"4-Hour Work Week" your thoughts?
Book Guy
I write it like I mean it, but mostly they just want my money.
The premise is, learn to automate and outsource your life. Get off the internet, never look at your email (people will phone; set up an auto-responder that says so, and then connect to your email only once every week), master the art of saying "no" to extra projects, learn the 80/20 rule in all things and then apply it to a heck-of-a-lot of cutting and hacking out the clutter from your life. Part of this will involve "sneaking" out of the office and working by tele-commuting, or just by not going in as often as they think you're going in, but being just as productive, until you can talk them into letting you loaf around the house and still get paid. From there, use the time to set up an internet-based business which will get you some passive income, get IT all set up to be as automated as possible (thanks to the internet, and to Virtual Assistants -- online personal assistants who do the scut-work, and although they may cost a fee, you can choose to hire those who are in locations where a beneficial exchange rate reduces that fee and anyway, the loss of a little of your new income is worth the gain in more income and time). Then, learn to "always" work and "always" vacation and "always" retire, all at the same time. Little mini trips all the time, or run that internet business from Costa Rica while on a skin diving vacation ("skin" diving heh heh heh, or just, ya know, skin diving), live a life rather than working in order to wait to live.
That's the executive summary. Now you don't have to buy the book. :)
Well, it all sounds great. I am going to go about trying to establish a "muse" (this is one of those automated internet stores) over the next year or so, while I also get started in a new job. Ideal time, I think, to do something "out of the office," since I won't have established any patterns or expectations (in my own head, or in the heads of others) about my productivity levels and therefore my imminent removability. Any weakness on the job can be toted up to "he's new here, he'll be learning soon."
But I wonder. For example, I have worked as a shipping clerk and as a publicist. Neither of those positions could be done by "tele commuting" and "minimizing information." The shipping clerk had to be in the office where the boxes were, for other people to dump on him at the last minute. The publicist had to answer all emails immediately -- if the New York Times reporter called at 4 and was on a deadline that day, and the publicist didn't get back to the NYT reporter by 4:05, then the NYT didn't put the thing the publicist was publicizing out in the published stuff for publicity. FAILURE.
On the other hand, I could easily see how someone whose job it is, to create major documents, or plans, or to tweak spreadsheets, could easily do his work outside the confines of the normal 8 to 5 schedule. (And by the way, the Princeton MBA prick who wrote this thing -- though he does hate the rat race, so I sympathize with him -- keeps referring to it as 9 to 5; what's WITH that? I've NEVER been at an office that opened at 9!). I didn't ever "pick" having to be the guy who was tied to a low job and a regular, excessively long work schedule. It just "ended up" that way.
So, for me, a lot of the advice in the book is quite encouraging. Especially the business about using the internet to "create" a magic wealth-building machine for yourself. I've always thought in terms of work being something you "avoid" as much as possible, and try to get the most bang for buck. In fact, that attitude gets me at odds with many of the more stodgy employers, since I'm always productive BUT NOT A DRONE. I get the work done and then think it's silly to come in early just to "prove" I'm dedicated, and although I know that an older generation often doesn't respect that attitude (morons!) and so I try to pretend to have whatever emotion they need me to have, I'm evidently bad at pretending. I just get fired, even though I'm wildly effective. They want "busy bee" there all the time, not "did the job and we made a profit." At least, in the idiot-burgs where I've been working. So, I am already a member of the choir, and the author of this 4-Hour thing needn't preach to me about that sort of thing.
In fact, the hard part won't be doing the tasks to get set up with this "disconnected" thing. The hard part will be convincing my co-workers and bosses that it's a better way for them to use me.
I wonder if other people have read this book. Thoughts, ideas? I'd love to be able to live in Costa Rica and twiddle at my little internet thing while there, not even need to live it up in style. Just enough money for a "puta" every week, maybe a girlfriend, and use the exchange rate to my benefit otherwise. No rent in the USA (everything got thrown away when I flew to San Juan, get it?) and then on my way to Germany. The "bootstrap" budget traveler, but with a business to support him on his way. In fact, this is so right up my alley, that I remember at one point a while back, someone suggested that for my next job I should try to leverage Google Ad-Words on a blog. That's an explicit part of this guy's plan.
Your ideas? Thoughts? Just another too-good-to-be-true self-help flash-in-the-pan load of bullshit, right along with the Scarsdale Diet?
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So let's not get side-tracked on the "foreign market" thing. The simple deal is, learn to think in the right terms. Here are a few of the ideas I've picked up from the book.
1. Working 40 hours a week (which of course adds up to 60 or 90 depending on how pussy-whipped you let yourself become, or even are REQUIRED to become) is for chumps, try to get out of it.
2. You can live off of a lot less than the bond traders want you to think. Especially if you have "passive income," and don't buy stuff, and travel NOT as a tourist but rather MOVE to the new location for extended stays (working from there?).
