The 4-Hour Workweek | Book Notes

This is a book about lifestyle design. Those who design their life in accordance with Tim Ferriss’s principles achieve a 4-hour workweek and far more. They’ve “seen the promised land, and there is good news. You can have it all.” Though it may sound too good to be true, I urge you to give these ideas a try. It has worked for thousands of people, including myself.

To get the most from this book, you don’t need to hate your job or have grand plans to travel the world. You don’t need to be a risk-taking, single twenty-something, Ivy League graduate. You only need to desire to live life as you want it now, instead of during some faraway retirement. For anyone sick of the deferred-life mentality of “once I have X, then I’ll do Y,” this is a must-read.

“There is a way to get the rewards for a life of hard work without waiting until the end.” It begins with a simple distinction: people don’t want to be millionaires; they want to experience what they believe millions can buy: freedom.

The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and live luxuriously in the present with the currency of the NR: time and mobility. Achieving the millionaire lifestyle of complete freedom, without first having millions, requires Lifestyle Design (LD). 

You must see and seize the options others do not by being a dealmaker and negotiating with reality. “All rules can be broken.” The DEAL of “dealmaker” is the acronym that captures the step-by-step process to join the NR, which this entire book revolves around.

• D for Definition introduces the rules and goals of the new game, turns common sense upside-down, and lays the fundamentals before we add the three ingredients of Lifestyle Design in the next sections.
• E for Elimination destroys the outdated notion of time management and puts time back in your hands. This section provides the first ingredient of LD: time.
• A for Automation puts cash flow on autopilot, giving you the second ingredient of LD: income.
• L for Liberation forever breaks the chains that confine you to a single location, delivering the third and final ingredient of LD: mobility.

Read the steps in the entrepreneurially minded DEAL order, but if you’re an employee, implement them in the DELA order. Your boss will not be happy if you, having Automated your income, spend one hour in the office a day. Liberate yourself from the office first.

This book is not about:

1. The problem. Ferriss assumes you are suffering from time famine, dread, or most commonly, “a tolerable and comfortable existence doing something unfulfilling.”
2. Saving. You don’t need to choose between enjoyment today or money later. You can have both.
3. Finding your dream job. The vast majority will not find a job of unending fulfillment, so it’s a given that the best job is the one that takes the least time.

Much of what Ferriss recommends “will seem impossible and even offensive to basic common sense.” But if you keep an open mind and try things out, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. There are many testimonials from Lifestyle Design practitioners, and the book includes their stories. Though I’ll omit them in this summary, just know these principles are tried and true.

A Three-Sentence Summary

1. You can have it all and live like a millionaire without needing to be one.
2. Negotiate with reality to act on your dreams instead of deferring life.
3. Gain time, income, and mobility by eliminating interruptions, automating cash flow, and liberating yourself from a single location, respectively.

A Detailed Summary

Here’s how I came up with my three-sentence summary.

You can have it all and live like a millionaire without needing to be one.

People want to be millionaires for the freedom it allows, not for the numbers in the bank account. They want to experience time freedom, financial freedom, and location freedom. The good news is that you can achieve all these things without being part of the ultrarich, and you can achieve it more easily than you think.

Negotiate with reality to act on your dreams instead of deferring life.

Achieving the time and mobility of the New Rich requires you to play by new rules. To get your way in a world of Deferrers, you must have the courage to boldly act on your dreams now and disregard what others think of you. Learn to negotiate with the circumstances and obstacles you face.

Gain time, income, and mobility by eliminating interruptions, automating cash flow, and liberating yourself from a single location, respectively.

As a DEALmaker, you must first Define your goals, which are time, income, and mobility. To gain time, Eliminate interruptions and unimportant tasks and get on a low-information diet. To generate income, create a muse, an Automated system to generate cash without consuming time. Lastly, to Liberate yourself, negotiate a remote work arrangement or quit your job.

Step I: D Is for Definition

Comparisons

Let’s see what separates the New Rich (NR) from the all-too-common Deferrer (D), ”those who save it all for the end only to find that life has passed them by.” We’ll start with a comparison of their goals.

D: to work for yourself. NR: to have others work for you.

D: to work when you want. NR: to do the minimum necessary for maximum effect.

D: to retire early. NR: to distribute mini-retirements throughout life regularly and recognize that inactivity is not the goal. 

D: to buy all the things you want to have. NR: to do all the things you want to do and be all the things you want to be. If this includes some possessions, so be it, but they aren’t the focus.

D: to have more. NR: to have more quality and less clutter.

D: to make a bunch of money. NR: to make a bunch of money with defined reasons, dreams, timelines, and steps.

D: to have freedom from doing the things you dislike. NR: to have freedom from doing the things you dislike and the resolve to pursue your dreams. The goal is not only to eliminate the bad, which only leaves you with a void, but to pursue and experience the world.

Being financially rich and living a millionaire lifestyle are two completely different things. “Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it.”

Compare the 80-hour-per-week, $500,000-per-year investment banker with the 20-hour-per-week, $40,000-per-year NR. 

What: to keep up with their coworkers, the banker spends money on status symbols he doesn’t care for. The NR spend money on what they genuinely desire.

When: the banker is dictated by the schedule of the company and can only enjoy himself during his off time. When that time actually comes, he’s so tired or distracted that he can’t savor the moment. On the other hand, the NR spend the most energetic parts of the day and the best decades of their life on what they love.

Where: the banker is limited to the location they reside, and everything costs more in that high-income area. The NR has the world to experience, and it often costs far less than rent in the U.S.

Whom: the banker has little choice over the coworkers he spends the majority of his active time with. At best, they don’t annoy him. Whereas, the NR spend their energy and time with loved ones.

Rules that change the rules

There’s a difference between challenging the status quo and being stupid. If most people walk on their legs, do you choose to walk with your hands in the name of being different?

Different is only better when it’s more effective or fun. If everyone is defining a problem and solving it in one way and the results are subpar, this is the time to challenge the status quo. “If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are.” Here is the new recipe and its ten new rules.

First, retirement is worst-case-scenario insurance. Treating retirement as anything more than that, much less a goal, is flawed for three reasons. First, it assumes you’re spending your prime years doing what you dislike, and nothing can justify that sacrifice. Second, most people cannot maintain a high standard of living in retirement with inflation and the growing life expectancy. Third, even if you do have enough money, you’ll be so bored one week into retirement that you’ll look for work to do. That said, still plan for the worst case and contribute to your 401(k) and IRA.

Second, interest and energy are cyclical. Alternating periods of activity and rest are necessary to survive, let alone thrive. Capacity, interest, and mental capacity all wax and wane. By working only when you’re most effective, life is more productive and enjoyable. That’s why the NR distribute mini-retirements throughout life instead of hoarding the recovery for retirement at the end.

Third, less is not laziness. It’s hard to accept in a culture where long hours equals social validation and contributions often are measured in time and not results. The NR, despite fewer hours, produce far more meaningful outcomes in both business and personal life. Be productive, not busy.

Fourth, the timing is never right. The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. “Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave. If it’s important that you do it, just take action and correct course along the way.

Fifth, ask for forgiveness, not permission. People are eager to stop you if you haven’t started, but they’re hesitant if you’re already moving. Try actions and justify them later, and say sorry if you screw up.

Sixth, emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses. “Most people are good at a handful of things and utterly miserable at most.” Working on strengths is more fun and multiplies results while working on weaknesses only increments results.

Seventh, things in excess become their opposite. This is true of everything, including possessions and time. Lifestyle Design doesn’t focus on creating an excess of time but rather focuses on the meaningful use of free time. 

Eighth, money alone is not the solution. We often use our supposed lack of money as an excuse to postpone the intense self-examination necessary to create a life of enjoyment. We trap ourselves in an all-consuming work routine to avoid dealing with deeper issues. Pay attention to more than just money.

Ninth, relative income is more important than absolute income. Absolute income is measured with one variable: the dollar. Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time. Instead of measuring income by salary, measure income by your hourly rate. 

Tenth, distress is bad, eustress is good. Not all stress is bad. Learn to tell the types of stress apart, and avoid distress while seeking eustress. Distress could be destructive criticism or physical injury, while eustress could be constructive feedback or exercise. Distress makes you weaker and less confident, while eustress stimulates growth. 

