The Four-hour Work Week

This is not a recent read of mine. I read it in the summer of 2007. But you might say that this is where the idea that I can design my life came from. The guy who wrote this book, Tim Ferrell, is quite a character. He seems to be living his life more fully than anyone else on Earth: he holds a world record in Tango dancing, he is a champion Thai kick-boxer, he's learned German break-dancing in Germany, and so on. In the book, he describes how he designed his life to make all of that possible. It all revolves around passive income.

The book starts off with a description of how he began his life and what made him decide to make his life awesome. Then he lays out how he did what he did. To begin, he started a small business without much capital or intellectual property; he had a vitamin company sell a relabel of their product under his name (I'm still a little unclear how that works). Using this business, he refined his selling and advertising strategies to an extremely-efficient science. After this, he just had to hire someone to do what he was doing and remove himself from the process (while still making some money from the whole deal). Then, he moved on to starting other, more-involved businesses. But his goal is always to remove himself from the business so that he makes money by doing nothing. It seems to work very well for him.

The rest of the book is the fun part: he shows you how to do what he did. He explains how to calculate how much money you need each month (for necessities and for things you want), how to get ideas for businesses, how to automate your business, how to learn from other people's business plans, how to market, how to get cheap advertising in magazines, and more that I can't remember. He really lays out a detailed plan that I feel anyone can follow.

At the very least, it's exciting to read and imagine what your life could be like. He really makes it sound like you could do what he does. But that raises the question "If it's so attainable, have you done it?" The answer, of course, is "no". There are plenty of excuses: "I'm too busy" and "I can't afford it" are the big ones (both of which he discusses in the book). The actual reason is that it is scary and maybe I don't need all that freedom.

While I never did anything with the book, it did instill in me a feeling of power over life, that it's within our abilities to make our lives more like what we want. It taught me a little about the power of confidence and the old saying "the squeaky wheel gets greased".