4 Hour Work Week

[blackomen]

Anyone else read that book by Tim Ferriss?  Although I doubt I could actually implement a 4 hour work week in my career, there's quite a bit of valuable time management advice to be taken.

[MediumTex]

I read it a while back.

Ferriss is an interesting guy.

He is very good at getting people excited about his ideas, though I don't know if they actually lead to much durable change in the lives of his readers.

[Jake]

I'm glad I read it, although I also have criticisms of both the writing style and the content. If you are interested my recent podcast review of it is here http://thevoluntarylife.blogspot.co.uk/ ... y-tim.html.

MP3 file http://thevoluntarylife.com/TVL_E073_th ... k_week.mp3

[Storm]

I've read excerpts of 4 hour work-week, and was mostly unimpressed.  He does have some interesting ideas around time management, but most of his success has to do with being in the right place at the right time, and couldn't be replicated by doing the same thing now.  For example, I believe Tim Ferris made quite a lot of money by identifying keywords that people were searching for on Google, then paying overseas writers a few bucks to write an article about that.  For example, if someone was searching for "Guitar lessons" on Google, you could calculate that a page near the top of the search results would generate $20 per month in Adwords revenue (by people clicking on the ads embedded in such a page).  Then, if it only cost you $10 to have someone online write a page with links to online guitar lessons, you instantly made $10 in profit your first month, and if people kept going to it, you might make around $20 a month in ad revenue perpetually.

This strategy worked pretty well a few years ago, but now you can bet that every 2-bit huckster from here to Bangalore is doing the exact same thing.  Keyword farming has become a scientific art where a keyword with only a few cents of profit in it might be jumped upon by two or three different vultures, who pay unemployed writers a few bucks an hour to write a shoddy article in hopes of generating some Google search traffic to it and driving ad clicks.

To me, this is like the multi-level marketing business of the Internet.  It works if you get in early, but it soon stops working when everyone wants to try it.  Just like selling Amway, maybe you would have been successful decades ago, when you were the only one in your neighborhood selling it, but once everyone is an Amway distributor, the business model falls apart rather rapidly.

Tim has been very smart, by being in the right place at the right time, although I think that's more because he has some smart friends that gave him ideas and he just implemented them.  Now, he makes a huge amount of money for public speaking and writing books about how you can be successful too.

If we could only replicate his success, it would be awesome.  Can you imagine how powerful the self-help book "The 4 hour author - writing self help books for fame and fortune" would be?