- Morning Bites
- Posts
- Tim's 4 hour work week
You can have it all. Really.
Table of Contents
The real world: A collection of socially reinforced illusions
If you're sick of the standard menu of options and prepared to enter a world of infinite ones, this book is for you.
That’s what I imagine I would write if I were to author this book.
The 4 Hour Work Week is Tim Ferriss’s Magnum Opus, his chef d’oeuvre if you will, and the more you read it, the more you understand why this book spent over 4 years in the New York Times Best Seller list as well as selling over 2 million copies worldwide.
Within those pages not only you´ll find a myriad of insights, hundreds of lessons and dozens of life-changing questions regarding life & work, but you’ll also stumble upon a finely crafted “How-to guide” to do so.
Within your hands you have the tool to create a life of purpose and meaning while enjoying a new lifestyle accessible only to those Tim calls the New Rich.
And how does one achieve this life?
For starters, freeing yourself from time and location.
Working wherever you want and whenever you want is the staple concept of this book and soon we’ll get into the how, why, and when.
And if that seems like a quixotic view on life, let me tell you…it´s far easier than it seems.
For starters, Tim challenges the most basic assumptions of the work-life equation, starting with these questions:
How do your decisions change if retirement isn’t an option?
What if you could use a mini-retirement to sample your deferred-life plan reward before working 40 years for it?
Is it really necessary to work like a slave to live like a millionaire?
Though apparently simple questions to answer, they pack quite a punch considering our work, and consequently our life, are based around a simple, widely understood “truth”.
The common path is the only path.
When answering this questions, Tim found out that this simple one-liners took him to an uncommon conclusion:
The commonsense rules of the "real world" are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions.
A bunch of ideals passed down from generation to generation, repeated as a dogma for us to take as our own and build our life around it.
An undeniable truth on the work&life equation we must all embrace and follow as our ancestors did.
Though Tim begs to differ. He claims that there’s another way of living. One that doesn’t require 40 years of work to enjoy the life we want, nor does it require to chose between our jobs and other priorities such as family, hobbies, and more.
This is what Tim calls the New Rich (NR).
Those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.
And this book provides all the tools necessary for such lifestyle.
And so, what makes this book different?
Using Tim’s own words, this book:
First: Doesn’t spend much time in the problem. It assumes you are suffering from time famine, creeping dread, or—worst case—a tolerable and comfortable existence doing something unfulfilling.
Second: Is not about saving and will not recommend you abandon your daily glass of red wine for a million dollars 50 years from now. I'd rather have the wine. I won't ask you to choose between enjoyment today or money later. I believe you can have both now.
Third: Is not about finding your "dream job." I will take as a given that, for most people, somewhere between six and seven billion of them, the perfect job is the one that takes the least time.
That being said, let’s challenge the first and probably most important assumption of them all: Retirement.
Citing Tim, here are the reasons why retirement should be the ulimate fallback, and not a primary option:
Retirement planning is like life insurance, it should be viewed as nothing more than a hedge against the absolute worst-case scenario like becoming physically incapable of working. Retirement as a goal is flawed for at least 3 solid reasons:
It is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life.
Most people will never be able to retire and maintain even a hotdogs-for-dinner standard of living. Even one million is chump change in a world where traditional retirement could span 30 years and inflation lowers your purchasing power 2-4% per year. The math doesn't work. The golden years become lower-middle-class life revisited. That's a bittersweet ending.
If the math does work, it means that you are one ambitious, hardworking machine. If that's the case, guess what? One week into retirement, you'll be so damn bored that you'll want to stick bicycle spokes in your eyes. You'll probably opt to look for a new job or start another company. Kinda defeats the purpose of waiting, doesn't it?
So if not retirement, then what?
Well, that question will be answered in due time but before that, we must first understand what the main goal of this “new” lifestyle is:
To create freedom of time and place and use both however you want.