Fear-setting

Nine to five for a working lifetime of 40 years is “500 months” of nonstop work. Yet, we manage to spend 500 months of our time on an uninspiring job. We postpone action on our dreams out of fear.

People disguise their fear as optimistic denial, believing that things will get better eventually. Are you better off than you were a few months ago? Do not fool yourself and use wishful thinking as an excuse for inaction.

To break free of the fear to pursue your dreams, you must first define your fears by answering questions in a process known as fear-setting. Write down your answers to these questions, as “thinking a lot will not prove as fruitful or as prolific as simply brain vomiting on the page.”

1. What is the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering?
2. In that worst-case scenario, what steps could you take to repair the damage?
3. What are the outcomes and benefits of the more probable scenario?
4. If you were fired today, what would you do to get things under financial control?
5. What are you putting off out of fear?
6. What is it costing you financially, emotionally, and physically to postpone action?
7. What are you waiting for?

Often, you realize your fear is blown out of proportion. Even if your highly unlikely worst-case scenario does happen, it wouldn’t be too hard to get back to where you were. On the other hand, a likely probable-case scenario would have a positive life-changing effect.

“Measure the cost of inaction, realize the unlikelihood and repairability of most missteps, and develop the most important habit of those who excel and enjoy doing so: action.”

System reset

Reset your expectations on what you can achieve. Doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic, for two reasons. 

First, there’s less competition for big goals. “The fishing is best where the fewest go.” The competition is the fiercest for realistic goals, as 99% of people are convinced they’re incapable of greater things. Do not overestimate others and underestimate yourself. If you feel insecure, incompetent, or otherwise lacking, recognize these are universal human feelings shared by others too. 

Second, a greater goal provides the endurance to withstand challenges. “If the potential payoff is mediocre or average, so is your effort.” Realistic goals are uninspiring and will not fuel you for long, while grand goals will sustain you throughout the course.

Choosing goals

Well, what goals should you choose? What is the outcome that makes the effort worth it? Happiness. But happiness is too vague. We need a more practical synonym for happiness. Let’s do an exploration.

The opposite of love is not hate but indifference. The opposite of feeling can only be the absence of feeling. Love and hate are intertwined, as we’ve often hated the people we love most. Similarly, the opposite of happiness is not sadness but boredom. It follows that excitement closely resembles happiness. The question shouldn’t be “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”

Answer that question precisely. Otherwise, you’ll work until death. If you think, “I’ll work until I have X dollars and then do what I want,” and don’t define “what I want,” you’ll raise the X figure indefinitely to postpone answering the question.

What do you want, or what excites you? To answer this, we’ll go through a process called dreamlining that applies timelines to dreams. Revisit this process whenever the Deferrer mentality creeps in and indefinitely raises the X figure.

Dreamlining

Dreamlining differs from goal setting in three ways: goals are unrealistic to be effective, have defined steps, and focus on activities to fill the vacuum when work is removed. It’s important to avoid boredom, as it’s the opposite of excitement. As Victor Frankl said, “The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.”

Let’s fill out a dreamline.

Steps 1, 2, and 3: create a dreamline for six months, listing up to five things you dream of having, being, and doing. Don’t limit yourself or be concerned with how these things will be accomplished. “Be sure not to judge or fool yourself. If you really want a Ferrari, don’t put down solving world hunger out of guilt.”

For all their complaining about what’s holding them back, most people have trouble coming up with what they’re being held back from, especially in the “doing” category. Think, what would make you most excited to wake up to another day?

Step 4: convert each “being” to a “doing” to make it actionable. Then, put a star next to the four most important dreams. 

Step 5: figure out the monthly cost for each of the four dreams. Next, determine your total monthly expenses by adding up rent or mortgage payments, utilities, insurance, groceries, etc. Finally, add the total monthly cost of the four dreams to 1.3 times your monthly expenses. The 1.3 factor is a buffer for safety and savings. The total is your Target Monthly Income (TMI). Divide this by 30 to get your Target Daily Income (TDI).

Step 6: determine three steps for each of the four dreams. Set simple, well-defined actions for today, tomorrow, and the day after. Then, complete today’s four actions for your four dreams now. Each should be simple enough to do in five minutes. If not, tone it down. If the action revolves around research, don’t get paralysis by analysis by spending too much time reading books and articles. Instead, consult someone who has done it. “Tomorrow becomes never. No matter how small the task, take the first step now!”

Step II: E Is for Elimination

The end of time management

Forget traditional time management. You shouldn’t be trying to stuff every second with some sort of work. Instead, enter the world of elimination.

Now that we have Defined what we want to do with our time, we need to free that time. This section will increase productivity, giving employees the leverage to negotiate pay raises and a remote working arrangement, and giving entrepreneurs increased profit.

Let’s understand the foundational terms.

Being effective versus being efficient: effectiveness is doing things that get you closer to your goals, while efficiency is completing a task (whether important or not) in the most economical way. Doing something well or spending a lot of time on something does not make it important. “What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.” Efficiency is useless unless applied to the right things.

The Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule): the principle states that “80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs.” 80% of the wealth is produced and possessed by 20% of the people, 80% of Pareto’s garden peas were produced by 20% of the plants, and so on. The ratio is often skewed more severely, but we’ll keep it at 80/20 for the sake of explanation.

Ask yourself, which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness? Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness? Do an intense truth-baring analysis, applying these questions to everything from relationships to work. Find inefficiencies so you can eliminate them, and find strengths so you can multiply them. 

The truth often hurts. Most things make no difference. “Being busy is a form of laziness–lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.” A lack of time is actually a lack of priorities. Experiment to see which activities pull the most weight, which shouldn’t take more than a month or two.

The 9-5 illusion: how is it possible that everyone in the world needs exactly eight hours to finish their work? It’s not. 9-5 is an arbitrary illusion. You don’t need eight hours a day to become a millionaire. “Eight hours per week is often excessive.” But since we’re stuck in the office from 9-5, we’re compelled to create activities to fill the time.

Parkinson’s law: this law dictates a task will swell in complexity to fill up the time allotted for its completion. “It is the magic of the imminent deadline.” Time pressure forces you to focus on the bare essentials, while an abundance of time creates deliberation, a loss of focus, and needless complexity. The end product of the shorter deadline is just as good, if not better, due to greater focus.

The Pareto principle and Parkinson’s law are two sides of the same coin:

• The Pareto principle: limit tasks to the important to shorten work time.
• Parkinson’s law: shorten work time to limit tasks to the important.

The best solution is to combine the two, identifying the few critical tasks that contribute most to your desired outcomes (Pareto) and scheduling them with short and clear deadlines (Parkinson’s).

“Most inputs are useless and time is wasted in proportion to the amount that is available.” To have more time, do less. Contemplate these questions:

• Are you being productive or just active?
• Are you inventing things to do to avoid the important?
• If you had a heart attack and had to work two hours per day, what would you do? 
• If you had a second heart attack and had to work two hours per week, what would you do?
• If you had a gun to your head and had to stop doing four-fifths of time-consuming activities, what would you remove?
• What are the top three activities that you use to fill time to feel as though you’ve been productive?
• Who are the 20% of people who produce 80% of your enjoyment, and who are the 20% of people who produce 80% of your anger and second-guessing?
• If this is the only thing you accomplish today, will you be satisfied with your day?

The low-information diet

Ferriss never watches the news and has “bought one single newspaper in the last five years,” and I’m just the same, minus buying that one newspaper. Why do I say this as if I’m bragging about it? It’s because I am.

“Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence. I challenge you to look at whatever you read or watched today and tell me that it wasn’t at least two of the four.”

How do you stay informed? First off, you don’t need to be emotionally involved with everything that happens to everyone everywhere. Second, if you actually do need to be informed, like during a presidential election, send emails to educated friends who share your values and ask them for their opinion. “It was like having dozens of personal information assistants, and I didn’t have to pay them a single cent.”

What if you want to learn something a friend doesn’t know? Just pick out a book based on reader reviews and the fact the author has actually done what you want to do. You can also choose to contact the world’s experts on the topic and gain a mentor in the process. Remember, unrealistic goals are easier to achieve than realistic goals.

Follow these three steps to get on the low-information diet of the NR.

