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📚 The 4 Hour Workweek - Expanded And Updated

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By Adam 22 min read

Ditch the 9-5 grind and learn how to work less but smarter. Through DEAL—Definition, Elimination, Automation, Liberation—Ferriss shows you how to cut the crap, make money in your sleep, and live your dream life. It’s all about working smart, automating your income, and living freely. Packed with cool tips and real talk, this book is perfect for anyone ready to shake up their work game and have more fun. Give it a read if you’re into doing more with less and living big.

About the book

   
Author: Timothy Ferriss
Year of release: 2009
Genre: Busines, Self-Help, Productivity, Persona lDevelopment, Entrepreneurship, Finance
Pages: 416
Average WPM: 300
Date Started/Finished: 25-Jun to 9-Aug
Time took: 5.58 Hours

What I Liked About It and What I didn’t

The author gives a lot of examples and resources for everything he discusses about but a few information is outdated

How I Discovered It

Through Ali Abdaal’s YouTube video

Who Should Read It?

  • Whoever wants to work more efficient and effectively
  • People who want to spend less time doing mundane tasks and more time doing important stuff
  • “People who want to escape the matrix” ~ Andrew Tate 💀 (idk why I quoted him)

Actionable Takeaways

Outsource work.

Summary + Notes

First and Foremost

My Story and Why You Need This Book

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - MARK TWAIN

Here is the step-by-step process you’ll use to reinvent yourself:

D  for Definition: It replaces self-defeating assumptions and explains concepts such as relative wealth and eustress.

E  for Elimination kills the obsolete notion of time management once and for all. This section provides the first of the three luxury lifestyle design ingredients: time.

A  for Automation puts cash flow on autopilot using geographic arbitrage, outsourcing, and rules of non decision. This section provides the second ingredient of luxury lifestyle design: income.

L  for Liberation is the mobile manifesto for the globally inclined. The concept of mini-retirements is introduced, as are the means for flawless remote control and escaping the boss. This section delivers the third and final ingredient for luxury lifestyle design: mobility.

Chronology of a Pathology

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. - NIELS BOHR, Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner


Step 1: D is for Definition

Chapter 1 - Cautions and Comparisons: How to Burn $1,000,000 a Night

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. - RICHARD P. FEYNMAN, Nobel Prize–winning physicist

  • The options are limitless, but each path begins with the same first step: replacing assumptions.
  • Some people remain convinced that just a bit more money will make things right.

Chapter 2 - Rules That Change the Rules: Everything Popular Is Wrong

I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time. - HERBERT BAYARD SWOPE, American editor and journalist; first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize

Everything popular is wrong. - OSCAR WILDE, The Importance of Being Earnest

  • Different is better when it is more effective or more fun.
  • Don’t follow a model that doesn’t work. If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are.
  • The following rules are the fundamental differentiators to keep in mind throughout this book.
    1. Retirement Is Worst-Case-Scenario Insurance.
    2. Interest and Energy Are Cyclical.
    3. Less Is Not Laziness.
      • Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.
      • Few people choose to (or are able to) measure the results of their actions and thus measure their contribution in time. More time equals more self-worth and more reinforcement from those above and around them.
      • Focus on being productive instead of busy.
    4. The Timing Is Never Right.
    5. Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission.
      • If the potential damage is moderate or in any way reversible, don’t give people the chance to say no.
    6. Emphasize Strengths, Don’t Fix Weaknesses.
      • It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre.
      • Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.
    7. Things in Excess Become Their Opposite.
    8. Money Alone Is Not the Solution.
      • 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.
    9. Relative Income Is More Important Than Absolute Income.
      • Chap A moving at 80 hours per week and Chap B moving at 10 hours per week. They both make $50,000 per year. Who will be richer when they pass in the middle of the night? If you said B, you would be correct, and this is the difference between absolute and relative income.
      • Absolute income is measured using one holy and inalterable variable: the raw and almighty dollar. Jane Doe makes $100,000 per year and is thus twice as rich as John Doe, who makes $50,000 per year.
      • Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours. The whole “per year” concept is arbitrary and makes it easy to trick yourself. Let’s look at the real trade. Jane Doe makes $100,000 per year, $2,000 for each of 50 weeks per year, and works 80 hours per week. Jane Doe thus makes $25 per hour. John Doe makes $50,000 per year, $1,000 for each of 50 weeks per year, but works 10 hours per week and hence makes $100 per hour. In relative income, John is four times richer.
    10. Distress Is Bad, Eustress Is Good.
      • There are two separate types of stress, each as different as euphoria and its seldom-mentioned opposite, dysphoria.
      • Eustress, on the other hand, is a word most of you have probably never heard. Eu-, a Greek prefix for “healthy,” is used in the same sense in the word “euphoria.”
      • People who avoid all criticism fail. It’s destructive criticism we need to avoid, not criticism in all forms.