One thing that you must keep at the forefront of your mind is that the New Rich don’t require having millions in the bank account nor owning a Ferrari as their daily driver, but rather they’ve realized that the life they want is far cheaper than they thought it was and freedom is on the menu as well.
People don't want to be millionaires—they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy.
And once you understand that, life takes a whole new meaning.
The importance of the dealmaker
The manifesto of the dealmaker is quite simple: Reality is negotiable.
For you to become part of the select gorup of people known as the New Rich, you must become a dealmaker. Lucky enough, DEAL is also de acronym for the process for becoming a member of the NR:
D for Definition
E for Elimination
A for Automation
L for Liberation
Below we’ll dive into what each one of them means.
Outside of science and law, all rules can be bent or broken.
📍Step 1: D is for Definition
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
Cautions and comparissons
1:00 AM, 30,000 feet over Las Vegas
There were only two people in a first-class flight leaving Las Vegas, Tim and another guy we’re gonna call Mark.
Owner of practically all gas stations in South Carolina among other businesses, he was a legitimate business magnate, and he had just left Vegas after a weekend trip with the boys.
He and his fellow warrios had just lost an average of USD 1 Million in just one night, and they were about to get back to their lives as if nothing had happened.
So Tim, surprised of his astounding record of achievements, asked him:
Of all your business, which one did you enjoy the most?
The answer took him less than a second.
None of them
He explained that he had spent more than 30 years with people he didn't like to buy things he didn't need. Life had become a succession of trophy wives—he was on lucky number three—expensive cars, and other empty bragging rights. Mark was one of the living dead. This is exactly where we don't want to end up.
This is the actual difference between the Rich and the New Rich, which also introduces one of the cardinal concepts for the NR:
Money isn’t everything. Options - the ability to chose - is real power.
The differences between the New Rich and the Deferrers are based on their goals, which reflect very distinct priorities and life philosophies.
Deferrers | New Rich |
|---|---|
To work for yourself | To have others work for you |
To work when you want to | To prevent work for work’s sake and do the minimum necessary for maximum effect. |
To be the boss | To be nor the boss or the employee but the owner |
To retire early or young | To distribute recovery periods and adventures throughout life on a regular basis and recognize that inactivity is not the goal. Doing what excites you is. |
And so, you must realize that the blind quest for cash is a fool’s errand.
Being financially rich and having the ability to live like a millionaire are fundamentally two very different things.
As Tim later shows, having the luxuries we think only the rich can buy, is actually cheaper than rent in the USA or any other first world country.
It has nothing to do with currency rates or else, it’s about the freedom multiplier; Where money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it.
Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees, but that's just the beginning.
Everything popular is wrong
I can't give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.
Why work harder when you could work smarter?
As demonstrated by an anecdote told by Tim in which he won the Kickboxing Championship with only four weeks of preparation by readaing the rules and finding loopholes, there are always better/smarter ways to do stuff than we are normally told.
The “normal path” has been paved with decades of socially imposed norms in which us, individuals, have fallen prey of a world-wide pandemic of abandonment of any original thought.
We´ve learned to listen instead to think, and follow instead to lead, thus falling in the endless flow of “do what´s normal, instead of what´s better”.
Though be cafeful, there´s a difference between challenging the status quo and downright being stupid.
Different is better when it is more effective or fun. But different isn´t always better.
“If everyone is defining a problem or solving it one way and the results are subpar, this is the time to ask, What if I did the opposite? Don't follow a model that doesn't work. If the recipe sucks, it doesn't matter how good a cook you are. “
So be smart, try new things and above all, emphasize on strengths, don’t fix weaknesses: It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre.
Fear-setting and escaping paralysis
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
Emotions can truly be a force to be reckoned with, but unfortunately it´s not always a good one.
Fear has been, throughout history, one of our primary emotions; one that allowed our ancestors to survive and become the advanced species we are today.
It´s thanks to fear that they were able to avoid dangerous predators, threatening environments and more. But there´s a downside to said emotion.
