Top 5 Takeaways from“The 4-Hour Work Week”

A list of life lessons from the revolutionary author Tim Ferris on how to achieve freedom with step-by-step guides.

A Best Seller

The 4-hour workweek is a book by the New York Times best-selling author Tim Ferris. He is an author of 5 #1 New York Times and The Wall Street Journal bestsellers and a lifestyle designer.

The 4-hour workweek is truly a masterpiece. In short, the book teaches you how to escape the 9–5, live anywhere, and join the new rich. Now, who is the new rich you might ask? The new rich are those whose currencies are time and mobility. They use these currencies to achieve full lifestyle design and freedom.

Why is lifestyle design so important?

When people imagine having $1 million, what they truly want is something different. They want the lifestyle that those kinds of money can provide. For that reason, the new rich focus on how to achieve the lifestyle they want.

The key to success

The goal of the book is for you to obtain the lifestyle the new rich have. The focus of this lifestyle is to free your time and automate your income, and according to Tim Ferris, this is the key to success.

The basics of the lifestyle of the new rich are to make your income independent of your location and time. The point of this is to give you the freedom and options to choose, which according to Tim Ferris is the real power in life. True freedom is about having enough income and time to do what you actually want to do with your life.

Top Takeaways

Here is a list of my top takeaways from this book.

1. A 4-step guide to achieving the lifestyle you want

The biggest takeaway, and most important theme of this book, is the lifestyle of the new rich and how to achieve it. Here are four steps to achieving the kind of life of the new rich. They can be summarised to the word DEAL — Definition, Elimination, Automation, and Liberation. If you are an employee you should follow the steps to make the word DELA instead.

Step-by-step guide:

Step 1: D stands for definition — How to know what you want We all have different goals and priorities. Tim suggests we should chase our dreams with timelines and written-out steps. Most people will never know what they want, hence the first step is crucial.

How to know what you want? Most people will ask themselves what will make them happy, but you should instead be asking what makes you excited. Excitement is a more practical synonym for happiness as being excited will make you happy, but being happy will not always make you excited. So ask yourself the question: What will make me excited?

Another way to define your goals is to use dreamlining. Dreamlining is all about applying timelines to your dreams. Tim Ferris creates a six and twelve month timeline with 3 goals each. That is a simple way to turn your dreams into actionable goals. See “system reset” below for a more actionable guide to dreamlining.

Step 2: E stands for elimination This step is about eliminating inefficiencies in any task. To do so, you should follow Parkinon’s law and the 80/20 rule. Parkinson’s law is the belief that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. So, your task will take the time you allocate to it. Make deadlines for yourself to finish the tasks faster.

The 80/20 rule says that 20% of your inputs will make 80% of your outputs. Make sure to follow Parkinson’s law and the 80/20 rule to make you as efficient in any task as possible.

Step 3: A stands for automation The third step is automation. If you are an employee your third step should be liberation, and then automation as step 4. Automation is about learning how to outsource your tasks. It is also about being able to define clear rules and processes for assistants to follow before hiring them, so they can do your tasks without you and do it well.

Tim Ferris suggests you identify your 5 most time-consuming non-work tasks and 5 other personal tasks. Outsourcing your personal tasks should just be for sheer fun. Outsourcing your most time-consuming non-work tasks should give you more free time, whilst still creating large work outputs.

Tim also argues you should start a business as this will give you even more opportunities to achieve your preferred lifestyle. According to Tim, the best business for people who want to achieve the lifestyle of the new rich is selling information products which you can micro-test through advertisements.

The most important thing is not to automate everything. You first want to eliminate any task that is not relevant, important, or useful to you. Thus only automating what is left, which should only be what is most important.

Step 4: L stands for liberation This step is about being location independent. For employees this means you persuading your company to let you work remotely. This step is about building a business or getting a job that gives you cashflow and location independence.

