The 4-Hour Work Week

High-Level Thoughts

The title may sound gimmicky, however, The 4-Hour Work Week is a timeless classic filled with gems on productivity, traveling, and living the life of your dreams. Topics include outsourcing your work, how to create real passive streams of income that work from any part of the globe, and time management techniques that will give you the output levels of a small company. Although many of the sites he recommends in the book are outdated, I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to travel or start their own business but feels like they don't have the mindset or tools to do it.

The 4-Hour Work Week Summary and Notes

Rules That Change the Rules: Everything Popular is Wrong

Retirement is worst-case-scenario insurance.

Money alone is not the solution, because relative income is greater than absolute income. Relative income is based on money plus time.

He recommends 3-6 months deadlines for your goals, rather than having super long term dreams because things change quickly.

"Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away"                  — Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Effective vs Efficient: Effectiveness = doing things that get you closer to your goals. Efficient = doing things economically, with little waste.

Pareto’s Law: 80/20 principle applies to almost everything. From wealth, sales, crimes, pollution, etc.

"There is a direct correlation between an increased sphere of comfort and getting what you want."

Ask yourself: Am I being productive or just active? Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?

Define a TO-DO list but also a NOT TO-DO list, also don't multitask.

"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking" — Albert Einstein

"Information consumes attention. So a wealth of info is equal to poverty of attention"  — Herbert Simon

Increased output requires decreased input.

Go on a media fast, no news, no social media.

Increased output requires decreased input, and lifestyle design is based on massive output.

Don't finish books or articles that aren't worth it anymore.

Batch all time-comsuming shallow work, answer all your emails on one day, do your laundry once per week.

Virtual Assistants

Practice remote management and communication.

Be clear and concise when giving instructions, each task must be time-consuming and well-defined.

Request that they check in to show their work, and have them confirm they understand what you want.

There might be a trial and error phase when finding the perfect assistant but once you do, you'll realize the immense power it brings.

Best times to send email if you need a fast response are late in the evening or right before 8 am.

Income Autopilot: finding the Muse

Plan and test products, don't just put all your eggs in one basket and expect it to be a success.

Pick an affordable, reachable niche market.

• Creating demand is hard, instead, find a market: define your customers and THEN developer a product FOR them.
• If everyone is your customer, no one is your customer.

The Ideal product

• The ideal product should cost between $50-200
• Shoot for an 8-10x markup.
• The main benefit can be captured in one sentence.

How to create info products:

• Combine info from several books on a topic.
• Repurpose public domain content.
• License content or pay an expert to help you create content, clickbank is great site for this.
• Footnote: be warned these models since the release of the book have become extremely saturated especially dropshipping. I would also advise against selling something your not an expert in, as shoddy online courses taught by "gurus" have made the public extremely sensitive and can ruin your reputation for life.

LLCs and S-Corps are preferred by small businesses.

The goal is not to create the biggest business, but a business that bothers you the least.

If you're working at a company, try to convince your boss to give you one remote day per week, and slowly expand this as you slowly build trust.

"Formula for success: Double your rate of failure" — Thomas Watson

Take mini-retirements, a couple of months in a new place. This goes against the preconception that you can only do this after you retire.

Traveling around the world can even save you money (currency rates)

Don’t invest in public stocks where you can’t influence outcomes.

Retirees get depressed because of boredom and social isolation.

"What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task" — Viktor E. Frankl