Tim Ferriss Revisited

http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2008/05/19/tim-ferriss-revisited/

by utnick • 18 years ago

26 28 18 years ago

texasstartupblog.com

jraines• 18 years ago

"Envy never comes to the party dressed as envy, but as high moral standards."

That's a paraphrase, Wilde or Shaw I think, but this post is a perfect example.

I think the idea that "hard work is an end unto itself" is pretty dumb.

I'd also like to address his comment about "who will do the work?" if everyone implemented Ferriss methods. Well, obviously some people are going to lack the initiative, brains, risk-tolerance, information, or opportunity to do so, and will be stuck manning the refineries or stuffing the boxes. But you can't really blame Ferriss for that, as he wrote a best-selling book trying to show how and why to do it, even without having much money or "qualifications"!

kirubakaran• 18 years ago

The author pretty much seems to say "What will happen if everyone starts coding?" It is amazing how some people don't try to extract what is valuable to them from Tim's book, PG's essays etc and simply try to reiterate why it won't work for them.

This guy is a blubist.

(I am using http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html to my advantage ;) Search for defeatist)

soundsop• 18 years ago

Our founders were the hardest working people of their time.

I think that distinction probably goes to their slaves.

dissenter• 18 years ago

There is still debate over whether slaves worked harder even than other paid farmhands. The last great volley (slaves do) could be said to have won its author a Nobel Prize.

gojomo• 18 years ago

Good, substantive point that anyone cheering on the glibness of the grandparent post should consider.

fallentimes• 18 years ago

"We don’t mow our lawns, we don’t clean our homes, we don’t cook our meals, we don’t drill for oil, we won’t build oil refineries, we simply don’t do much anymore".

This is a sign of prosperity not a lack of hard work. We also don't cut our own trees, build our own furniture, use printing presses or churn our own butter. Instead, we've been able to reassign our time and talents to more productive or fulfilling tasks while leaving or paying for tasks such as these to machines or to a lesser amount of people.

One caveat, in TFHWW, Ferriss often comes off as sort of a douche, but that doesn't mean there aren't great concrete ideas and references throughout the book - the key is knowing which ones are applicable to your life. The book is by no means perfect, but it's certainly better than the self-improvement fluff and vapor proliferating itself all over the Amazon best seller lists.

The blog post author seems to confuse working hard and working smart.

mhartl• 18 years ago

One caveat, in TFHWW, Ferriss often comes off as sort of a douche, but that doesn't mean there aren't great concrete ideas and references throughout the book

I agree. I do recommend TFHWW to people, but never without embarrassment.

Psyonic2• 18 years ago

I feel precisely the same way. The book excites me, but also makes me laugh.

bisi2• 18 years ago

Well .. I think the writer has a few things wrong ... Everybody is not going to be successful . All fingers are not equal .

This is why if you have 50 students in a class who have been taught by the same lecturer using the same books . They dont all get A's

If everyone one in America is given $1 Million most would be broke in less than 3 years . Money will be pissed away on Alchohol, Drugs, Women, Gambling, Bad Biz choices, etc

There is never a time when 100% of the people will get it right 100% of the time .

So saying who will wash the dishes if everyone is a chef makes no sense because life is designed there to be winners and losers . A lot of people that bought the book wont even finish reading the book if they start at all .

Life is meant to be enjoyed . Your not meant to spend your life working hard till you drop dead .

Your meant to utilize you talents to get ahead and finishe early .

bisi2• 18 years ago

Yeah ..Our founders didnt do the work .. They outsourced it to slaves .

qaexl• 18 years ago

The guy's older article is just as interesting for the confusion. (http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2007/08/09/timothy-ferriss-r...)

He takes the example of one person who has ruined his life. Ruined how? The guy is no longer a customer. He hides from the people he is working with. Therefore, he disvalues building lasting relationship.

Unfortunately, he assumes that a professional life necessarily encompasses a personal life. He seems to be implying that if your professional life tanks, then you no longer have a personal life ... whereas the main thing I get out of Tim Ferris's book is giving priority to your personal life. Since the blog post author only knows his example by through his professional life, he has no way of knowing if his former client has ruined his personal life.