By now you should have automated the most important tasks. You have to put in fewer inputs yourself and achieve even higher outputs than you ever could by yourself. You can then travel the world, which is actually a lot cheaper than what people normally think, have a stable income, and enjoy the freedom this lifestyle has to offer.

2. System Reset

Doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic. This is the theme of Tim Ferris’s chapter 4 on system reset. 95% of people believe they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for mediocre. The realistic and mediocre goals take up all their time and energy making them actually incapable of achieving something great.

As we covered in step 1 above, you want to have goals that excite you, not only goals that make you happy. Excitement is the cure to boredom, and boredom is the true failure in life. Having an unusually large goal is an adrenaline infusion that provides endurance to go along with any goal.

For this reason, you want to reset your system. You are not one of that 95% of people. You should firmly believe you are able to change the world in many ways. You should use “dreamlining” to turn dreams into exciting goals.

Step-by-step guide: Dreamlining

Step 1: Answer these questions: what would you do if there were no way you could fail? If you were 10 times smarter than the rest of the world? You should list up to 5 dreams you aim to achieve in both 6 and 12 months.

Step 2: You can ask yourselves these questions to find your top 5 dreams to achieve: What is one place you would like to visit? One thing to do before you die? One thing to do every day to bring you joy? One thing do weekly? One thing that you have always wanted to learn?

Step 3: Make an actionable plan that describes what you can do to make the dream a reality. Split your goals into 3 steps with at least 1 action each that will make you achieve your goal, and take the first step now.

3. Being Time-Efficient

Being time-efficient is about giving up interruptions and learning the art of refusal. Interruptions can be 1) time wasters, 2) time consumers and 3) empowerment failures.

Time wasters are for example email, which is unimportant and should take the least amount of time possible.

Time consumers are tasks that need to be done but interrupt you when being focused on other important tasks. This could be email, phone calls, or personal errands.

Empowerment failures are times where someone needs the approval to make something small happen. E.g. fixing customer problems.

Step-by-step guide:

Step 1: Emails The first step is to fix your emails. You want as little input and output as possible. You want to receive and send as little emails as possible. It is easy to get an assistant to do delete and take care of unimportant emails, and then forward the important ones to you. I will talk more about hiring an assistant in “Outsourcing life” below.

Tim Ferris suggests to never check email in the morning. You want to get the important tasks done first. You should tell your colleagues you only check your email twice a day, and you should tell them when. Also, tell them to call you if emergencies occur.

Step 2: Phones This is a true life hack for me at least. You should have 2 phone numbers — one should be for urgent calls and one for non-urgent one. Make the one for non-urgent calls on silent, so it will not distract you. When you pick up a call you can either say you are short on time or low on battery to make them get straight to the point and skip the chitchat.

Step 3: Being effective and efficient It is your job to train your staff to be as effective and efficient as possible. Here is a list of things you can tell them to make them (and maybe yourself) a lot more productive:

1) Use email to have contact people, then phone, then meetings in-person. 2) Make sure to define the purpose of the meeting — use email instead of meetings if possible. 3) If you absolutely need to make a phone call, define the end time — when the call should end no matter what. 4) If someone comes to you for your attention, and you are not interested, then wear headphones or make a fake phone call, and tell them to email you instead.

Step 4: Empowerment failures Establish rules to give your employees power, e.g. to fix problems themselves as long as the cost is less than $100 or to use 15 minutes fixing a problem before asking anyone for help.

4. Outsourcing Life:

The number one rule of outsourcing your life is to get an assistant — even if you do not think you actually need one. You need to learn to command, which you can do by starting with a small project and using your assistant to help you. You should use virtual, foreign assistants in the early stages as they are a lot cheaper to use. You can find virtual assistants online on sites like Fiverr or Upwork.

Always remember to eliminate before you delegate/automate your tasks to make sure they are important. Your goal is to free your time to focus on bigger and better things. You can automate your most important tasks to your assistant. If your test project goes well, then consider hiring assistants for other projects too.

