“The 4 Hour Work Week” – I’ve just been reminded that I hate this book so much

Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.

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Somebody recently asked me if I’ve read The 4 Hour Work Week.

Unfortunately, yes.

I read this years ago, back in my BBA days. (Yeah, there was once a version of me in the universe that was going to graduate with a BBA and go work in HR. Thank the gods that never came to pass, I’m a creative through and through.)

Most white guys in my BBA program were reading it, and I wanted to see what they were all raving about.

And The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss is tech bro productivity tosh.

It’s a book rooted in a get rich quick philosophy, but rather than focusing on the process of getting rich being fast, it focuses on it being easy.

It focuses on telling you how to live a life where you can just check out and engage as little as possible.

It encourages you to leverage the gig economy by getting workers from the global south to take over the unpleasant tasks of running an everyday life in a business, rather than doing it yourself.

Ferriss gives you a blueprint for how to “escape the 9-5, live anywhere and join the new rich”. There’s quite a bit to unpack here, so let’s start at the beginning.

Late night, come home, work sucks, I know.

Ferriss admits — even in the book — that there’s not really anything new or revolutionary in the book itself. Rather, he pulled together a bunch of tips and advice about working in the online space that were already floating around.

I think it’s arguable, though, that his effort of putting the book together and then having it become the success that it did, is a key turning point in online business, because without it, I doubt this idea of using the internet to get rich quick easily would have become the mainstream staple it is today.

It doesn’t matter what platform you go to, you can’t scroll or swipe without being hit by someone pitching you an easy-peasy lemon squeezy side hustle to make bank with. And that’s only gotten worse since Chat GPT became mainstream.

There were people doing business online long before Ferriss showed up (that’s where he got most of the stuff in the book from), but the book itself happened to be in the right place at the right time.

And Ferriss himself relentlessly networked with tech influences in Silicon Valley before his book became the kind of sensation that had him giving presentations at places like Google. (A little privilege never hurt when marketing your money maker, right?)

Ferriss had created a brand that was something like a Tony Robbins geared to the tech set, targeted to young creative people obsessed with efficiency. After making some money to play with, he took investing lessons from his venture capitalist friend Mike Maples and made some bets that turned out to be hugely successful, including Uber and Twitter. He grew his career as a Valley celebrity.

— Richard Feloni, “After decades in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and investor, Tim Ferriss found it was too ‘closed-minded’ and moved to Austin, Texas instead”

It was published just before the crash of ´08 that saw the reshuffling of some of the fundamental pillars of the global economy.

The rise of unemployment and fall of job security, coupled with one job not necessarily being enough to pay your bills, all fed into the gig economy taking off at speed.

So, the first point Ferriss makes is that a 9-5 job is a death trap.

Ferriss writes, “for most people . . . the perfect job is the one that takes the least time. The vast majority of people will never find a job that can be an unending source of fulfilment”.

Now, while I absolutely agree that you can end up in any number of jobs that suck the soul out of the very core of your being (been there, done that), it doesn’t have to be so.

There are good 9-5s out there. In fact, a lot of 9-5s are good jobs.

They’re relatively steady, they pay decent wages and can have some pretty good perks. As long as your job isn’t contributing to your mental or physical health declining, I think Ferriss’ premise holds little water.

Because just the though of my full-time job being the “unending source of fulfilment” reads as incredibly unrealistic. Why would I even want that?

It’s a similar to this idea floating around the heteronormative mythology that you should have your one partner fulfil your every need.

But that’s insane and unrealistic.

One person cannot fulfil all the needs of another person, because that’s not how human beings work. We’ve evolved as a social group, we’re designed to have different needs fulfilled by different needs in our social groups.

(If you’re expecting one person to do it all for you, that’s a great recipe for divorce.)

And so is this idea that your one job should be a source of unending fulfilment. Nothing in life is a source of unending fulfilment. Everything has boring or unpleasant or challenging aspects to it.

Just normal life has parts that are less than thrilling, but which just are part and parcel of being alive. So, if your job is paying your bills and it’s relatively okay, there really isn’t anything wrong with it.