Studies have shown that our brain is unable to tell the difference between real fear and imagined fear. Hence why this emotion has hijacked our brain and actively works as a filter through which every thought must go through.
And there´s one thing that people fear most above all: Uncertainty.
Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.
Fear is often the reason people never act upon their dreams and blaming outside circumstances so the burden of failure doesn’t weight on their shoulders is the normal course of action.
But this “fear” is mostly based on misguided assumptions. Beliefs that things are far worse than they really are.
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
On a scale from 1-10, for most people, a worst-case scenario is a temporary impact of 3-4, and keep in mind this is a one in a million disaster nightmare, on the other hand, the best-case scenario is a permanent 9-10.
This means we’re risking a temporary 3 or 4 for a probable and permanent 9 or 10?
Uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noises in the shadows.
And so Tim recomends we should spend ate least a day writing down our worst case scenarios and being at peace with them. You’ll realize more often than not, they’re not as bad as we think they are.
Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: "Is this the condition that I feared?"
Though be mindful where fear comes from, as most intelligent people in the world dress it up as something else: optimistic denial.
There's no difference between a pessimist who says, "Oh, it's hopeless, so don't bother doing anything," and an optimist who says, "Don't bother doing anything, it's going to turn out fine anyway." Either way, nothing happens.
Is wishful thinking an excuse for inaction?
Regardless of where the source of fear is, one thing is clear, to conquer our fears, we must first, name them.
System reset: Being unreasonable and unambiguous
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
It was spring, 2005, at Princeton University and Tim had jsut finished giving a lecture that had his enthusiastic students eager for more knowledge.
That´s when Tim chose to give them a “simple” challenge: Contact 3 seemingly impossible-to-reach people (J-Lo, Bill Clinton, etc) and get at least one reply to three questions.
The prize?
A round-trip ticket to anywhere in the world!
Out of the twenty students, every single one of them whined and groaned claiming it was impossible, and apparently they were right. No one was able to complete the challenge.
Though surprisingly, next year Tim tried the same challenge with a diffrent group of students, and almost half of them completed the challenge.
The difference?
The second group embraced a single truth Tim shared with them just before the challenge…
Doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic
It was in the eaerly 19th century when Carl Gauss achieved a major breakthrough in probability theory and called it the “normal distribution” or “Gaussian distribution”.
“A probability distribution that describes how data naturally clusters around a central value. It is symmetrical, meaning most values are close to the mean (average), with fewer values appearing as you move farther away in either direction.”
And when it says data, it means every single piece of data. The Gaussian distribution appears everywhere you look.
That’s why it's lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for "realistic" goals, paradoxically making them the most time-and energy-consuming.
And the first step to do big things is asking for them properly.
Is not about what you want. We all want happiness yet such emotion can still be bought with a 10 dollar wine bottle and a back of fritos.
The question you should be asking isn't "What do I want?" or "What are my goals?" but "What would excite me?"
Remember - boredom is the enemy, not some abstract “failure”.
Get unrealistic!
📍Step 2: E is for Elimination
Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.
The end of time management: Illusions and Italians
Just a few words on time management: Forget all about it.
Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. The options are almost limitless for creating "busyness".
Checking your email twice every 5 minutes or opening social media and scroll till the battery runs out! It´s easy looking busy. In fact, in most companies being busy is a synonym of a hard working employee so pat yourself on the back as you share dog videos with your friends on working hours. There´s nothing better than gatting paid while you scroll instagram, right?
Unfortunately this ¨busyness¨ won´t get you anywhere as a NR. The New Rich understand that time is priceless and you can´t buy more of it, but you sure can free some.
Enter the world of elimination.
It is not only possible to accomplish more by doing less, it is mandatory.
In the earlier chapter we clarified what we want in life, so now it´s time to make the time for it.
In fact, let’s simplify it.
First we must understand the difference between being efficiente and effective.
“Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.”
Here are two truisms to always keep in mind:
Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.
What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.