First, go on an immediate one-week media fast. No newspapers, magazines, audiobooks, radio, news websites, television, books, or web surfing. The only exceptions are music, one hour of TV pleasure viewing per day, this book, and necessary web surfing to complete the day’s tasks. You’ll realize the “world doesn’t even hiccup, much less end, when you cut the information umbilical cord.”

What do you do with the extra time? Rediscover the lost art of talking. Replace the newspaper at breakfast with family conversation. During lunch break, talk with a colleague. Ask them if anything important happened in the world. Stop when you realize their answer doesn’t affect your actions in any way.

Second, develop the habit of asking yourself, “Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?” Information must be immediate and important. If it can’t be used immediately, it will be forgotten. If it cannot be applied to something important, it’s useless. Focus on “just-in-time” information instead of “just-in-case” information.

Third, practice the art of nonfinishing. Starting something doesn’t necessitate finishing it. If what you’re reading sucks, stop reading.

Interrupting interruption and the art of refusal

Doing the important and ignoring the trivial is hard because people force crap upon you. So, “Learn to be difficult when it counts… having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment.” There are a few routine changes that make bothering you more painful than leaving you alone.

We’ll learn to deal with the three principal types of interruptions:

1. Time wasters: things that can be ignored with little consequence, like unimportant meetings, emails, and web surfing.
2. Time consumers: all necessary and repetitive tasks including email, phone calls, personal errands, and more.
3. Empowerment failures: instances when someone needs your approval to make something small happen.

Time wasters

Eliminate these interruptions by limiting your availability and directing all communication towards action.

The greatest single interruption in the modern world is email. Limit this by turning off any notifications and only checking email at designated times. Checking email twice per day, at 12 pm and 4 pm, is sufficient. 

Never check email first thing in the morning. Instead, use the time before 11 am to complete your most important task. You can create an email autoresponse to tell others that you will only be checking email during designated times due to a high workload. For autoresponse templates, check out the book. 

Move to once-per-day as soon as possible. “People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important. This autoresponse is a tool that, far from decreasing collective effectiveness, forces people to re-evaluate their reason for interrupting you and helps decrease meaningless and time-consuming contact.” 

Ferriss was initially terrified of missing important requests but “Nothing happened,” and he was the sole owner and employee of his sports supplement company.

Next, screen and limit phone calls. Make your number hard to obtain. For example, Ferriss has two telephone numbers, one office line and one cellular. The office line always goes to voicemail, automatically responding with a message that encourages them to email and includes his cellular phone number for true emergencies. 

If someone does call you, treat it as urgent. “Don’t encourage people to chitchat and don’t let them chitchat. Get them to the point immediately.” To do this, say you’re in the middle of something but have a few minutes to spare. 

The next most common time waster is meetings. Avoid all meetings that do not have a clear objective. Some people may be offended the first few times they are rejected, but they’ll eventually accept it and move on. “Don’t suffer fools or you’ll become one.”

“It is your job to train those around you to be effective and efficient.” Follow these steps:

One, steer people towards the following modes of communication, in order of preference: email, phone, and meeting. If someone asks for a meeting, ask for an email and use the phone as a fallback offer. Cite urgent work tasks as your reason.

Two, respond to voicemails by email when possible. It trains people to be concise. Use the “if… then” structure to limit the back-and-forths. For instance, “Can you meet at 3 pm? If not, then please let me know three other times that work.”

Three, meetings should only be held to make decisions about a predefined situation, not to define the problem. If someone asks for a meeting, ask them to email you with an agenda so you can best prepare. Adding a “thanks in advance” increases your chances of getting that email. “Nine times out of ten, a meeting is unnecessary and you can answer the questions, once defined, via email.”

Four, if you cannot stop a meeting from happening, define an end time. Cite other commitments. “If things are well-defined, decisions should not take more than 30 minutes.” If you cannot control the meeting length, let the organizer know that you have something in 15 minutes and would like to cover your portion first. Have someone else update you later. 

Five, don’t permit casual visitors to your cubicle. Some use a do not disturb sign. Ferriss puts on headphones, even if he isn’t listening to anything. To keep it simple, just let the invader know you’re in the middle of something but have a couple of minutes to spare. If they need more time, ask them to send an email.

Six, use the Puppy Dog Close to get others into the no-meeting habit. “If someone likes a puppy but is hesitant to make the life-altering purchase, just offer to let them take the pup home and bring it back if they change their minds… the return seldom happens.” Instead of asking for no meetings forever, repeat the disappearing act as often as possible, citing improved productivity. Ask “Just this once!” Use this tactic, but don’t fall for it, like when a boss asks for overtime “just this once.”

Time consumers

For the repetitive time-consuming tasks that interrupt the most important, use an approach called batching: wait until you have a larger task or order to do it. Just like you wouldn’t do the laundry every time you dirtied a piece of clothing, you shouldn’t do a small task every time it comes up. 

“There is an inescapable setup time for all tasks, large or minuscule.” This psychological switching of gears consumes “more than a quarter of each 9-5 period (28%). This is true of all recurring tasks and is precisely why we have already decided to check mail and phone calls twice per day at specific predetermined times.”

Batch both personal and business tasks further and further and realize “just how few real problems come up.” Let’s do the math. Consider if moving from a twice-per-week email-checking frequency to a once-per-week frequency saved you 5 hours but made you lose $50 in sales. Suppose your calculated hourly rate is $30, so those 5 hours would “cost” you $150. You’d come out with a net profit of $100. Stop batching when the cost of problems exceeds the money saved. 

If you consider the benefits of completing important tasks with the energy and cognitive power saved by batching, the value of batching is much higher than its per-hour savings.

Empowerment failures

It’s what happens when you can’t complete a task without first obtaining permission or information. It’s common if you are micromanaging others or are being micromanaged yourself.

The solution is different between employees and entrepreneurs. As an employee, the goal is full access to necessary information and as much independent decision-making ability as possible. As an entrepreneur, the goal is to grant as much information and decision-making ability as possible to your employees.

If you’re a micromanaged employee, explain to your boss that you want to interrupt them less and be more productive. Have a few proposals in mind, like being able to fix a customer issue for less than $100 without first getting permission, that would help you work more autonomously. Propose a trial period during which your boss can review your decisions on a daily or weekly basis.

If you’re a micromanaging entrepreneur, empower others to act without interrupting you. “It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.”

Actions

To sum up the actions to deflect interruptions:

1. Time wasters: create systems to limit your availability and deflect inappropriate contact, especially meetings.
2. Time consumers: batch repetitive tasks to limit setup costs and provide more time for the important things.
3. Empowerment failures: set or request autonomous rules and guidelines with occasional reviews of results.

Step III: A Is for Automation

Outsourcing life

Having eliminated the interruptions, you’re down to the bare essentials: personal tasks and important work items. Think you can’t get rid of these? Think again. Think outsourcing.

Getting a remote virtual assistant (VA) is a huge departure point. It trains you in the “most critical of NR skills: remote management and communication.” You learn basic entrepreneurship and build a system to replace yourself. Even if you have no intention of becoming an entrepreneur, and even if you don’t end up being replaced, this exercise will cut any remaining inefficiencies from your schedule.

Whether or not you need a VA is irrelevant. This low-cost exercise gets you past the hurdle of paying others to do work for you. “You can always do something more cheaply yourself,” but it doesn’t mean you should spend your time doing it.

Delegating 101

Before delegating, eliminate. If the task can’t be eliminated or automated, only then consider delegating. Otherwise, you delegate unnecessary work that wastes your hard-earned cash. For example, instead of hiring a VA to read emails, eliminated the vast majority of your emails.

Now, what should you delegate? The delegated task “must be both time-consuming and well-defined.” Apart from that, a VA can do nearly anything that doesn’t require their physical presence, which is little in today’s day and age. 

Common tasks include web research, website maintenance, document creation, managing recruitment processes, scheduling meetings, and preparing presentations. But don’t limit yourself. VAs have sent flowers and cards, arranged parties, and even got a job for a client. Just ask if something is possible.

“Foreign assistance isn’t just for the small time. I know from firsthand discussions that executives from big five accounting and management consulting firms routinely charge clients six figures for research reports that are then farmed to India for low four figures.”

To where should you delegate? For the most part, delegate overseas to countries like India and China. There are plenty of options listed in the book. Not only do you get lower rates, the time zone difference means they work while you sleep. You can give work to them at the day’s end and get it the next morning.

