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My assistant Jess is amazing. She’s hard-working, sharp as a tack, and not afraid to tell me when I’m being a complete douchebag. She tells me when I’m doing things I shouldn’t be wasting my time with, such as book keeping. Or spreadsheets. Or anything requiring a long attention span.

Folks, I’m horrible at a lot of things. Book keeping being ‘numero uno’.

Jess keeps me in check by letting me know I should focus on my strengths and let her handle the rest (which just happen to mostly be her strengths). Cool how that works out…

I asked her to read Tim Ferris’ 4 Hour Work Week so that she could understand all the mindset stuff I preach around the workplace like it’s goin’ outta style.

Here’s what she wrote:

When I first started reading the 4-Hour Work-Week by Timothy Ferriss, I was immediately interested, although a little bit skeptical.  I read,

“Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan. There is no need to wait, and no reason not to.”

and I thought, this will be the best book ever.  Who doesn’t want to hear about how you could enjoy your life now, instead of waiting until your 70 and retired? So I started reading and here is what I found.

From the beginning, I thought that the whole mentality of the 4-Hour workweek was just how to minimize your responsibilities and work as little as possible. But as I read it, I found out the basic premise of the book is not how to be lazy, but how to have the time to do what you actually want to be doing.

Cartoon Courtesy of AustinKleon.com

I mean, who doesn’t want to be able to continue to work and have an income, but do so in a manner that  they can also visit Oktoberfest in Germany or run with bulls or climb Kilimanjaro? And who doesn’t want the freedom to do those things now, before you’re really too old or have too many responsibilities to enjoy it?

The whole entire point of this book is to teach you how to be extremely successful in your business by maximizing your time at work, eliminating all distractions (i.e. millions of emails, unnecessary meetings, chats with coworkers, etc.), and outsourcing any task that is feasible to a virtual assistant.

Inside this book, you will find detailed methods of how to become indispensable to your boss, ease him or her into the idea of you working from “home” (wherever that may be), and then practicing principles that he details for you, line by line on how to be successful and accomplish all of your work goals, all the while accomplishing your personal goals as well.

Tim gives you excellent starting points, charts on how to decide what your dreams are and the income necessary to achieve them, and then how to get there. His personal story is one of an entrepreneur, but his principles could apply to any position, although if you’re working for someone else the salary is not necessarily dictated by you.

Either way, you can apply some or all of these principles and begin exploring how to really enjoy your life and do what you want to do right now, not 30 years from now.

I will say the book slowed down a little bit for me in the  middle, but everyone else I have talked to who read it, finished in a day or two and absolutely loved it, so that might just be me.

If you take nothing from this book regarding the outsourcing or working from home, what you absolutely need to put into practice are  the time management tips and prioritization guidelines that are throughout. His insights are invaluable to becoming more productive and less distracted in your workday. And in this day and age with a thousand things pulling at our attention every minute, these tips are an awesome way to get started at being more focused each day at your job.

So, overall I give a huge thumbs up to the 4-Hour Work Week! Go out and get it, you definitely will not be disappointed.

~jess

Tags: 4 Hour Work Week, 4HWW, book review, lifestyle design, Outsourcing, Tim Ferriss