"The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferriss

• The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the new rich: time and mobility.
• Reality is negotiable. Outside of science and law, all rules can be bent or broken, and it doesn’t require being unethical.
• The DEAL of deal making is also an acronym for the process of becoming a member of the New Rich.
• D - definition
• E - Elimination
• A - Automation
• L - Liberation.
• Inactivity is not the goal. Doing that which excites you is.
• If you can free your time and location, our money is automatically worth 3-19 times as much.
• 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.
• Options--the ability to choose--is real power.
• Sports evolve when sacred cows are killed, when basic assumptions are tested. The same is true in life and in lifestyle design.
• Different is better when it is more effective or more fun.
• Retirement is worst-case-scenario insurance.
• It [retirement] is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life.
• Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to survive let alone thrive.
• By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable.
• Interest and energy are cyclical.
• Less is not laziness.
• Few people choose to (or are able to) measure the results of their actions and thus measure their contribution in time.
• Focus on being productive instead of busy.
• The timing is never right.
• If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually”, just do it and correct course along the way.
• Ask for forgiveness, not permission.
• If it isn’t going to devastate those around you, try it and then justify it.
• If the potential damage is moderate or in any way reversible, don’t give people the chance to say no.
• Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses.
• Most people are good at a handful of things and utterly miserable at most.
• It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.
• Things in excess become their opposite.
• Too much, too many, and too often of what you want becomes what you don’t want.
• Money alone is not the solution.
• “If only I had more money” is the easiest way to postpone the intense self-examination and decision-making necessary to create a life of enjoyment--now and not later.
• Relative income is more important than absolute income.
• Absolute income is measured using one holy and unalterable variable: the raw and almighty dollar. Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours.
• Distress is bad, eustress is good.
• Distress refers to harmful stimuli that make you weaker, less confident, and less able. Eustress, on the other hand, is stress that is helpful and the stimulus for growth.
• There is no progress without eustress, and the more eustress we can create or apply to our lives, the sooner we can actualize our dreams.
• Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.
• Conquering fear = defining fear.
• Usually, what we most fear doing is what we most need to do.
• Resolve to do one thing everyday that you fear.
• Doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic.
• Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre.
• Doing big things begins with asking for them properly.
• Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.
• Living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things and not just owning enviable things.
• “I believe that success can be measured in the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have.”
• You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.
• The best first step, the one I recommend, is finding someone who’s done it and ask for advice on how to do the same.
• No matter how small the task, take the first step now.
• The most important actions are never comfortable.
• To have an uncommon lifestyle, you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.
• There is a direct correlation between an increased sphere of comfort and getting what you want.
• “One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase, but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.” -- Bruce Lee
• Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
• Increase your productivity to increase negotiating leverage for two simultaneous objectives: pay raises and a remote working agreement.
• You need to liberate yourself from the office environment before you can work ten hours a week, because the expectation in that environment is that you will be in constant motion from 9-5.
• Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task in the most economical manner possible.
• Doing something unimportant well does not make it important. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.
• What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.
• Maximum income from minimal necessary effort (including minimum number of customers) is the primary goal.
• Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness--lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.
• Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.
• It’s easy to get caught in a flood of minutiae, and the key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities.
• 9-5 is arbitrary.
• Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.
• The end product of a shorter deadline is almost inevitable of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.
• Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
• Most inputs are useless and time is wasted in proportion to the amount that is available.
• The key to having more time is doing less, and there are two paths to getting there, both of which should be used together:
• Define a to-do list.
• Define a not-to-do list.
• Simplicity requires ruthlessness.
• You are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends.
• If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.
• Don’t ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities.
• There should never be more than two mission-critical items to complete each day.
• Do not multitask. If you prioritize properly, there is no need to multitask.
• Stop the back-and-forth and make a decision.
• Stop asking for opinions and start propagating solutions.
• It is important that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable. Most are all three.
• Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it
• Starting something doesn’t automatically justify finishing it.
• More is not better, and stopping something is often 10 times better than finishing it.
• Learn to be difficult when it counts.
• Check email twice per day, once at 12 noon or just prior to lunch, and again at 4. Never check email first thing in the morning.
• Emergencies are seldom that. People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutes to fill time and feel important.
• Don’t encourage people to chit chat and don’t let them chitchat. Get them to the point immediately.
