Final Essay: 4 Hour Work Week

Published on January 2017 | Categories: Documents | Downloads: 42 | Comments: 0 | Views: 325
of 5
Download PDF   Embed   Report

Comments

Content

The Four Hour Work Week In the 14th century it was William Occum, the originator of Occum’s Razor, who believed “it is vain to do more what can be done with less.” (65) The technology has changed since Occum’s time, making it possible to do even more with less, but culture can take time to catch up to technology. Timothy Ferriss, in The Four Hour Work Week, provides a shift in cultural thinking, opening a pathway to a new lifestyle he calls “New Rich”. These New Rich make up a subculture that live by a very uncommon set of rules by today’s standard. For example how could a lifelong blue-chip employee escape to travel the world for a month without his boss even noticing? He would use technology such as outsourcing, e-mail, and video conferencing to hide his tracks. Even a college student, such as myself, can use this technology to their advantage. Currently, I run a website design business, although all I really do is draw up the websites and market to potential consumers. I outsource the programming and actual design work of the sites to offshore professionals. This keeps my time available to concentrate on my studies, play racquetball, and have a fair amount of income on the side, all with minimum effort on my part. A motto repeated in The Four Hour Work Week is to work smarter, not harder and I strongly believe in using technology to attain that ideal. Due to the massive increase in publicly available technology in the past 50 years, the way we work and do business has changed, yet the outdated industrial business hierarchy and model are still being used by major corporations. Tim Ferriss’ solution to change pathways is DEAL, or Definition, Elimination, Automation, Liberation. By following the outline he provides it is more than possible to leave the 9 to 5 lifestyle and join the New Rich.

The first step in the pathway is to define where you want to go, because if you do not know where you want to go or do not care where you go, your like an unguided missile and could go anywhere. One of the most interesting points in the definition chapters of the book discuss “deferred retirement” and “mini-retirements”, and challenging the status quo of waiting to retire until you have accrued enough wealth over the years to live off it. The New Rich way is to have many mini-retirements throughout life. My first reaction to this was similar to the time I tried guacamole for the first time, I looked at it in disgust but when I swallowed my pride and tried it I never looked back (I now eat guacamole on almost everything). I actually thought it would not be possible to have such a mini-retirement getting paid what I do now, but it is surprisingly cheap if you leverage yourself into other economies. Discussing mini-retirements with a close friend of mine who had lived in Thailand for over two years, it idea came out of the surreal and into the possible. Using a friend who worked in the airline business and a few of my Thai friends of a friend we were able to calculate a three week mini-retirement (including airfare) for less than $600 USD. Considering I pay almost that on rent each month, it was a no brainer to arrange the trip and if all goes as planned I will be leaving in late May of this upcoming year. After you know where you are going, you can start to eliminate. One of the key points in this section of the book is the “low-information diet” or the idea that instead of spending time gaining useless knowledge, only absorb critical knowledge and spend your time other, more productive, ways. It would be more efficient to use auto-responders, frequently asked questions, and only check e-mail at specified times. One of my favorite quotes included in the book is from Albert Einstein, “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.” (82) This makes me think of high school when you are taught to absorb and regurgitate useless information. I absolutely love being at a university because the teach you to do the opposite, use your head and see what you can come up with, rather than regurgitate what you have already been told. Even more importantly is that university teaches you to find the importance and reasons behind actions and events more so than the actions and events themselves. Thinking for yourself is one of the key themes Timothy Ferriss attempts to get across throughout the book. With all of the excess trimmed from your work life, it makes it easy to automate the rest. The book has a surprising amount of resources for any field of work, if you have a job that you do not want to lose, you can outsource most of your work for a fraction of the price. If you are between jobs, Tim Ferriss outlines how to select product niches, get provisional patents, and invent information products. A real life example of this is at my job as a marketing consult for a real estate investment firm, instead of writing marketing plans from scratch, I instead have them fill out a short form and than that form auto-propagates a marketing plan with minimal work for me to just fill in the remaining blanks. The process of automating very basic tasks is the key to achieving maximum potential in the work environment and life in general. With all of the possible tasks automated and outsourced, it is now possible to liberate yourself from the workplace and be where you want to be, when you want to be. It is ironic that what sounds so simple, just walking away from work, is actually the hardest step. Psychologically I believe we have a desire and a need to be productive in life and that people are not inherently lazy. The Four Hour Work Week calls this desire “work for work’s sake”, which roughly translated means that some people work just to feel like they are working, and not actually for the sake of being productive for their organization. In the liberation chapters discuss

how to remove yourself from the office and send you on mini-retirements and philanthropy trips. My high school business partner spent the last six months in Hong Kong teaching English and backpacking all over China. It is my belief that philanthropy can be more rewarding than working a regular job, without the constraints that a job provides. Using the principles and ideas of the New Rich subculture, it is possible to get more done in less time by working intelligently. In the 4th century BC, the Spartans were dominating Greece. This success came because they could afford to spend their time on knowledge, although this is due to enslaving other peoples to due their monotonous work. We have computers and machines that can do a majority of our jobs for us. It is up to the work force to implement these resources that are presented before us in new and innovative ways to increase our time, energy, and output in life. New ways of life are byproducts of the technology we have cultivated. This is but one of the many cultural implications of the information society.

Works Cited Ferris, Timothy. The 4-Hour Workweek : Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. New York: Crown, 2007.

Sponsor Documents

Or use your account on DocShare.tips

Hide

Forgot your password?

Or register your new account on DocShare.tips

Hide

Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link to create a new password.

Back to log-in

Close