Tim Ferris: The 4 Hour Work Week Review

The Four Hour Work Week is a partial autobiographical, mostly self-help book by Tim Ferris, detailing ways to create a ‘four hour work week’ by being an online entrepreneur.  The book has garnered rave reviews from some editors and mixed reviews from readers, so let’s take a look shall we?  What is Tim Ferris: The 4 Hour Work Week all about?

Tim Ferris is first and foremost, an online businessman, specializing in-you guessed it!-product selling.  He claims to have the knowledge that allows you to ultimately make up to 40K a week with only about 4 hours of work a week.  Sounds too good to be true…?

So, What’s the DEAL?

Tim Ferris’ system basically breaks down into DEAL:

Definition: Define what you want in life (Basically, write down your goals) and what you want and need to do to get there.  Build yourself a roadmap to success, a list of goals, a bucket list, whatever you want.

Elimination: Stop wasting your time with surfing the ‘net, checking your phone, writing e-mails, and the myriad of other distractions which plague so many newcomer entrepreneurs and contributes to their failure.

Automation: Learn how to outsource most of your hum-drum activities to virtual assistants for as cheap as possible.  This way, you can have someone else manage things like writing e-mails, taking phone calls and making appointments for you and whatever else would distract you from building your online business.

Liberation: Outsource everything you can and take more mini-vacations.  Eventually, quit your job altogether.  You shouldn’t need it anymore by this point anyway!

Does this all sound way to good too be true?

Many users have been very happy with this system; they were able to follow the steps, build online businesses and live fairly comfortable lives, free from their job.  Others take parts of the information found here and apply it well while still mixing in their own spin.  The information found in this book is largely general enough to apply to anyone at least in part, so there is something for everyone.

Still others though have been suspicious.  The idea of only spending four hours a week working sounds good, but the fact is that at least in the beginning, you will be logging in a lot more than four hours a week on your business and if you have several businesses rotating around as most successful entrepreneurs do, you will generally be working more than four hours a week.  It’ll be less than forty, but more than four.  Still others don’t want to outsource everything; they may not trust someone across the ocean with their personal information, they may have been burned by bad freelancers before, they may like some aspects of the work to do it themselves.  Finally, many people had problems with the ethics in the book and the idea of outsourcing everything on the principle that if everyone did that, nothing would get done.  (I guess there’s always mooks who’d rather work than lounge around).

Is This Book Worth It?!

Surprisingly, yes, despite the nay-sayers.  This book does contain some gems of wisdom, including where you can outsource successfully and how and why, some good ideas on how to market your particular product and plenty of motivation for you.  If you don’t mind using legal-but-grey-ethical-practices, this book has plenty of tips and tricks for you and by working through the steps and putting in the effort at the beginning, mixed with a good dose of luck, you too can have a four hour work week (or nearly).

This book seems to be best used though in conjunction with your own ideas and ethics in the online business world.  Not everyone is going to want (or need) a virtual assistant, not everyone will want to outsource their writing, coding and graphic work, and not everyone will want to do things like re-branding their product or throwing fake E-bay auctions for market research.  But everyone can take a boost of motivation (or laughter) from his life story and common sense ideas like eliminating the distractions in your life and defining what you want in life and work is always a good thing.

The Four Hour Work Week is yet another book detailing ways to be successful in making money online.  It has its humorous spots and has plenty of tips and tricks to minimize the amount of time you actually spend working.  Whether or not you actually have a four hour work week is largely up to luck and how much work you want to do yourself; much like the rest of the book, your best bet is to pick the things that seem like they’d work for you and leave the rest behind.

Worth the price?  Maybe, but you could take it out of the library too and save your money.  After all, one of the keys to any successful business online and off is spend little, make lots and that is one of the themes in this book too.  Pick it up for yourself if you’re interested in basic techniques for building online businesses or you just want to add some tweaks to your usual methods to make money online.