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photo credit: Ryan Kilpatrick
After three years and almost 100 posts, I decided that the Life Sutra could use a bit of a face lift. I updated the software (WordPress), and updated the theme (something nice from Simplethemes). What started off as a journal that would track my progress towards a 4-Hour Workweek
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The New Rick are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rick: time and mobility.
Source: 4-Hour Workweek.
I just read a post by Hilary Catherall over at her personal blog. She writes about her discouragement with the 4-Hour Workweek. Besides having written a guest post for The Life Sutra, Hillary was one of a handful of 4-Hour Workweek bloggers I started to follow early on when I first initiated this blog. Hilary is not the only 4-Hour Workweek blogger that seems to have had some frustration. I think she shares the same frustration that others have, in particular with respect to "muses" which Timothy Ferris, the author of the 4-Hour Workweek describes as:
...an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.
Source: 4-Hour Workweek.
I have always thought that the "muse" component of the book was the weakest part, and came across like an infomercial. If it was that easy to create these cash generation machines, everyone would have them! Wanting something doesn't make it so.
I think we should all appreciate something about Timothy Ferriss and muses: Tim had the basis of his main muse before he had his breakthrough regarding what it means to be one of the newly rich. It seems that he was conventionally rich before he was newly rich. Regardless of the financial metric and definitions of the term "rich", his supplement business pre-existed the 4-Hour Workweek. It's easy to talk about muses when you already have one! How many people have developed products and services that have not become muses??? Those people might have the exact same philosophy as Tim. Hopefully you get the point - the 4-Hour Workweek philosophy and the ability to create "muses" are not necessarily correlated at all.
I want to talk briefly about mutual funds. You may think I am digressing here, but I promise I am not! There is no question that mutual funds could be used as part of a personal investment strategy and could provide value to the purchasers of these funds. However, you should always keep something in mind: mutual funds are products not investments. While, as a product, they may provide value for investors, they are, as a product, meant to provide the greatest value to the shareholders of the mutual fund company! And so it is with the 4-Hour Workweek.
First and foremost, it is a book that is designed to provide revenue and profits for its author, its publisher and those that sell the book. The book is a "muse" for the author! Does this mean it is somehow not as valuable? Hardly. Just like mutual funds, this product can provide value for the purchasers. I am also quite sure that the stakeholders intend to provide that value. Most businesses truly wish to provide value to their customers as such value is what will ultimately ensure ongoing revenues and profits.
I have written previously about the 4-Hour Workweek's hype cycle. After reading Hilary's post, I started to wonder if any disillusionment (the Trough of Disillusionment in the hype cycle) with the 4-Hour Workweek could somehow be equated with the 5 stages of grief:
So yes, the muse idea could be labeled as cheesy. There are no free lunches - ask an economist or even a physicist. But there is a lot of good ideas in the 4-Hour workweek. Hilary even reminds us of the main attributes of the truly rich:
Source: Hilary Catherall
In a way, Ferriss is only trying to show how these are possible. Put another way, how many of us do so much work, only not to be compensated fairly, or for others to be compensated more for the same amount of work? How many of us are slaves to someone else's clock? How many of us are slaves to our possessions instead of having fulfilling experiences?
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Thanks to Rhett Maxwell for the photo of the palm tree and rainbow.
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There are hacks, and there are anti-hacks. Both have their merit. I think this blog has been a mixture of both almost since the beginning. I like certain things about Getting Things Done ("GTD"), and yet I detest productivity for productivity's sake. After all, it was the book The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss that actually inspired me to start writing on "lifestyle" in the first place - a book dead set against work for work's sake.
As I have evolved, or perhaps more honestly, stumbled along in writing my posts, I keep coming back in my mind to the double edged sword that the Life Sutra or "rules of life" represent. On the one side, the "rules of life" represent unquestioned assumptions dictated by conventional wisdom. These rules often limit our potential without us even knowing it. At the same time, those brave enough to question these assumptions about how life works often uncover hints towards new rules of life - the positive side of the Life Sutra - that offer new possibilities and perhaps even revolutionary change.
Consider my most popular post to date - an update on a high intensity training program I used at the gym as the basis for a new fitness regimen. When you think about it, the whole concept of high intensity training is a questioning of accepted conventional wisdom which has always dictated that you have to train long and hard to achieve significant muscular growth or maintain peak fitness. High intensity training suggests you can achieve better results through significantly less training! So that series of posts is really all about questioning the existing "rules", and seeing what is possible once you step out of the self imposed barriers they often create. And this was a post about going to the gym!
