Leaders of the Free World

4HWW - Australian Edition

My arse indeed Tim Ferriss. Let’s get things straight, I’ve read the Four Hour Work Week (4HWW), I love it and it’s consumed my life for the last 9 months. I’ve recommended it to a dozen people and given away about three copies. (Affiliate commission cheque in the mail?).

The concept is great, create an automated income stream by developing a muse product to sell online, and thus scaling your own work commitments back to only four hours per week, while having your bank account swell to fund your custom designed lifestyle of jet-setting, traveling, dancing around in South America and learning foreign languages.

You spend 4 hours a week at work making coffee.

You’ll finish reading this book and have a sense of drive, hopefully you realise that your current situation of converting your time for an income is ridiculous. Do you want a successful career or automated money, deposited into your bank every week, offering you the freedom to do whatever you like? Your friends don’t care that you put in 60 hours at the office this week, but they’ll sit up and take note if you’re cashed up and DON’T have to go to the office.

In the book, Tim Ferriss establishes a protein/supplement product which he sells on line. This is used as his vehicle for automation, dealing with clients, outsourcing tasks, streamlining website sales and generating an income stream.

So there I was, sitting in the airport and pouring through my copy of 4HWW. Almost hiding it from view from people who passed by as if I’d been let in on a secret; lifestyle design, escaping the 9-5 and all that jazz and I didn’t want anyone else to know about it until I’d cracked the code myself.

Skip the first couple of chapters.

If only Tim Ferriss had released a precursor to the Four Hour Work Week. He managed to gloss over it in the book, but in order to build his company and finally crack under the workload of a hundred hours per week, he actually had to build a company. He didn’t manage to fund his ideal lifestyle by:

• writing google Adwords ads to shitty online products and collect an affiliate commission from Clickbank,
• writing some fluffy self help eBook about freeing himself from work and how you can to, by buying the fluffy eBook, which is about how to write your own fluffy eBook and sell it,
• starting a blog, building subscribers and a sense of trust and then try and sell them a product.

Nope, he started a legitimate business & product that provided REAL, tangible and direct value to the customer. Dealt with sales issues & keeping customers happy and then removed himself from the decision tree in an effort to automate.

He started his own company & launched a product, built a client base, managed sales, worked his arse off and then outsourced & automated.

I wish someone had told me this before I read the 4HWW. Everyone reads the book, gets a fuzzy notion that you can sell a crappy product, set up a website, buy a few keywords from google and point them at your site to drive traffic. Now you only need to sell 8 alarm clocks per day to fund your ideal lifestyle.

Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the 4HWW has sold a truckload of copies. So now everyone has had a wake-up call, sadly every man and his dog are trying to think of the next muse, the next product that can be manufactured in china for 30 cents and drop shipped to needy customers all over the world.

I’d still recommend the book to people, as a starting point. I’m still getting strange looks when I tell people I’ve thrown my job in to finish off my muse, build a client base and focus on marketing and sales.

The 4HWW is a snap shot of what Tim had accomplished; it glossed over his hard yards and focused on the jet setting, the automation and the lifestyle. It makes a good story and acts as a good first step for people who are stuck in the 9 – 5 to realise that there ‘might’ be something else out there. I can definitely credit the book with giving me the kick in the arse I needed.

What’s been your experience since reading the 4HWW? Have you read it? Are you still trying to think of the ever elusive muse?

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