Chapter 3 - Dodging Bullets: Fear-Setting and Escaping Paralysis

  • Uncovering Fear Disguised as Optimism

There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, “Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything,” and an optimist who says, “Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyway.” Either way, nothing happens. - YVON CHOUINARD, founder of Patagonia

  • Fear itself is quite fear-inducing. Most intelligent people in the world dress it up as something else: optimistic denial.

  • To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as serious as you make them out to be.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. - MARK TWAIN

  • What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. As I have heard said, a person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.

Chapter 4 - System Reset: Being Unreasonable and Unambiguous

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Maxims for Revolutionists

Doing the Unrealistic Is Easier Than Doing the Realistic
  • Unreasonable and unrealistic goals are easier to achieve for yet another reason.
  • Doing big things begins with asking for them properly.
What Do You Want? A Better Question, First of All
  • Most people will never know what they want. I don’t know what I want. If you ask me what I want to do in the next five months for language learning, on the other hand, I do know. It’s a matter of specificity. “What do you want?” is too imprecise to produce a meaningful and actionable answer.
  • Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all. When people suggest you follow your “passion” or your “bliss,” I propose that they are, in fact, referring to the same singular concept: excitement.
  • 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?”
  • boredom is the enemy, not some abstract “failure.”
Correcting Course: Get Unrealistic

Dreamlining is so named because it applies timelines to what most would consider dreams.

It is much like goal-setting but differs in several fundamental respects:

  1. The goals shift from ambiguous wants to defined steps.
  2. The goals have to be unrealistic to be effective.
  3. It focuses on activities that will fill the vacuum created when work is removed. Living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things and not just owning enviable things.

  • “I deal with rejection by persisting, not by taking my business elsewhere.”

  • What would you do if there were no way you could fail? If you were 10 times smarter than the rest of the world?
    • Create two timelines—6 months and 12 months—and list up to five things you dream of having (including, but not limited to, material wants: house, car, clothing, etc.), being (be a great cook, be fluent in Chinese, etc.), and doing (visiting Thailand, tracing your roots overseas, racing ostriches, etc.) in that order. If you have difficulty identifying what you want in some categories, as most will, consider what you hate or fear in each and write down the opposite.
  • Get in touch with someone who knows the answer instead of spending too much time in books or online, which can turn into paralysis by analysis. The best first step, the one I recommend, is finding someone who’s done it and ask for advice on how to do the same. It’s not hard.


Step 2: E is for Elimination

Chapter 5 - The End of Time Management: Illusions and Italians

The End of Time Management

Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away. - ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY, pioneer of international postal flight and author of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince)

It is vain to do with more what can be done with less. - WILLIAM OF OCCAM (1300–1350), originator of “Occam’s Razor”

  • Just a few words on time management: Forget all about it.
  • Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions
Being Effective vs. Being Efficient

Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.

  • Here are two truisms to keep in mind:
    1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
    2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.
  • From this moment forward, remember this: What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.
Pareto and His Garden: 80/20 and Freedom from Futility

What gets measured gets managed. - PETER DRUCKER, management theorist, author of 31 books

  • The mathematical formula he used to demonstrate a grossly uneven but predictable distribution of wealth in society—80% of the wealth and income was produced and possessed by 20% of the population—also applied outside of economics. Indeed, it could be found almost everywhere.
  • Pareto’s Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs. Alternative ways to phrase this, depending on the context, include:
    • 80% of the consequences flow from 20% of the causes.
    • 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort and time.
  • Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.
The 9–5 Illusion and Parkinson’s Law

  • How is it possible that all the people in the world need exactly 8 hours to accomplish their work? It isn’t. 9–5 is arbitrary. You don’t need 8 hours per day to become a legitimate millionaire—let alone have the means to live like one.

  • Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline. If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials.