If you’re a squirrelly neurodivergent like me who just loves to have projects going on all the time, and you’ve cultivated a profoundly optimistic outlook on life, it shouldn’t be very difficult to look at jobs as an opportunity to be paid to learn things.

I’ve had jobs across the board; in fact, my job history reads less like a cohesive career and more like a connect-the-dots drawing completed incorrectly.

But even when I felt stuck in the worst jobs, I kept going until I could find something else by looking at it a being paid to learn.

And learn I did.

I got intimately familiar with what it’s like running a business in retail, I have more boots-on-the ground experience from customer service than I’d like, and I’ve seen the ins and outs of the underbelly of retail logistics, among other things.

And that’s not even counting the endless hours I spent listening to books and podcasts as I unwrapped designer handbags in an airless basement.

Economies of scale.

This used to be a term for businesses alone.

Wikipedia defines economies of scale as, “In microeconomics, economies of scale are the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to their scale of operation, and are typically measured by the amount of output produced per unit of time. A decrease in cost per unit of output enables an increase in scale.”

But no more.

Now you how to be just like an enterprise and take advantage of economies of scale.

Uncle Tim’s here to show you how to “double your income and outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want”.

Depending on which chapter you read, the impact Uncle Tim’s system is gonna have on your income varies. It’s either 40k, 60k or 80k a month, and on the cover he simply leaves it at “double your income”.

The point is; you’re gonna be rich.

And not just rich, new rich.

The first point of order is to take the 80/20-rule (again, another business and economics term applied to you as a person) and make sure you comb through all the tasks you do in a day, discarding those that “bring no value”.

The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, is a concept that suggests that roughly 80% of effects come from 20% of causes.

This principle was named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who in 1906 observed that approximately 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of its population.

The principle has since been applied to a wide range of areas, including business, economics, health, and productivity.

In business, for instance, it’s often observed that 80% of a company’s sales come from 20% of its customers, or that 80% of complaints come from 20% of customers.

In productivity and time management, it might be said that 20% of your activities contribute to 80% of your results.

The principle is used to highlight the importance of focusing on the most effective areas to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.

The thing about the 80/20 rule?

Yeah, the 80/20 rule is more of a guideline than a strict rule.

The actual ratio varies (for example, it might be 70/30 or 90/10). But the key idea is that a small percentage of causes, inputs, or effort usually leads to a disproportionately large percentage of the results, outputs, or rewards.

In business, we know this means that the idea is to prioritise that work which brings the most value, because the larger an organisation is, the more waste there is. And the focus in any business that is minding the bottom line, is to make sure that the people working in the company are prioritising the most important tasks.

Ferriss’ solution for the 80%? Just don’t do them!

Many smarter people than I have pointed out that how Tim Ferriss defines work more as a chore, as something tedious and repetitive, mandatory tasks that you really don’t want to do and would rather pay other people to do for you.

One of the key ways Ferriss wants you to grab hold of that precious 20%, is by convincing your employer to let you work from home.

And once you’ve achieved that, you’ll be able to avoid that unnecessary 80% that you waste at the office, and do your job in only half the time. Then you can use the time you’ve “saved” to cram in some more productivity.

Because, baby, you’re going to start a side hustle!

A product based, highly niche, direct to consumer business. You’re going to set up a website, find a drop-shipper, run a few ads, and automate the hell out of that sucker so you can watch the sales roll in while you sit on a remote beach somewhere sipping Piña coladas (more on that later).

What side hustle should you start?

The book is vague on what this should be, “the more nice the better” is about as specific as Ferriss gets. The tangible suggestions he does make include licencing an already existing product (which would cost you money, because someone’s already doing it and there are likely many competitors) or write a book.

Uncle Tim, in his infinite wisdom, recommends that (in case you’re struggling to come up with content for your book) you can create the content by paraphrasing and combining points from several books on the topic OR, if that’s simply too much work, just repurpose content in the public domain.

(In this and day age, you’re probably just gonna use generative AI to write your book.)

Because what we need are more books full of regurgitated content flooding platforms like Amazon, right?

And all those mind-numbingly boring tasks that it takes to set up a business, won’t they quickly become the very 80% of junk tasks you’re looking to avoid?