• From this moment forward, resolve to keep those around you focused and avoid all meetings, whether in person or remote, that do not have clear objective.
• Don’t suffer fools or you’ll become one.
• It is your job to train those around you to be effective and efficient.
• Meetings should only be held to make decision about a predefined situation, not to define the problem.
• If you absolutely can’t stop a meeting or call from happening, define the end time. If things are well defined, decisions should not take more than 30 minutes.
• “The Puppy Dog Close” just try it and if you don’t like it bring it back.
• If a boss asks for overtime “just this once”, he or she will expect it in the future.
• Batching is the solution to our distracting but necessary time consumers, those repetitive tasks that interrupt the most important.
• There is an inescapable setup time for all tasks, large or minuscule in scale.
• Do not work harder when the solution is working smarter.
• Empowerment failure refers to being unable to accomplish a task without first obtaining permission or information.
• It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.
• People are smarter than you think. Give them a chance to prove themselves.
• Realize that bosses are supervisors, not slave masters.
• Establish yourself as a consistent challenger of the status quo and most people will learn to avoid you, particularly if it is in the interest of higher per-hour productivity.
• Limit access to your time, force people to define their requests before spending time with them, and batch routine menial tasks to prevent postponement of more important projects.
• Do not let people interrupt you.
• Create systems to limit your availability via e-mail and phone and deflect inappropriate contact.
• Batch activities to limit setup cost and provide more time for dreamline milestones.
• Set or request autonomous rules and guidelines with occasional review of results.
• Remove the decision bottleneck for all things that are nonfatal if miss performed.
• “No” should be your default answer to all requests.
• Preparing someone to replace you (even if it never happens) will produce an ultra refined set of rules that will cut remaining fat and redundancy from your schedule. Lingering unimportant tasks will disappear as soon as someone else is being paid to do them.
• It is important to take baby steps toward paying others to do work for you. Few do it, which is another reason so few people have their ideal lifestyle.
• Unless something is well-defined and important, no one should do it.
• Eliminate before you delegate.
• Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined.
• Principle number one is to refine rules and processes before adding people.
• Set an hour cap for simple tasks.
• Never use debit cards for online transactions or with remote assistants.
• Develop the comfort of commanding and not being commanded.
• It’s called the criticism sandwich because you first praise the person for something, then deliver the criticism, and then close with topic-shifting praise to exit the sensitive topic.
• There are a million and one ways to make a million dollars.
• You don’t want to run a business. You want to own a business.
• Our goal is simple: to create an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.
• So first things first: cash flow and time. With these two currencies, all other things are possible. Without them, nothing is possible.
• Pick an affordably reachable niche market.
• Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is much easier. Don’t create a product, then seek someone to fill it. Find a market--define your customers--then find or develop a product for them.
• Be a member of your target market and don’t speculate what others need or will be willing to buy.
• It is more profitable to be a big fish in a small pond than a small undefined fish in a big pond.
• Brainstorm (do not invest in) products.
• People can dislike you--and you often sell more by offending some--but they should never misunderstand you.
• The main benefit of your product should be explainable in one sentence or phrase. Keep it simple and do not move ahead with a product until you can do this without confusing people.
• There are three main benefits to creating a premium, high-end image and charging more than the competition.
• Higher pricing means that we can sell fewer units--and thus manager fewer customers--and fulfill our dreamlines. It’s faster.
• Higher pricing attracts lower-maintenance customers. It’s less headache. This is huge.
• Higher pricing also creates higher profit margins. It’s safer.
• Intuition and experience are poor predictors of which products and business will be profitable.
• Micro-test your products.
• Micro-testing involves using inexpensive advertisements to test consumer response to a product prior to manufacturing.
• The basic test process consists of three parts.
• Best: Look at the competition and create a more-compelling offer on a basic one-to-three page website.
• Test: Test the offer using short Google Adwords advertising campaigns.
• Divest or Invest: Cut losses with losers and manufacture the winners for sales roll out.
• Reinventing the wheel is expensive--become an astute observer of what is already working and adapt it.
• Negotiate near closing time, choose your objective price, bracket, and make a firm offer with cash in hand for that amount.
• Get used to refusing offers and countering in person and--most importantly--on the phone.
• 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.
• Customer service is providing an excellent product at an affordable price and solving legitimate problems in the fastest manner possible. That’s it.
