Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss - Status-quo shattering book. I read it through once, and am starting over. The concepts are simple. Deferred living (retirement) is the worst kind of insurance. Live now. Forget abstract goals. Go for what excites you. In fact, go for specific, unreasonable goals that excite you. There's too much competition for the mediocre goals. Less competition for the unreasonable goals (John Nash was wrong; in a pick-up bar, everyone is pursuing the 8's, not the 10's.)

Ferriss makes a four hour workweek seem attainable. It takes discipline. It takes a low information diet and focusing on two principles or laws...

  1. Vilfredo Pareto's 80-20 Principle - 80% of income is produced by 20% of the population. Put another way, 20% of your activities produce 80% of the results. So find those the 20% (customers, employees, investments) that are giving the 80% great results and eliminate the rest. And find 20% of the activities (etc.) that cause 80% of your problems and eliminate those...or something like that.
  2. Parkinson's Law - "A task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion." So set tight deadlines or you'll make a mountain out of a molehill. I discovered this big-time in college. Procrastination...No, though the results can be similar. Take control. Set unreasonable time lines. It focuses the mind and effort, allowing no distractions.

"Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines."

"Most inputs are useless and time is wasted in proportion to the amount of time that is available."

Though if you look at Ferriss' website (or mine!) - http://4hourworkweek.com - you see that more time spent creating a good user experience would have helped. It's a hodgepodge, and though he refers to it often in his book, finding the resources he writes about is difficult. So, as always, such principles must be guided by your priorities to find the right balance of waste-cutting and production.

Very interesting reading.

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