The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (2007) is a self-help book by Timothy Ferriss, an American writer, educational activist, and entrepreneur. The book has spent more than four years on The New York Times Best Seller List, has been translated into 35 languages and has sold more than 1,350,000 copies worldwide. It deals with what Ferriss refers to as "lifestyle design" and repudiates the traditional "deferred" life plan in which people work grueling hours and take few vacations for decades and save money in order to relax after retirement.
Video The 4-Hour Workweek
Background
Ferriss developed the ideas present in The 4-Hour Workweek (4HWW) while working 14-hour days at his sports nutrition supplement company, BrainQUICKEN. Frustrated by the overwork and lack of free time, Ferriss took a 3-week sabbatical to Europe. During that time and continued travels throughout Europe, Asia, and South America, Ferriss developed a streamlined system of checking email once per day and outsourcing small daily tasks to virtual assistants. His personal escape from a workaholic lifestyle was the genesis of the book.
The format of The 4-Hour Workweek took shape during a series of lectures Ferriss delivered on high-tech entrepreneurship at Princeton University, his alma mater. The lectures (and book) described Ferriss' own experiences in company automation and lifestyle development.
Maps The 4-Hour Workweek
Blog
For the launch of the book, Ferriss created a blog also titled "TheFourHourWorkWeek.com". Though he has since written subsequent books, it remains the title of his blog and covers many topics besides those in the 4HWW. It now has more than 25,000 RSS subscribers.
The release of his book moved Ferriss' blog to the Top 1000 on Technorati. Ferriss stated, in a Fast Company interview, that 4HWW is read by many of the "top tech CEOs in the world".
Reception
The New York Times noted that Ferriss spends far more than 4 hours per week in blogging and self-promotion, which Ferriss describes as "evangelizing." USA Today commented: "If it all sounds too good to be true, maybe it is. Or maybe not. Clearly, selective ignorance, farming out chores and applying the 80/20 principle have paid off for Ferriss." Wired praised the book's ideas for telecommuting and its pre-retirement advice, but faulted it for "formulaic writing" and that "nearly every idea [is] taken to an extreme. No sense of work being anything more than a paycheck". Leslie Garner of The Telegraph noted that the book had a "punchy writing style" and that Ferriss had "struck a chord with his critique of workers' slavish devotion to corporations."
The book received coverage also through Fast Company, ABC News, The Today Show, Newsweek, and MSNBC.
References
External links
- Tim Ferriss Blog
Source of article : Wikipedia
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