  • This presents a very curious phenomenon. There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other:
    1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20).
    2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law).
  • At least three times per day at scheduled times, he had to ask himself the following question:
    • Am I being productive or just active?
      • Charney captured the essence of this with less-abstract wording:
    • Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?
  • Identify:
    • Positive friends versus time-consuming friends: Who is helping versus hurting you, and how do you increase your time with the former while decreasing or eliminating your time with the latter?
    • Who is causing me stress disproportionate to the time I spend with them? What will happen if I simply stop interacting with these people? Fear-setting helps here.
    • When do I feel starved for time? What commitments, thoughts, and people can I eliminate to fix this problem?
  • Learn to ask, “If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?”
    • I don’t recommend using Outlook or computerized to-do lists, because it is possible to add an infinite number of items. I use a standard piece of paper folded in half three times, which fits perfectly in the pocket and limits you to noting only a few items. There should never be more than two mission-critical items to complete each day. Never. It just isn’t necessary if they’re actually high-impact.
  • Do not multitask.
    • I’m going to tell you what you already know. Trying to brush your teeth, talk on the phone, and answer e-mail at the same time just doesn’t work. Eating while doing online research and instant messaging? Ditto.
    • If you prioritize properly, there is no need to multitask. It is a symptom of “task creep”—doing more to feel productive while actually accomplishing less. As stated, you should have, at most, two primary goals or tasks per day. Do them separately from start to finish without distraction.

Chapter 6 - The Low-Information Diet: Cultivating Selective Ignorance

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. - ALBERT EINSTEIN

  • Problems, as a rule, solve themselves or disappear if you remove yourself as an information bottleneck and empower others.

  • I’m going to propose that you develop an uncanny ability to be selectively ignorant. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also practical.

  • The first step is to develop and maintain a low-information diet. Just as modern man consumes both too many calories and calories of no nutritional value, information workers eat data both in excess and from the wrong sources.

How to Read 200% Faster in 10 Minutes

  1. Two Minutes: Use a pen or finger to trace under each line as you read as fast as possible.

  2. Three Minutes: Begin each line focusing on the third word in from the first word, and end each line focusing on the third word in from the last word.
  3. Two Minutes: Once comfortable indenting three or four words from both sides, attempt to take only two snapshots—also known as fixations—per line on the first and last indented words.
  4. Three Minutes: Practice reading too fast for comprehension but with good technique (the above three techniques) for five pages prior to reading at a comfortable speed.

Question and Actions

  1. Go on an immediate one-week media fast.
    • Each day at lunch break, and no earlier, get your five-minute news fix. Ask a well-informed colleague or a restaurant waiter, “Anything important happening in the world today? I couldn’t get the paper today.” Stop this as soon as you realize that the answer doesn’t affect your actions at all. Most people won’t even remember what they spent one to two hours absorbing that morning.
  2. Develop the habit of asking yourself, “Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?”
    • Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it.
    • Focus on what digerati Kathy Sierra calls “just-in-time” information instead of “just-in-case” information.
  3. Practice the art of nonfinishing.
    • Starting something doesn’t automatically justify finishing it. If you are reading an article that sucks, put it down and don’t pick it back up.
    • More is not better, and stopping something is often 10 times better than finishing it. Develop the habit of nonfinishing that which is boring or unproductive if a boss isn’t demanding it.

Chapter 7 - Interrupting Interruption and the Art of Refusal

Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. - RALPH CHARELL

  • Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.

  • an interruption is anything that prevents the start-to-finish completion of a critical task, and there are three principal offenders:
    • Time wasters: Common time wasters include meetings, discussions, phone calls, web surfing, and e-mail that are unimportant.
    • Time consumers: repetitive tasks or requests that need to be completed but often interrupt high-level work. Here are a few you might know intimately: reading and responding to e-mail, making and returning phone calls
    • Empowerment failures: instances where someone needs approval to make something small happen.
  • Let’s look at the prescriptions for all three in turn.
Time Wasters: Become an Ignoramus

The best defense is a good offense. - DAN GABLE, Olympic gold medalist in wrestling

Time Consumers: Batch and Do Not Falter
  • Do not work harder when the solution is working smarter.

People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don’t realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world. - CALVIN, from Calvin and Hobbes

  • Blaming idiots for interruptions is like blaming clowns for scaring children—they can’t help it. It’s their nature.


Step 3: A is for Automation

Chapter 8 - Outsourcing Life: Off-loading the Rest and a Taste of Geoarbitrage

  • Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. Otherwise, you waste someone else’s time instead of your own, which now wastes your hard-earned cash.
  • Principle number one is to refine rules and processes before adding people. Using people to leverage a refined process multiplies production; using people as a solution to a poor process multiplies problems.