So, here’s two simle methods you must use in order to become a NR:
Pareto’s Law: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs.
Parkinson’s Law: A task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.
Thus, a synergistic approach on productivity should look something like this:
Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20)
Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law).
And remember:
A lack of time is actually lack of priorities.
So straighten up your priorities and get to work.
And if by whatever reason you are unsure you’re being “productive”, ask yourself:
Am I being productive or just active?
Cultivating selective ignorance
There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.
Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also practical.
It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable. Most are all three.
Most information is time-consuming, negative, and most importantly, irrelevant to your goals. So there’s no need for you to dedicate time for them as they lead you down a perpetual river of useless information and time-consuming activities.
So, how do you act responsibly if you’re an ignorant on a specific subject?
By optimize your resources.
Ask people who you trust for their judgement on a specific subject. Now you have an educated opinion and it took you less than 15 minutes to do so.
You’ll realize is quite easy and requires almost no time unlike reading the news every single day for valuable information which is similar to finding a needle on a haystack the size of Texas.
The art of refusal
Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece.
Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.
“Doing the important and ignoring the trivial is hard because so much of the world seems to conspire to force crap upon you. Fortunately, a few simple routine changes make bothering you much more painful than leaving you in peace. It's time to stop taking information abuse.”
For the purpose of this book: An interruption is anything that prevents the start to finish completion of a critical task, and there are three principal offenders:
Time wasters: those things that can be ignored with little or no consequence. Common time wasters include meetings, discussions, phone calls, and e-mail that are unimportant.
Time consumers: repetitive tasks or requests that need to be completed but often interrupt high-level work. Here are a few you might know intimately: reading and responding to e-mail, making and returning phone calls, customer service (order status, product assistance, etc.), financial or sales reporting, personal errands, all necessary repeated actions and tasks.
Empowerment failures: instances where someone needs approval to make something small happen. Here are just a few: fixing customer problems (lost shipments, damaged shipments, malfunctions, etc.), customer contact, cash expenditures of all types.
People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.
It is your job to train those around you to be effective and efficient. No one else will do it for you.
So the bottom line is as follows: You only have the rights you fight for.
Limit other people’s access to your time and force them to be highly specific on their requests before you spend time with them. Also, batch routine tasks together so an email check can be done every monday on 30 minutes instead a daily 20 minutes task.
📍Step 3: A is for Automation
SCOTTY: She's all yours, sir. All systems automated and ready. A chimpanzee and two trainees could run her!
CAPTAIN KIRK: Thank you, Mr. Scott. I'll try not to take that personally.
The following steps are more practical than theoretical. If you’re interested in learning more about them, I highly advice visiting my notes on the book or visitin Tim’s website.
Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees, but that's just the beginning.
Becoming a member of the NR is not just about working smarter. It's about building a system to replace yourself.
Remember that we’re building a life in which we don’t work for work’s sake but rather because we enjoy it and do the bare minimum for it.
This is where we learn about the power outsourcing.
There’s an army of people outside your country who are not only willing but capable of taking all of your tasks and worries and deal with them for you.
That is the power of automation. The freedom of time and location one can only dream of.
But before outsourcing we must make sure we’ve eliminated as much as we can.
Remember—unless something is well-defined and important, no one should do it.
“Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined.”
Income autopilot 1: Finding the muse
There are thousands ofways to make a million dollars, from franchising to freelance consulting, the list is endless.
This book is not for people who want to run businesses but for those who want to own businesses and spend no time on them.
This might come accross as a dream-like concept considering we live in a society in which our value as a person comes directly as how hard we work, consequently how much time we spend on our jobs so be prepared to experience some resistance from youself and others.
So stay strong and remember:
People complain about things they’re too afraid to try.
So first things first: cash flow and time. With these two currencies, all other things are possible. Without them, nothing is possible.
So let’s dumb this down. There’s 2 things you must do and 3 type of products you can sell:
Pick an affordably reachable niche market.
Brainstorm products. Do not invest just yet.
