What 'The 4-Hour Work Week' Has Taught Me

It's been 2 years since I finished reading Tim Ferris's inspirational guide for digital nomads and entrepreneurs, 'The 4-Hour Work Week' and it is still fueling the better part of my judgments.

I started my freelance career without knowing the existence of this book and the first thing I realised was that I could only allow myself to work a limited number of hours per day to strike a delicate balance between productive and healthy. My number, off the top of my head, was 4 hours per day (and only on weekdays). I would start working at 9:00 A.M. and break for lunch at 11:00 A.M. After a nap of about 1 hour, I would resume work at 3:00 P.M. and call it a day at 5:00 P.M. This is by no means scientifically based but it was the result of some experiment I did back in 2019.

So it was one fine August day in 2019 and I was riding to work on my electric skateboard. My ride that day was a bit longer than usual since I was helping out on another project my company was working on for just 1 day. Little did I know that the battery of my electric skateboard would not be able to provide enough torque after ~10 km of non-stop riding. I felt perfectly fine one moment and found myself thrown out by the board the next. I broke my wrist and had a few bruises. I was lucky enough to have all my bones intact but still had to take several days off.

It was then I started experimenting with being a freelancer and soon discovered if I wanted to get things done in both work and life, I'll have to put a lid on the number of hours I work every day. That was when I tested my 9 - 11 & 3 - 5 workdays.

It worked like a treat. I was able to stay productive for months without even the slightest of burnout. I could explore however I want. But one problem soon emerged.

I was working as a translator back then, which is essentially trading my time and energy for money. Even if I knew to be selective about my clients and keep raising my rates, my annual revenue will still be capped at a certain number since the higher my rate, the fewer willing clients I could find. That was when I discovered this book.

This book boils down to two words: delegation and scaling. The first thing you need to realise is that your time is worth a lot more than you think and doing everything on your own is not always the best choice. What you should do instead is to delegate all the busy work to interns, assistants, or robots. I started automating my entire workflow and was able to maintain few than 15 working hours per week on average in 2021.

The second thing is to try to scale. Even if I become the best translator in the world and command the highest rates, my revenue will still be capped by my time and energy. What really works is scaling, that is, expanding the scope of your work with the least possible effort. This is more about finding the right project than actual scaling. There was also an interesting thought experiment I learned while listening to 3Blue1Brown's podcast when he invited his former boss, founder of Khan Academy. His boss mentioned that he would always try to imagine what his business would be like if it were to expand 10 fold. It really helps thinking long-term and will usher you into laying important groundwork for any future expansion you may have.

There are other important points in 'The 4-Hour Work Week' and these were just two points that I found most useful. Please read it for yourself if you feel interested or inspired in any way. I still have a long way to go to living the 4-hour work week but I have always been working towards that. I (and Tim Ferriss, presumably) would be delighted to see people testing different ideas and business modes across different industries.