Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour Reality Check
Silicon Valley's productivity guru takes a month off in Bali. It might be the most demanding vacation ever.
Photograph by Tom Foster
Drink Deeply: Tim Ferriss enjoys a break from his break.
Tim Ferriss wants me to know that pigs have an extremely high feed conversion ratio, or FCR. They grow fast. We're watching a pair of Balinese pig farmers wrestle a giant seven-month-old pig into a cylindrical metal cage, hoist it onto their shoulders on a fat bamboo rod, and carry it off to slaughter. This is taking place just across a small courtyard from Ferriss's bedroom for the next month, a spare room with a cot in a brick-walled compound shared by several families and dozens of farm animals in rural Bali, near the famous hippie town of Ubud.
Ferriss has his own version of a high feed conversion ratio, in which he goes native and absorbs as much of an experience as possible, as quickly as possible, with a kind of obsessive discipline. He's been in Bali only three days, and already he's speaking basic Indonesian with a convincing accent, laughing easily with his host family, waking with the roosters every morning, and helping feed the pigs. Vacation is hard work if you're Tim Ferriss.
None of which should be all that surprising if you're familiar with the Ferriss oeuvre. Ferriss is the author of the mega-best-selling 4-Hour series of self-help books (The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, and his latest, The 4-Hour Chef), which have made him something of a celebrity among the entrepreneurial set for a focus on maximizing results while minimizing time spent, whether in the realm of making money or acquiring skills.
It's been about six years since the publication of The 4-Hour Workweek, his first and most famous book, and Ferriss's life has changed profoundly in the interim, largely because of the book's success. When he was writing 4HWW, as his acolytes call it, Ferriss was running a dietary supplement company, BrainQuicken. He sold BrainQuicken to a London private equity group in 2009 and now spends his days promoting his books (and himself) and advising and investing in tech start-ups, an existence that earns him, he says, "comfortably many millions a year--more than three and less than 100."
The story of how Ferriss got to this point is something of a legend by now. After running BrainQuicken for a couple of years, he was bringing home about $40,000 a month and working nonstop seven days a week. He realized it was making him miserable and resolved to remove himself from day-to-day operations as much as possible, automating or outsourcing everything. He started with a plan to spend four weeks in Europe to clear his head and wound up traveling the world for 15 months. His business continued to thrive without him. When he returned, he kept the company on autopilot and started the process of writing about how he had managed to take back his life. Twenty-seven publishers passed on the book before one finally made a small bet on it and printed a paltry 12,000 copies. Then Ferriss the self-promoter got to work, and the book took off.
But if the autopilot version of running BrainQuicken afforded Ferriss a life of leisure--or at least a lifestyle he could tout as leisure while he was busy working on his next act--the business of being Tim Ferriss, Self-Help Guru, is not quite as accommodating. In The 4-Hour Workweek, Ferriss advises taking regular "mini retirements," ideally a month off for every two months of work. But he hasn't had a proper mini retirement in more than a year now.
Hence the Bali trip, which is an attempt to apply that core principle to his new life and keep from looking like someone who doesn't live by his own advice. Over four weeks, he's planning to become fluent in Indonesian, learn to play gamelan music, exercise or do yoga at least one hour per day, and immerse himself in the life of the family compound. He didn't bring a laptop and swears he won't touch his phone or email or calendar. He has a personal assistant in California handling his day-to-day affairs, and he alerted the founders of the companies he advises that he would be unreachable. "This is the first real complete power reset in the past year," he says. "You can't just set up systems and not test them. So this is a stress test."
