Most of those aren't really time management tricks, just reasons for hating Tim Ferris, as anyone with a brain already does (possibly including Tim Ferris).
The part about him spamming her blog cracked me up. I think some of the resources in his book are good, but her post exemplifies what happens when a large group of people take a book (or title) literally. I like the idea of automating as much of the mundane tasks as possible, but the book and him are controversial by design. It's marketing. A few examples:
1. He sells shady supplements making penis-pillesque claims.
Yeah, he comes off as a douche bag, but the overall message of his book, IMHO, is spend more time doing what you enjoy. And even with all these criticisms, the book is certainly better than the self-improvement fluff and vapor proliferating itself all over the Amazon best seller lists.
I'm not even sure if he had a name on the show, because it wasn't a big part. He was not the star of the show, and it might be stretching it to even say he was a regular. I think he was just on a couple/few episodes...? I believe it was broadcast out of Taiwan. He mostly just stands around in a suit with shades on, IIRC. That's why I seem to remember him as a Fed.
I heard him provide more information about the show in an interview or something...a friend of mine lives in Taiwan now and she sent me VHS copies of the show, but I don't have them anymore. I don't speak Chinese, so the show didn't have much context/meaning for me overall.
Sorry I couldn't be more helpful. Maybe you could email Ferris to ask him for more details?
Tim Ferris is a perfect example of why every message should be judged on its own merits, regardless of speaker.
For what I've seen of him (and that's very little), I don't imagine we'd be best friends, but his book is straightforward and preaches a message that many people are looking to hear. HN preaches the same message, yet offers different methods.
When a friend first told me about Ferriss and his book, I was quite skeptical. I got the book from the library (or my friend lent it to me), and ended up buying it.
Sure, some stuff is questionable, but there were enough interesting, practical ideas to make it worthwhile.
Ferriss is trying to make some points and sell a product, and he seems to be good at it, and his points are worth some consideration even if you don't always care for how he presents them.
Hate him? Steal the better ideas and ignore what you don't like.
Agreed... I'd hate myself if I only got to work 4 hours a week, work is sort of fun. What do you do with the rest of the week? Wallow in self loathing? :)
I read the book, and I hate myself for spending time with that. He is not just a self promoter, he is a liar, he certainly doesn't work 4 hours per week. He may have done it for a small period of time, but how many times per day do you think you need to work to get the self promotion he gets?
The plan of the guy is simple: 1) find something that most people are interested in (working less in this case); 2) Research whatever has been said about the topic and write in a friendly way; 3) make people believe by whatever unsubstantiated means that he is the master of that topic; 4) promote the book and laugh all the way to the bank...
He states in the book that the '4 hour of work' is just an arbitrary number. The title was used because his publisher was against his original title of 'Selling Drugs for Fun and Profit' and being such a self promoter he figured that working only 4 hours is something that would grab attention.
Um, you seem to have missed a rather key part of his story. Sure, he works more than four hours a week--that's not some amazing insight, it's plainly obvious. The thing you seem to have missed is that he only spends a negligible amount of time maintaining his income from the supplement company which was founded long before the book was even written. That was his primary income before the book and may very well still be today.
I'm not sure how you missed it. That he was able to establish an almost entirely automated source of income is pretty central to the book. Unless you'd like to supply some evidence that he didn't do that, you've done a better job of painting yourself as a liar than him.
The way he picked the title was interesting. He purchased adwords for a large array of possible book names and then went with the one that got the most click throughs
Sure, interesting, if all you want to do is sell books to the masses in the short term. If you want some longer lasting credibility, then probably best to choose the title and content some other way.
It sounds like the guy just redefines work as non-work. I guess that's what happens when you have to build a book around a title culled from AdSense responses. You have to do some semantics ninjitsu.
Having to work only four hours a week to survive is not the same thing as getting to work only four hours a week for the joy of it. That's what the content of the book is about.
"It's childish. It's a childish, semantic game. And it reminds me of him winning the Chinese National Kickboxing Championships by leveraging a little-known rule that people are disqualified if they stop outside the box. So he pushed each of his opponents outside the box to win.
He is winning the I-work-less-than-you game with a similarly questionable method: semantics."
Sounds like TF is a hacker and she is jealous of his sk33lz.
I don't know if that qualifies as a hack, but I don't see what's admirable about it, nor is it particularly clever. Should we applaud when a businessman finds a loophole in the tax system? Or when he hires a lawyer to "hack" the justice system?
You bet I do. I'd much rather hire someone clever who finds the optimal solution rather than some career jobber who just hammers out any old solution to get his pay check.
Finding optimal solutions is good, whatever industry you're in.
> It's general knowledge now that The 4 Hour Work Week is a farce
The book should be read as follows (not listed in chapter order):
1) how to build a business that scales in output in a more than linear proportion to the time you put into it. [and how to avoid nonlucrative or time-intensive businesses].
