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Craftsmanship – The Alternative to the Four Hour Work Week Mindset (2018)

143 points by rpkoven 7y ago

dang 7y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16248810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16248810
Antoninus 7y ago
I'm not a great developer by today's measurements. I struggled throughout my degree and the first 4 years of my career. Especially, when it came to computer networking and algorithms. 7 years into this profession and few projects high-profile projects later, I feel like I'm just getting my legs going. What keeps me going is adopting the mindset that software development is a lifelong craft from posts like this and HN community.
- artsyca 7y ago
  The software profession has been corrupted and utterly misdirected by the entire management industry that has been built around it -- it sounds like you've got the beginnings of enlightenment brewing inside of you and I invite you to use your critical reasoning outside of the facts of your `craftmanship` and see how the algorithms and concepts of computer science apply directly to one's pursuit of ultimate understanding and personhood Look to the history of computer science and the greats that brought us to where we are now, like Alan Turing and ask yourself if this is the future they had envisioned for our calling?
  - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    There was no 'calling' as those mathematicians and electrical engineers in the pre-computer ages saw it. They wanted to solve problems and build amazing machines. They did not imagine some mystical future of benevolence for programmers.
    - artsyca 7y ago
      Yes I'm sure that's what was going through Turing's mind when he solved the enigma -- let me save freaking Western civilization so I can be forced to suicide and all these millennials can come and get free lunch from their benevolent corporations
shartshooter 7y ago
becoming a craftsman and getting to the 99th percentile has major trade offs. In order to survive as a business you need to create value and capture the market faster than your competition can. To do that you need to do more than your craft. You have to operate a business or you’ll get swallowed up by competition who doesn’t follow your mantra. I also believe the cheapification of so much of society and the shallowness of so many companies means that people will be craving high quality, authentically produced goods and services. In the long run quality may win out, but that’s if your competition doesn’t put you out of business before.
- bhldev 7y ago
  If you want authentic and high quality you need craft. If you're not building a lifestyle business you need craft to operate as a business. Who do you really think has a chance at success the guy who works 4 hours a week or the guy who puts time in their work? You need more but you need different kinds. There's no way to avoid the work, and you got to be good at the work to get anywhere. Marketing is a craft so is sales so is raising money so is writing. There's no way around it and "4 week work week" is probably more applicable to the time of dropshipping, blogging, affiliate marketing and other lifestyle business than anything concerned with "time to market". Ignore craft at your own peril (cannot go anywhere without a very experienced CTO).
  - agota 7y ago
    I don't see why you think the "4 hours a week guy" doesn't have a chance at success. Presumably, his definition of success is building a business that can be run in 4 hours a week while making enough money to fund his desired lifestyle. So if he managed to do that, he's already successful. I don't get this contempt for lifestyle businesses.
    - bhldev 7y ago
      I think if "4 hours a week" means "spend 400 hours or 4000 hours then you can spend 4 hours a week" it's more honest. In short I think it's more honest to say, you might have to give up your lifestyle for awhile or have it be a small part of your life... For months or years. And have no guarantee of success. It's not irrelevant it is key because it means giving up the way you live. It is important to go into it eyes wide open so if you lose you know how to try again or recover. It's not a contempt I think it's a great idea I might even do it one day but the hidden catch of "lifestyle business" exists enough. And people deserve to know and compare with someone working their ass off, and compare chances of success.
rswail 7y ago
Appreciate the content, but not sure that "craftsmanship" is what is needed, it's a "generalist" approach rather than "specialist" that entrepreneurs need. Craftsmanship is about a dedication to a single activity, so a master cabinet maker, or a Wall St quant, or a "rock star" programmer (titles may vary).
- acheron9383 7y ago
  Maybe we could consider Craftsmanship in this sense to be the dedication to building a good business. Ideally, the CEO/Founder wouldn't be the most skilled artisan in any one thing in their company, but would be an artisan of integration of available parts into a viable business strategy. To borrow from your cabinet maker example, the cabinet craftsman isn't necessarily great at making high quality lumber, or fasteners. But trains themselves to understand the parts available and integrate that through skilled labor into a fine cabinet. In some sense, all craftsmanship is skilled integration.
- bhldev 7y ago
