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B**L
Which Life Changes are you Open to?
I was given a copy of Tim's book at a business conference I went to. I thought the title was catchy and the cover well designed. On top of that, several people in the room had recently read it and said it was a MUST READ.As an active business person and somebody who relies on distilled experience from people in the trenches (often in their books or courses) I wasn't resistant to this book. However, based on my already full schedule, I wasn't sure when I'd fit a thick book into my reading program.After ten day, the title kept nagging at me. I wanted to just get into this book if for nothing else to grab some ideas from the TOC. I told myself if I just got one idea I could put the book down and move on. What I found was more than one great idea.First, the book is a VERY good read. It flows well with a mix of Tim's personal experience and resources. It took me two extended reading sessions over a weekend to finish it.. and that led to some interesting results.I was able to immediately apply some of the ideas for outsourcing and virtual assistance to get ideas started that had been put on permanent hold. Tim's ideas gave me great content to share with others and I ended up giving my copy to a friend in my Toastmasters group - just requesting a book report in return.She read the book in about a day and a half and gave me a three-page email report. It was solid. She wasn't a total believer of 100% of the content or Tim's approach but really liked the possibilities the concepts made her think of. We discussed it over the weekend and it made for great conversation about outsourcing.. what "work" really means and why the career track is wrong in so many ways given the internet, a global economy, and a 24/7 way to get your products and services into people's lives.I realized after talking to another friend that I had indeed already met Tim. Of course, it was prior to his book's release and we only had a few conversations while at another conference, but Tim is the real deal. He's not as intimidating as the choke-holds on his web site pictures might intimate. He's clearly confident, fit, and well spoken. And now having read his book full of experiences, I can see why.How to read this book: Okay, if you've read this far, let me share a couple of ideas. 1. You don't need to make $40,000 per month and work only a few minutes each day to be successfuly and happy. (But, when you start doing what I like to call "Internet Math" you'll see why these numbers aren't really impossible.Tim's ideas work for him and many WILL work for you - making you more productive while increasing your income and your enjoyment. Even just thinking about what's possible puts me in an enjoyable frame of mind.2. Get through the book and share it with a couple of friends who want more than their current job offers. You'll know these people because they can't seem to feel content building somebody else's dreams. The ideas lead to very stimulating conversations that will expand what you believe is possible.Don't dismiss the book because of the title. A four-hour work week is a very real possibility given an internet-based business. If you're not already part of this culture, you will need to invest (to speed up the process) and learn. But that's true if you want anything.3. Realize that the 4-Hour work week does not mean don't work as much as it means work SMARTER. I'm sure Tim has lots of things he's working on that he absolutely loves.. and thus spends more than 4 hours each week in action. But it's likely not considered "work" in the labor definition."If you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life." Believe that.. let this book give you some ideas for that.Finally, I think the book is in the wrong place in the bookstores. I found it on the Self-Help shelves in Borders. It should definitely be in the Entrepreneur or Business section - the publisher might need to re-classify.At first, I wanted to keep this book a secret.. because some of the ideas seem so ... well.. valuable. Then I realized that if I shared the ideas with my friends, maybe we could all implement them and start some business projects that lead to us having more time to play. So far, I can say that it is happening. Thanks Tim for a brave title.
S**Y
Learn to live life now
I am a first time reviewer. I don't know Tim. I only know his book. That there are so many first time reviewers speaks volumes about the book. That said, here is my review:It took a kid to get the grown-ups to acknowledge what everyone knew to be true: the emperor was naked. Tim Ferriss is a kid relative to most other "self-help" authors but, like the young boy in the fable, his simple, uncluttered collection of "information we already know" more explicitly and successfully states the truth: our idea of achievement that requires a slavish obsession with working ourselves into the ground is a naked religion. Success is joy.Few books have the potential to inspire passion and fuel personal revolutions. The 4-Hour Workweek is one of them. This book speaks the common yearning to be liberated from the punishing work habits that our society has convinced us are compulsory for success. In simple, often humorous, terms, Tim Ferriss tells us how most of us lie to ourselves about why and how we work and shows us how we can become free.The modern age promised to bring freedom to humanity. Automation would liberate us from the drudgery of many common tasks, allowing us to complete our work with lightening speed, reserving the rest of our time for leisure. Like millionaires who can afford servants to do the drudgery, the common person would be able to forget the mundane and engage in the profound, to travel, to explore, and most importantly, to be free of worry. Unfortunately, we humans forgot about freedom and became slaves to our machines. Machines increased productivity and the availability of things. We reacted by convincing ourselves that we had to have them all to be satisfied and so became slaves to the jobs we believed necessary to obtain those things. More recently, email and cell phones, which were intended to increase productivity and communication, did so by making us instantly accessible and required us to be instantly responsive at any time of the day or night. Cable television and the Internet also increased communications and the flow of information, but also resulted in an information bombardment that left us catatonic, unable to disengage, yet unable to absorb it all. The result? At the end of our working lives - many times not by our own choice but because of downsizing and outsourcing -- exhausted and demoralized, we cannot enjoy the delayed gratification that has been our beacon of light, our holy grail, for so many years.Tim Ferris has the audacity to set the whole paradigm on fire in order to illuminate its true nature. Tim questions our assumptions about what progress is and what progress has done for us by highlighting the terrific costs we have imposed on ourselves. With gleeful delight Tim opens our eyes to the fact that we have become the cyborgs, less human rather than more. In a clear, step-by-step fashion, he presents elegant concepts and applies them to life in practical ways that have profound results. He reminds us that "the opposite of happiness is not sadness but boredom" and employs Pareto's 80/20 principle to demonstrate how we can identify those aspects of our lives that hold us back from being happy. He urges us to understand that life is not about the acquisition of things for later enjoyment, life is about happiness, fulfillment in the present, rather than in some un-promised future. Unfettered by useless jargon and overly academic presentation, Tim demonstrates how we can return to sanity and achieve happiness by finally becoming masters over the technology that was supposed to free us. He challenges us to give ourselves permission to quit the rat race and rejoin the human race. These ideas are not entirely new, but Tim's particular expression of them is like sparkling water to the parched souls of millions who now labor incessantly to achieve success yet yearn to quench their thirst for freedom. You don't have to be a millionaire to live a millionaire lifestyle, Tim says. Do you have a dream? Live it now.
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