Focus on cost per completed task, not cost per hour. If you need to spend time restating the task and otherwise managing the VA, add your per-hour rate to the end price of the task. “The biggest challenge with overseas help will be the language barrier, which often quadruples back-and-forth discussion and the ultimate cost.” That said, pricier overseas VAs fluent in English can duplicate the native speaker results.

Test a few assistants and sharpen your communication skills in the process. “It is impossible to predict how well you will work with a given VA without a trial.”

Lastly, opt for a support team over a solo VA. Hire a VA firm or VAs with backup operators. There are two major benefits. First, if anything happens to your VA, there’s always a backup. Second, a pool of talent allows you to assign varying tasks without bothering to find a person with specific qualifications.

Common fears

To address your number one fear: what if they run away with my confidential information? The good news: “In all of the interviews I conducted for this section, I could find only one case of information abuse, and I had to search long and hard.” That said, protect yourself in these three ways.

One, never use the new hire. Prohibit small VA firms to subcontract work to freelancers without your permission. Better yet, work with established higher-end firms, which all have security measures in place. Data is “100 times safer” with these firms than on your own computer.

Two, never use debit cards for online transactions or with VAs. Reversing an unauthorized credit card charge is much easier.

Three, create unique logins for your VAs. If your VA will be accessing website accounts on your behalf, change your account credentials and make them unique. This limits possible damage as most of us reuse logins.

Still, in today’s society, information and identity theft is inevitable. Just like with any worst-case scenario, it’s not as bad as we make it out to be and is reversible.

To address your second fear: they spend ridiculous amounts of time on tasks. The truth is, “If you are an effective person but unaccustomed to issuing commands, assume that most problems at the outset are your fault.” These are the most common beginner mistakes.

Accepting the first person the firm provides. Request someone who has excellent English and indicate phone calls will be required, even if not. Be quick to replace if needed.

Giving imprecise directions. “Sentences should have one possible interpretation and be suitable for a 2nd-grade reading level. This goes for native speakers as well.” Instead of asking them to respond if they have any questions, ask them to rephrase tasks to confirm their understanding.

Giving them a license to waste time. Request a status update after a few hours of work to ensure the task is both understood and achievable. “Some tasks are, after initial attempts, impossible.”

Setting a far deadline. Use Parkinson’s law and assign tasks that are “to be completed within no more than 72 hours.” Using short deadlines does not mean avoiding large tasks but breaking those tasks up into milestones that can be completed in shorter time frames.

Sending too many tasks with no prioritization. First, eliminate before you delegate. You should only send “one task at a time… and no more than two.” In the case of two, prioritize.

Income autopilot I

“Our goal is simple: to create an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.” We’ll call this vehicle a muse to separate it from the ambiguous “business” label, which can denote anything from a lemonade stand to a global conglomerate.

There are countless ways to make money, but most of them are unsuitable for our needs. We do not want to run a business. We want to own a business and spend no time on it. For example, Nike owns the shoe but the factories and distributors run the business.

To create a muse, we need a product to sell. If you own a service business, convert your expertise into a downloadable or shippable product. Why avoid services? The constant customer contact and per-hour model require too much time.

Our product must not take more than $500 to test and should lend itself to automation within a month. Once running, it cannot require more than one day per week of management. Let’s create a muse in the fewest number of steps. 

Step one: pick an affordably reachable niche market

“Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is much easier… Be a member of your target market and don’t speculate what others will be willing to buy.” If you choose a broad market, like dog lovers, you are competing with too many players. Start small with a niche market, making it cheaper to reach your customers and easier to charge premium prices. 

To find your niche market, answer these two questions.

1. Which social, industry, and professional groups do you belong to or have you belonged to? It could be anything, from bass fishermen to software developers.
2. Which of the groups you identified have their own magazines, Facebook groups, or other forms of circulation?

Step two: brainstorm (but do not invest in) products

The goal of this step is to generate a well-formed product idea and spend nothing. Start by picking two markets that have their own circulation network. Advertising in the network should cost less than $7,000 and there should be at least 15,000 members. 

The product must abide by these four criteria:

1. The main benefit of the product must be explainable in one sentence.
2. It should cost the customer $75-300 (inflation-adjusted to 2023). Higher pricing means you can sell to fewer customers, deal with lower-maintenance customers, and have higher profit margins. Too high and customers will want to speak on the phone with someone which requires more maintenance, but too low and a competitor will undercut you and destroy profits. Ferriss “aims for an 8-10x markup,” meaning a $100 product can’t cost him more than $10-12.50.
3. It should take no more than a month to manufacture. Contact manufacturers who specialize in the product you’re considering, and find the per-unit costs of production for 100, 500, 1,000, and 5,000 units.
4. It should be fully explainable in an FAQ. Otherwise, you spend a fortune on call center operations.

We’ll cover the three product options that meet these criteria in ascending order of preference.

One, resell a product. Purchasing a product at wholesale and reselling it is the easiest but least profitable route. “It is the fastest to set up but the fastest to die off due to price competition with other resellers.”

To purchase at wholesale, follow these two steps. First, contact a wholesaler and request a “wholesale price list” (generally 40% off retail prices) and terms. Second, if a business tax ID is needed, file for an LLC or similar protective business structure. Do not purchase product until you complete the next step, step three.

Two, license a product. There are two sides to the licensing deal. On one side, there is the licensor who invents the product and sells others the right to manufacture their product, generally for 3-10% off the wholesale price. On the other side, the licensee manufactures and sells the product for 90-97% of the revenue. For most NR, this side is more interesting. 

Licensing is a full art in itself, and “the profits can be astounding.” Though we won’t be discussing it in detail, you can check it out on Ferriss’s blog. 

Three, create a product. This route is the most profitable option for most people. You can design a “hard” product, try private labeling, or create an information product.

For “hard” products, you can hire a freelance mechanical engineer to develop a prototype which is then taken to a contract manufacturer. This option is difficult because it often requires special tooling and high manufacturing start-up costs.

Private labeling is slapping a custom label onto something already manufactured, like how Costco does with its Kirkland brand. However, your label must have some sort of brand recognition for this option to have any effect.

The best option is the information product. They’re “low-cost, fast to manufacture, and time-consuming for competitors to duplicate.”

You don’t need to be an expert to create an information product. You only need to “know more about the topic than the purchaser.” Don’t discount yourself. Oftentimes, amateurs are in a better position to teach it than an expert. 

If someone has just learned the basics, it’s easier for them to recount their learning experience and help the beginner accordingly. On the other hand, the expert at Level 20 might have completely forgotten what it was like to learn Level 1.

Combining different fields is a common way to become an expert. Let’s say you’re a real estate broker who sees a demand among brokers for self-promotional websites. You also happen to do web design as a hobby. While you may not be the top real estate broker or the top web designer, you’re an expert in the intersection of the two areas and can sell a web design guide specific to brokers.

To brainstorm informational product ideas, consider these questions:

1. How can you add to what is being sold successfully in the network? “Think narrow and deep rather than broad.”
2. What skills are you interested in that you, and others in the market, would pay to learn? Could you adapt a skill for your market?
3. What experts could you interview and record to create a sellable product?
4. Do you have a failure-to-success story that can be turned into a how-to product?

There are three options to make your content:

1. Create it yourself, often by paraphrasing books and articles on a topic.
2. Repurpose copyright-free content in the public domain.
3. License content or compensate an expert to create content.

The first two options will require an expert reputation in a limited field, which can be obtained “in less than four weeks.” There is a difference between being perceived as an expert and being one. In business, the former is what sells product and the latter is what creates good products.

It’s possible to know all there is about, say, medicine, but few will listen if you don’t have an M.D. at the end of your name. The M.D. is what Ferriss calls a credibility indicator. “The so-called expert with the most credibility indicators, whether acronyms or affiliations, is often the most successful in the marketplace, even if other candidates have more in-depth knowledge.”