  Well capitalism is about arbitrage, so yeah you can buy low and sell high somewhere else. Problem with that is everyone does it and there's no market differentiation. I absolutely think you need craftsmanship. If you don't have it you have to pay for it or find someone who does. If you open a restaurant you need a chef if you release music you need a singer if you write code you need some developer to give you an edge. You can be some generalist who's good at raising money and coding at the same time to save some pennies or you can be really good at raising money and hire someone to deal with the coding. The second is way more likely to succeed. Not to mention you can usually tell what startups will succeed by one simple test. Walk around their shop after hours and on the weekend, the ones that will succeed have people (persons) working after hours. At least, that's one way of telling. So there is no avoiding your craft if you build a product. Yes you can be generalist in your approach and solve general problems but to build a big enough box to catch everyone you have to be very, very good at building boxes. The alternative is to constantly raise as much money as possible and hire everyone under the sun but eventually you will run up against a wall. If you can raise Series A B C D E F H ad infinitum rounds and become the next Uber sure you can hire "generalist" programmers who only know algorithms and nothing domain specific or technology specific but then you are just shifting the problem... Instead of guy who has 30 years of C++ you hire guy (or girl) who can raise so many money bags your company takes over the world. So you always need craftsmanship of some kind and the less you have the more money you need (which is a craft itself).
jasonkester 7y ago
I guess if we're going to discuss this article again, I should get to say my piece about it again: > To lounge on a beach or travel the world and not actively engage in building your arsenal of expertise is professional malpractice. I've seen this thought expressed before in writing about Startups. If you're not burning your life down 24/7 in the struggle to make it Big, you're doing it wrong. But that's silly. The entire goal of building a business, in my mind, is to get the point where you can lounge on a beach or travel the world and not need to actively engage in anything except the pursuit of happiness. I personally averaged out at a little less than four hours of work per week in 2017, running the sort of low maintenance, feature complete, Software-as-a-Service business that the author spends a paragraph explaining is not in fact a "serious company". But look at the product and you'll see craftsmanship. Ten years of work, in fact as of roughly today. But never at the author's pace. Always at mine. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. That's the great thing about building a business. You can do it any way you like. [from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16248810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16248810]
- keiferski 7y ago
  I think you're missing the point of craftsmanship as a general value. It is not about extracting and then spending resources. It's about dedicating your time, perhaps even your life, to mastering a skill. Traditional Japanese culture understood this and that's why you still get people like Jiro.[1] In the West, the only remaining traditional craftsmen that I can think of offhand are the bespoke tailors in Savile Row and their counterparts in France and Italy. In the craftsmanship model, the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of purpose and mastery, not simply the pursuit of sensory pleasures and relaxation. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiro_Ono_(chef) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiro_Ono_(chef)
  - jasonkester 7y ago
    But I am dedicating my time and my life to mastering a skill. That skill is Rock Climbing. To do so, I have also needed to find a way to live at a world class bouldering area and to spend 4 full days per week training and climbing, which means not having a full time job. Building a software business is a means to that end. Keep in mind, also, that if one begins programming at age six and does it every day for 40 odd years, one tends to achieve mastery of programming as well. Even if one figures out a way to not need to do it full time for the last half dozen of those years.
adim86 7y ago
I think the source of this issue is as recent as the industrial age. People grow up wanting to be "Managers". We grew up watching our parents have a skill and working at a corporation, but then looking for that promotion to become a Manager. Somewhere along the line people are like, why don't I skip the whole working my ass off part and just hack resources together and manage it (Especially with the rise of the startup life). We lost the notion that there is a value to hard work, that there is a value to failing and picking yourself up. This is further compounded by the corruption we see in our governments, societies and money markets where people move around shares and numbers on excel sheets and become millionaires. It feeds further into the idea that people who work hard or develop a skill are losers
kevintb 7y ago
Excellent article, thanks for posting.
bondgaurav21 7y ago
This post really changed my mindset towards four hour work week mindset. But, I want to ask one thing from you which is- are you suggesting us to choose those entrepreneurial endeavors in which we have a huge desire to get an excellence instead of finding those ideas which are easy to setup and do not need so much knowledge crunching from our side?
TeMPOraL 7y ago
