The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Life changing - if you want to change!

Follow your bliss, and doors will open", Joseph Campbell famously stated. In "The Four Hour Work Week" Tim Ferriss details how he has followed his bliss, and the doors have certainly opened for him. Rather generously, he then tells us how to do the same. I found this book to have much that is very worthwhile. There is an enormous amount of information here, and the reader is free to pick and choose what he/she wants to take or leave. It has changed my life for the better. Some reviewers commented that they found the first half of T4HWW fascinating, but then lost interest. Assuming they are not the very time-deficit folks Ferris talks about, this is probably because the first portion of the book is entertainingly anecdotal, while towards the middle it becomes heavy with lists of information sources - web sites, organisations, reference books and so on. I have personally found this later section to be incredibly useful. That's because I have read and re-read the book with an intention to actually use it. I get the sense that a lot of the critics have never really tried to apply the book's philosophy and specific tips, and quickly returned to re-testing the keypads on their Blackberries. I found many of the listed web sites very useful. I have always wanted to feel the rush of being a colonial master, so I have hired book editors, programmers, virtual assistants, and translators from sites mentioned in the book, and all at very inexpensive prices. If I hadn't read the book, I would not have been aware of that these people even existed; or at the very least, would never have thought that I, with my one-man writing/publishing business, could ever use them. One other philosophical positive, Ferris is scathing of the modern culture of work for work's sake, information overload, and time wasting with gadgets. I fully concur. People are wasting their lives tapping away on mobile phones, Blackberries and lap-tops, just like I am now. There's a whole world out there waiting...