5 ms·

Someone gifted me the Tim Ferriss book this author is talking about (“The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”). It has a few pote

Someone gifted me the Tim Ferriss book this author is talking about (“The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”). It has a few potentially interesting parts about work life balance, but the majority of it is self-help pipe dreams. It advocates techniques like only answering e-mail once per day or less. He provides scripts for asking your boss to work from home so you can secretly travel the world while collecting paychecks and doing as little work as possible. He suggests it’s simple to start a lifestyle business to sustain your lifestyle while only working a couple hours per week, using virtual assistants to do most of the work for you while you travel the world. I’m sure there are some people who have used his techniques successfully, but I’ve mostly watched people become terrible coworkers after trying to implement his advice. Like the author of this article says, much of his advice is about shifting your work to other people so you have more free time for yourself. That’s fine if you’re doing this as honest business transactions by hiring people, but most office workers implementing this advice just end up shifting their work to their teammates by hiding from communication and working less than everyone else. If you get a “4-Hour Work Week” believer on your team, you’re going to end up picking up a lot of their slack. At least until your manager catches on and lets them go. That said, I can’t agree with the author’s argument that we need to put a legal upper limit of 35 hour work weeks on everyone. That wouldn’t actually solve the problem of certain people abusing systems to work less than others. It would just require even more people to pick up the slack. There are broader arguments about those who can afford to live off of investments, but they aren’t really addressed in the article. It’s worth mentioning that Tim Ferriss didn’t actually get wealthy by following his own advice. He claims to have built and sold a supplement company, but even when his book was released it was hard to find anything about it. By his own accounts he actually worked quite hard at many endeavors and he also writes about burnout from overwork. Much of his wealth actually comes from good timing on being an early investor in companies like Uber.