You should always define rules or processes before adding people as employees. It should be clear for them what to do and how to handle in any possible situation.

Other things you should do to outsource your life is to start small but think big. Look at what has been on your to-do list the longest and start doing that. Each time you get interrupted ask yourself “could a VA (virtual assistant) do this?”. Ask yourself “What causes me the most frustration and boredom” and make your VA do that for you.

5. Income On Autopilot

These chapters (9, 10, and 11) are for people who want to own businesses and not run them — spending no time on them at all. You ideally want to create a product that you can automate in 4 weeks and that does not require more that 1 day per week of time from you.

Before launching your product you want to micro-test it using inexpensive advertisements. These are the steps to follow to make a great product that can take of itself.

Step-by-step guide:

Step 1: Market selection First, pick an affordably reachable niche market. To find a market ask yourself “What groups to I understand? What do I own and what groups of people purchase from the same companies?

Step 2: Product brainstorm After picking a great market you then need to brainstorm products. According to Tim Ferris, you should never invest in products, but choose if you want to 1) resell, 2) license, or 3) create a product. Information products (like online books, courses, etc.) are best for this kind of business.

When you have found your product you should start by creating a premium image and charge more than your competition. This will make you sell fewer units, have lower maintenance customers, and give you a higher profit margin. Your product should take no more than 3 to 4 weeks to manufacture.

Step 3: Micro-testing There are multiple ways to test and advertise your product for a small amount of money. You could find magazines that your market reads, and find out the cost of advertising there. You could also sell auctioned products on sites like eBay to test demand before purchasing a big inventory.

Step 4: Rollout and automation This is pretty simpel and covers most of what we have looked at so far in this post. First, you want to roll out your product and make sure it fits the market. You then want to make rules and procedures, hire people, and make them run your business whilst you are enjoying your freedom.

6. Steps For Employees To Work Remotely

This is a bonus one as I think many of you could benefit from this. This step by step guide is probably my favorite one in the entire book. Hopefully, this can help you become location independent and bring you more freedom.

Step-by-step guide:

Step 1: Increase investment: You want your company to invest as much as possible in you as possible, so the cost is high if you decide to quit.

Step 2: Prove increased output offsite: Call in sick one day, and show them how you are actually getting more done from home.

Step 3: Prepare the quantifiable business benefit: Make a plan on how you will be able to do your job even better when working outside of the office to convince your boss to make you work remotely.

Step 4: Propose a revocable trial period: Present the plan in front of your boss and tell then a revocable trial period, where they can see how you are doing. This does not have to be you working remotely every day. You could start by proposing to work outside of the office 1 day every week.

Step 5: Expand remote time: Make sure your days outside of your office are the most productive to convince your boss that working remotely is much more effective for you. Get a short remote agreement (1 day a week) and then slowly negotiate up to working remotely full-time.

Step 6: Extend each successful trial period until you reach full-time or your desired level of mobility. Your company needs you, so make sure to perform well and ask them what they want from you. If they will not let you work remotely, Tim suggest you leave and find another job you love. Life is too short and the world is too big to spend your life in a job that will not give you the freedom you desire.

To Read Or Not To Read

The real question to ask yourself is if you liked this post. Did you find my takeaways relevant for your life, and did they excite you? Do you like the lifestyle of the new rich? If yes, then I would strongly suggest reading it.

Although I do not agree with everything in the book I believe Tim Ferris presents some valuable lessons to help you enjoy life more and achieve the lifestyle you truly want.

I would give the book an 8 out of 10. Most of the principles in this book are explained well, but I still think he could have used more space to explain how employees could gain location independence. The book is fairly long sitting at about 380 pages, but overall a great read in my opinion.

To get a more detailed guide on how to achieve the lifestyle you want together with examples, I would suggest reading the book. You can skip to the chapters you want to know more about — most of them have the same title as my takeaways.