The Book that Changed My Life!

byLundquik

13.9K followers

Updated 8 years ago

My life changed the day I read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. In my opinion, it's a must read for anyone who wants to enter the world of online marketing, or even if you just want to streamline your life.

The 4-Hour Workweek is divided into four sections, each of which explores one of the components to lifestyle design:

• Define your objectives. Decide what’s important. Set goals. Ask yourself, “What do I really want?”
• Eliminate distractions to free up time. Learn to be effective, not efficient. Focus on the 20% of stuff that’s important and ignore the 80% that isn’t. Put yourself on a low-information diet. Learn to shunt aside interruptions, and learn to say “no”.
• Automate your cash flow to increase income. Outsource your life — hire a virtual assistant to handle menial tasks. Develop a business that can run on auto-pilot.
• Liberate yourself from traditional expectations. Design your job to increase mobility. This could mean working from home, or it could mean using geographic arbitrage to take mini-retirements in countries with favorable exchange rates.

Here are 20 quotes from the book to give you an idea of what it's about.

1. Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.
2. What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. As I have heard said, a person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear.
3. Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.
4. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.
5. It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.
6. “SOMEDAY” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you!
7. Learn to ask, “If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?” Don’t ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities.
8. What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.
9. The key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities.
10. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective—doing less—is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.
11. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre.
12. Uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noises in the shadows. Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.
13. Money doesn’t change you; it reveals who you are when you no longer have to be nice.
14. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. The options are almost limitless for creating “busyness”: You could call a few hundred unqualified sales leads, reorganize your Outlook contacts, walk across the office to request documents you don’t really need, or fuss with your BlackBerry for a few hours when you should be prioritizing.
15. Regret is past-tense decision-making. Eliminate complaining to minimize regret.
16. 16. Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life.
17. But you are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.
18. If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are.
19. A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.
20. Opportunities abound in bad times as well as good times. In fact, the opportunities are often greater when the conventional wisdom is that everything is going into the toilet.

I've read The 4-Hour Workweek numerous times. Besides giving me tips, tricks and motivation to keep me going in my pursuit of an online business, it has also given me scientific principles and email management techniques that I use everyday at work in my "day job".

I hope that you have the opportunity to read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.

To your massive success! Kevin