It took Ferriss’s friend just three weeks to become a “top relationship expert who, as featured in Glamour and other media, has counseled executives at Fortune 500 companies on how to improve their relationships.” Here’s how to do it:

1. Join two or three related trade organizations with official-sounding names.
2. Read the three top-selling books on your topic.
3. Give a free one-to-three-hour seminar at the closest well-known university and promote it. Do the same at branches of two well-known companies. Tell the company you have given seminars at University X and are a member of the groups from step 1. Emphasize that you are doing it for free to gain additional speaking experience and won’t be selling anything. Record the seminars for future use in products.
4. Optional: offer to write a few articles for trade magazines, citing what you’ve accomplished in the previous steps. If they decline, offer to interview an expert and write the article.
5. Join ProfNet or similar networks that journalists use to find experts to quote for articles. Use the previous steps to show credibility and respond to journalist queries. “Done properly, this will get you featured in media ranging from small local publications to the New York Times and ABC News.”

Remember, you’re an expert in something. You know, or can learn, more about a topic than your target market. And that’s enough. You just need to get yourself recognized.

As a side note, the book contains many useful resources and links to help with creating a muse, from estimating market size to finding public domain information to repurpose. I won’t be including these here for brevity.

Income autopilot II

Now that we have our muse, we must test our muse. Intuition is a poor predictor of whether our product will be successful. Surveying is similarly misleading. 

Ask people if they would buy your product, and tell those who said “yes” that you have units on hand and ask them to buy. The initial positive responses become polite refusals. “To get an accurate indicator of commercial viability, don’t ask people if they would buy–ask them to buy.”

Step three: micro-test your products

Micro-testing means using inexpensive ads to test customer response for a product before manufacturing it. The test process has three parts.

1. Best: look at the competition and create a better offer on a one-to-three-page website.
2. Test: test the offer with small Google Ads campaigns.
3. Divest or invest: cut the losers and manufacture the winner(s).

First, best the competition. Google the top terms you would use to find your product. To come up with terms, you can use search suggestion tools. Visit the top websites that consistently appear in top search positions. How can you differentiate yourself from them? More credibility indicators? A better selection? Free shipping?

Then, create a one-page, 300-to-600-word, testimonial-rich advertisement emphasizing key differentiators and benefits using both text and photos. For examples of ads, refer to those that have prompted you to purchase or have caught your attention. Obtain testimonials from friends who you give the product to.

Second, test your advertisement. Buy a domain name and set up your website with a website builder. Create a “purchase” button that takes them to a basic contact detail form. On this form, create a “continue with order” button that takes them to a message along the lines of “We are out of stock but will contact you as soon as the products are back in stock.” If the user reaches the out-of-stock message, consider it an order.

If you aren’t comfortable with “dry testing,” even though it’s legal as long as billing data isn’t captured, offer an email sign-up for a free teaser product. This could be a sneak peek at your informational product or a digital add-on to your physical product. Consider a certain percentage of email sign-ups as hypothetical orders.

Then, decide on the best search keywords and create an ad campaign. Keep terms ultra-specific for higher conversion rates (the percentage of visitors who purchase) and aim “for second through fourth positioning,” but no more than $0.30 cost-per-click.

Design ads that focus on your differentiators. Test not just headlines but keywords, ad descriptions, product names, domain names, and more. Create several ads, different in content, that are rotated automatically by Google. Ferriss remarks, “How do you think I determined the best title for this book?”

Disable the feature on Google that serves only the best-performing ad. We need to compare clickthrough rates (the percentage of viewers who click) and combine the best header, ad text, and domain name into one final ad.

You can use free analytical tools to see metrics like page abandonment rate. Also, “ensure the ads don’t trick prospects into visiting the site.” We want qualified traffic to generate accurate data.

Third, invest or divest. After five days, tally the results. What’s a “good” clickthrough rate and conversion rate? It depends on your product. If you make $1,000 of net profit from a purchase, you obviously need a lower conversion rate than someone who makes $10 per purchase. You’ll need to do the math for your specific situation.

Consider how much you spent on ads and how much you “sold.” If the results didn’t meet your expectations, adjust your product. For instance, add a money-back guarantee or advertise in niche magazines instead of on Google. Then, retest it. 

If the results do meet your expectations, set up a merchant account, order your product (if applicable), and sell it to your waiting customers. Continue to test and try out new things. Maybe put a phone number in the ad that forwards to your cell phone so you can determine the most common question for your FAQ. Offer promotions or sales. Negotiate longer-term ad agreements. The options are endless.

Again, the book contains many useful links to help with this process.

Now, you need to build a system that automates this operation. 

Income autopilot III

At this stage, some businesses may hire people and introduce a whole host of headaches. Instead, our muse completely removes the human element with automation. 

Start the rollout of your muse with the end in mind. Know what you want the eventual business to look like. “Our goal isn’t to create a business that is as large as possible, but rather a business that bothers us as little as possible.” Here is Ferriss’s business architecture that does just that.

Each outsourcer takes a piece of the revenue pie. By drawing out a diagram, you can better determine your revenue and expenses. In this example, expenses include advertising, website fees, call center costs, fulfillment costs,  manufacturing, shipping, credit card processing, and return fees.

If you’re selling an information product, the architecture would be simpler, and fewer parties would take a slice of the revenue.

Where are you in the diagram? Nowhere. You should not be a “tollbooth through which anything needs to pass,” but more like a police officer who steps in if reports from your outsourcers look odd. Create a “process-driven instead of founder-driven business.” 

Step four: rollout and automation

The diagram should be your blueprint for designing an automated system. There may a be few differences, but the principles are the same:

1. Contract outsourcing companies that specialize in one function over freelancers whenever possible so no singular person can derail your operations.
2. Ensure all outsourcers are willing to communicate among themselves to solve problems, and “give them written permission to make most inexpensive decisions without consulting you first.”

When people initially create their muse, they often begin with the cheapest tools available to get things running with little cash. This isn’t a problem, but you need to recognize when to upgrade your infrastructure at certain milestones.

Phase 1: 0-50 total units shipped. Do everything yourself. Put your phone number out there and take customer calls to determine questions for your future FAQ. The FAQ will also be used to train phone operators and develop sales scripts.

Answer all emails and “put the nature of the customer’s questions in the subject line for future indexing.” Modify and test your advertisements. Personally pack and ship your product to determine the cheapest options for both. Investigate opening a merchant account “for later outsourced credit card processing at higher roll-out volumes.”

Phase 2: >10 units shipped per week. Add the FAQ to your website and continue to add answers to common questions. Find a fulfillment house with the following criteria:

1. No setup fees or monthly minimums. “If this isn’t possible, ask for at least 50% off both and then request that the setup fee be applied as an advance against shipping or their own fees.”
2. Can respond to order status emails (ideal) or phone calls from customers. Your prior customer service emails will be provided as copy-and-paste responses.

To lower fees, explain you’re a startup with a small budget. You need the cash for advertising that will drive more shipments. You’re also considering other competitive fulfillment houses. 

Lastly, ask for three client references and ask these references for negatives: “I understand they’re good, but everyone has weaknesses… Can you please describe an incident or a disagreement? I expect these with all companies, so it’s no big deal, and it’s confidential, of course.”

After one month of prompt payments for their services, ask for “net 30 terms,” payment for services 30 days after they’re rendered. “It is easier to negotiate all of the above points with smaller operations that need the business.”

Have your manufacturer directly ship to the fulfillment center, and put the fulfillment center’s contact information on the “thank you” order page for order status questions. To keep a professional look, display an email address with your domain, which forwards emails to the fulfillment center. 

Phase 3: >20 units shipped per week. Now you have the cash flow to afford the setup fees and monthly minimums of end-to-end fulfillment houses that handle it all, from order status to returns. Ask them for referrals to call centers and credit card processors they’ve collaborated with. Don’t assemble a group of strangers, as their inevitable mistakes will be expensive.

“Set up an account with the credit card processor first, for which you will need your own merchant account.” You need this for the fulfillment center to handle refunds and declined cards.

Optionally, set up an account with a call center the fulfillment center recommends. Look at the percentage of phone orders, and see if the percentage justifies a call center account. It often doesn’t. “Those who call to order will generally order online if given no other option.”

If you decide to go with a call center, test them. Get several numbers they answer and ask difficult product-related questions. “Call each number at least three times (morning, afternoon, and evening) and note the make-or-break factor: wait time… More than 15 seconds will result in too many abandoned calls.”

Lastly, if resellers are needed, limit your product to one or two resellers. By being exclusive, you get leverage to negotiate better terms. And, the more competing resellers there are, the faster your product goes extinct. When one reseller sells your product for less to compete, it starts a chain reaction and soon no one is making a profit. Customers are accustomed to this lower price and the process is irreversible.

