Book Review: The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich

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"The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich" by Tim Ferriss is one of those books I had heard about but not got around to reading until now.

My key takeaways:
  • Think about what parts of your work or personal life you could outsource to free up time to do other things (some good references are provided in the book such as elance, Your Man In India and Brickwork). 
  • There are some good reminders about time management, handling interruptions, testing (even down to product name testing via Google AdWords) and keeping it simple for the customer by reducing the number of decisions they need to make.
  • Some good advice was provided about having a minimum advertised pricing clause in order to prevent wholesaling wars (not only by organisations, but also by discounters on eBay)
  • There are some useful links to tools and sites to get a website up and running quickly, some good advice about projecting that your company is bigger than it is (e.g. by having multiple email addresses for multiple departments) and using this as an enabler to scale later.
I skimmed over many of the other parts of the book since it was a bit too verbose.

Comments

  1. UnknownJune 12, 2015 at 12:19 AM

    I read the book a few weeks ago and here is what I thought about it: I agree with you that it is a bit wordy and some of the fluff could have been left out. This book gets off to a good start, by making the valid (if trite) points that one should not defer all gratification indefinitely; and making money should not be an end in itself, but rather a means towards making it possible for you to do the things that you want to do. It also offers some useful (if basic) ways to save time, such as not checking email constantly, but rather dealing with it all at once at fixed (and not too frequent) times. All in all, would not recommend highly. Didi from InTouch http://www.intouchcrm.com/

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