The Four-Hour Workweek blog is the companion online presence to the book of the same name, by Tim Ferriss. If you haven’t read the book, or even if you have, I would highly recommend checking out the blog, because I think there’s something in it for everyone who’d like to improve their life.
This is one of those blogs that doesn’t rely on amazing design or stylistic touches. Like Tim Ferris, it’s all about substance rather than style. The point here is changing your life, and if you are drawn in by the prospect you have to take a look at this website.
Some of the things that Ferris talks about on the site, which extend the themes of the book, are how to create passive income streams and free up your time to pursue activities that really interest you. There are specific suggestions on how to use the Internet to create infrastructure and recruit help in the name of building often small businesses to enable you to do this. It all about being an entrepreneur, and it never seems so do-able as when Tim Ferriss talks about it.
Travel is a big part of Ferriss’ lifestyle, but not the sort of ‘binge travel’ vacations that we take as 1-week antidotes to lives that we aren’t happy with. He suggests the sort of travel that enriches rather than simply being fun, and not just for short periods either. There’s plenty of talk of ‘mini-sabbaticals’, constructed around an activity you’ve always wanted to try, and places to which you might go to do things like this. In the blog Ferriss also elaborates on his philosophy of ‘geoarbitrage’ i.e. living in inexpensive parts of the world while you’re making money from customers in parts of the world where people will pay more for products that you are selling. I had not encountered this idea before, but it was one of the really liberating concepts from the book and there are many, many practical suggestions on ways to do this in the blog as well.
As Ferris makes heavy use of technology and the Internet to build ways of making a living, he also somewhat ironically advocates carefully restricting the amount of non-actionable, non-value added information we consume. He calls this the ‘low information diet’ and he suggests we all get on it! He points out the dangers of endless news consumption, game playing, etc. which can degenerate into distractions from producing a means to liberate ourselves and lower our quality of life in general.
Like the book, the Four-Hour Workweek website is an exhilarating experience full of specific suggestions that anyone can use to get off the employment treadmill and become a small-scale entrepreneur. Ferriss has done it himself and the website also features guest posts from people from all walks of life who have completely remade their lives in original and impressive ways. This is an inspirational weblog. And every time I visit I find practical steps and ideas on increasing my quality of life. Highly recommended.NULL