A question to HN: reading this and other discussions, it seems to me that "craftsmen" are being rated by how good a business they run (or are contributing to). Similarly with the word "professional". I'd like to ask, what then would be the word for a "craftsmen" by rated how good the work is at its purpose (and without the usual cop-out of redefining "good" as value in dollars)? Optimization for "good work" is only partially aligned with "good business"; frequently, the two are at odds. A good product, in my view, is one that lets the user achieve their goals as efficiently as possible, endures for as long these goals need to be achieved (often lifetime or more), and - after meeting these constraints - is also optimized to minimize the price and use of materials. It's the kind of product that you buy once, are happy about it, and when you no longer need it, give or sell to someone else. It's your grandfather's watch, passed on to you by your parents, and who you'll one day pass on to your kid. It's the furniture you've inherited with the house that remembers World War II, but is still almost as good as new. It's the forever repairable Soviet-era sound amplifiers or irons for clothes. It's the web page your bank had three redesigns and two SPA frameworks ago. A good "professional" would take a look at one of such products and declare them bad. Overengineered. Because what's "professional", what's good for business, are products that break fast (ensuring recurring revenue) and are as cheap as possible to make. Do they solve 100% of the problems it was supposed to? Doesn't have to, customers don't know that when buying, and when they figure it out, it'll be easier for them to learn to deal with missing part of functionality, or learn to be extra careful around the product, than it'll be for them to spend money on something else. Whatever other defects there may be, we can cheaply cover for with sales&marketing. What a "professional" does is ensures their work makes them (or their employer) maximum amount of money for minimum amount of effort. So, HN, I'm looking for a word that describes the person, the art, of doing good work and good products, as defined above, in contrast to being a "professional", which I increasingly despise of.
- mdorazio 7y ago
  Perhaps "artisan", although in practice I don't think there is a single word. Instead, people tend to use the domain-specific term for whatever type of true craftsman they are referring to. "Welder" "Machinist" "Watchmaker" "Tailor" "Woodworker" etc. Also as an aside, I think the whole "craft" term was co-opted by people who wanted to cash in on the perception of quality and care when really they just wanted better small business margins. It used to mean something more.
agota 7y ago
"4 hours work week" mindset and a craftsman mindset are not at odds with each other. If you can build a business that you can maintain in four hours a week while generating enough profit to pay the bills, why not? That would free up a lot of time that you can then spend pursuing interests that are unlikely to ever pay the bills (mathematics, music, painting, creative writing, whatever). If your business is a means to that end, are you still a hack or are you a craftsman? This disdain for lifestyle businesses is absurd. It's both sad and gross that some people are unable to see that it's possible to have ambition that is not tied to making money. A lifestyle business can give you an experience similar to that of being independently wealthy. It might be hard for some to imagine, but not everyone is an Elon Musk wannabe, there are people who see building a business as a means to an end, not an end in itself. I understand that he didn't address the scenario I propose, presumably because he can't even conceive of it, but I don't get the traveling the world criticism either. I mean, I myself am very critical of the digital nomad lifestyle, but "Spending time on something that you find enjoyable is professional malpractice" is not among my list of criticisms.
vivekjuneja2010 7y ago
I like the author's emphasis on taking one's craft seriously, and pursuing curiosity as a means to build expertise in any domain of their choice. The interpretation of "four hour work week" is fragmented, and people choose the parts to retain what they think aligns closely to them or sometimes easy to adopt. To me, the essence of the the "four hour work week" is to look beyond traditional occupations and instil habits that allows one to optimize on their time while keeping a healthy work-life harmony. The take away for me is that hard work and dedication has no substitutes and one should not see "hacks" and "shortcuts" as a way to achieve long term success, but rather use them reasonably as a means to validate assumptions and pursue curiosity.
cranium 7y ago
I tend to take this kind of article with a grain of salt, especially when there are definitive statements like: "To be successful over the course of a career requires the application and accumulation of expertise". This idea that top-skills are required to succeed is comforting for us craftsmen and craftswomen but ultimately misleading because it forces us to only look for paths leading to skill improvements. I strongly believe that success is mostly opportunity-driven. Exploring the search space to find the most opportunities (ie. the Ferriss way) or exploiting those available by putting the effort in (ie. the craftsmanship way) are two valid non-mutually exclusives strategies. As always, either of them can work but for the best result I believe a combination of the two will outperform any strategy applied narrow-mindedly. Now, for the mixing proportions...
davidjnelson 7y ago
> If you are to optimize for anything, optimize for the long term. Use the challenges of your business today to build mastery in your craft. There is no guarantee that any one venture will succeed, but that mastery will bend luck in your favor over the long course of your career. I’ve found this has personally served me very well. Failed businesses and startups have indeed been great learning experiences. If you can keep a growth mindset and use cognitive tools to prevent rumination, it all just becomes more fuel to the fire that burns inside. Even if that simply means you are a more beneficial employee.