And:
Resell a product
Licence a product
Create a product
And if you’re worried you’re not an expert, worry not. An expert is merely someone who knows more about the topic than the purchaser. It’s not required to be the best, just better than the small target of customers for your potential product.
Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is much easier.
Don't create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market— define your customers—then find or develop a product for them.
Income autopilot 2: Testing the muse
Intuition and experience are poor predictors for which products and businesses will be profitable.
So to be able to get an accurate indicator of commercial viability, don’t ask people if they would buy - ask them to buy it.
This response is the only one that matters. People will jump at you telling they’ll buy something but when it’s time to put their money where their mouth is, most if not all will fall back.
The best you can do is micro-test your products. Spend as little as possible on social-media advertisement and see if you get a reaction. Something as simple as a picture with a product and a “subscribe if you’re interested” can take you a long way for less than $ 50 a month.
Income autopilot 3: Management by absence
The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
Once you have a product that sells, it’s time to design a self-correcting business architecture that runs itself.
The end is always Liberation. Remember, you’re building a business to free yourself from work, not to enable it.
Our goal isn’t to create a business as large as possible, but rather a business that bothers us as little as possible. The architecture has to place us out of the information flow instead of putting us at the top of it.
So do your best in removing yourself from the equation. It may hurt at first but doing so is a great exercise on empowering others as well as releasing some tension on yourself.
The system is the solution.
The problem with most entrepreneurs isn’t bootstrapping businesses but rather not knowing when to replace themselves or their homemade infrastructure with something more scalable.
Also, remember to make it easy for the customer. The paradox of choice is a great example of how having too many options can the customer stressed and a business inefficient.
Fewer decisions = more revenue
The customer can have any color he wants, so long as it’s black.
“Serving the customer ("customer service") is not becoming a personal concierge and catering to their every whim and want. Customer service is providing an excellent product at an acceptable price and solving legitimate problems (lost packages, replacements, refunds, etc.) in the fastest manner possible. That's it.”
The more options you offer the customer, the more indecision you create and the fewer orders you receive—it is a disservice all around.
While you’re at it, remember that not all customers are createsd equal. A customer is an equal trading partner, not an infallible blessing of a human being to be pleased at all costs. Make your customer base an exclusive club, and treat the members well once they've been accepted.
📍Step 4: L is for Liberation
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.
The old rich are characterized as being well-established in one place. The new rich are defined by a more elusive power than simple cash - unrestricted mobility.
This is not limited to start-up owners or freelancers. Employees can pull it off too.
But before jumping on a plane and hoping all goes well, as an employee there´s two things you must do:
Demonstrate the business benefit of remote working.
Make it too expensive or excruciating to refuse a request for it.
Here’s an example using a method called the Hourglass Approach in which you use a long proof of-concept up front to get a short remote agreement and then negotiate back up to full-time out of the office. Here's what it looks like.
Use a preplanned project or emergency (family issue, personal issue, relocation, home repairs, whatever) that requires you to take one or two weeks out of the office.
Say that you recognize you can't just stop working and that you would prefer to work instead of taking vacation days.
Propose how you can work remotely and offer, if necessary, to take a pay cut for that period (and that period only) if performance isn't up to par upon returning.
Allow the boss to collaborate on how to do it so that he or she is invested in the process.
Make the two weeks "off" the most productive period you've ever had at work.
Show your boss the quantifiable results upon returning, and tell him or her that—without all the distractions, commute, etc.—you can get twice as much done. Suggest two or three days at home per week as a trial for two weeks.
Make those remote days ultra productive.
Suggest only one or two days in the office per week.
Make those days the least productive of the week.
Suggest complete mobility—the boss will go for it.
Killing your job
Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.
Some jobs are simply beyond repair. Improvements would be like adding a set of designer curtains to a jail cell.
If you’ve tried everything to liberate yourself from the phisical location of your job and all else has failed, then it’s time to kill it. Learn when to get off and don’t look back.