I keep seeing so much hate in those comments. I saw the hate in the reviews on Amazon. Particularly, people keep coming back to the idea that if everyone follows Ferris's strategy, no one would be left to do the work. Why are people waving that around as if they were waving a flag to make a last stand against a charging horde of barbarians?

It seems to me that this blog author reacts violently to the idea that a person can benefit from someone else's "hard honest work", to the point that he may be taking it personally: reacting unconsciously to the idea of "Tim Ferris is taking advantage of MY hard honest work." It is as if Ferris's ideas threatens all those years of struggle with putting in long hours to put food on the table. These are responsibilities as an adult, that one had to give up personal things as a child to become an adult ... and here comes Ferris who seems to advocate extending your childhood ... So he tells himself, "If everyone follows Ferris's ideas, who is actually going to do the work" While this is mathematically true, it serves more as an emotional security blanket validating that all the "sacrifices" he had made was not for naught.

In his book, Ferris himself claimed to have worked extremely hard in his early days, before dropping everything to go to Europe. There, with nothing to do, and no "hard work" to validate himself as a person, he had to either fill it up with something (usually hard work) or come to some sort of a realization about himself. Ferris by no means the first person who has espoused this idea. In my studies of Lao Tzu's ancient text, Tao Te Ching, these very same ideas are already there. In fact, Ferris does not really escape the whole Protestant Work Ethic -- he's turning his entire drive and passions towards doing the things he wants to do (whatever those "wants" are), whereas Taoists of Lao Tzu's ilk tame those fires and retire into a contemplative life away from the material world. Ferris still works hard, he just doesn't work hard in what the mainstream American society considers "productive".

bkbleikamp• 18 years ago

I've never read the book, but taking the title literally was the authors first mistake.

From what I've seen in reviews and when I skimmed the book it's not about working 4 hours a week, it's about working less on mundane tasks and doing what you love in your free time (traveling, golfing, whatever)

wallflower2• 18 years ago

In the book, the author explains how he used Google Adwords to test the marketability/flash of book titles. 4HWW won.

elai• 18 years ago

The original title was drug dealing for fun and profit! The book isn't necessarily about working 4 hours a week.

k7lim• 18 years ago

I tried to get through this, despite the piss poor writing ("Let's begin at the beginning...") and the arrogant tone. I skimmed the beginnings of every chapter, and realized that this book could be written in 5 pages. Then I read the part about him cheating to win a kickboxing tournament. That's when I chucked the book aside, and picked up Warren Buffett's biography instead. Talk about contrast. Buffett is insanely talented, works hard AND smart and has incredible depth. Ironically, Ferriss himself recommended the Buffett bio at a talk he did. My prediction? Ferriss is going to do talks to plug his book at smaller and smaller venues, whoring himself out to everything but the local Elk's club, following in the crap footsteps of Andrew Keen's book tour. Then, as he realizes the ship has lost all momentum, he'll admit that this book is just another corner-cutting, outsourced, unoriginal, first-draft, lazy piece of work in a long line of shams that he's pulled.

icey2• 18 years ago

Has anyone seen a blog post where someone applied the information from "Four Hour Workweek" and it worked well for them? (Excluding Tim Ferriss, of course)

webwright• 18 years ago

Ferriss suggests:

1) Reducing information/news intake (Peter Drucker said that) 2) Working ON the business (automating it) rather than IN the business. 3) Pushing the envelope on how much mundanity you can outsource.

You don't have to look far for people who've had success following these ideas.

icey2• 18 years ago

I appreciate that he is using largely recycled ideas. What I am looking for, though, is someone stating that Four Hour Workweek is the tool that they used to get them from point A to point B.

wallflower2• 18 years ago

The information in FHW is simple but not easy. It takes a lot of initiative to create a Muse (Ferriss' term for a semi-autonomous business entity). However, it's not black-and-white - choose to apply what you may.

