4-hour Work Week, Escape the 9-5. Get a New Life

A Guide to Living the Lifestyle of the New Rich

Sep 27, 2008

This book demonstrate a way of enjoying better work-life balance by spreading mini-retirements through a lifetime: it argues wealth is not the aim but the lifestyle is.

In 4-Hour Work Week Timothy Ferris suggests his lifestyle challenges traditional concepts of retirement as old-fashioned. It is a manifesto for living more, working less and living the dream of the New Rich. He makes the distinction between the wealthy who are working hard making money, usually putting their dreams on hold until some indeterminate time in the future, and the New Rich who work smart and live the millionaire lifestyle along the way.

Despite the author’s protestation that it is not about time management there is good advice about how to use time more effectively, not just more efficiently, by doing only the essential. The purpose of freeing more time is not to do more meaningless or unfulfilling work but to be able to live life now.

This book advocates owning a business, not managing it, by using automation and third parties. It is an approach used by many large organisations and is central to the 4-hour work week as it is about getting the benefits from a business without the work.

This book is also a guide to addressing adult-onset Adventure Deficit Disorder where realisation dawns, usually in middle-age, about missed opportunities that are no longer possible as they require youth. Looking back one tends to regret opportunities not taken and this book encourages the reader to enjoy life now.

General self-improvement

The aim is to use the freedom created by the proposed work changes to do more living and eliminate the baggage that is acquired as a substitute for actually being fulfilled.

The first step in Ferris' DEAL approach is to challenge self-defeating assumptions of “common sense” as a prelude to the three main ingredients.

This uses Pareto analysis to remove the non-productive which forms the argument that this book is not about time management . This approach will allow most people to be more productive even in a traditional working environment.

Automate is about creative approaches to running a business that delivers income without the owner, the New Rich, needing to manage it day to day. Many ideas can also be used by employees who automate parts of their working and private lives to give free time.

This explains the mini-retirement concept and how it can be achieved both as an employee or as the owner of an automated business. From this approach comes mobility which gives the opportunity of making money go further to support the New Rich lifestyle.

The 4-Hour Work Week is good read and like many books of this type it has a simplistic feel but it is not trivial. There is sound advice which can be used without wholesale changes. Nevertheless there is much validity in the author’s arguments about lifestyle and the reviewer knows people living this way.

Ferris makes a strong case that it is possible, even for an employee, to live the New Rich lifestyle but most never will because of the need to move out of a comfort zone acceptable to wider society. If the reader can overcome inertia, and fear, then this book may well be the start of a new and rewarding life.

The 4-Hour Work Week is published by Vermilion at £11.99 - ISBN: 978-0-09-192372-3

It makes one think. It is suggested hunter-gatherers have more leisure than most people working in modern society. Who has it right - could it be Ferris?

The copyright of the article 4-hour Work Week, Escape the 9-5. Get a New Life in Business Books is owned by Martin P Wilson. Permission to republish 4-hour Work Week, Escape the 9-5. Get a New Life in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.