4 Hour Work Week

At a blogger MeetUp last week, the book 4 Hour work Week by Tim Ferriss came up as a must read. I don't know if I would call it that. The concept of paring everything down and outsourcing everything you can is clever, but for most folks it is unrealistic.

For people looking to make a fast dime by leveraging as many other folks as possible, then, yeah, go read the book. Then jump on elance or guru and start hiring folks to do all the things that you don't want to do. Get a maid on CL. Etc.

The key is that you have to make more money than you are spending. Ah ha! To do that you are leverage other people's time and effort to make money for yourself. So if a maid is cleaning your house for 3 hours for $60, you need to find a way to convert some of that 3 hours into more than $60. (Which notably not everyone can do).

I started the book, got annoyed, then listened to Tim's speech at SxSW last year. The more I listen to him, the more I dismiss him as an exaggeration. He has some decent concepts and he is correct:

when people say they'd like to be millionaires, they don't mean that they'd like to have a million dollars. They mean that they'd like to live like a millionaire. It's possible to do that without the money, and in my mind the first step to luxury is paring down. [unclutterer]