starfallg 5y ago
> It’s worth mentioning that Tim Ferriss didn’t actually get wealthy by following his own advice. He claims to have built and sold a supplement company, but even when his book was released it was hard to find anything about it. By his own accounts he actually worked quite hard at many endeavors and he also writes about burnout from overwork. Much of his wealth actually comes from good timing on being an early investor in companies like Uber. It's just not as glamorous nor as profitable writing a humble book on getting rich by being at the right place at the right time through knowing the right people.
- Inhibit 5y ago
  The thrilling tale of: Drinking Orange Crush while someone's mentioning this "Uber" thing. And thinking that might make a good longshot investment for the 4k you've made in an anonymous management position your uncle got you. (I joke, it may have been a former college roommate) Yea, I can see how "work less, get rich" makes for a better selling book.
znpy 5y ago
> It has a few potentially interesting parts about work life balance, but the majority of it is self-help pipe dreams. Yup, I had the same feeling when I got myself a 2nd hand copy years ago. It's mostly a bragging book, where the author suggests trying and replicating his lifestyle. If anything, one might pull out some quotes about work-life balances, but then again, if that's the game, there are better books about that stuff.
traveler01 5y ago
Here in Portugal the public workers already have a 35 hour week, but workers from the private sector can't. I hear people saying "tax the rich" and all other bs... it doesn't work, taxation doesn't actually solve the problem and the lower classes always endup paying all those taxes on way or another, either by having smaller wages or paying more for the products. We need to find real solutions for these problems since nowadays I feel like people are working harder than in the XX century and having less wages.
- ajmadesc 5y ago
  Taxation does fix the problem. The tax system is simply intentionally overcomplicated to allow the wealthy to avoid taxes.
  - Workaccount2 5y ago
    The problem is how do you tax wealth that is mostly in the form of investments? How do you tell Bezos he has to dump 1% of his controlling interest in Amazon every year to pay his tax bill?
    - ajmadesc 5y ago
      He did it to buy the world's biggest yatch, and a space program
  - traveler01 5y ago
    Well it is like that because they're trying to make it harder to avoid paying the taxes. But obviously richer folks can pay for smart people who know the system very well and actually avoid all the system using loopholes.
- gpapilion 5y ago
  I think the solution is pay everyone fairly. In the US, we are uncomfortable with dictating wages so it’s easier to take money away from where it accumulates and redistribute it. Unfortunately, we also suck at redistribution so no one is happy with the result.
ebiester 5y ago
"That said, I can’t agree with the author’s argument that we need to put a legal upper limit of 35 hour work weeks on everyone. That wouldn’t actually solve the problem of certain people abusing systems to work less than others. It would just require even more people to pick up the slack." I think that's the key. If more people are required to pick up the slack, the supply of labor is reduced. That means that the pay for labor is increased. It also flows upwards. If a manager must only work 35 hours a week, it requires three managers to do the work of two, creating upward pressure. (Now, in practice, nobody is going to be able to stop the startup CEO from working more hours. It stops somewhere.)
HEmanZ 5y ago
I think it's important to put this book into a few contexts: - It was published in 2007. I think if you picked up the book around that time it was extremely prescient in many ways. If you hopped on the "sell anything online" and "outsource most online labor" bandwagon in 2007/2008 I think you had a very good shot of coming out with a good business. At least, this is what I have seen with acquaintances who bought the hype back then. - It was written by an ambitious 20-something with a lot of dreams, idealism, and smarts but not much "real world" experience. Many of us were ambitious 20-somethings who thought we had the answers to the new world at one point in our lives. Reading it from this perspective paints the ideas in the book with that wonderful energy-of-youth instead of cringe internet-guru vibes. It is a young-persons book written for a very specific point in time. I do not expect it to age well but I also don't criticize it nearly as much as some people who tend to really hate on it.
- devchix 5y ago
  > It was written by an ambitious 20-something with a lot of dreams, idealism, and smarts A generous assessment, I would describe the mindset as exploitative with the self-knowledge that he didn't have any of his own talent worth exploiting. TL;DR: hire other people to do the work for you and mark it up a lot. I binned it quickly. To this day I avoid the author's name without exception everywhere it appears, he's guest to a lot of podcasts. Unfair maybe, but that mindset at 20 is probably that mindset at 30, 40, but with a sophistication to sell it better.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
k-mcgrady 5y ago
>> It’s worth mentioning that Tim Ferriss didn’t actually get wealthy by following his own advice. This is missing the point of the book though. Wealth isn't the goal. Earning enough money per month to satisfy your needs + wants in addition to freeing up as much time as possible is.[1] [1] https://tim.blog/lifestyle-costing/ https://tim.blog/lifestyle-costing/
andreilys 5y ago
It’s worth mentioning that Tim Ferriss didn’t actually get wealthy by following his own advice. I would give the book another read as it’s not a book about hoarding wealth, but instead about accumulating life experiences. Rather than waiting until you’re 65 to retire and travel the world/learn to sail/etc., you can do so in your 20s while remaining financially afloat. We work to live, not live to work. Much of his wealth actually comes from good timing on being an early investor in companies like Uber. Also Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and many others. Not sure why you have an axe to grind with Tim. Of all the public influencers he’s the most forthcoming about his background and has done a lot of good (through psychedelic research, sustainability, etc.)
dopidopHN 5y ago
France implemented 35H week more than a decade ago. In practice folks still work around 40h, but they have more vacations to compensate. I don't see much downside, beside... people working less overall. The end goal of this law was to share work. I work in the US since 6 years. I miss a actual work life balance. I've quit 2 jobs because I was not able to obtain proper level of vacation and that 'pay without leave' was not an option. I did show them twice that, leaving and not being pay is always an option with a at-will contract. They did not like it, I told them all I was asking was some down time and that I was more than willing to compromise for it, but that they were not. I would not have those issues for similar level of responsibilities in France.
- orwin 5y ago
  In fact, i mostly work 35h/w while collecting the additional vacations. I still have crunch time before deliverables so I guess its evens out over the year. But yeah, i wonder how people survive without at least 5 week/year. So much stuff to do and so little time :(
  - dopidopHN 5y ago
    I switched job recently, very nice compensation package. Whole shabang. 3 weeks vacation. Being relatively senior, I asked to receive less money, and more vacation. It was a very, very hard negotiation to go to 4 week of PTO while reducing my yearly salary by the equivalent of 40H*MyRate. What's bug me the more in this context is how insane people think I am to ask for more free time. I don't count my hours outside of vacation. I do what I'm supposed to do and I enjoy it. But once in while. Once or twice a year, I want to be away from any type of technology and fuck off in the woods. It should not be that hard. Plus, preventing me to do that will just hast my departure from the company that apparently can't suffer a employee being gone 1 more week? Nobody is irreplaceable, and if someone is, that person is not doing it's job and should be replaced. Edit : to your question about having less than 5 week / year. I think my quality of life has vastly decrease, that my mental health as well, and that I missed a lot of bonding with my wife and children. As a result, I will gladly go back to a french level of financial compensation to get those benefit back.
jimbokun 5y ago
> It advocates techniques like only answering e-mail once per day or less. Global productivity would probably sky rocket if everyone took up this practice. Frequent email checking and responding kills far more productivity than it generates.