2) suggestions of how to spend your time and money in a way that makes the most of both, in terms of quality [assumes you enjoy travel]
3) various useful companies and resources, some specific to US-based businesses that need to drop-ship physical goods
4) stupid chapter on how to skip out on work if you're an employee [with potentially useful tips on how NOT to do it]
5) various inspiration to get off your duff and do things (both in terms of starting your own business, and in traveling and doing things you've always wanted to).
The most useful pieces are (1) and (5), followed by (2) and (3) if they apply to you. (4) is the only part that I'd consider farcical, but the rest of the book was interesting enough that I don't sit around wishing for my $20 back.
There seems to be a decent contingent of people who hate the book, but I'm more interested in hearing from people who actually tried out the recommendations in the book and failed, especially if they're willing to go into the details of what went wrong.
Under other circumstances, this would be trolling, but note that edw519 is the third most voted user of HN (12387 karma). I agree, this author has had a few other toxic posts to HN that, while excellent link bait, significantly reduce the intellectual civility of the community.
It seems the one piece of time management advice here is "Don't waste your time dealing with assholes like Tim Ferris", which is good advice, but not exactly a new thought.
A farce is a comedy written for the stage or film which aims to entertain the audience by means of unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations, disguise and mistaken identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, which may include sexual innuendo and word play, and a fast-paced plot whose speed usually increases, culminating in an ending which often involves an elaborate chase scene.
I think we're in the chase scene phase now.
But, seriously, yeah: The book is a farce! Quite deliberately so in many parts. The bit where he outsourced his social networking to India? The intent is that you will laugh at that. It's "unlikely, extravagant, and improbable" in a way that's meant more to entertain than to inform.
Playing real life as a farce is not a polite style of humor. I've never been a big fan of practical jokes, I'm intrigued by the late Andy Kaufman but I often find him uncomfortable to watch, I can't bring myself to watch Borat and I didn't watch Punk'd. Nor would I ever want to actually see Ferriss hacking his way to a kickboxing championship by exploiting a loophole in the rules -- though perhaps fans of Borat would enjoy watching it, and I find it very funny when it's described abstractly in print.
Have you read the book or followed it at all? Tim Ferris has made it quite clear that the book isn't about working 4 hours a week. The title was picked solely on the response rate in online tests. It's about decreasing inputs and increasing the quality of output.
Though, like much farce, it does prove a rather important point: Book titles are chosen by publishers to sell books. They're often inaccurate, or cheesy, or stupid, but if they move books they've met their design goal. The difference between this book and all the others is that it gives away that secret in the middle of the book. Think: Penn and Teller's Cruel Business Tricks for Dear Friends.
Sorry, that doesn't apply to the books I've read in the past year:
- The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
- Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
- Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
- Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
- On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in
War and Society
- The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
- The Yiddish Policeman's Union
Each of those titles tells you the contents of the book. The only one that perhaps does not is "The Yiddish Policeman's Union," but it's clearly fiction, and it is in fact about a Jewish policeman.
Yes, that's where the phenomenon becomes obvious. I note that none of your titles are business books, for example. ;)
[Pertinent side question: How do I know that? I haven't read any of the books. Though I probably should, because your reading list sounds awesome.]
Which is not to say that the titles of all those books weren't chosen primarily to enhance sales. It's just that the target customer was a nonfiction reader, a person who is probably more likely to buy a book if it has a descriptive, serious-sounding, nonfiction-type title. Perhaps the median nonfiction reader is much more likely to pick up The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York than Architect: Robert Moses and his Largely Discredited Ideas, or Robert Moses: A Musical Homage to an Architectural Juggernaut. (Though the last one might turn out to be a great farce!)
Have you noticed that every nonfiction book has a colon in the title? Even my fake book titles have that stupid colon -- it's like a tic, I can't get rid of it! Why is that, do you think? I think it's because the titles are designed for marketing: The initial title is short, and memorable, and evocative like a tiny little poem, kind of like a good domain name should be. The part after the colon tells you what the book is actually about, because the first title is so busy being pretty that it doesn't have time to tell you anything.
What you say is "marketing," I think is author creativity. Knowing the authors, the titles sound like their writing. For example, being a power broker is probably the main theme of the book about Robert Moses. The term is used several times, there's a chapter entitled that, and the central theme of the book is how Moses came to respect, acquire and wield power.
Similarly for The Coldest Winter, the author (David Halberstam) stresses the cold as a perennial problem for the infantry, and most of the events occur during a particular winter. I've read several of his books, and it's very much in line with his writing style.
Same with Shake Hands With the Devil. The author (Romeo Dallaire) uses that phrase in the introduction and at a turning point of the book to express how he felt about his position - he literally shook hands with perpetrators of genocide.
