The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich - Expanded and Updated Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  The 4-Hour Workweek

  “It’s about time this book was written. It is a long-overdue manifesto for the mobile lifestyle, and Tim Ferriss is the ideal ambassador. This will be huge.”

  —JACK CANFIELD, cocreator of Chicken Soup for the Soul®, 100+ million copies sold

  “Stunning and amazing. From mini-retirements to outsourcing your life, it’s all here. Whether you’re a wage slave or a Fortune 500 CEO, this book will change your life!”

  —PHIL TOWN, New York Times bestselling author of Rule #1

  “The 4-Hour Workweek is a new way of solving a very old problem: just how can we work to live and prevent our lives from being all about work? A world of infinite options awaits those who would read this book and be inspired by it!”

  —MICHAEL E. GERBER, founder and chairman of E-Myth Worldwide and the world’s #1 small business guru

  “This is a whole new ball game. Highly recommended.”

  —DR. STEWART D. FRIEDMAN, adviser to Jack Welch and former Vice President Al Gore on work/family issues and director of the Work/Life Integration Program at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

  “Timothy has packed more lives into his 29 years than Steve Jobs has in his 51.”

  —TOM FOREMSKI, journalist and publisher of SiliconValleyWatcher.com

  “If you want to live life on your own terms, this is your blueprint.”

  —MIKE MAPLES, cofounder of Motive Communications (IPO to $260M market cap) and founding executive of Tivoli (sold to IBM for $750M)

  “Thanks to Tim Ferriss, I have more time in my life to travel, spend time with family, and write book blurbs. This is a dazzling and highly useful work.”

  —A. J. JACOBS, editor-at-large of Esquire magazine and author of The Know-It-All

  “Tim is Indiana Jones for the digital age. I’ve already used his advice to go spearfishing on remote islands and ski the best hidden slopes of Argentina. Simply put, do what he says and you can live like a millionaire.”

  —ALBERT POPE, derivatives specialist at UBS World Headquarters

  “Reading this book is like putting a few zeros on your income. Tim brings lifestyle to a new level—listen to him!”

  —MICHAEL D. KERLIN, McKinsey & Company consultant to Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund and a J. William Fulbright Scholar

  “Part scientist and part adventure hunter, Tim Ferriss has created a road map for an entirely new world. I devoured this book in one sitting—I have seen nothing like it.”

  —CHARLES L. BROCK, chairman and CEO of Brock Capital Group; former CFO, COO, and general counsel of Scholastic, Inc.; and former president of the Harvard Law School Association

  “Outsourcing is no longer just for Fortune 500 companies. Small and mid-sized firms, as well as busy professionals, can outsource their work to increase their productivity and free time for more important commitments. It’s time for the world to take advantage of this revolution.”

  —VIVEK KULKARNI, CEO of Brickwork India and former IT secretary of Bangalore; credited as the “techno-bureaucrat” who helped make Bangalore an IT destination in India

  “Tim is the master! I should know. I followed his rags to riches path and watched him transform himself from competitive fighter to entrepreneur. He tears apart conventional assumptions until he finds a better way.”

  —DAN PARTLAND, Emmy Award–winning producer of American High and Welcome to the Dollhouse

  “The 4-Hour Workweek is an absolute necessity for those adventurous souls who want to live life to its fullest. Buy it and read it before you sacrifice any more!”

  —JOHN LUSK, group product manager at Microsoft World Headquarters

  “If you want to live your dreams now, and not in 20 or 30 years, buy this book!”

  —LAURA RODEN, chairman of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs and a lecturer in Corporate Finance at San Jose State University

  “With this kind of time management and focus on the important things in life, people should be able to get 15 times as much done in a normal workweek.”

  —TIM DRAPER, founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, financiers to innovators including Hotmail, Skype, and Overture.com

  “Tim has done what most people only dream of doing. I can’t believe he is going to let his secrets out of the bag. This book is a must read!”

  —STEPHEN KEY, top inventor and team designer of Teddy Ruxpin and Lazer Tag and a consultant to the television show American Inventor

  For my parents,

  DONALD AND FRANCES FERRISS,

  who taught a little hellion that marching to a different drummer

  was a good thing. I love you both and owe you everything.

  SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL TEACHER—

  10% of all author royalties are donated to educational

  not-for-profits, including Donorschoose.org.

