What do you think of Tim Ferriss' philosophy? Is it possible for everyone on our planet to live the 'Four-Hour-Work-Week' lifestyle?

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Hi Loy! Tim’s philosophy is extremely misunderstood. Few people do more than just pick up the book, try a few things, then conclude the whole thing is bunk because they didn’t follow through. On the other end of it, they fail to appreciate that Tim started from a quite privileged position in his life and was singularly motivated like few of us are, and anyone trying to replicate his success is going to have to make up that gap.

Tim Ferriss routinely clocked in 100+ hour weeks in his quest to get rich. In other words, he was the world’s biggest workaholic. The genesis of his book came about after he burned the candle on both ends for so long, it took not only his house down but also his neighbor’s house with it.

That said, his book aims to teach anyone to do it better, quicker, and more sustainably than Tim did. Obviously some people have had success with putting Tim’s ideas to work. Personally in my life, the big win for me was the realization that a person could, if they were a top performer at their job, negotiate perks. Tim offered some extremely useful advice for doing that that I took to heart.

I never took the next step of starting a muse. Shortly after I read the book, I did do some traveling, and considered making the ‘travel lifestyle’ mine. But by the time it was time for me to come home, I was ready. I am a homebody, not a vagabond.

My ideal lifestyle is not a 4 hour work week, but rather a 4–5 hour work day. And Tim’s business advice simply wouldn’t work for me. I’m an engineer, not a businessman. I want to deal with the world in terms of infrastructure and solving problems, not in terms of products and markets. Ultimately Tim and I are very very different people. I took his book, learned what I could from it, but it did not provide me with any kind of North Star to follow.

You see, I didn’t stop with 4HWW, I went and read through most of the supplemental reading, the ideas Tim riffed on when writing his book. The E-Myth Revisited was the one I remembered the most, but I did go through a significant fraction of them. At the end of the day, a lifestyle change on the order of starting and maintaining a muse would have been like turning an ocean liner for me, and I like my life the way it is.

You asked a good question, “Is it possible for everyone on our planet to live the ‘Four-Hour-Work-Week’ lifestyle,” this question would be useful to unpack. There’s a difference between asking if everyone can do it at the same time, rather than if anyone can do it.

If you asked whether anyone could do it, I’d answer with a heavily qualified ‘sure, why not’. Anyone could go read the supplemental materials, then beat their head against an online business for a few years until it manages to start making money, then beat their head against the issues you’ll run into trying to automate it. It’s not impossible.

But Tim’s book is not a blueprint you can follow. It’s not even really a decent map. It’s Arnold Schwarzenegger giving you a thumbs up and saying that you too could be a famous actor and bodybuilder.

That said, could everyone do it? I’d actually rank that as something that’s more achievable than any one random person. Commerce is going that way. I mean, we can’t literally structure all human economic activity that way, someone still has to grow the food and do physical labor that hasn’t been automated, but we’re rapidly reaching the point where less and less human labor is needed in order to provide a modern lifestyle for everyone.

The basic realities of life that keep firms together are going to break down eventually, and getting humans to agree to do anything for you is going to have to be negotiated on much fairer ground than the typical employer-employee relationship.