I agree that non-fiction books often have a kicker in the title to clarify the subject matter. But I think the pretty, poetical title is usually written by the author. At least I think it is for the books I read.
What you say is "marketing," I think is author creativity.
What's the difference? Just because the author wrote the title doesn't mean it wasn't chosen for marketing purposes -- to grab your eye, to be memorable, to describe the subject concisely, to pique your curiosity, to remind you of a story inside of the book so that hearing the title mentioned in conversation prompts you to tell the story. Authors are marketers too. Indeed, the first task of any new commercial author is to convince a publisher to buy a manuscript, and that requires a title which catches the publisher's eye, and which the publisher is convinced will catch the public's eye.
In other words, when I suggest that publishers pick titles with an eye to marketability, I'm not suggesting that the typical model is "publisher buys the book and then suggests the title". I suspect that's actually rather rare, although some authors have had that experience. Much more likely is the model where the publisher solicits hundreds of manuscripts and proposals and then picks out the handful that feel commercially viable -- and a good title helps a manuscript to stand above the rest of that slushpile.
Actually, the subtitles tell you the content. The titles themselves are still more marketing labels that look good 6" wide in bold. They may relate metaphorically to the content, but they would be scrapped in a heartbeat if they didn't sound sellable. In fact, given that most non-fiction books are sold to the publisher before so much as a chapter is written, it's not unreasonable to say that many such books might not even exist without an edgy and sellable title.
I found it fascinating. He makes a compelling argument - with evidence - that humans have a natural instinct not to kill each other. I had never thought about it in the way he presented it, and it changed how I look at wars and killing in general. His followup to that, how one of modern military training's main purposes is to overcome that natural instinct, also changed how I looked at training and practice of any kind.
His interviews with veterans who had killed was both fascinating and heartbreaking.
Regarding media, one point he makes that I agree with is the non-chalance with which people kill in movies and tv is ridiculous. Not offensive, just fantasy. It did change how I view killing in entertainment. Simply, in reality, most people won't kill.
What I didn't buy was his final argument, which tries to argue that the rise of violence in media has contributed to the rise of violence in society. I did not find his evidence convincing. He just spent an entire book arguing for the value of conditioning through actual training, then claims that viewing violence is enough to make someone do it. Unfortunately, this claim is what Robert Grossman is most famous for. I think that's sad, because the rest of the content are things I think all of society should know, in particular those who know someone who has served.
A note on the writing itself: not the greatest. In many ways it reads like someone's term paper. He also tries to make connections to the fuzzy-wuzzy side of psychology at times. But that doesn't stop the rest from being good and worth your time.
Honestly, I'd rather ask you what you thought about it. I've never been a soldier, so I'm fascinated to know what soldiers feel about it.
Thanks for the insight. Perhaps I'll let you know/blog about it once I'm finished the book... I got 6 books for Christmas though, so it may be a while! :)
"So it's purposefully deceitful?" ... yes? Isn't all marketing a little deceitful?
"I don't have time to read a book about getting work done. I have too much work to do." - Are you suggesting I shouldn't read up on programming because I have too much coding to do?
I assume a book's title is a representation of its subject and contents. If you violate that assumption, then you've lost my trust and I don't want to read your book.
As for time and reading, you certainly should read things you think are valuable. But I doubt the efficacy of methods that sound good, feel good, but have not been tested. What seems to work for me and everyone else I know is working hard. I think I'll stick to that.
How does that work? You're both rejecting a book for having a title which you feel is misleading and for the content which you assume the title would indicate if it were not misleading.
How so? It sounds more like confirmation bias. If I told you (in more words than I use here) that your previous description of the book sounded like bullshit on a stick compared to the book I read about implementing data-driven improvements to workflow effectiveness, would my analysis count? Or is the title and cover still too off-putting to consider?
If you told me concrete things that you have done as a direct result of reading the book, that have improved your life, then sure, I'd take notice.
FWIW, building a self sustaining income isn't that hard. Buying and selling traffic and making a nice profit in the middle is simple to do, and once set up, it takes nothing to maintain, but it's a bit soul destroying and boring TBH.
I can't believe how many people are bashing this book without actually reading the book.
The book's title is to catch attention and summarize a goal that uses a lot of little cool "life hacks" that Tim has invented.
His book is not so much being lazy or avoiding responsibilities. I got out of it 2 major learning points:
1. How to use your time wisely, either by streamlining human interaction or outsourcing menial jobs.
and
2. How to execute on a product business using new web tools and hacks that even I, a veteran web entrepreneur, had very little exposure or knowledge of.
Obviously either of those titles would be extremely boring and not sell well, so Tim had to do what he had to do to sell his book. But there is a lot of good stuff, probably one of my top 5 books of all time.