Keep it simple

The more options you offer, the more indecision you create and the fewer orders you receive, and the more manufacturing and customer service work you create for yourself. Follow these steps to minimize the number of decisions your customers can make to reduce service overhead by “20-80%”: 

1. Offer only one or two purchase options (basic and premium).
2. Do not offer multiple shipping options.
3. Do not offer overnight or expedited shipping, as you will only get anxious phone calls. If you have a reseller offering such options, refer them there.
4. Eliminate all phone orders and direct everyone to online ordering.
5. Do not offer international shipments. You’ll spend “10 minutes per order filling out customs forms” and have to deal with customer complaints when the product costs “20-100% more with tariffs and duties.”

Filter your customers

Now that you have some cash flow, it’s time to re-evaluate your customers. Do business with good customers and avoid the bad ones. “If you offer an excellent product at an acceptable price, it is an equal trade and not a begging session between subordinate (you) and superior (customer).” You’re not the customer’s servant.

Instead of dealing with bad customers, prevent them from ordering in the first place. Think 80/20: by giving up 20% of bad customers and their orders, you avoid the 80% of expenses created by customers and 80% of the time consumed by them. In addition to keeping a $75-300 pricing, here are further policies to attract high-profit and low-maintenance customers:

1. Do not accept payment via Western Union, checks, or money orders.
2. Raise wholesale minimums to 12-100 units and require a tax ID to qualify resellers.
3. Refer all potential resellers to an online form to fill out. “Never negotiate pricing or approve lower pricing for higher-volume orders.”
4. Offer low-priced products instead of free products to obtain contact information. Offering something for free will attract time-eaters.
5. Offer a lose-win guarantee instead of free trials. A lose-win guarantee makes it profitable for the customer even if the product fails. Examples include a 150% or 200% guarantee that gets you more than your purchase price back if you return it, or food delivered in under 30 minutes or else it’s free. For the few people that abuse the system, you get far more orders, with many people increasing sales by “200%.”
6. Do not accept orders from common mail fraud countries like Nigeria.

Looking Fortune 500

When approaching large partners, small company size will be an obstacle. After all, a properly created muse should only employ one person, though it may have hundreds of people running it from the call centers to the fulfillment houses. Look Fortune 500 with these steps:

1. Don’t be the CEO or founder. Give yourself a mid-level title of VP of X or Director of X that can be adapted to the situation. For negotiation purposes, it helps to not appear as the ultimate decision-maker.
2. Put multiple emails and phone numbers on the website. Have various emails for the different departments and forward them all to your email or the outsourcer’s email. Same thing for the phone numbers.
3. Set up an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) remote receptionist. In just a few minutes, you can set up a number that greets callers with a prompt like, “Thank you for calling X. Please say the name of the person or department you would like to reach, or just hold on for a list of options.” Upon selection, the caller is forwarded to your phone number (or the outsourcer’s) with on-hold music and all.
4. Do not provide home addresses or you will get visitors. If you decide to work with an end-to-end fulfillment center that handles checks and money orders, leave out the “PO Box” and include the street address of the post office itself. “PO Box 555, Nowhere, U.S. 11936” becomes “Suite 555, 1234 Downtown Ave., U.S. 11936.”

Step IV: L Is for Liberation

The old rich, with their castles and estates, are characterized as being well-established in one place. The New Rich (NR), however, are defined by unrestricted mobility. This freedom is not exclusive to entrepreneurs, but is also attainable by employees.

Even if you don’t care to travel the world or to have unlimited mobility, you must escape the office. Here’s why.

Now that you have eliminated interruptions and unimportant work, you complete your work in a quarter of the time. But, the expectation in the office is that “you will be in constant motion from 9-5,” so you still have to act busy and create useless activities to fill the time.

Even if you produce twice the results you had before, if you’re working a quarter of the hours of others, guess who will get fired? If you reason that you’re producing twice the results despite working just 10 hours a week, you’ll be asked to work 40 hours a week and produce eight times the results.

Escaping the office

As you become more productive and provide more value to the company, you have more leverage in negotiations. In addition, since you’ve moved nearly all communication with your coworkers to email, your move to remote work becomes less noticeable. All that’s left is to negotiate a remote work arrangement with these steps:

1. Increase investment: get your company to invest in you, whether through promotions or employee trainings, so that the company’s loss is greater if you quit.
2. Proved increased output offsite: call in sick for a couple of days and double your output on those days. Leave an email trail for your boss to notice and keep quantifiable records of what you accomplished for future negotiations.
3. Prepare the quantifiable business benefit: present remote work as a good business decision with quantifiable benefits, like doubling the number of designs you created in a day. Cite fewer office distractions and the removal of the commute as your explanation.
4. Propose a revocable trial period: propose working from home two days per week for just two weeks to your boss. Plan a script with the quantifiable business benefit but do not make a slideshow presentation or give it the appearance of something irreversible.
5. Expand remote time: ensure your remote days are more productive than in-office days, even dropping in-office productivity to increase the contrast. Prepare a document showing the increased results of remote work and suggest going to four days per week remotely for two weeks. After these two weeks, request a fully remote schedule. Negotiate when you have more leverage, like when your expertise is crucial for an ongoing project. In addition, be prepared to use the threat of quitting.

An alternative negotiation strategy is the hourglass approach. You use a long proof-of-concept in the beginning and then negotiate to fully remote work with results from that proof-of-concept. Here’s what the hourglass approach entails.

1. During a crucial work project, use a preplanned emergency that requires you to take one to two weeks out of the office.
2. Say that you recognize you can’t stop working and that you’d prefer to work instead of using vacation days.
3. Propose how you can work remotely. If needed, offer to take a pay cut for that period only if performance isn’t up to expectations.
4. Allow the boss to collaborate on the remote work arrangement so that they’re invested in the process.
5. Make the weeks of remote work the most productive period you’ve ever had at work.
6. Show your boss the quantifiable results upon returning and say how you can get double the work done without the distractions and commute. Suggest two or three days at home per week as a trial for two weeks.
7. Make the remote days highly productive.
8. Suggest only one or two days in the office per week.
9. Make the in-office days the least productive of the week.
10. Suggest complete mobility.

Prior to negotiating remote work, you should practice getting past “no” and have the discipline to work solo.

Killing your job

As Machiavelli said, “Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.” 

Some jobs are simply beyond repair. For this chapter, a “job” will refer to both a company if you run one and a normal job if you have one.

Don’t fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy: the delusion of continuing to do something just because you’ve invested heavily in it, even when abandoning it would be more beneficial. Just because something has required a lot of work or taken a lot of time doesn’t make it worthwhile.

Don’t let the consequences of bad decisions made years ago stop you from making good decisions now. “Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.” Entering a job or project without defining when worthwhile becomes wasteful is like going into a casino without a limit on what you’ll gamble.

You may argue that your situation is complicated. Is it really? “Most situations are simple–many are just emotionally difficult to act upon.” You likely know what to do, but you’re just terrified you may end up worse off. There are common fears that prevent people from quitting their jobs, are there are rebuttals to all of them.

1. “Quitting is permanent.” Practice fear-setting and realize a change of direction is almost always reversible.
2. “I won’t be able to pay the bills.” Firstly, the goal is to have a new source of cash flow before quitting. Secondly, even if you don’t have money coming in, “it isn’t hard to eliminate most expenses temporarily and live on savings for a brief period.”
3. “Health insurance and retirement accounts will disappear.” This is simply untrue. You can get health insurance coverage without your employer and transfer your retirement account.
4. “It will ruin my resume.” Do something interesting with your time off and “you will get more interviews because you will stand out.” If there’s ever a question of why you took a break, answer “I had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do X and couldn’t turn it down. I figured that, with X years of work to go, what’s the rush?”

“The person who has more options has more power.” Don’t wait until you need alternatives to find them. Keep in mind other jobs, even if you don’t need them, and it will make taking action and being assertive easier.

Mini-retirements

It’s time to turn your finite cash into almost infinite lifestyle output with travel and excitement. It is one of the biggest misconceptions that extended world travel is the domain of the ultrarich. 

