Looking back at his 2007 “The 4-Hour Workweek,” it cannot but feel a little like Tim Ferriss had a crystal ball.
He wrote about outsourcing tasks to virtual assistants - twenty years ago! Ok, his VAs were offshore humans not Claude, but still visionary-ish.
Ferris advocated for remote work more than a decade before the pandemic made it de rigueur.
And he said we need to put away our cell phones at dinner back when the word “app” still meant appetizer and only 6% of the US population owned a smartphone.
While “The 4-Hour Workweek” rocked my world, by the end of the noughties I’ll admit I was a tad disenchanted with TF.
His follow-on book “The 4-Hour Body” felt like the riff that didn’t quite work…
Again, sort of gazing straight into a future we’re living, Ferriss was all about super-low carbs, protein-maxxing and what we’d now call HIIT workouts.
That said, how could his top recommendation - not eating sugar and flour six days a week - possibly be called 4-hour anything? More like the 144-hour work week – as that’s the number of grueling hours in the week he recommends forgoing sugar and flour.
Perhaps more crucially, my frustration with the guy boiled down to - how could a person who advocates working only 4-hours a week obviously be working so dang much himslef? Maybe on another planet, that’s four hours, but here on earth, it was crystal clear Ferris must be working upwards of 20-hours every day.
Could his advice be that good if he could not even follow it himself?
I felt like writing TF a letter - or at least a Tweet.
It would say “For a fellow who believes in a 4-hour workweek, you set the worst example. You obviously work your tail off, Mr. Book-a-year, podcaster, over-exerciser, article writer, oh now I’m in Asia on a book tour, catch me if you can.”
At some point recently though a light bulb flickered up there.
Ahhhhh, maybe the point is only four-hours a week should feel like work. The rest should feel… amazing. It should feel like flow, like setting goals, working toward goals, the rest might look like work to those poor souls who don’t get it, but for you it’s not really work because it’s stuff you love to do.
How many of us are spending 36+ waking hours a week doing what we love? Do we even know what that might look like? Connecting with people we care about and who challenge and/or nourish us, reaching goals, striving, learning, taking good care of ourselves, creating and working at jobs that provide purpose and meaning?
Maybe even while we’re doing what looks like work to others, we’re engaged, focused and feeling amazing. Maybe it’s not really even work .
When I went back and reread the book, I realized I had forgotten how it’s also chock-full of hacks that might not as easily pass the 20-year test e.g. “do not offer overnight or expedited shipping” p. 210. I guess Jeff Bezos didn’t take that one to heart.
Also, I realized how far off piste TM goes from the 4-hour work week ethos e.g. how to travel the world with 10 pound or less, including two full pages of minutiae of what he likes to pack, p. 317-320. TMI Tim.
For all that, rereading the last chapter gave me chills.
Called “The Last Chapter,” it starts with an epigraph quoting Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech:
“For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.'“
Jobs spoke those words six years before he died at 56 and Ferris bookended the “4-Hour Workweek” with Jobs’ eerily foreboding quote years before it was public knowledge Jobs’ pancreatic cancer had metastasized.
As true as it was 20 years ago, it’s might be as true today: If we want to know how to live tomorrow, we might want to pay attention to Ferris today.
