Timothy Ferris and his book
«The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich” (2007)
BOOK REVIEW IN RUSSIAN — HERE:
Tim is Indiana Jones for the digital age. I’ve already used his advice to go spearfishing on remote islands and ski the best hidden slopes of Argentina. Simply put, do what he says and you can live like a millionaire.
Albert Pope, Derivatives Trading, UBS World Headquarters
Timothy Ferriss, nominated as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People of 2007” and Forbes Magazine’s “Names You Need to Know in 2011,” is an angel investor (StumbleUpon, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc.) and author of the new #1 New York Times bestseller, The 4-Hour Body. He is also author of the #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been sold into 35 languages. He is listed as #13 in the “100 Most Influential VCs, Angels & Investors” rankings.
Newsweek calls Tim “the world’s best guinea pig,” which he takes a compliment.
This blog is one of Inc. Magazine’s “19 Blogs You Should Bookmark Right Now“, and it has been ranked #1 on the Top 150 Management and Leadership Blogs list, based on Google PageRank, Alexa traffic ranking, Bing results, Technorati authority, Feedburner subscribers, and PostRank.
Tim has been featured by more than 100 media outlets–including The New York Times, The Economist, TIME, Forbes, Fortune, CNN, and CBS–and has been a popular guest lecturer at Princeton University since 2003, where he presents entrepreneurship as a tool for ideal lifestyle design and world change.
He is also an active education reformer and has architected experimental social media campaigns such as LitLiberation to out-fundraise traditional media figures like Stephen Colbert 3-to-1 at zero cost, building schools overseas and financing more than 25,000 US students in the process.
He is on the advisory board of DonorsChoose.org, an educational non-profit and the first charity to make the Fast Company list of 50 Most Innovative Companies in the World.
Tim has been invited to speak at some of the world’s most innovative organizations, including Google, MIT, Harvard Business School, Nike, PayPal, Facebook, The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Microsoft, Ask.com, Nielsen, Princeton University, the Wharton School, and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
He has also been invited to speak and keynote at world-renowned technology summits including EG, FOO Camp, E-Tech, Supernova, LeWeb, and the Web 2.0 Exposition, where he shared the stage with figures like Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board of Google, and Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
Oscar Wilde, Irish dramatist and novelist
Tim has amassed a diverse (and certainly odd) roster of experiences:
Princeton University guest lecturer in High-Tech Entrepreneurship and Electrical Engineering;
Finance and Entrepreneurship advisor at Singularity University at NASA Ames, co-founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil;
First American in history to hold a Guinness World Record in tango;
Speaker of 5 languages (6 if he’s reactivating something previously studied);
National Chinese kickboxing champion;
Horseback archer (yabusame) in Nikko, Japan;
2009 Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute;
Political asylum researcher;
MTV breakdancer in Taiwan;
Hurling competitor in Ireland;
Wired Magazine’s “Greatest Self-Promoter of 2008″;
Actor on hit TV series in mainland China and Hong Kong (“Human Cargo”).
Tim received his BA from Princeton University in 2000, where he studied in the Neuroscience and East Asian Studies departments. He developed his nonfiction writing with Pulitzer Prize winner John McPhee and formed his life philosophies under Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe.
He is 35 years old, and The 4-Hour Workweek is his first book.
<= See here: Timothy Ferris
<= The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
<= www.amazon.com
BOOK OVERVIEW — TIMOTHY FERRIS
«The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich” (2007)
Whether you’re an overworked employee or an entrepreneur trapped in your own business, The 4-Hour Workweek is the compass for a new and revolutionary world.
Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan—there is no need to wait and every reason not to. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, high-end world travel, monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, this book is the blueprint.
You can have it all—really.
Join Tim Ferriss, popular guest lecturer in entrepreneurship at Princeton University, as he teaches you:
How to outsource your life and do whatever you want for a year, only to return to a bank account 50% larger than before you left
How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs
How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of little-known European economists
How to train your boss to value performance over presence, or kill your job (or company) if it’s beyond repair
How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent “mini-retirements”
What automated cash-flow «muses» are and how to create one in 2-4 weeks
How to cultivate selective ignorance—and create time—with a low-information diet
Management secrets of Remote Control CEOs
The crucial difference between absolute and relative income
How to get free housing worldwide and airfare at 50-80% off
How to fill the void and creating meaning after removing work and the office
The 4-Hour Workweek also includes the sample e-mails, voicemails, and real-life deals (with dollar figures and all) you will need to master the new world of luxury lifestyle design.
CHAPTER SAMPLE — TIMOTHY FERRIS
«The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich” (2007)
In 2002, I was asked by Ed Zschau, übermentor and my former professor of High-tech Entrepreneurship at Princeton University, to come back and speak to the same class about my business adventures in the real world.
