How Does Working Only 4 Hours a Week Sound?

Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Work Week, has become a classic guide for those trying to blaze their path instead of taking the one others want them to follow. Even if you don’t end up working four hours a week, there is much to learn from this book in fine-tuning your career, and more importantly, your quest to Find Your Purpose, Find Your Story.  This is a book that you will frequently revisit, and start here with some of the many memorable quotes from Tim:

“Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.

Doing less meaningless work, so you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness.

Focus on being productive instead of busy.

Ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Money alone is not the solution.

Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.

Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but is useless unless applied to the right things.

Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

Lack of time is actually lack of priorities.

Am I being productive or just active?

Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?

“Task creep” – doing more to feel productive while actually accomplishing less.

Be selectively ignorant. Less is more.

Does your life have a purpose? Are you contributing anything useful to this world, or just shuffling papers, banging on a keyboard, and coming home to a drunken existence on the weekends?

More is not better, and stopping something is often 10 times better than finishing it.

Learn to be difficult when it counts.

Blaming idiots for interruptions is like blaming clowns for scaring children – they can’t help it. It’s their nature.

An interruption is anything that prevents the start-to-finish of a critical task.

Unless something is well-defined and important, no one should do it.

Most people aren’t lucky enough to get fired and die a slow spiritual death over 30-40 years of tolerating the mediocre.

Just because something has been a lot of work or consumed a lot of time doesn’t make it productive or worthwhile.

If tolerating a punishing work environment for years at a time is a prerequisite for promotion in your field, could it be that you’re in a game not worth winning?