  CONTENTS

  Preface to the Expanded and Updated Edition

  First and Foremost

  FAQ—Doubters Read This

  My Story and Why You Need This Book

  Chronology of a Pathology

  Step I: D is for Definition

  1 Cautions and Comparisons: How to Burn $1,000,000 a Night

  2 Rules That Change the Rules: Everything Popular Is Wrong

  3 Dodging Bullets: Fear-Setting and Escaping Paralysis

  4 System Reset: Being Unreasonable and Unambiguous

  Step II: E is for Elimination

  5 The End of Time Management: Illusions and Italians

  6 The Low-Information Diet: Cultivating Selective Ignorance

  7 Interrupting Interruption and the Art of Refusal

  Step III: A is for Automation

  8 Outsourcing Life: Off-loading the Rest and a Taste of Geoarbitrage

  9 Income Autopilot I: Finding the Muse

  10 Income Autopilot II: Testing the Muse

  11 Income Autopilot III: MBA—Management by Absence

  Step IV: L is for Liberation

  12 Disappearing Act: How to Escape the Office

  13 Beyond Repair: Killing Your Job

  14 Mini-Retirements: Embracing the Mobile Lifestyle

  15 Filling the Void: Adding Life After Subtracting Work

  16 The Top 13 New Rich Mistakes

  The Last Chapter: An E-mail You Need to Read

  Last but Not Least

  THE BEST OF THE BLOG

  The Art of Letting Bad Things Happen

  Things I’ve Loved and Learned in 2008

  How to Travel the World with 10 Pounds or Less

  The Choice-Minimal Lifestyle: 6 Formulas for More Output and Less Overwhelm

  The Not-to-Do List: 9 Habits to Stop Now

  The Margin Manifesto: 11 Tenets for Reaching (or Doubling) Profitability in 3 Months

  The Holy Grail: How to Outsource the Inbox and Never Check E-mail Again

  Tim Ferriss Processing Rules

  Proposal to Work Remotely on a Contract Basis

  LIVING THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK: CASE STUDIES,

  TIPS, AND HACKS

  Zen and the Art of Rock Star Living

  Art Lovers Wanted

  Photo Finish

  Virtual Law

  Taking Flight with Ornithreads

  Off-the-Job Training

  Doctor’s Orders

  The 4-Hour Family and Global Education

  Financial Musing

  Who Says Kids Hold You Back?

  Working Remotely

  Killin
g Your BlackBerry

  Star Wars, Anyone?

  RESTRICTED READING: THE FEW THAT MATTER

  BONUS MATERIAL

  How to Get $250,000 of Advertising for $10,000

  How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months

  Muse Math: Predicting the Revenue of Any Product

  Licensing: From Tae Bo to Teddy Ruxpin

  Real Licensing Agreement with Real Dollars

  Online Round-the-World (RTW) Trip Planner

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PREFACE TO THE EXPANDED AND

  UPDATED EDITION

  The 4-Hour Workweek was turned down by 26 out of 27 publishers.

  After it was sold, the president of one potential marketing partner, a large bookseller, e-mailed me historical bestseller statistics to make it clear—this wouldn’t be a mainstream success.

  So I did all I knew how to do. I wrote it with two of my closest friends in mind, speaking directly to them and their problems—problems I long had—and I focused on the unusual options that had worked for me around the world.

  I certainly tried to set conditions for making a sleeper hit possible, but I knew it wasn’t likely. I hoped for the best and planned for the worst.

  May 2, 2007, I receive a call on my cell phone from my editor.

  “Tim, you hit the list.”

  It was just past 5 P.M. in New York City, and I was exhausted. The book had launched five days before, and I had just finished a series of more than twenty radio interviews in succession, beginning at 6 A.M. that morning. I never planned a book tour, preferring instead to “batch” radio satellite tours into 48 hours.

  “Heather, I love you, but please don’t $#%* with me.”

  “No, you really hit the list. Congratulations, Mr. New York Times bestselling author!”

  I leaned against the wall and slid down until I was sitting on the floor. I closed my eyes, smiled, and took a deep breath. Things were about to change.

  Everything was about to change.

  Lifestyle Design from Dubai to Berlin

  The 4-Hour Workweek has now been sold into 35 languages. It’s been on the bestseller lists for more than two years, and every month brings a new story and a new discovery.

  From the Economist to the cover of the New York Times Style section, from the streets of Dubai to the cafes of Berlin, lifestyle design has cut across cultures to become a worldwide movement. The original ideas of the book have been broken apart, improved, and tested in environments and ways I never could have imagined.

  So why the new edition if things are working so well? Because I knew it could be better, and there was a missing ingredient: you.

  This expanded and updated edition contains more than 100 pages of new content, including the latest cutting-edge technologies, field-tested resources, and—most important—real-world success stories chosen from more than 400 pages of case studies submitted by readers.

  Families and students? CEOs and professional vagabonds? Take your pick. There should be someone whose results you can duplicate. Need a template to negotiate remote work, a paid year in Argentina, perhaps? This time, it’s in here.

