Work from home for only 4 hour a week?

I just finished reading ‘4 hour work week‘ and I can understand why this book has been a bestseller for so long. While most of us are dreaming of go travel round the world with no money worry, Timothy Ferriss, the author, is doing it now.

He has raced motorcycles in Europe, ski in the Andes, scuba dive in Panama, won a kick boxing competition, danced tango in Buenos Aires and a whole lot of other activities.

Is it big deal? From my point of view, yes!

Why? Because he did all these things in his mini-retirements. No typo, I mean retirementS! They are long vacations that last three to 6 months. Now, how many of us can do that?

Tim used to work 15-hour work day in his business until he came across the 80/20 rules. He took 2 days off his schedule and dissected his business model. He found that indeed about 80% of his income come from 20 % of his clients.

Besides this, he also analyze which clients gave him the most headache. And after the analysis, he fired one of his big clients as the support provided is too much.

Then he start to outsource his business operations to virtual assistants who are based in India. He even empowered them to handle financial matters such as handling refunds. The last I heard he even get his virtual assistants to arrange dates for him!

With more time on his hand, he started taking mini-retirements.  He only spend 1 to 4 hours per week communicating with his assistants via emails so that he know what is going on in his business.

Besides outsourcing, Tim also touched on the importance of managing your time. At one stage, he has so much time on hand that he did not know what to do. He warned that many people will start creating things to do to fill the gap. This is bad and can reverse what you have achieved (time and financial freedom).

The books also contained many examples of other regular guys who achieved similar lifestyle as him. If you do not have time to read the nook, just read all the examples. They are very interesting and inspiring.

This book is not without its flaw. There are a few chapters which I think can be shortened or dropped totally. Some areas can be expand further.

But overall, I find this book very enjoyable to read. In fact, I finished reading the book in 1 weekend, which is rare for me. Most of the time, I will take a week to finish a non-fiction book with these many pages. And it will strike a cord with many people, in particular those in a dead end job.