starfallg 5y ago

> It’s worth mentioning that Tim Ferriss didn’t actually get wealthy by following his own advice. He claims to have built and sold a supplement company, but even when his book was released it was hard to find anything about it. By his own accounts he actually worked quite hard at many endeavors and he also writes about burnout from overwork. Much of his wealth actually comes from good timing on being an early investor in companies like Uber. It's just not as glamorous nor as profitable writing a humble book on getting rich by being at the right place at the right time through knowing the right people.

Inhibit 5y ago
The thrilling tale of: Drinking Orange Crush while someone's mentioning this "Uber" thing. And thinking that might make a good longshot investment for the 4k you've made in an anonymous management position your uncle got you. (I joke, it may have been a former college roommate) Yea, I can see how "work less, get rich" makes for a better selling book.

znpy 5y ago

> It has a few potentially interesting parts about work life balance, but the majority of it is self-help pipe dreams. Yup, I had the same feeling when I got myself a 2nd hand copy years ago. It's mostly a bragging book, where the author suggests trying and replicating his lifestyle. If anything, one might pull out some quotes about work-life balances, but then again, if that's the game, there are better books about that stuff.

traveler01 5y ago

Here in Portugal the public workers already have a 35 hour week, but workers from the private sector can't. I hear people saying "tax the rich" and all other bs... it doesn't work, taxation doesn't actually solve the problem and the lower classes always endup paying all those taxes on way or another, either by having smaller wages or paying more for the products. We need to find real solutions for these problems since nowadays I feel like people are working harder than in the XX century and having less wages.

ajmadesc 5y ago
Taxation does fix the problem. The tax system is simply intentionally overcomplicated to allow the wealthy to avoid taxes.
- Workaccount2 5y ago
  The problem is how do you tax wealth that is mostly in the form of investments? How do you tell Bezos he has to dump 1% of his controlling interest in Amazon every year to pay his tax bill?
  - ajmadesc 5y ago
    He did it to buy the world's biggest yatch, and a space program
- traveler01 5y ago
  Well it is like that because they're trying to make it harder to avoid paying the taxes. But obviously richer folks can pay for smart people who know the system very well and actually avoid all the system using loopholes.
gpapilion 5y ago
I think the solution is pay everyone fairly. In the US, we are uncomfortable with dictating wages so it’s easier to take money away from where it accumulates and redistribute it. Unfortunately, we also suck at redistribution so no one is happy with the result.

ebiester 5y ago

"That said, I can’t agree with the author’s argument that we need to put a legal upper limit of 35 hour work weeks on everyone. That wouldn’t actually solve the problem of certain people abusing systems to work less than others. It would just require even more people to pick up the slack." I think that's the key. If more people are required to pick up the slack, the supply of labor is reduced. That means that the pay for labor is increased. It also flows upwards. If a manager must only work 35 hours a week, it requires three managers to do the work of two, creating upward pressure. (Now, in practice, nobody is going to be able to stop the startup CEO from working more hours. It stops somewhere.)

