Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour Reality Check
It's not hard to understand why Ferriss's message has achieved mainstream success. It promises an easy path to big rewards--in Ferriss's case, quality of life as defined by Corona ads, with or without the attendant riches. What's less obvious is why The 4-Hour Workweek became a runaway success in the technology start-up world and has given Ferriss vast credibility in Silicon Valley.
On the surface, there's a disconnect between most ambitious entrepreneurs and the audience Ferriss seems to target in The 4-Hour Workweek. The book is about, and for, people who dislike what their work has done to their lives. A lot of tech entrepreneurs, on the other hand, want nothing more than to work.
But there are also similarities between Ferriss's approach to lifestyle and the hacker mindset of Silicon Valley. Both are looking for the shortest path to a desired outcome, and both take it as an inherent good to exploit an existing rule to your benefit, or, better yet, to write an entirely new set of rules. "The 4-Hour Workweek was really about hacking your time," says Mike Maples, founder of the venture capital firm Floodgate and an occasional co-investor with Ferriss. "The book could have just been called Time Hacks. 4-Hour Body could have been called Body Hacks. To some degree, even though those weren't the titles, the idea immediately resonated with that hacker mentality."
One of the key ways Ferriss tries to disrupt how people think about productivity is by urging them not to think in terms of time management. "I think time management as a label encourages people to view each 24-hour period as a slot in which they should pack as much as possible," Ferriss says. For maximum productivity, in his view, people should focus on doing less, not more. The point is to maximize the outcome, not the amount of work.
One of Ferriss's more heretical pieces of advice is based on what he calls the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of your productivity comes from 20 percent of your efforts, and likewise, 80 percent of your wasted time comes from 20 percent of the possible causes. So eliminate the 20-percent time wasters, and spend as much energy as possible on the productive 20 percent. Ferriss's favorite example of acting on this phenomenon comes from his BrainQuicken days, when he realized two customers were the source of nearly all of his work stress, and the effect was carrying over into his personal life. He read those customers the riot act. One reformed. The other Ferriss fired. Immediately, he had more time for his healthier business relationships, and his bottom line grew.
"That passage just leapt off the page for me," says Tobi Lütke, the CEO of the e-commerce platform Shopify, another company Ferriss advises. "If you go into business school and suggest firing a customer, they'll kick you out of the building. But it's so true in my experience. It allows you to identify the customers you really want to work with. If you never engage in the process, it's very difficult to have such a crisp definition of the kinds of people you're looking for."
Ferriss's fans tend to cherry-pick techniques from his work, something he encourages. He himself has had to cherry-pick and improvise a bit, now that he's not running a business on autopilot. His assistant, whom he found through TaskRabbit, still helps run his schedule, ships books to the cities where he's doing readings, and does research projects (she set up the whole Bali trip, for example--a process that involved a 40-page PowerPoint presentation detailing his options). But marketing, for instance, is trickier. "It's harder now to set up systems," he concedes. "In the BrainQuicken days, people wanted a product, but now they want me, so the key for me is to create products that don't require me to be there"--blog posts, say. But he insists on writing his own blog, and that's harder and more time-consuming than outsourcing the manufacture and distribution of supplements. "There are certain things I will automate, but when it comes to quality control, I want to keep a very close eye."
As part of his ascetic trip, Ferriss is abstaining from alcohol while he's in Bali, so one day we spend happy hour at an organic café in Ubud nursing glasses of turmeric juice, a chalky concoction the color of ballpark mustard that's said to have myriad healing properties. "I feel like they might have blended some carrot in this to make it more palatable," he says, disappointed.
If there's one idea that ties Ferriss's three books together, it's continuous self-improvement. Ferriss runs his life like a high-tech Japanese auto factory, in which every move is evaluated, every input and output is measured for efficiency. (In the latter case, quite literally: While he was writing The 4-Hour Body, he even weighed his excrement.)
Much as he's planning to learn Indonesian and gamelan in Bali, Ferriss is constantly pursuing new skills. Among his biggest education projects in the past few years has been learning to operate like a tech entrepreneur, despite never having worked in a tech start-up. The pursuit has paid off handsomely. He's invested in or advised (in exchange for equity) about 30 start-ups, many of which make tools that help people be more productive. It's an impressive list of companies--in addition to Shopify and TaskRabbit, he's invested in Evernote, Uber, Rally, and Reputation.com, among others. His co-investors include Digg founder Kevin Rose (now a partner at Google Ventures), About.me founder Tony Conrad, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom, and Mike Maples.
This immersion raises the question of whether Ferriss himself harbors dreams of his own tech start-up--maybe a suite of productivity tools or an online life-coaching service--and cashing in big. But his sights are on less obvious ideas. "I'm not averse to making a lot of money," he says. "But where does that end? I hang out with people with hundreds of millions of dollars. Is that the standard by which I should measure myself? Where does that take you if you're in my business? I think it takes you to pretty dark, corrupt places. And every time I find myself stressed out, it's because I do things primarily driven by growth."
Ferriss is toying with the idea of a digital animation studio, to create how-to videos. He's interested in pursuing a TV deal--maybe something focused on "rapid learning with some high stakes involved." He's interested in acquiring rights to foreign or out-of-print books and other content and selling it to his audience--creating, in effect, a Ferriss-approved self-help network.
"I have plenty of money to do what I want to do, and I have the relationships," Ferriss says. "Part of this trip is trying to push back from keeping up with the Joneses. It's easy to get caught up in that. But to unplug like this, which a lot of people in Silicon Valley will not do.... They want to keep up with me."