143 points by rpkoven 7y ago

dang 7y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16248810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16248810

I'm not a great developer by today's measurements. I struggled throughout my degree and the first 4 years of my career. Especially, when it came to computer networking and algorithms. 7 years into this profession and few projects high-profile projects later, I feel like I'm just getting my legs going. What keeps me going is adopting the mindset that software development is a lifelong craft from posts like this and HN community.

artsyca 7y ago
The software profession has been corrupted and utterly misdirected by the entire management industry that has been built around it -- it sounds like you've got the beginnings of enlightenment brewing inside of you and I invite you to use your critical reasoning outside of the facts of your `craftmanship` and see how the algorithms and concepts of computer science apply directly to one's pursuit of ultimate understanding and personhood Look to the history of computer science and the greats that brought us to where we are now, like Alan Turing and ask yourself if this is the future they had envisioned for our calling?
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  There was no 'calling' as those mathematicians and electrical engineers in the pre-computer ages saw it. They wanted to solve problems and build amazing machines. They did not imagine some mystical future of benevolence for programmers.
  - artsyca 7y ago
    Yes I'm sure that's what was going through Turing's mind when he solved the enigma -- let me save freaking Western civilization so I can be forced to suicide and all these millennials can come and get free lunch from their benevolent corporations

shartshooter 7y ago

becoming a craftsman and getting to the 99th percentile has major trade offs. In order to survive as a business you need to create value and capture the market faster than your competition can. To do that you need to do more than your craft. You have to operate a business or you’ll get swallowed up by competition who doesn’t follow your mantra. I also believe the cheapification of so much of society and the shallowness of so many companies means that people will be craving high quality, authentically produced goods and services. In the long run quality may win out, but that’s if your competition doesn’t put you out of business before.

bhldev 7y ago
If you want authentic and high quality you need craft. If you're not building a lifestyle business you need craft to operate as a business. Who do you really think has a chance at success the guy who works 4 hours a week or the guy who puts time in their work? You need more but you need different kinds. There's no way to avoid the work, and you got to be good at the work to get anywhere. Marketing is a craft so is sales so is raising money so is writing. There's no way around it and "4 week work week" is probably more applicable to the time of dropshipping, blogging, affiliate marketing and other lifestyle business than anything concerned with "time to market". Ignore craft at your own peril (cannot go anywhere without a very experienced CTO).
- agota 7y ago
  I don't see why you think the "4 hours a week guy" doesn't have a chance at success. Presumably, his definition of success is building a business that can be run in 4 hours a week while making enough money to fund his desired lifestyle. So if he managed to do that, he's already successful. I don't get this contempt for lifestyle businesses.
  - bhldev 7y ago
    I think if "4 hours a week" means "spend 400 hours or 4000 hours then you can spend 4 hours a week" it's more honest. In short I think it's more honest to say, you might have to give up your lifestyle for awhile or have it be a small part of your life... For months or years. And have no guarantee of success. It's not irrelevant it is key because it means giving up the way you live. It is important to go into it eyes wide open so if you lose you know how to try again or recover. It's not a contempt I think it's a great idea I might even do it one day but the hidden catch of "lifestyle business" exists enough. And people deserve to know and compare with someone working their ass off, and compare chances of success.

rswail 7y ago

Appreciate the content, but not sure that "craftsmanship" is what is needed, it's a "generalist" approach rather than "specialist" that entrepreneurs need. Craftsmanship is about a dedication to a single activity, so a master cabinet maker, or a Wall St quant, or a "rock star" programmer (titles may vary).

