ROC Weekly Management & Mindset Segment
ROC Weekly Management & Mindset Segment
Adopting the 4-Hour Work Week in Your Life
“The 4-Hour Work Week” is a self-help book by Timothy Ferriss, written for those who want to become a member of the New Rich: to live large and find freedom and happiness now, rather than waiting until retirement. The entire point of the book is to have free time, as time is the only valuable asset we have, not money.
The book is premised on the 80/20 principle, where 80% of your productivity is accomplished in 20% of your time, and the remaining 20% of your productivity takes 80% of your time. Ferris states that in order to become a member of the New Rich, you free up most of your time and automate your income; outsource the tasks that take 80% of your time, and focus on the most important ones. In one of the most important and tone setting quotes in the book, Ferris states, “Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.”
The book is divided into 4 sections that spell out the acronym DEAL, each that explore the components of the New Rich lifestyle:
Step 1: Definition
This step is about defining your goals. It also deals with abandoning engrained ideas, such as working yourself to death for material items and treating retirement as a holy grail. He also explains that absolute income is not the most important thing. Instead, relative income, or the amount you earn per hour of work, is the most important. Once your dream is defined, break it down into tangible steps and goals and start seeing how close you are to achieving it.
Step 2: Elimination
The key to this step is to remember that what you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. It focuses on eliminating the most mundane aspects of your professional life. For example,
Stop all multitasking immediately. When you’re trying to write, close your email, phone, and web browser and just focus on writing, nothing else. This allows you to churn out the task way faster.
Make your to-do list for tomorrow before you finish today. When you add an item to this list, ask yourself if you would view a day as productive if that’s the only thing on the list that you got done.
Never have a meeting without a clear agenda. If someone suggests a meeting, request the specific agenda of the meeting. If there isn’t one, ask why you’re meeting at all.
Step 3: Automation
This step explains how to be a no-value-added entrepreneur, or a middleman. The purpose is that you can streamline your processes with very little effort. Some of the most critical skills necessary for becoming a member of the New Rich are learning how to communicate and to manage remotely. To get used to this idea, Ferriss suggests hiring a digital assistant to practice giving other people orders. An essential facet of being a member of the New Rich is learning how to replace yourself within a system.
Step 4: Liberation
This steps ties all the steps together; it takes the dreams defined in the first step, the enhanced productivity of the second step, and the passive income of the third step and creates the four hour workweek. The first step is to change your life so that you can work remotely. To do this, develop your efficiency skills and demonstrate them during your vacation or sick leave. Then, ask to work remotely all the time.
The three main lessons:
Be effective, not efficient- Instead of focusing on doing the best you can, focus on the things that lead to the greatest progress.
Validate all of your business ideas- Before you go out and build any product or service, make sure people will give you money for it.
Charge a premium to make your life easier- Once you have validated your business ideas, ensure that you are producing a quality product or service. It is easier to find a smaller amount of people to spend a higher amount of money than it is to find more people willing to spend a smaller amount of money.
Ten rules of the New Rich
To be a part of the New Rich, Ferriss offers ten rules that are fundamental to your success:
Retirement is the worst-case-scenario insurance. It assumes you are doing something you dislike for the ablest years of your life rather than enjoying those years now.
Interest and energy are cyclical. Alternating between periods of rest and activity is essential.
Less is not laziness. Despite spending fewer hours in the office, the New Rich produce more meaningful results.
The timing is never right. Holding out for the perfect moment to make a decision will rarely come to fruition.
Ask for forgiveness, not permission. People deny things according to their emotions, but they can learn to accept them after the fact.
Emphasize strengths. By improving your strengths over your weaknesses, you focus on multiplying the results as opposed to incrementally fixing your flaws.
When things are done to excess, they often take on the characteristics of their opposites. Too much and too often of what you want will soon become what you don’t want.
Money alone is not the solution. We often use not having enough money as a scapegoat for not self-reflecting and working out what we want out of life.
Relative income is more important than absolute income. Relative income looks at both money and time, whereas absolute income only looks at money.
Distress is bad, eustress is good. Distress refers to harmful stress that makes you weaker. Eustress refers to the type of stress that helps you grow.
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