HEmanZ 5y ago

I think it's important to put this book into a few contexts: - It was published in 2007. I think if you picked up the book around that time it was extremely prescient in many ways. If you hopped on the "sell anything online" and "outsource most online labor" bandwagon in 2007/2008 I think you had a very good shot of coming out with a good business. At least, this is what I have seen with acquaintances who bought the hype back then. - It was written by an ambitious 20-something with a lot of dreams, idealism, and smarts but not much "real world" experience. Many of us were ambitious 20-somethings who thought we had the answers to the new world at one point in our lives. Reading it from this perspective paints the ideas in the book with that wonderful energy-of-youth instead of cringe internet-guru vibes. It is a young-persons book written for a very specific point in time. I do not expect it to age well but I also don't criticize it nearly as much as some people who tend to really hate on it.

devchix 5y ago
> It was written by an ambitious 20-something with a lot of dreams, idealism, and smarts A generous assessment, I would describe the mindset as exploitative with the self-knowledge that he didn't have any of his own talent worth exploiting. TL;DR: hire other people to do the work for you and mark it up a lot. I binned it quickly. To this day I avoid the author's name without exception everywhere it appears, he's guest to a lot of podcasts. Unfair maybe, but that mindset at 20 is probably that mindset at 30, 40, but with a sophistication to sell it better.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

k-mcgrady 5y ago

>> It’s worth mentioning that Tim Ferriss didn’t actually get wealthy by following his own advice. This is missing the point of the book though. Wealth isn't the goal. Earning enough money per month to satisfy your needs + wants in addition to freeing up as much time as possible is.[1] [1] https://tim.blog/lifestyle-costing/ https://tim.blog/lifestyle-costing/

andreilys 5y ago

It’s worth mentioning that Tim Ferriss didn’t actually get wealthy by following his own advice. I would give the book another read as it’s not a book about hoarding wealth, but instead about accumulating life experiences. Rather than waiting until you’re 65 to retire and travel the world/learn to sail/etc., you can do so in your 20s while remaining financially afloat. We work to live, not live to work. Much of his wealth actually comes from good timing on being an early investor in companies like Uber. Also Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and many others. Not sure why you have an axe to grind with Tim. Of all the public influencers he’s the most forthcoming about his background and has done a lot of good (through psychedelic research, sustainability, etc.)

dopidopHN 5y ago

France implemented 35H week more than a decade ago. In practice folks still work around 40h, but they have more vacations to compensate. I don't see much downside, beside... people working less overall. The end goal of this law was to share work. I work in the US since 6 years. I miss a actual work life balance. I've quit 2 jobs because I was not able to obtain proper level of vacation and that 'pay without leave' was not an option. I did show them twice that, leaving and not being pay is always an option with a at-will contract. They did not like it, I told them all I was asking was some down time and that I was more than willing to compromise for it, but that they were not. I would not have those issues for similar level of responsibilities in France.

orwin 5y ago
In fact, i mostly work 35h/w while collecting the additional vacations. I still have crunch time before deliverables so I guess its evens out over the year. But yeah, i wonder how people survive without at least 5 week/year. So much stuff to do and so little time :(
- dopidopHN 5y ago
  I switched job recently, very nice compensation package. Whole shabang. 3 weeks vacation. Being relatively senior, I asked to receive less money, and more vacation. It was a very, very hard negotiation to go to 4 week of PTO while reducing my yearly salary by the equivalent of 40H*MyRate. What's bug me the more in this context is how insane people think I am to ask for more free time. I don't count my hours outside of vacation. I do what I'm supposed to do and I enjoy it. But once in while. Once or twice a year, I want to be away from any type of technology and fuck off in the woods. It should not be that hard. Plus, preventing me to do that will just hast my departure from the company that apparently can't suffer a employee being gone 1 more week? Nobody is irreplaceable, and if someone is, that person is not doing it's job and should be replaced. Edit : to your question about having less than 5 week / year. I think my quality of life has vastly decrease, that my mental health as well, and that I missed a lot of bonding with my wife and children. As a result, I will gladly go back to a french level of financial compensation to get those benefit back.

jimbokun 5y ago

> It advocates techniques like only answering e-mail once per day or less. Global productivity would probably sky rocket if everyone took up this practice. Frequent email checking and responding kills far more productivity than it generates.