Tim Ferriss is little more than a very successful self-promoter. I say this as a big fan of his, having bought and read all of his books and following his blog. He’s very good at identifying what makes other humans sit up and take notice, what we find impressive, and then going full munchkin on the process of achieving those things.
Perfect examples include the martial arts tournament where he hacked the weight classes, his use of Google Adwords to determine the most effective book titles, his workout routines and language-learning honed to obtain maximum results from minimum time investment, likewise his bare-bones approach to learning to cook … In fact, the entire point of Four Hour Chef is to teach the reader generalized skills for munchkining your way through to apparent competence at apparently difficult skills like cooking.
He’s a master of finding psychological levers, which is another way of saying he’s an expert at marketing. But he is not actually superhuman; the idea that he is superhuman is the marketing tool which he has used to sell you books.
It does not. The entire book is about how he cleverly figured out how to take his struggling small business and automate, streamline, or outsource all its parts until he only had to actually attend to it … roughly four hours a week. The rest of the book that isn’t about this is about how to use your new-found free time to live an enviable life, using himself as an example.
I say again that I am a fan of his and that The Four Hour Workweek had a lasting positive effect on how I think about work and how I think about the value of my free time. I am not saying that the content of his books is bunk because he is an aggressive self-promoter. I am rather saying that the content of his books is in a sense inextricable from the fact that he is an aggressive self-promoter, perhaps because a hidden theme across all his work is that being an aggressive self-promoter is useful.
ETA: He also uses other people as examples, in all his books, but he always includes himself and his personal anecdotes. I wanted to clarify that the books aren’t actually 100% about him, they’re not even 10% about him, but his signature and his exploits run throughout them.
Tim Ferriss is little more than a very successful self-promoter. I say this as a big fan of his, having bought and read all of his books and following his blog. He’s very good at identifying what makes other humans sit up and take notice, what we find impressive, and then going full munchkin on the process of achieving those things.
Perfect examples include the martial arts tournament where he hacked the weight classes, his use of Google Adwords to determine the most effective book titles, his workout routines and language-learning honed to obtain maximum results from minimum time investment, likewise his bare-bones approach to learning to cook … In fact, the entire point of Four Hour Chef is to teach the reader generalized skills for munchkining your way through to apparent competence at apparently difficult skills like cooking.
He’s a master of finding psychological levers, which is another way of saying he’s an expert at marketing. But he is not actually superhuman; the idea that he is superhuman is the marketing tool which he has used to sell you books.
I’ve also seen a claim that he doesn’t include self-promotion in his 4 hour work week. Does this seem plausible to you?
It does not. The entire book is about how he cleverly figured out how to take his struggling small business and automate, streamline, or outsource all its parts until he only had to actually attend to it … roughly four hours a week. The rest of the book that isn’t about this is about how to use your new-found free time to live an enviable life, using himself as an example.
I say again that I am a fan of his and that The Four Hour Workweek had a lasting positive effect on how I think about work and how I think about the value of my free time. I am not saying that the content of his books is bunk because he is an aggressive self-promoter. I am rather saying that the content of his books is in a sense inextricable from the fact that he is an aggressive self-promoter, perhaps because a hidden theme across all his work is that being an aggressive self-promoter is useful.
ETA: He also uses other people as examples, in all his books, but he always includes himself and his personal anecdotes. I wanted to clarify that the books aren’t actually 100% about him, they’re not even 10% about him, but his signature and his exploits run throughout them.
I’m a bit sceptical about T4HW, since the numbers in this blog post (http://thehackensack.blogspot.de/2009/10/how-much-was-tim-ferriss-really-making.html) imply he exaggerated very, very much (although 4.000 $/month still alllows a comfortable living).