Gaining emotional freedom

“If you’re accustomed to working 50 weeks per year, the tendency, even after creating the mobility to take extended trips, will be to go nuts and see 10 countries in 14 days and end up a wreck. It’s like taking a starving dog to an all-you-can-eat buffet. It will eat itself to death.”

The alternative to this sort of binge traveling entails relocating to one place for one to six months, known as a mini-retirement. The mini-retirement is also different from a sabbatical in that mini-retirements are recurring. It’s common for the NR to take a few mini-retirements per year.

You can have both financial and time freedom but no emotional freedom. You’re still emotionally caught in the rat race and its time-famine mindset. It takes “two to three months just to unplug from obsolete routines and become aware of just how much we distract ourselves with constant motion.”

Can you have a three-hour dinner with friends without getting anxious? Can you get accustomed to a town where all businesses take an afternoon break for two hours and close at 4 pm?

Take this time to slow down and rediscover yourself.

The financials

People grossly overestimate the cost of extended world travel. Ferriss presents monthly figures from travels in South America and Europe to prove that luxury is not limited by currency devaluation in third-world countries. I’ll adjust the figures to 2023 dollars, as the newest version of the book was published in 2009. Note the numbers are per month.

Ferriss “lived like a rock star–and both experiences could be done for less than 50%” of what he spent. Compare the numbers with your total monthly expenses, and you may realize traveling around the world can save you serious money.

The table doesn’t include airfare because it was free for Ferriss, who used credit card rewards. To get airfare at “50-80% off,” follow these three steps:

1. Use credit cards with reward points for large muse-related advertising or manufacturing expenses. Capitalize on inevitable costs, but don’t spend more money to get points. This alone gets Ferriss “a free round-trip international ticket every three months.”
2. Purchase tickets far in advance (three months or more) or last minute, and aim for both departure and return between Tuesday and Thursday.
3. Consider buying one ticket to an international hub and then another ticket with a cheap local airline.

Overcoming excuses

We make excuses not to travel because “it’s easier to live with ourselves if we cite an external reason for inaction.” Ferriss has met “paraplegics and the deaf, senior citizens and single mothers, homeowners and the poor,” all of whom have found excellent reasons for travel instead of focusing on the small reasons against it.

The prime fear regarding travel is safety. But when travel is less of hotel-hopping and more of a relocation to a second home (a mini-retirement), the likelihood of problems is far less. Furthermore, most places are safer than the media portrays them to be. 

Here’s a funny story. Robin was visiting Argentina after being warned by family not to visit due to riots in 2001. When she told locals she was from New York, their jaws dropped: “I saw those buildings blow up on TV! I would never go to such a dangerous place!” The moral of the story: don’t assume that places abroad are more dangerous than your hometown without doing your own research.

Another excuse not to travel is children. Conquer this excuse in two ways. One, before embarking on a long international trip with your children, do a trial run for a few weeks. Two, for each stop on the mini-retirement, arrange a week of language classes and see if the school has other resources like transportation from the airport and assistance with apartment rentals.

Decluttering

Extended travel is the perfect reason to declutter your life. “It is impossible to realize how distracting all the crap is until you get rid of it.” Remember the 80/20 rule? Apply it here. You use 20% of your possessions 80% of the time. Those magazines you’ve saved? You’ll never reread them. The clothes you got as a gift and still haven’t worn? You’ll never wear them.

It’s not just the extra physical space you gain but the extra mental space. Think about how you feel when you gaze upon an organized, spacious room. Now what about a messy, cluttered room?

When packing for your trip, take less with you. Bring a “settling fund” for purchasing things as needed after arriving. “Pack as if you were coming back in one week,” but remember the bare essentials:

1. One week of clothing appropriate to the season
2. Important documents and photocopies
3. Debit cards, credit cards, and $200 worth of small bills in the local currency
4. Locks for securing luggage or for lockers
5. One travel guide

What about a laptop? Unless you are a writer, Ferriss votes no as it’s too cumbersome and you risk spending too much time on it. Just set up remote access software, which enables you to access your computer remotely via other devices.

The countdown

Below are the steps you should follow in preparation for a mini-retirement. Most steps can be eliminated or condensed once you get one trip under your belt. For Ferriss, it takes him “three afternoons” to prepare.

First, take an asset and cash-flow snapshot. On one sheet, record all assets and their corresponding values. On another sheet, draw a line down the middle and record all incoming cash flow and outgoing expenses. What can you eliminate that doesn’t add value?

Second, fear-set a one-year mini-retirement in a dream location. Use the fear-setting questions in the Definition section to evaluate the real potential consequences. Almost everything is reversible, if not avoidable.

Third, choose a location for your actual mini-retirement. There are two options. One, choose a starting point and then wander until you find your second home. Two, scout a region by spending a few weeks in each destination and then settle in your favorite spot. You can take a mini-retirement in your own country, but “the transformative effect is hampered if you are surrounded by people who carry the same socially reinforced baggage.”

Choose an overseas location that is foreign but not dangerous. Here are Ferriss’s favorite starting points, with the underlined ones denoting the most lifestyle for the dollar. “Argentina (Buenos Aires, Cordoba), China (Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei), Japan (Tokyo, Osaka), England (London), Ireland (Galway), Thailand (Bangkok, Chiang Mai), Germany (Berlin, Munich), Norway (Oslo), Australia (Sydney), New Zealand (Queenstown), Italy (Rome, Milan, Florence), Spain (Madrid, Valencia, Sevilla), and Holland (Amsterdam).”

In all of these places, it’s possible to live well while spending little. And in almost all cities, there are gentrified areas with higher standards of living. There are some exotic places not recommended for mini-retirement beginners, though veterans can make them all work: all countries in Africa, the Middle East, or Central and South America (except Costa Rica and Argentina).

Fourth, prepare for your trip and start the countdown. 

At three months out, eliminate. Even if you don’t plan on traveling, get used to asking yourself, “What are the 20% of belongings that I use 80% of the time?” Eliminate the other 80%. Check your current health insurance coverage for extended overseas travel. If you own a home, get ready to rent or sell it. Renting is most recommended by mini-retirement veterans. If you’re a tenant, prepare to end your lease and move all belongings into storage.

At two months out, automate. Contact companies that bill you regularly and set up autopayment with credit cards that have reward points. For credit card companies themselves and others that refuse, set up automatic debit payments from your checking account. For variable payments like utilities, set scheduled payments for $15-20 more than expected, which will accrue as credit if not used. Cancel paper delivery of bank and credit card statements. Give a trusted person power of attorney, which gives that person the authority to sign documents in your name.

At one month out, go to your post office and have all mail forwarded to a friend or family member. They’ll email you a brief description of non-junk mail every week, and you can pay them to do so. Get the required immunizations. Set up remote access software and make sure everything works as expected. If your muse still sends you checks, give the payees direct deposit information. 

At two weeks out, scan all identification, health insurance, and credit and debit cards and print multiple copies. Leave several copies with family members and take some copies with you. Email the files to yourself so you can also access them digitally. Consider buying a local SIM card. Reserve a hostel or hotel at your starting point for three to four days. 

At one week out, decide on a schedule for routine batched tasks to eliminate excuses for senseless pseudo-work during your mini-retirement. “Make a commitment now and expect serious withdrawal cravings.” Save important documents onto a USB flash drive. Move all your belongings into storage, pack a single small backpack and a carry-on suitcase, and move in briefly with a family member or friend.

At two days out, put remaining automobiles into storage or a friend’s garage. Put fuel stabilizer in the gas tanks, disconnect the negative cable from batteries to prevent drain, and put the vehicle on jack stands to prevent tire damage. Cancel all auto insurance except theft coverage.

Congratulations, now you’ve arrived! On the first morning and afternoon after check-in, take a bus tour of the city followed by a bike tour of potential neighborhoods. Then, during the evening, find apartment owners or brokers on online websites and contact them for a viewing in the next few days.

On the second and third days, find and book an apartment for a month. “Don’t commit to more than one month until you’ve slept there.” On move-in day, get settled. If needed, ask locals what insurance they use and purchase local health insurance. Resolve not to buy souvenirs or take-home items until two weeks before departure.

Enjoy your mini-retirement!

Confronting the void

“The retired and ultrarich are often unfulfilled and neurotic for the same reason: too much idle time.” In the beginning, you may not feel it. External fantasies are enough. During this time, “Go nuts and live your dreams… stop repressing yourself and get rid of your postponement habit.” But there will come a time when you cannot stand lounging on the beach for another minute. Self-criticism and existential crises start around this time.