I was stuck. There were already decamillionaires speaking to the same class, and even though I had built a highly profitable sports supplement company, I marched to a distinctly different drummer.
Over the ensuing days, however, I realized that everyone seemed to be discussing how to build large and successful companies, sell out, and live the good life. Fair enough.
The question no one really seemed to be asking or answering was, Why do it all in the first place?
What is the pot of gold that justifies spending the best years of your life hoping for happiness in the last?
The lectures I ultimately developed, titled “Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit,” began with a simple premise: Test the most basic assumptions of the work-life equation.
How do your decisions change if retirement isn’t an option?
What if you could use a mini-retirement to sample your deferred-life plan reward before working 40 years for it?
Is it really necessary to work like a slave to live like a millionaire?
Little did I know where questions like these would take me.
The uncommon conclusion? The commonsense rules of the “real world” are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions. This book will teach you how to see and seize the options others do not.
What makes this book different?
First, I’m not going to spend much time on the problem. I’m going to assume you are suffering from time famine, creeping dread, or—worst case—a tolerable and comfortable existence doing something unfulfilling. The last is most common and most insidious.
Second, this book is not about saving and will not recommend you abandon your daily glass of red wine for a million dollars 50 years from now. I’d rather have the wine. I won’t ask you to choose between enjoyment today or money later. I believe you can have both now. The goal is fun and profit.
Third, this book is not about finding your “dream job.” I will take as a given that, for most people, somewhere between six and seven billion of them, 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 fulfillment, so that is not the goal here; to free time and automate income is.
I open each class with an explanation of the singular importance of being a “dealmaker.” The manifesto of the dealmaker is simple: Reality is negotiable. Outside of science and law, all rules can be bent or broken, and it doesn’t require being unethical.
The DEAL of deal making is also an acronym for the process of becoming a member of the New Rich.
The steps and strategies can be used with incredible results—whether you are an employee or an entrepreneur. Can you do everything I’ve done with a boss? No. Can you use the same principles to double your income, cut your hours in half, or at least double the usual vacation time? Most definitely.
Here is the step-by-step process you’ll use to reinvent yourself:
D for Definition turns misguided common sense upside down and introduces the rules and objectives of the new game. It replaces self-defeating assumptions and explains concepts such as relative wealth and eustress. Who are the NR and how do they operate? This section explains the overall lifestyle design recipe—the fundamentals—before we add the three ingredients.
E for Elimination kills the obsolete notion of time management once and for all. It shows exactly how I used the words of an often-forgotten Italian economist to turn 12-hour days into two-hour days . . . in 48 hours. Increase your per-hour results ten times or more with counterintuitive NR techniques for cultivating selective ignorance, developing a low-information diet, and otherwise ignoring the unimportant. This section provides the first of the three luxury lifestyle design ingredients: time.
A for Automation puts cash flow on autopilot using geographic arbitrage, outsourcing, and rules of nondecision. From bracketing to the routines of ultrasuccessful NR, it’s all here. This section provides the second ingredient of luxury lifestyle design: income.
L for Liberation is the mobile manifesto for the globally inclined. The concept of mini-retirements is introduced, as are the means for flawless remote control and escaping the boss. Liberation is not about cheap travel; it is about forever breaking the bonds that confine you to a single location. This section delivers the third and final ingredient for luxury lifestyle design: mobility.
I should note that most bosses are less than pleased if you spend one hour in the office each day, and employees should therefore read the steps in the entrepreneurially minded DEAL order but implement them as DELA. If you decide to remain in your current job, it is necessary to create freedom of location before you cut your work hours by 80%. Even if you have never considered becoming an entrepreneur in the modern sense, the DEAL process will turn you into an entrepreneur in the purer sense as first coined by French economist J. B. Say in 1800—one who shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher yield.
Last but not least, much of what I recommend will seem impossible and even offensive to basic common sense—I expect that. Resolve now to test the concepts as an exercise in lateral thinking. If you try it, you’ll see just how deep the rabbit hole goes, and you won’t ever go back.
Take a deep breath and let me show you my world. And remember—tranquilo. It’s time to have fun and let the rest follow.
ONE OF BOOK REVIEWS:
The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss is one of those books that leaves you thinking, ‘Why don’t they teach you this stuff in school?!’ If you are interested in lifestyle design or just want to learn how to be more productive in what you do – then you need to read this book!
Information sources:
1) http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/ — The blog of Tim Ferris. Experiments in lifestyle design.
2) http://www.facebook.com/timferriss?sk=wall — Tim Ferriss on Facebook