Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

The Four Hour Work Week will help you enjoy life more by working less. Sounds like a dream, right? Well, it can be your reality!

The book shows how Tim Ferriss created a hands-off business that earns $80,000 in PASSIVE income. Ferriss creates his own freedom and enjoys life however he sees fit.

Ferriss divides the book into three main steps.

The first step the Process of Elimination

He focuses on Pareto’s Law (also known as the 80/20 principle). The law states that 20% of activities produce 80% of the results. Ferriss mentions that you can apply this principle to everything that surrounds you including customers, friends, and work. Note that this first step is called the Process of Elimination; therefore, your first goal is to identify the inefficiencies in your life so that you can eliminate them. After you have eliminated 80% of your non-productive tasks, do the process again and again until you focus on the few things that matter the most.

Moving on to the second step: Cultivating Selective Ignorance

Realize that you can’t please everyone! You need to learn how to ignore the things that don’t matter. The big part of ignorance that Ferriss mentions is to let things wait. Ferriss uses email as an example. He calls it the single largest interruption in our lives. We always think that we have to answer email as soon as we get it. So how do we ignore email? Ferriss suggests setting up an auto response to all emails that tells people who write you that you only check your email two to three times a day at specific times (he recommends that you also leave a note in the auto response that tells the writer if the matter is urgent that he/she should call you). This will allow you to be more efficient and work uninterrupted for longer periods of time.

The final step and most interesting step: Outsourcing Your Life

Let others do the work for you!! You will start realizing that the money you pay people to do your job can be less than the money you actually get paid to complete the job yourself. When you realize this, you will start outsourcing. This will give you more time to do important things and to enjoy life more!

…and if you follow Ferriss’s advice while maintaining your productivity system developed from Getting Things Done (see our previous blog post), you will soon be at your peak efficiency level and you will love life. Why? Because you will be part of the new rich!