Just because something has been a lot of work or consumed a lot of I time doesn't make it productive or worthwhile. This is what economists call the sunken-cost fallacy. Just because you are embarrassed to admit that you're still living the consequences of bad decisions made 5, 10, or 20 years ago shouldn't stop you from making good decisions now. Don’t let pride stop you. There’s nothing worst than wasting the most valuable years of your life in the wrong place.
Being able to quit things that don't work is integral to being a winner.
If you’re afraid of acting because you might leave worse off than you are right now. Let me tell you something, if you’re at this point, you won’t be worse off. So act.
Mini-retirements: Embracing the mobile lifestyle
The parable of the businessman and the fisherman
A successful American businessman was vacationing in a small coastal village when he saw a fisherman docking his small boat with a few large fish inside.
The businessman complimented the fisherman and asked, "How long did it take you to catch these fish?"
"Only a little while," the fisherman replied.
"Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more?" the businessman asked.
The fisherman smiled and said, "I catch enough to support my family’s needs."
The businessman, curious, asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"
The fisherman replied, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, and in the evenings, I go into the village to drink wine and play guitar with my friends. I have a full and happy life."
The businessman scoffed, "I’m a Harvard MBA. I can help you. If you fish longer, you can sell more fish and buy a bigger boat. With a bigger boat, you’ll catch even more fish and eventually buy several boats until you have a fleet. Instead of selling to a middleman, you could sell directly to a processor, then open your own factory, and eventually move to the city to run your expanding empire."
The fisherman asked, "And then what?"
The businessman smiled, "Then, after years of hard work, you can sell your company for millions and retire rich!"
"And what would I do after that?" the fisherman asked.
The businessman replied, "Well, you could move to a small coastal village, sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, and drink wine with your friends in the evening."
The fisherman simply smiled and walked away.
Moral of the Story
This parable highlights the difference between success and fulfillment.
The beauty of this story is that it perfectly describes the fault in the system that we’re all part off. What’s the point of fighting” 40 years for a life that could be achieved right now?
One of the most misunderstood luxuries of the modern age is travel. More so: extended world travel as the domain of the ultrarich.
It’s entirely wrong to think we cannot have that lifestyle now. In fact, it’s far cheaper than you think.
Don’t wait till you’re 65 to start enjoying a lifestyle that could easily be enjoyed now.
For most, the limits we impose on ourselves are self-made rather than real barriers of entry.
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
“Why can’t we take the usual 20-30-year retirement and redistribute it throughout life instead of saving it all for the end?"
Mini-retirements are the solution and geoarbitage is the tool. By relocating to a new country where life is cheaper and enjoyment is higher, not only will you save money but also realize that outside your “comfort bubble”, there’s a world waiting for you to explore.
The mini-retirement is not an escape but rather a reexamination of life, the creation of a blank slate.
And the best part, they’re recurring. It’s not a 15-day vacation filled with adrenaline and high-stress planning only to come back home more tired than you left, but rather a lifestyle built on enjoyment while working.
Though it’s important to mention that it’s not all sunshine & rainbows. Releiving oneself from a high-stress environment and materialistic living requires practice and a gruelsome process, but it’s definitely worth it.
This time-famine mindset that we all have coded within our brains is hardwired on our source code and removing it will take some time, but once you do so you’ll realize how free and peaceful life can be.
Filling the void
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
Only when we lack the normal routine to get us out of bed and forget about the bigger questions in life can we truly understand how difficult it is to live outside the “normal lifestyle”.
“Too much free time is no more than fertilizer for self-doubt and assorted mental tail-chasing. Subtracting the bad does not create the good. It leaves a vacuum.”
Decreasing income-driven work isn't the end goal. Living more — and becoming more—is.
So in the spirit of enjoying life more and reducing the dread of existential crises, it´s time to look for things to do.
Here lies the beauty of the lifestyle of the NR, though it doesn´t come without a punch.
Having free time means enjoyment, if you still understand what that is.