Worry not, Uncle Tim’s got the solution for you; just outsource all that boring shit to some cheap virtual assistants in the global south! See, there’s that economies of scale again, hard at work.

But wait, the good advice on how to make the most of economies of scale doesn’t stop there. Because now that you’re a super successful business owner (Ferriss presents this formula for success as something that has no chance of failure), you’re gonna move to Asia!

If you follow this foolproof business plan and achieve that Holy Grail of the four hour work week, you’re only going to be raking in 80k, 120k or 160k a year. You’re practically destitute!

But the way to fix this, says Uncle Tim, is to move to a country where the exchange rate will allow you to live the rock star life you deserve. Though to be fair, Ferriss’ recommends avoiding all countries in the Middle East, Africa and South America* (except for Costa Rica and Argentina). Ferriss himself lives in the US.

What to do if you get fired?

Because, as it happens, your employer might not like you skimping on one job just so you can do another one.

But fear not, as Uncle Tim likes to remind us, “there are always options”.

. . . if you jump ship or get fired, it isn’t exactly hard to eliminate most expenses temporarily sand live on savings for a brief period. From renting out your home to refinancing it or selling it, there are options.

— Timothy Ferriss, The 4 Hour Work Week

If that ain’t the white, rich tech bro speaking, I don’t know what is.

Clearly, it never occurs to Ferriss that most of those things aren’t an option for a lot of people — not in the least when we consider that the book was published in 2007, just a year before the market crash.

The feeling I walked away with from The 4 Hour Work Week was that a white, privileged Silicon Valley dude got bored at work and decided to do something about it as only a white, privileged Silicon Valley dude can.

The kind of unending tweaking of your productivity that Ferriss talks about, essentially has one goal; of putting you on a semi-permanent vacation where you can check out of everyday life.

Work is painted as a tedious chore that you don’t want to do yourself, so you outsource all the mundane stuff to cheaply resourced online assistants from the global south.

This inevitably makes it seem like everyday life is too mundane to be tolerated, so why not outsource most of that too, by going and living in a country where your stronger currency can buy you a life of luxury.

I can’t help but wonder, once you’ve outsourced everything, batched checking and answering emails, and refuse to fulfil orders in your shop that are too low value for them to be meaningful to you, then what?

Once you’ve put in your 4 hours a week, then what?

I’d go insane lying on a beach for the rest 36 hours a week. That’s why I’ve typically had several projects on the side of whatever job I’ve been doing.

Not because I want to find a way to outsource tasks to someone else, but because I’m full of ideas and curiosity. I like working.

And, as we’ve learned, “passive income” is rarely truly passive. (That’s why you can’t get away with less than 4 hours a week, even according to Uncle Tim.)

Considering the amount of marketing bros selling you on “easy ways to make 10k a week with a side hustle”, it’s hardly a blue ocean opportunity any more.

I like work and I like it when it feels meaningful.

I like helping and being useful. I like being a part of a conversation (ergo my love of writing).

I’d hate to be so rich that the only thing left in my life was working on tweaking my productivity to make even more money. That sounds incredibly empty.

But it does sound like a way that a white, privileged Silicon Valley bro would see the world.

Which is why I hate this book and I haven’t missed it since I forgot about it.

Did I enjoy it?

No.

As I’ve said, I’m sick of advice from men, and it’s because of books like this.

And The 4 Hour Work Week hasn’t aged well. You can tell it isn’t written for women, as Uncle Tim says you should ask for the phone numbers of at least “two attractive members of the opposite sex” every day.

By that he doesn’t mean men.

It isn’t even written for people who want to live a meaningful life.

While the book parades itself around as being the solution to getting out of the rat race, it only advocates getting out of one and getting into another, where instead of finding work you enjoy and get paid to do, your whole existence becomes a dick-measuring contest in how much wealth you have.

I’ve started businesses before, and the tremendous effort it takes to do that isn’t worth it for anything that I don’t care about.

If it’s money I was after, I’d rather just go out and get a job.

This book isn’t written for human people.

This advice it touts isn’t healthy for humans and it doesn’t aim to make the internet (or the world) a better place, it just encourages you to make money so you can engage in navel gazing for 36 hours a week.

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