The theme repeats itself... what if what we experience is not really "real" outside of our thoughts? What if perfect isn't really the best? What if you didn't go to your office when you needed to be at work? What if you didn't keep true to your dreams?
Let's consider another example, something I have not really written about directly. Proponents of Getting Things Done will argue persuasively about the productivity gains such a system provides with simple concepts like capture easing the mental bookkeeping often required in our hectic lives. The budding anti-hack movement observes lives built around a productivity system and a myriad of to-do lists - maybe having a system is necessary, but the productivity system should not become an end to itself. Both sides make compelling cases. However, maybe the real question is what exactly are you trying to get done? Should you even be doing this? Those are the questions that I find the most powerful. Yes, it is good to argue the merits of this or make fun of that, but sometimes it is better to question the axiom itself.
So that is what I think the Life Sutra is all about: questioning so-called "rules of life" and seeing where that takes us. Sometimes you don't even have to answer the question to discover new possibilities. In fact, once you start questioning these tacit assumptions, maybe you should avoid coming to any kind of "answer". If you think about it, an answer hints at some kind of finality. Answers inhibit the possibility of new options by stopping the question.
Soon you will see a few changes here at the Life Sutra - things like a new tag line and some consistent themes between posts. I think I have finally articulated a way I want to look at lifestyle design, productivity, personal development, life hacking and anti-hacking - by considering some of the fundamental assumptions upon which popular productivity, lifestyle and hacking techniques are based. At the same time, I want to keep it practical. Yes, perhaps the ultimate solution is to sell everything, meditate (or chant - I think chanting in the monastic movement is underrated with all the hype over meditation - is it just me???) and hope for enlightenment. I tried that once, but I momentarily left the state of Nirvana to get a beverage and upon returning had insufficient funds for the cover charge.
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Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.
- Malcolm X
A key component to The 4-Hour Workweek lifestyle is liberation from the office. The main idea is that once you are working remotely, you are not beholden to the clock but rather to your productivity. Once liberated from your cubicle, you can freely outsource and automate as much of your work as possible. Taken to the extreme, you provide all of the deliverables required of your job as you sip margaritas on the beach while some guy in India does all the work.
Up until now, I have been treading very safely on my 4-hour workweek quest. Too safely. On Friday I decided to do a simple, but meaningful experiment in liberation. I had arranged with my employer to work from home on Friday. However, I had a slightly different plan. Instead of working from home, I would work from another country! I wanted to see if my employer would know any better. I figured by limiting the experiment to a single day I could mitigate any real risks, for example, if it all went to hell I could call in and feign sickness or something like that.
Of course, in order to pull this off, I needed a plan!
First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.
- Napoleon Hill
My preparations:
On Thursday evening after work, unbeknownst to my employer, I left Boston and headed north to Montreal, Canada under the cover of darkness. It's about a 5 hour drive and I got into Montreal just before midnight. It was all very clandestine. I used the hotel's complimentary Internet access to check email. I did a little bit of the work I would have started in the morning had I worked from home. Crucially, I staged all my email in my drafts folder. I waited until after breakfast the next day to send these out, making it look as if I was already knee deep in work from my desk at home. The stealth!
Next, I spent the day exploring the city. It's a nice place, and if you have never been, I highly recommend a visit - it's a like a little bit of Europe in North America. I made sure to stop every hour or so to put in 30 to 60 minutes of work at a coffee shop with wi-fi. If I had to respond to an email outside of these working periods, I had the Blackberry. Of course to make and take any calls I had my cell phone.
At the end of the day, I had a great evening in Montreal and headed back to Boston Saturday afternoon.
In the end, it was a smashing success. For all my employer knew, I was at home the whole day. In hindsight, there was no real reason why I would not have been able to pull this off, which of course I did. I think the biggest outcome of this little foray was breaking down the psychological barriers that I had. It takes some time to get the idea that a specific location is often inconsequential to one's work. I am already planning my next great experiment in liberation, where I will try to work for a few days at a time away from the office. I'll up the ante by working from a different time zone or something like that.
To Oliver Mallich for the photo of Montreal (I know, I should have taken my own while I was there! It's just that Flickr is so convenient...)
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Clay Collins has a new post titled Productivity Guru SMACKDOWN: Tim Ferriss v. Dave Allen at his excellent blog The Growing Life. It immediately appealed to me having read both Getting Things Done (GTD) and The 4-Hour Workweek. Before I get into this, I have to mention that Clay is a great writer! This is one of the most entertaining posts I have read lately. It is hard to believe that his blog is only a couple of months old given the quality of the writing!