Just like most retirees, once your life doesn’t revolve around a job you´ll come to realize a dozen of faults within the system you´ve based your life upon and that hurts more than any phisical pain you´ve ever felt.
So in order to avoid this one must proactively built a life around our enjoyment instead of having joy whenever there´s time.
And do keep in mind, the excess of time isn’t the only reason retirees go crazy: Social isolation is.
Lacking an external focus, the mind turns inward on itself and creates problems to solve, even if the problems are undefined or unimportant. If you find a focus, an ambitious goal that seems impossible and forces you to grow, these doubts disappear.
Most of the “doubts” we’re gonna experience come from outdated comparisons using the more-is-better and money-as-success mind sets.
So take your time, little by little you´ll build a life with work as an activity and not a personality.
Just be sure to keep yourself busy with what excites you and allow yourself to talk to other people often. There´s no denying we´re naturally gregarious creatures, so actively look for company, you´ll realize you feel better more often than not.
The point of it all
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
Tim Ferriss: “I believe that life exists to be enjoyed and that the most important thing is to feel good about yourself. Each person will have his or her own vehicles for both, and those vehicles will change over time.”
So take everything in this book with a grain of salt and value your own experience above everything else. The way you design your life is personal and unique, just like the way you dress. And even if others think of it as weird or uncommon, remember that it’s freedom you truly want, so throw out the window any outdated views on success and personal growth.
And if you ever find yourself doubting the meaning of it all, I always come back to Tim’s definition of life’s purpose:
To love, be loved, and never stop learning.
To live is to learn. I see no other option.
“Do your best and hope for the best. If you're improving the world—however you define that—consider your job well done.”
An email you need to read
“If you're confused about life, you're not alone. There are almost seven billion of us. This isn't a problem, of course, once you realize that life is neither a problem to be solved nor a game to be won.
The heaviness of success-chasing can be replaced with a serendipitous lightness when you recognize that the only rules and limits are those we set for ourselves.
So be bold and don't worry about what people think. They don't do it that often anyway.”
- Tim Ferriss
SLOW DANCE (an email sent from a terminally ill girl to Tim Ferriss)
Have you ever watched kids On a merry-go-round?
Or listened to the rain slapping on the ground?
Ever followed a butterfly's erratic flight? Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?
You better slow down. Don't dance so fast.
Time is short. The music won't last.
Do you run through each day On the fly?
When you ask How are you? Do you hear the reply?
When the day is done, do you lie in your bed
With the next hundred chores Running through your head?
You'd better slow down. Don't dance so fast.
Time is short. The music won't last.
Ever told your child, We'll do it tomorrow?
And in your haste, Not see his sorrow?
Ever lost touch, Let a good friendship die
Cause you never had time To call and say, "Hi"?
You'd better slow down. Don't dance so fast.
Time is short. The music won't last.
When you run so fast to get somewhere You miss half the fun of getting there.
When you worry and hurry through your day, It is like an unopened gift thrown away.
Life is not a race. Do take it slower.
Hear the music Before the song is over.
This was a summay of a fantastic book by New York Times bestselling author Tim Ferriss called The 4 Hour Work Week.
Tim Ferriss is an American entrepreneur, bestselling author, investor, and podcast host known for his work in lifestyle design, productivity, and self-improvement. He gained worldwide recognition with "The 4-Hour Workweek," which became a #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, was translated into over 40 languages, and helped popularize remote work, passive income, and automation.
If you wish to learn more about becoming part of the New Rich and freeing yourself from time and location, I highle encourage to visit his website where he has all sort of tools and resources to help you get on your way.
Also, here’s a link of my personal notes on his book in case you want a lengthier dive into it:
Also, if you stumbled upon this post online, I encourage you to subscribe to my newsletter where we review 1 book per week with the goal making knowledge accessible and easy to digest for everyone.
As always, thank you so much for reading, and I’ll see you next week.
Live for more,
Luis Beltran
Quito, Ecuador