have also read a myriad of books on the same topic before.