Here is my take: I am biased towards Tim Ferriss myself, but mostly because his material seems a little more fundamental. He questions assumptions about work before he talks about doing work. Dave Allen is mostly about the doing part. Personally, I agree with Ferriss when he says:
[T]he person who…develops an elaborate system of folder rules … is efficient on some perverse level. … Doing something well does not make it important … What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.
Source: Timothy Ferriss.
However, surely once you discover what you really want to be doing, what is truly most important, you can still be more effective at that if you are better organized! If you put the thinking of Ferriss ahead of Allen, I think The 4-Hour Workweek and Getting Things Done actually complement each other.
Fair enough you might say, but both Ferriss and Allen both speak about how to do work. Perhaps there is some competing, incompatible strategies here that require a SMACKDOWN! Let's review productivity from the vantage point of a really smart guy:
Productivity is driven by two variables: the amount of work performed and the time it takes to perform that work. Productivity can be increased by either increasing the amount of work performed in a set amount of time, or by performing the same amount of work in a shorter period of time.
I think that Allen is really addressing the work variable in the productivity equation. Allen is starting from a tacit assumption that work has to be done or managed by you and so he provides a system for performing more work in a set amount of time. Ferriss is really working on the time variable (the title of his book is a dead give away). By automating and outsourcing massive amounts of work, you can get the same amount of work done in a fraction of the time.
Why can't we employ both strategies? Why are the methods and philosophies of Ferriss and Allen exclusive of one another? Why not attack the productivity equation on both sides of the division sign? Yes, we need to ensure that we don't use our productivity gains to do work for work's sake, but I don't think Allen is advocating this at all. Besides, I find it hard to believe that massive amounts of automation and outsourcing do not require a decent amount of organization. What would Stephen Covey say? What do you say?
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Gartner uses the Hype Cycle to describe how the hype regarding a new technology is often followed by a period of disappointment and subsequently by a period of more modest practical benefits:
Source: Jeremy Kemp / Wikipedia.
If we also consider management fads and personal productivity movements as technologies, I think one would find that the hype cycle equally applies to these as well. For example, there has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about GTD entering the "trough of disillusionment". Where in the hype cycle is The 4-Hour Workweek?
Personally, I think it is still in the "peak of inflated expectations" phase. The book remains wildly popular. My prediction is that people, specifically salaried employees, are going to have problems liberating themselves from the office environment. If they can even achieve mobility in the first place, the next challenge will be automating sizeable amounts of work via personal outsourcing (the single biggest issue I hear from 4-hour workweek readers is "what can I outsource?" often accompanied by explanations built around client confidentiality, etc.). I have already commented in my post The 4-Hour Workweek: Easier Said Than Done on some of the reasons to be skeptical. So, like almost all personal effectiveness movements, I am certain The 4-Hour Workweek will go through the inevitable trough of disillusionment. I am also equally sure it will rebound, especially since some have already been successful in applying the principles - so there is something real here.
Where do you think The 4-Hour Workweek is in its hype cycle? Do you even think the hype cycle applies?
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Shortly after starting this blog, I decided I needed to extend the scope beyond the confines of The 4-Hour Workweek. I realized that the main epiphany for me when reading the book was Timothy Ferriss' insistence that we should abandon the deferred life plan where we work like hell in the prime of our lives, save as much as we can and then retire - a plan that is ultimately just a "socially reinforced illusion". Life does not have to be this hard, instead we could choose to master time and mobility and create fulfilling lifestyles today. I realized that it is this questioning of unquestioned assumptions that often leads to paradigm shifts in our lives. The 4-Hour Workweek is but one example of someone stepping outside the box of conventional wisdom.
That being said, The 4-Hour Workweek offers a lot of tactical and practical advice on how to work less and live more. I still want to work a 4-hour workweek, I still want to dreamline, and I still want to develop new and novel revenue sources to fund my new lifestyle, and so, this blog remains a 4-Hour Workweek Journal. However, in reading my own posts, I sometimes get the feeling I have given an all knowing, all perfect, almost omniscient quality to Mr. Ferriss. I suppose I have become a bit of a disciple, but my initial desire to journal my following his advice was bourne out of both a hope that his methods would prove helpful and a healthy dose of skepticism.
Since I have provided my fair share of glowing praise for The 4-Hour Workweek in my posts, in the spirit of balance I thought I would also share a little more explicitly what makes me a bit of a sceptic:
Let's face it, Ferriss was already making a good chunk of change before preaching his work-less, live-more mantra. Its seems to me that he was somewhat rich the old fashioned way before he reduced his work week down to four hours and joined the newly rich. This suggests that one might be more successful in attaining a 4-hour workweek if one were starting from a position of relative wealth and means.