I'm confident if you successfully applied FHW you wouldn't just have a blog post - you could have a blog e.g. ihaveafourworkweeknow.com where people would pay to subscribe - to learn how you did it. For added value, keep a detailed blog while you are figuring out how to apply the FHW (e.g. Day 25 - Boss negotiation) and timecapsule so you can unveil it to paying subscribers once you achieve the FHW.

coglethorpe• 18 years ago

From what I've read, the founder of plentyoffish.com might have been doing much of this before the book was written. I've heard he only works 2-4 hours a day on the site.

amuse• 18 years ago

You have to give Tim credit, he came up with an excellent controversy. Of course, you all must realize that Tim doesn't follow his own advice. He admits that it took a lot more than 4 hours a week to write the book. He spends more than 40 hours a week promoting the book (even now). Get it? He doesn't believe his own thesis. Sure, it is possible, but for how many people? for how long? Not very many and not very long.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

Ferriss never claimed to be writing his book for money. The book is his hobby: he enjoys writing books. He enjoys promoting his book. That's one reason why he's so good at it!

I do agree, though, that the book's advice is not for everyone.

mpk• 18 years ago

I've read the four-hour-work-week, and at its core the message is that if you work hard and focused towards building a company that actually makes something people want and structure it in such a way that that you can offload support, etc to third-parties .. well then you can go do something else and macro-manage it in a few hours per week.

It takes a lot of effort and focus to get to that point, though.

Tim Ferriss is hardly a snake-oil vendor. The marketing of the book might suggest otherwise, but to me he seems like a guy who found a novel way to structure his business and wrote the book as a "here's how I did it".

The book's worth picking up if you're reading this site, though comments along the lines of programmers being a dime a dozen (or words to that effect) might put you off.

chaostheory• 18 years ago

hmmm I didn't feel that Ferriss was espousing laziness. Instead here's what I thought his major ideas were:

1) your time is very valuable; you only live once

2) it is stupid to spend all your time working so you collect and hoard expensive toys that you won't have time to play with. instead use your money to expand your free time and freedom to do cool stuff

3) you can delegate some of your work to expand your free time

4) there are unconventional solutions to conventional problems

tdavis2• 18 years ago

Anytime I see someone try to use "ethics" to make an argument I instantly stop reading. Ethics and morality are human constructs and inefficient ones at that. The question isn't "Did I succeed at X by cheating/being unethical?" its "Did I succeed at X?" Everything else is superfluous. There are countless real-world "hacks" that require one to bend the rules or forgo being "nice" to accomplish a goal.

Psyonic2• 18 years ago

Really? I agree that ethics doesn't really apply in this case, as what Tim Ferriss suggests is just basic capitalism (companies always profit off the backs of their workers... what has changed?) but you don't even consider it? i.e. professional assassin is fine as long as pays the bills?

tdavis2• 18 years ago

Honestly? Yes, it is. That being said, were I planning to run for President, I probably wouldn't pick a job like professional assassin because if the public found out they likely wouldn't vote for me. I consider ethics only when my perception as ethical/unethical factors into my probability for success at a given task. In this case, Ferriss' success didn't hing on his ability to be ethical and/or not be an ass so it's irrelevant.

Take Google for instance; their Do No Evil mantra. Maybe they really are super ethical people and truly want to improve the world we live in. Or maybe its just really important to appear and be ethical when dealing with tons of information from the public in order to gain the trust necessary for them to use Google services. Either way, it's an important factor for their success.

I don't go out of my way to break social constructs or be a jerk, but my business partner can attest that I don't go out of my way not to, either. Its why he does most of the talking ;)

eru• 18 years ago

Perhaps you could rephrase "Did I succeed at X by cheating/being unethical?" as "Did I succeed at X without having to fear bad long term consequences and/or retribution based on a heuristic called 'ethics'?"

(I agree that the purpose of some ethical/moral norms seems to be self-replication like a meme. On the other hand Game theory has some things to say about norms and values as equilibria selection in games with multiple equilibria.)

Tim Ferriss Revisited

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