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VISUAL NOTE-TAKING

THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK

Thursday, January 24th, 2008 | Permalink

Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek. Why did I read this book? It was all Tim and Mark’s fault. Also, the fault of the UT librarian who displayed it prominently in the new books section.

After skimming about 2/3 of the way through, I took Tim Ferriss’s own advice from page 88:

Practice the art of non-finishing…Starting something doesn’t automatically justify finishing it…If you are reading [a book] that sucks, put it down and don’t pick it back up…

Great advice! I once wrote a post about walking out on bad concerts that suggested the same.

Like any self-help book, there are a few little fortune-cookie nuggets of wisdom. My favorite was a solution to some questions that have been puzzling me lately: What if I don’t know what I want? What if I don’t have any huge goals? Ferriss suggests, that I’m asking the wrong questions—that what I should be asking is, “What excites me?”

I like that.

The other good part of the book is the idea of a “Low Information Diet.” That is, get off the f***ing computer, don’t watch TV, try to limit your reading only to those things that truly give you pleasure and enrich your life.

Which is why I’m putting this book away and starting Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.

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4 Comments on “THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK”

  1. Tim Says:
    January 24th, 2008 at 8:52 pm

    Your mind-mappy book notes KILL me. I’m gonna work on that…

    Anyway, glad you got something good out of the book.

  2. Mark Says:
    January 24th, 2008 at 11:34 pm

    Oy, I could use a low-info spa treatment. This weekend is as good as any.

    A couple years down the road, it might be cool to see the mind-maps in a bound volume…

  3. Austin Kleon Says:
    January 25th, 2008 at 9:18 am

    Tim: Thank you, sir.

    Mark: I hear ya. I’m going to try to stay unplugged this weekend in San Antonio. I’ve started putting them in a big folder…so you never know…

  4. Austin Kleon Says:
    July 20th, 2008 at 1:46 pm

    Couple of paragraphs from a NYTimes review:

    In only his early 30s, Ferriss suffers from a relative lack of hard knocks; he resorts to citing birth trauma to prove his intimacy with suffering. In his short life, he has nonetheless become rich peddling pills scarily called BrainQuicken and BodyQuick. Do you want to do the same? Precisely the same? Pay attention, then: in this book, Ferriss gives instructions for recreating his own life. Forget “follow your dreams.” Ferriss recommends creating intellectual property by searching Writer’s Market for obscure magazines with 15,000-plus circulations whose readers spend money in the same consumer patterns as, say, bass fishermen, then asking the magazines’ advertising directors to e-mail you rate cards while you search back issues for repeat advertisers who sell directly to consumers via 1-800 numbers and Web sites. I’m not kidding. That’s Step 1.

    Unlike the stern advicemen who follow the 1970s self-help giant M. Scott Peck in insisting that “life is difficult,” Ferriss, whose maxim is “life doesn’t have to be so damn hard,” is above all pro-hokum. In his vertiginous free time, he crash-diets, cheats at kickboxing and persuades people to give him money. He leads the new generation of advice-mongers in proposing to hack the whole American way. Eventually, what he pushes is search-engine optimization — the art of gaming Google by, say, inventively conjoining terms and selling a passworded file that will be the top result retrieved by searches using the conjunction. Once people shell out $4.95 for an electronic document with a title that brings together “lose weight” and “at my computer,” you can sell the suckers longer, more expensive documents. Maybe a T-shirt, too, or protein jelly beans. This stuff is diabolical, and only the young have the stomach for it. As Ferriss points out, Google-testing is how he settled on the title and subject for his real cash cow, “The 4-Hour Workweek.”

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