I think Ferris may recognize this and so to get us into the same position of wealth, he suggests how we might create self running businesses, or muses as he calls them, that will supply us with an endless cashflow to fund our new found desire to trot the globe. All you have to do is market a product on the Internet and outsource the fulfillment of orders and the handling of customer service. Its that easy! Besides giving a few examples of what others have done, he does not really discuss how we comes up with or find these magical products. I don't mean to sound too harsh, but sometimes it comes off sounding a bit like Don Lapre (this is the guy from the early 90's with the late night infomercials claiming that by placing "tiny classified ads" in newspapers he was able to make $50,000 per week from his one bedroom apartment). Tiny classified ads... Google Adsense...
While he goes to great pains to explain how his method applies equally to salaried employees and people with kids, in the end, he started as a business owner and he does not have kids. I'm just saying.
I just wanted to share what makes me skeptical. It is nothing more than my opinion - the opinion of a man still living, one could argue, an at least somewhat "socially reinforced illusion". In fairness, I do want to reiterate my first point: regardless of the meat of the book, Ferriss opens our eyes to our unconscious acceptance of the work-hard-now-enjoy-life-later plan. This, in and of itself, is of immense value. At minimum, this creates an opening, allowing us to have a conscious choice and to consider new options. Lastly, it was the reading of The 4-Hour Workweek that got me started on the idea that things could be different and more fulfilling in my own life. It is still early days for me, and my first steps have been rather timid and safe, but already I feel like things are better. My attitude has improved and things just seem brighter. Can we still be friends Tim?
By the way, this is for those of you who remember the infamous Don Lapre:
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Yesterday I wrote a guest post titled Time Management: Sometimes Things Change over at the Diary of a Four-Hour-a-Weeker. In this post I expand on my rethinking of time management. I discuss how Stephen Covey's Time Management Matrix can be recast into a Life Management Matrix to reflect the principles of The 4-Hour Workweek. Lastly I touch on the fact that task importance is a dynamic quality and therefore the need to revisit how we grade our tasks over time. I encourage you to check it out. Rex, the man behind the Diary of a Four-Hour-a-Weeker is also on a quest to work less and live more. He's written on some of the challenges in applying the principles of The 4-Hour Workweek on his site - great material for us 4-Hour workweek fans!
I am pleased to be a part of the new 4-Hour Workweek Feedburner Network: A network of blogs devoted to the idea of living more while working less (but more effectively!). The discussions on this network are all about defining your dreams, liberating yourself from the 9-5 grind, eliminating low value work and automating the rest. If your blog is following these kinds of ideas and you would like to join the network, please leave a comment below.
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Yes, it's true. Author Tim Ferriss has invited me to edit his best selling book The 4-Hour Workweek. Here's the thing: he has basically extended this invitation to everyone! For those who wish to contribute, Ferriss is collecting ideas via an open wiki for the next edition of the book:
I want an improved and expanded 4HWW to help propel the critical mass needed for large-scale institutional, and even policy-level, change. The book alone won’t do it, obviously, but I believe it can play a small part as instigator.
Source: The Blog of Tim Ferriss.
I think this is an interesting strategy. A lot of people (including myself obviously) have been inspired by the ideas behind the book and have made new innovations in lifestyle design using the book as a starting point. As Ferriss says: "we" is smarter than "me".
Ferriss goes on to say:
To my knowledge, this is the first time a NY Times bestseller has ever been made open to public editing. In fact, I haven’t seen any traditionally-published book ever crowdsourced on a global scale.
Source: The Blog of Time Ferriss.
Well, I am not so sure about that. Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, the authors of the best selling Naked Conversations, put chapters of their book on their blog for review. In essence, that book (or at least a good portion of it) was edited by the blogosphere. I believe there are other examples (as far as I know Producing Open Source Software was - fittingly - reviewed by many online before being published). By the way, I highly recommend both of these books, although the later will probably most interest those who work in the software industry.
Anyway, here is your chance to leave your mark on the book that started it all while Ferriss gets his book updated and fact checked virtually for free - which is cool - after all crowdsouring is just another version of outsourcing!
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Last week I wrote a guest post over at Hilary Catherall's blog on the topic of tracking how one spends their time, an idea I have written about in the past. Specifically, I discuss using an open source time tracking application called Personal Task Manager which can track both your activities and computer application usage. If you are looking for tools to help you efficiently track your time, you might find this post of interest. Besides this specific post, Hilary's blog provides some great insights on The 4-Hour Workweek and related subject matter. I highly encourage you to visit her site!
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