Chapter 9 - Income Autopilot I: Finding the Muse

  • It is critical that you decide how you will sell and distribute your product before you commit to a product in the first place. The more middlemen are involved, the higher your margins must be to maintain profitability for all the links in the chain.

  • Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is much easier. Don’t create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market—define your customers—then find or develop a product for them.

  • Be a member of your target market and don’t speculate what others need or will be willing to buy.

  • Option One: Resell a Product
  • Option Two: License a Product
    • I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow ~ WOODROW WILSON
    • Some of the world’s best-known brands and products have been borrowed from someone or somewhere else. The basis for the energy drink Red Bull came from a tonic in Thailand, and the Smurfs were brought from Belgium. PokĂ©mon came from the land of Honda.

Chapter 10 - Income Autopilot II: Testing the Muse

  • Basically I try to keep all of my tools online so that if my laptop gets stolen, I can buy a new one and have everything up and running within 24 hours.

Chapter 11 - Income Autopilot III: MBA—Management by Absence

  • The contradictory advice you find in business books and elsewhere usually relates to managing employees—how to handle the human element. Herb tells you to give them a hug, Revson tells you to kick them in the balls, and I tell you to solve the problem by eliminating it altogether: Remove the human element. Once you have a product that sells, it’s time to design a self-correcting business architecture that runs itself.
  • I’m often asked how big my company is—how many people I employ full-time. The answer is one. Most people lose interest at that point. If someone were to ask me how many people run Brain-QUICKEN LLC, on the other hand, the answer is different: between 200 and 300. I am the ghost in the machine.


Step 4: L Is for Liberation

It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains. - THOMAS H. HUXLEY, English biologist; known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”

Chapter 13 - Beyond Repair: Killing Your Job

Some jobs are simply beyond repair. Improvements would be like adding a set of designer curtains to a jail cell: better but far from good.

If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time. - CHINESE PROVERB

Just because something has been a lot of work or consumed a lot of time doesn’t make it productive or worthwhile. Just because you are embarrassed to admit that you’re still living the consequences of bad decisions made 5, 10, or 20 years ago shouldn’t stop you from making good decisions now. If you let pride stop you, you will hate life 5, 10, and 20 years from now for the same reasons.

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. - THOMAS J. WATSON, founder of IBM

Only those who are asleep make no mistakes. - INGVAR KAMPRAD, founder of IKEA

Chapter 15 - Filling the Void: Adding Life After Subtracting Work

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike. - OSCAR WILDE

Chapter 16 - The Top 13 New Rich Mistakes

If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake. - FRANK WILCZEK, 2004 Nobel Prize winner in physics


Last But Not Least (Extra Chapters)

The Art of Letting Bad Things Happen

  • Just remember: If you don’t have attention, you don’t have time. Did I have time to check e-mail and voicemail? Sure. It might take 10 minutes. Did I have the attention to risk fishing for crises in those 10 minutes? Not at all.
  • Time without attention is worthless, so value attention over time.

How to Travel the World with 10 Pounds or Less

  • I practice what I’ll label the BIT method of travel: Buy It There.
  • I’ve learned to instead allocate $50–200 per trip to a “settling fund,” which I use to buy needed items once they’re 100% needed.
  • Also, never buy if you can borrow.

The Not-to-Do List: 9 Habits to Stop Now

“Not-to-do” lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance. The reason is simple: What you don’t do determines what you can do.

  1. Do not answer calls from unrecognized phone numbers.
  2. Do not e-mail first thing in the morning or last thing at night.
  3. Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time.
  4. Do not let people ramble.
  5. Do not check e-mail constantly—“batch” and check at set times only.
  6. Do not over-communicate with low-profit, high-maintenance customers.
  7. Do not work more to fix overwhelmingness—prioritize.
  8. Do not carry a cell phone or Crackberry 24/7.
  9. Do not expect work to fill a void that non-work relationships and activities should.

The Margin Manifesto: 11 Tenets for Reaching (or Doubling) Profitability in 3 Months

  1. Revisit Drucker—What Gets Measured Gets Managed
  2. Less Is More—Limiting Distribution to Increase Profit
  3. Net-Zero—Create Demand vs. Offering Terms
  4. Negotiate Late—Make Others Negotiate Against Themselves
  5. Hyperactivity vs. Productivity—80/20 and Pareto’s Law
  6. The Customer Is Not Always Right—“Fire” High-Maintenance Customers
  7. Deadlines Over Details—Test Reliability Before Capability
Summarized, Book
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