  The Experiments in Lifestyle Design blog (www.fourhourblog.com) was launched alongside the book, and within six months, it became one of the top 1,000 blogs in the world, out of more than 120 million. Thousands of readers have shared their own amazing tools and tricks, producing phenomenal and unexpected results. The blog became the laboratory I’d always wanted, and I encourage you to join us there.

  The new “Best of the Blog” section includes several of the most popular posts from the Experiments in Lifestyle Design blog. On the blog itself, you can also find recommendations from everyone from Warren Buffett (seriously, I tracked him down and show you how I did it) to chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin. It’s an experimental playground for those who want better results in less time.

  Not “Revised”

  This is not a “revised” edition in the sense that the original no longer works. The typos and small mistakes have been fixed over more than 40 printings in the U.S. This is the first major overhaul, but not for the reason you’d expect.

  Things have changed dramatically since April 2007. Banks are failing, retirement and pension funds are evaporating, and jobs are being lost at record rates. Readers and skeptics alike have asked: Can the principles and techniques in the book really still work in an economic recession or depression?

  Yes and yes.

  In fact, questions I posed during pre-crash lectures, including “How would your priorities and decisions change if you could never retire?” are no longer hypothetical. Millions of people have seen their savings portfolios fall 40% or more in value and are now looking for options C and D. Can they redistribute retirement throughout life to make it more affordable? Can they relocate a few months per year to a place like Costa Rica or Thailand to multiply the lifestyle output of their decreased savings? Sell their services to companies in the UK to earn in a stronger currency? The answer to all of them is, more than ever, yes.

  The concept of lifestyle design as a replacement for multi-staged career planning is sound. It’s more flexible and allows you to test different lifestyles without committing to a 10- or 20-year retirement plan that can fail due to market fluctuations outside of your control. People are open to exploring alternatives (and more forgiving of others who do the same), as many of the other options—the once “safe” options—have failed.

  When everything and everyone is failing, what is the cost of a little experimentation outside of the norm? Most often, nothing. Flash forward to 2011; is a job interviewer asking about that unusual gap year?

  “Everyone was getting laid off and I had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to travel around the world. It was incredible.”

  If anything, they’ll ask you how to do the same. The scripts in this book still work.

  Facebook and LinkedIn launched in the post-2000 dot-com “depression.” Other recession-born babies include Monopoly, Apple, Cliff Bar, Scrabble, KFC, Domino’s Pizza, FedEx, and Microsoft. This is no coincidence, as economic downturns produce discounted infrastructure, outstanding freelancers at bargain prices, and rock-bottom advertising deals—all impossible when everyone is optimistic.

  Whether a yearlong sabbatical, a new business idea, reengineering your life within the corporate beast, or dreams you’ve postponed for “some day,” there has never been a better time for testing the uncommon.

  What’s the worst that could happen?

  I encourage you to remember this often-neglected question as you begin to see the infinite possibilities outside of your current comfort zone. This period of collective panic is your big chance to dabble.

  It’s been an honor to share the last two years with incredible readers around the world, and I hope you enjoy this new edition as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

  I am, and will continue to be, a humble student of you all.

  Un abrazo fuerte,

  TIM FERRISS

  San Franciso, California

  April 21, 2009

  First and Foremost

  FAQ—DOUBTERS READ THIS

  Is lifestyle design for you? Chances are good that it is. Here are some of the most common doubts and fears that people have before taking the leap and joining the New Rich:

  Do I have to quit or hate my job? Do I have to be a risk-taker?

  No on all three counts. From using Jedi mind tricks to disappear from the office to designing businesses that finance your lifestyle, there are paths for every comfort level. How does a Fortune 500 employee explore the hidden jewels of China for a month and use technology to cover his tracks? How do you create a hands-off business that generates $80K per month with no management? It’s all here.

  Do I have to be a single twenty-something?

  Not at all. This book is for anyone who is sick of the deferred-life plan and wants to live life large instead of postpone it. Case studies range from a Lamborghini-driving 21-year-old to a single mother who tr
aveled the world for five months with her two children. If you’re sick of the standard menu of options and prepared to enter a world of infinite options, this book is for you.

  Do I have to travel? I just want more time.

  No. It’s just one option. The objective is to create freedom of time and place and use both however you want.

  Do I need to be born rich?

  No. My parents have never made more than $50,000 per year combined, and I’ve worked since age 14. I’m no Rockefeller and you needn’t be either.

  Do I need to be an Ivy League graduate?

  Nope. Most of the role models in this book didn’t go to the Harvards of the world, and some are dropouts. Top academic institutions are wonderful, but there are unrecognized benefits to not coming out of one. Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path. How do I know? I’ve been there and seen the destruction. This book reverses it.