With more money and time than you ever dreamed possible, how it is possible that you’re depressed? Be glad that you’re figuring out this question now instead of at the end of life.

Don’t freak out and fuel the flames. “This is normal among all high-performers who downshift after working hard for a long time… Learning to replace the perception of time famine with the appreciation of time abundance is like going from triple espressos to decaf.”

Don’t be afraid of these new challenges. “Freedom is like a new sport.” In the beginning, the novelty makes everything interesting. But once you learn the basics, playing the sport with skill requires serious practice.

Without distractions and deadlines, doubts invade your mind as nothing else fills it. Once past freedom’s honeymoon phase, you’ll begin to question your decision to leave behind the rat race. Common questions include:

1. Am I really doing this to lead a better life or am I just lazy?
2. Did I quit the rat race because it was bad or because I couldn’t win?
3. Is this as good as it gets? Perhaps, I was better off when I was following orders and ignorant of the possibilities.
4. Am I really successful or am I just kidding myself?
5. Have I lowered my standards to make myself a winner? Are my friends, who are now making twice as much as three years ago, really on the right track?
6. Why am I not happy? If I can do anything and I’m still not happy, do I even deserve it?

Most of these questions can be overcome by recognizing them for the more-is-better and money-as-success mindsets that got us into trouble in the first place. Still, there are deeper questions to be answered, the most prominent one being “What is the meaning of life?”

Ferriss has one answer to the big questions of life: he doesn’t answer them. And he’s no nihilist, having “spent more than a decade investigating the mind and the concept of meaning” in “the neuroscience laboratories of the world” and “the halls of religious institutions worldwide.”

Here are his conclusions. Most big questions we face “use terms so undefined as to make attempting to answer them a complete waste of time. This isn’t depressing. It’s liberating.” Before spending time answering a stress-inducing question, ensure the question passes two criteria:

1. Have I decided on a single meaning for each term in this question?
2. Can an answer to this question be acted upon to improve things?

“What is the meaning of life?” fails the first criterion. Questions beyond what you can control, like “What if the train is late tomorrow?” fail the second criterion. 

“If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it. If you take just this point from this book, it will put you in the top 1% of performers in the world and keep most philosophical distress out of your life.” 

It’s not about being atheist, crass, or superficial. “It’s being smart and putting your effort where it can make the biggest difference for yourself and others.”

Filling the void

Ferriss believes “life exists to be enjoyed and that the most important thing is to feel good about yourself.” Dozens of NR were asked “What can I do with my time to enjoy life and feel good about myself?” The two fundamental components in all their answers were “continual learning and service.”

Continual learning is best done by relocating, as the unique conditions and immersive environment make progress faster. When traveling overseas, Ferriss focuses on one mental skill (e.g., language acquisition) and one physical skill (e.g., Brazilian jiu-jitsu). “The most successful serial vagabonds tend to blend the mental and physical.”

Language learning deserves special mention. It is “the best thing you can do to hone clear thinking.” Not only does understanding a language help you fully understand the culture, but a new language also makes you aware of your own language: your own thoughts. 

Ferriss knows “from research and personal experimentation with more than a dozen languages that (1) adults can learn languages much faster than children when constant 9-5 work is removed and that (2) it is possible to become conversationally fluent in any language in six months or less.”

The benefits of language learning are underestimated while the difficulties are overestimated. Gain a language and you gain a second lens to understand the world.

Service means doing something that improves life besides your own. It is not equivalent to philanthropy, the altruistic concern for human life. Countless things need help, so don’t get baited into “my cause can beat up your cause” arguments with no right answer. For example, how can you help starving children in Africa when there are starving children in your country? How can you save the animals when homeless people are freezing to death?

“Those thousands of lives you save could contribute to a famine that kills millions, or that one bush in Bolivia that you protect could hold the cure for cancer… Do your best and hope for the best. If you’re improving the world–however you define that–consider your job well done.”

Service isn’t limited to saving lives or the environment. It can also mean improving lives, like how a musician brings entertainment to millions of people. “Find a cause or vehicle that interests you most and make no apologies.”

Of course, you can’t learn languages or fight for a cause for the rest of your life. However, there are good starting points that can lead to meaningful experiences. There is no right answer to “What should I do with my life?” But, there is the next step. Pursue something that seems fun or rewarding. Don’t be in a rush to jump into a long-term commitment. “Take time to find something that calls to you.”

Here is a good sequence that the NR have used with success.

First, revisit ground zero: do nothing. Escape speed addiction and recalibrate your internal clock. Slowing down doesn’t mean accomplishing less but rather cutting out distractions and the perception of being rushed. Consider a silence retreat of three to seven days. “Learn to turn down the static of the mind so you can appreciate more before doing more.”

Second, make an anonymous donation to an organization of your choice. This disassociates feeling good about service with getting credit for it. 

Third, take a learning mini-retirement in combination with local volunteering. Take a longer mini-retirement to focus on learning and serving. Write down self-criticisms and negative self-talk in a journal. “Describing these doubts in writing reduces their impact” by demanding clarity of thought.

Where to go and what to do? What makes you most angry about the state of the world? What are you most afraid of for the next generation? What makes you happiest in your life and how can you help others have the same?

Fourth, revisit and reset dreamlines. Following the mini-retirement, revise your dreamlines. What are you good at? What could you be the best at? What makes you happy? What excites you? What makes you feel accomplished? What are you most proud of having accomplished in your life, and can you repeat this or further develop it? What do you enjoy sharing or experiencing with other people?

Fifth, based on the outcomes of the previous steps, consider testing new part-time or full-time vocations. “Full-time work isn’t bad if it’s what you’d rather be doing.” This is what separates a “job” from a “vocation.” What did you dream of doing when you were a kid?

Again, throughout this section and the entire book as a whole, there are resources and links to help with accomplishing the things discussed, like finding overseas volunteer opportunities and learning languages.

The top 13 New Rich mistakes

“Mistakes are the name of the game in lifestyle design.” Don’t get frustrated. It’s part of the process. These are the most common mistakes:

1. Losing sight of dreams and falling into work for work’s sake
2. Micromanaging and emailing to fill time
3. Handling problems your outsourcers or coworkers can handle
4. Helping outsourcers or coworkers with small problems when you should’ve given them if-then rules and the freedom to act on all but the largest problems
5. Chasing customers, particularly unqualified or international prospects, when you have sufficient cash flow
6. Answering emails that will not result in a sale or that can be answered by an autoresponder or FAQ
7. Working where you live, sleep, or should relax
8. Not performing a thorough 80/20 analysis every two to four weeks for your business and personal life
9. Striving for endless perfection rather than great or simply good enough whether in your personal or professional life, which is often an excuse to work for work’s sake
10. Blowing minutiae and small problems out of proportion as an excuse to work
11. Making non-time-sensitive issues urgent to justify work
12. Viewing one product, job, or project as the end-all and be-all of your existence
13. Ignoring the social rewards of life and forgetting to surround yourself with loved ones

One last note: do not approach life as a game to be won. “If you are too intent on making the pieces of a nonexistent puzzle fit, you miss out on all the real fun.” Be bold and don’t worry what others think.

My Thoughts

Don’t feel obligated to do everything the book says. I certainly haven’t implemented everything, especially the Automation part. But by reading the entire book, I now understand the world from a new perspective. Having only known the Deferrer mentality for most of my life, this New Rich mindset enables me to do so much more. 

There are endless options and possibilities open to you in this world. You never have to do anything. If you continue with your 9-5 job, that’s your choice. 

When you approach life in the “it’s-my-choice” mentality instead of an “I-have-to” mentality, you feel more enjoyment and meaning in what you’re doing. And it always is your choice. If you’re reading this article, you probably have the means to go out and do what this book suggests. So if you aren’t content with your situation, there’s no one to blame but you. 

Don’t make excuses. Own up to it. If you’re fearful and prefer familiarity and security, then so be it. But if you feel bored or dissatisfied, don’t blame external circumstances. The only thing holding you back is you. It’s your choice to continue to live the way you do. It’s also your choice to act on the book’s principles and live the life of your dreams.

You know all the options, and I hope you choose to best one for you.