acheron9383 7y ago
Maybe we could consider Craftsmanship in this sense to be the dedication to building a good business. Ideally, the CEO/Founder wouldn't be the most skilled artisan in any one thing in their company, but would be an artisan of integration of available parts into a viable business strategy. To borrow from your cabinet maker example, the cabinet craftsman isn't necessarily great at making high quality lumber, or fasteners. But trains themselves to understand the parts available and integrate that through skilled labor into a fine cabinet. In some sense, all craftsmanship is skilled integration.
bhldev 7y ago
Well capitalism is about arbitrage, so yeah you can buy low and sell high somewhere else. Problem with that is everyone does it and there's no market differentiation. I absolutely think you need craftsmanship. If you don't have it you have to pay for it or find someone who does. If you open a restaurant you need a chef if you release music you need a singer if you write code you need some developer to give you an edge. You can be some generalist who's good at raising money and coding at the same time to save some pennies or you can be really good at raising money and hire someone to deal with the coding. The second is way more likely to succeed. Not to mention you can usually tell what startups will succeed by one simple test. Walk around their shop after hours and on the weekend, the ones that will succeed have people (persons) working after hours. At least, that's one way of telling. So there is no avoiding your craft if you build a product. Yes you can be generalist in your approach and solve general problems but to build a big enough box to catch everyone you have to be very, very good at building boxes. The alternative is to constantly raise as much money as possible and hire everyone under the sun but eventually you will run up against a wall. If you can raise Series A B C D E F H ad infinitum rounds and become the next Uber sure you can hire "generalist" programmers who only know algorithms and nothing domain specific or technology specific but then you are just shifting the problem... Instead of guy who has 30 years of C++ you hire guy (or girl) who can raise so many money bags your company takes over the world. So you always need craftsmanship of some kind and the less you have the more money you need (which is a craft itself).

jasonkester 7y ago

I guess if we're going to discuss this article again, I should get to say my piece about it again: > To lounge on a beach or travel the world and not actively engage in building your arsenal of expertise is professional malpractice. I've seen this thought expressed before in writing about Startups. If you're not burning your life down 24/7 in the struggle to make it Big, you're doing it wrong. But that's silly. The entire goal of building a business, in my mind, is to get the point where you can lounge on a beach or travel the world and not need to actively engage in anything except the pursuit of happiness. I personally averaged out at a little less than four hours of work per week in 2017, running the sort of low maintenance, feature complete, Software-as-a-Service business that the author spends a paragraph explaining is not in fact a "serious company". But look at the product and you'll see craftsmanship. Ten years of work, in fact as of roughly today. But never at the author's pace. Always at mine. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. That's the great thing about building a business. You can do it any way you like. [from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16248810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16248810]

keiferski 7y ago
I think you're missing the point of craftsmanship as a general value. It is not about extracting and then spending resources. It's about dedicating your time, perhaps even your life, to mastering a skill. Traditional Japanese culture understood this and that's why you still get people like Jiro.[1] In the West, the only remaining traditional craftsmen that I can think of offhand are the bespoke tailors in Savile Row and their counterparts in France and Italy. In the craftsmanship model, the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of purpose and mastery, not simply the pursuit of sensory pleasures and relaxation. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiro_Ono_(chef) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiro_Ono_(chef)
- jasonkester 7y ago
  But I am dedicating my time and my life to mastering a skill. That skill is Rock Climbing. To do so, I have also needed to find a way to live at a world class bouldering area and to spend 4 full days per week training and climbing, which means not having a full time job. Building a software business is a means to that end. Keep in mind, also, that if one begins programming at age six and does it every day for 40 odd years, one tends to achieve mastery of programming as well. Even if one figures out a way to not need to do it full time for the last half dozen of those years.

adim86 7y ago

I think the source of this issue is as recent as the industrial age. People grow up wanting to be "Managers". We grew up watching our parents have a skill and working at a corporation, but then looking for that promotion to become a Manager. Somewhere along the line people are like, why don't I skip the whole working my ass off part and just hack resources together and manage it (Especially with the rise of the startup life). We lost the notion that there is a value to hard work, that there is a value to failing and picking yourself up. This is further compounded by the corruption we see in our governments, societies and money markets where people move around shares and numbers on excel sheets and become millionaires. It feeds further into the idea that people who work hard or develop a skill are losers

kevintb 7y ago

Excellent article, thanks for posting.

bondgaurav21 7y ago

This post really changed my mindset towards four hour work week mindset. But, I want to ask one thing from you which is- are you suggesting us to choose those entrepreneurial endeavors in which we have a huge desire to get an excellence instead of finding those ideas which are easy to setup and do not need so much knowledge crunching from our side?