3. You don't have to retire after a long time. Retire a little bit now, then work a little bit, then repeat the cycle.
4. Conquer your fear of doing the unconventional.
5. One good entrepreneurship venture MIGHT be, to use online "reselling" schemes and automation to create a "muse" type of business -- something that has a lot of minor outsourced fees but still draws an income. Instead of setting up your entrepreneurial venture such that YOU make all the decisions and are therefore the bottleneck for all activity (and therefore you work 100% of the time), pumping up as much profit as you can in the hopes that it will eventually get "good enough" that it will run itself; rather, set it up to run itself essentially in the first place, perhaps at lower profit but thereby also at lower time expenditure for yourself.
I don't know if item 5 is going to work. I'm going to give it a go. I spend a lot of time on the internet, whether or not I have a job. It seems to be something I can just "cobble together" in spare time (and indeed, the plan in the book suggests you do EXACTLY that) at first. Work always has "free" internet connections, for example, and nobody really knows what you're doing if you're typing away, right? I'm going to try to learn to do the "bare minimum" in terms of work whenever that work is "for someone else" (as an employee of a business OWNED by someone else -- stockholders or the richie-rich dudes who are fucking me over, etc.). This may get me fired. But hey! I got fired from my last job for doing "ultra maximum" levels of quality and work commitment anyway! I always get fired. :)
I DO think you're "doing something wrong with the rat race" that you're in. I think we ALL are. What we're doing, is work for the sake of work. If I had done a personal cost-benefit analysis of my last job, I would have found (and I suspected it at the time) that it was an overall negative. I was paid very little, worked very much, spent a lot of money on things I didn't want and services that were necessary merely for keeping me at the workplace, had no longer-term prospects of this situation changing (and, in the truly perverse manner in which humans operate, even if I HAD somehow gotten more money and a little bit better working conditions, nevertheless I likely would have wanted to SPEND that money all over the place again and again, thus justifying nothing but ... trying to get even MORE money).
This isn't about doing without money. The dude who wrote it is developing himself into being a millionaire. This is about rearranging your time commitments to the workplace and saying "fuck you" to the "you have to be here all the time with your warm butt in a chair that I own." I don't really want ANY self-help book that says, "You don't need to go to strip clubs and 'waste' all that money on lap dances." Or, further, "When you go to Brazil for that soccer trip you've always planned on, you can't afford to hire a hot little carioca at the spa to give you three blowjobs an hour." No way, what's the point of going to Brazil or Thailand if you can't ... sample. :) And this book seems to have a few keys toward affording that WITHOUT having to work 40 years and sell your soul to Mannon in the process.
Tony Robbins would agree with the main premise to your book. One of his sayings is that "most people major in minor things." Meaning that most people spend so much time doing trivial things (like email) that they never find time to do what's important.
I think there are a lot of ways to support yourself without having a full-time job if you have no dependents and are willing to live with fewer "things." The first step is to reject our society's values.
Then I found this "other" way to do business. I'd heard of other schemes, but none of them appealed to me. I know about Carleton Sheets and about flipping houses (guy down the block from me is doing that here, after Katrina; it's easier to get at something because people who want to sell are desperate for a "legitimate" buyer -- though they're also less likely to lower their price, since they've already moved on and the semi-ruined house is no skin off their back if it sits there another month or two). I had always thought, "Gosh, I SHOULD do those things but boy they sound like CRAP to me." I wasn't INTERESTED. I know I wouldn't have followed through, because it would have been ... just another grind. Another way to have to have a boring existence.
For me, this new thing seems better. So far, I'm all "into" it in a way I haven't ever been about doing business. I think of myself as the medieval Dutch merchant "building a society" rather than as the capitalist pig lampooned in so many Victorian novels "ruining the common man." It's just an imagination thing, it doesn't have anything to do with reality, but at least it's a step in the profitable direction.
Now I keep seeing business opportunities everywhere I look. On a fountain pen website, where collectors and aficionados congregate, people were complaining about not being able to get fountain-pen-friendly papers in their daily journals and logs. Aha! Make journals with better paper! Sell to fountain pen websites! Do it on the internet, automate it, retire to Costa Rica! It actually sounded interesting to me, instead of like some kind of hell on the web. It might have hassles -- but those would be similar to the problem solving hassles I undergo in finding a decent strip club here at TUSCL, or getting RomanticLover onto my ignore list, or whatever.
So that much is good. Maybe I'm just becoming a grown up. I would like to watch stocks and investments, too, but I don't have anything to invest yet. They always say that the first thing you should put your money into is a six-month "emergency" fund, and I've never exceeded that. I have about $6,000 available in a checking account, am living for free with relatives, have all my stuff up in storage. But I'm expecting to have to take an apartment in NYC soon (zoop, there goes the emergency fund!) and will start work up there, if all goes well.
Get rid of my car, stay in Manhattan a few years. The strip clubs are terrible. :( But I'm sure the business opportunities are wonderful. :)