The guy's older article is just as interesting for the confusion. (http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2007/08/09/timothy-ferriss-ruining-lives-four-hours-at-a-time

The guy's older article is just as interesting for the confusion. (http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2007/08/09/timothy-ferriss-ruining-lives-four-hours-at-a-time/ http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2007/08/09/timothy-ferriss-r...) He takes the example of one person who has ruined his life. Ruined how? The guy is no longer a customer. He hides from the people he is working with. Therefore, he disvalues building lasting relationship. Unfortunately, he assumes that a professional life necessarily encompasses a personal life. He seems to be implying that if your professional life tanks, then you no longer have a personal life ... whereas the main thing I get out of Tim Ferris's book is giving priority to your personal life. Since the blog post author only knows his example by through his professional life, he has no way of knowing if his former client has ruined his personal life. I keep seeing so much hate in those comments. I saw the hate in the reviews on Amazon. Particularly, people keep coming back to the idea that if everyone follows Ferris's strategy, no one would be left to do the work. Why are people waving that around as if they were waving a flag to make a last stand against a charging horde of barbarians? It seems to me that this blog author reacts violently to the idea that a person can benefit from someone else's "hard honest work", to the point that he may be taking it personally: reacting unconsciously to the idea of "Tim Ferris is taking advantage of MY hard honest work." It is as if Ferris's ideas threatens all those years of struggle with putting in long hours to put food on the table. These are responsibilities as an adult, that one had to give up personal things as a child to become an adult ... and here comes Ferris who seems to advocate extending your childhood ... So he tells himself, "If everyone follows Ferris's ideas, who is actually going to do the work" While this is mathematically true, it serves more as an emotional security blanket validating that all the "sacrifices" he had made was not for naught. In his book, Ferris himself claimed to have worked extremely hard in his early days, before dropping everything to go to Europe. There, with nothing to do, and no "hard work" to validate himself as a person, he had to either fill it up with something (usually hard work) or come to some sort of a realization about himself. Ferris by no means the first person who has espoused this idea. In my studies of Lao Tzu's ancient text, Tao Te Ching, these very same ideas are already there. In fact, Ferris does not really escape the whole Protestant Work Ethic -- he's turning his entire drive and passions towards doing the things he wants to do (whatever those "wants" are), whereas Taoists of Lao Tzu's ilk tame those fires and retire into a contemplative life away from the material world. Ferris still works hard, he just doesn't work hard in what the mainstream American society considers "productive".