TeMPOraL 7y ago

A question to HN: reading this and other discussions, it seems to me that "craftsmen" are being rated by how good a business they run (or are contributing to). Similarly with the word "professional". I'd like to ask, what then would be the word for a "craftsmen" by rated how good the work is at its purpose (and without the usual cop-out of redefining "good" as value in dollars)? Optimization for "good work" is only partially aligned with "good business"; frequently, the two are at odds. A good product, in my view, is one that lets the user achieve their goals as efficiently as possible, endures for as long these goals need to be achieved (often lifetime or more), and - after meeting these constraints - is also optimized to minimize the price and use of materials. It's the kind of product that you buy once, are happy about it, and when you no longer need it, give or sell to someone else. It's your grandfather's watch, passed on to you by your parents, and who you'll one day pass on to your kid. It's the furniture you've inherited with the house that remembers World War II, but is still almost as good as new. It's the forever repairable Soviet-era sound amplifiers or irons for clothes. It's the web page your bank had three redesigns and two SPA frameworks ago. A good "professional" would take a look at one of such products and declare them bad. Overengineered. Because what's "professional", what's good for business, are products that break fast (ensuring recurring revenue) and are as cheap as possible to make. Do they solve 100% of the problems it was supposed to? Doesn't have to, customers don't know that when buying, and when they figure it out, it'll be easier for them to learn to deal with missing part of functionality, or learn to be extra careful around the product, than it'll be for them to spend money on something else. Whatever other defects there may be, we can cheaply cover for with sales&marketing. What a "professional" does is ensures their work makes them (or their employer) maximum amount of money for minimum amount of effort. So, HN, I'm looking for a word that describes the person, the art, of doing good work and good products, as defined above, in contrast to being a "professional", which I increasingly despise of.

mdorazio 7y ago
Perhaps "artisan", although in practice I don't think there is a single word. Instead, people tend to use the domain-specific term for whatever type of true craftsman they are referring to. "Welder" "Machinist" "Watchmaker" "Tailor" "Woodworker" etc. Also as an aside, I think the whole "craft" term was co-opted by people who wanted to cash in on the perception of quality and care when really they just wanted better small business margins. It used to mean something more.

agota 7y ago

"4 hours work week" mindset and a craftsman mindset are not at odds with each other. If you can build a business that you can maintain in four hours a week while generating enough profit to pay the bills, why not? That would free up a lot of time that you can then spend pursuing interests that are unlikely to ever pay the bills (mathematics, music, painting, creative writing, whatever). If your business is a means to that end, are you still a hack or are you a craftsman? This disdain for lifestyle businesses is absurd. It's both sad and gross that some people are unable to see that it's possible to have ambition that is not tied to making money. A lifestyle business can give you an experience similar to that of being independently wealthy. It might be hard for some to imagine, but not everyone is an Elon Musk wannabe, there are people who see building a business as a means to an end, not an end in itself. I understand that he didn't address the scenario I propose, presumably because he can't even conceive of it, but I don't get the traveling the world criticism either. I mean, I myself am very critical of the digital nomad lifestyle, but "Spending time on something that you find enjoyable is professional malpractice" is not among my list of criticisms.

vivekjuneja2010 7y ago

I like the author's emphasis on taking one's craft seriously, and pursuing curiosity as a means to build expertise in any domain of their choice. The interpretation of "four hour work week" is fragmented, and people choose the parts to retain what they think aligns closely to them or sometimes easy to adopt. To me, the essence of the the "four hour work week" is to look beyond traditional occupations and instil habits that allows one to optimize on their time while keeping a healthy work-life harmony. The take away for me is that hard work and dedication has no substitutes and one should not see "hacks" and "shortcuts" as a way to achieve long term success, but rather use them reasonably as a means to validate assumptions and pursue curiosity.

cranium 7y ago

I tend to take this kind of article with a grain of salt, especially when there are definitive statements like: "To be successful over the course of a career requires the application and accumulation of expertise". This idea that top-skills are required to succeed is comforting for us craftsmen and craftswomen but ultimately misleading because it forces us to only look for paths leading to skill improvements. I strongly believe that success is mostly opportunity-driven. Exploring the search space to find the most opportunities (ie. the Ferriss way) or exploiting those available by putting the effort in (ie. the craftsmanship way) are two valid non-mutually exclusives strategies. As always, either of them can work but for the best result I believe a combination of the two will outperform any strategy applied narrow-mindedly. Now, for the mixing proportions...

davidjnelson 7y ago

> If you are to optimize for anything, optimize for the long term. Use the challenges of your business today to build mastery in your craft. There is no guarantee that any one venture will succeed, but that mastery will bend luck in your favor over the long course of your career. I’ve found this has personally served me very well. Failed businesses and startups have indeed been great learning experiences. If you can keep a growth mindset and use cognitive tools to prevent rumination, it all just becomes more fuel to the fire that burns inside. Even if that simply means you are a more beneficial employee.