• The more options you offer the customer, the more indecision you create and the fewer orders you receive.
• The art of “undecision” refers to minimizing the number of decisions your customers can or need to make.
• Offer one or two purchase options (“basic” and “premium”) and no more.
• Do not offer multiple shipping options. Offer one fast method instead and charge a premium.
• Do not offer overnight or expedited shipping, as these shipping methods will produce hundreds of anxious phone calls.
• Eliminate phone orders completely and direct all prospects to online ordering.
• Do not offer international shipments.
• Not all customers are created equal.
• Instead of dealing with problem customers, I recommend you prevent them from ordering in the first place.
• Those who spend the least and ask for the most before ordering will do the same after the sale. Cutting them out is both a good lifestyle decision and a good financial decision.
• Those who spend the most complain the least.
• Offer a lose-win guarantee instead of free trials.
• How to look like a fortune 500 business:
• Don’t call yourself the CEO or founder.
• Put multiple email and phone contacts on the website.
• Set up an interactive voice response remote receptionist.
• Do not provide home addresses.
• Don’t underestimate how much your company needs you. Perform well and ask for what you want. If you don’t get it over time, leave. It’s too big a world to spend most of life in a cubicle.
• Just because something has been a lot of work or consumed a lot of time doesn’t make it productive or worthwhile.
• Just because you are embarrassed to admit that you’re still living the consequences of bad decisions made 5, 10, or 20 years ago shouldn’t stop you from making good decisions now. If you let pride stop you, you will hate life 5, 10 and 20 years from now for the same reasons.
• Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.
• Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple--many are just emotionally difficult to act upon.
• It’s easier and less painful than you think.
• Few things are fatal, particularly for smart people.
• There are two types of mistakes: mistakes of ambition and mistakes of sloth. The first is the result of a decision to act--to do something. This type of mistake is made with incomplete information, as it’s impossible to have all the facts beforehand. This is to be encourage. Fortune favors the bold. The second is the result of a decision of sloth--to not do something--wherein we refuse to change a bad situation out of fear despite having all the facts.
• One cannot be free from the stresses of a speed- and sized-obsessed culture until you are free from the materialistic addictions, time-famine mind-set, and comparative impulses that created it in the first place.
• Learn to slow down. Get lost intentionally.
• Most excuses not to travel are exactly that--excuses.
• Before spending time on a stress-inducing question, big or otherwise, ensure that the answer is “yes” to the following two questions.
• Have I decided on a single meaning for each term in this question?
• Can an answer to this question be acted upon to improve things?
• If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.
• The top 13 New Rich mistakes:
• Losing sight of dreams and falling into work for work’s sake.
• Micromanaging and emailing to fill time.
• Handling problems your outsources or co-workers can handle.
• Helping outsources or co-workers with the same problem more than once, or with non crisis problems.
• Chasing customers, particularly unqualified or international prospects, when you have sufficient cash flow to finance your nonfinancial pursuits.
• Answering email that will not result in a sale or that can be answered by a FAQ or auto-responder.
• Working where you live, sleep, or should relax.
• Not performing a through 80/20 analysis every two to four weeks for your business and personal life.
• Striving for endless perfection rather than great or simply good enough, whether in your personal or professional life.
• Blowing minutiae and small problems out of proportion as an excuse to work.
• Making non-time-sensitive issues urgent in order to justify work.
• Viewing one product, job, or project as the end-all and be-all of your existence.
• Ignoring the social rewards of life.
• Focus on great for a few things and good enough for the rest. Perfection is a good ideal and direction to have, but recognize it for what it is: an impossible destination.
• Surround yourself with smiling, positive people who have absolutely nothing to do with work.
• Once you realize that you can turn off the noise without the world ending, you’re liberated in a way that few people will ever know.
• Just remember: if you don’t have attention, you don’t have time.
• Be focused on work or focused on something else, never in-between.
• Time without attention is worthless, so value attention over time.
• It’s deliberation--the time we vacillate over and consider each decision--that’s the attention consumer. Total deliberation time, not the number of decisions, determines your attention bank account balance (or debt).
• “Not-to-do” lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance. The reason is simple: What you don’t do determines what you can do.
• Not-to-do:
• Do not answer calls from unrecognized numbers.
• Do not email first thing in the morning or last thing at night.
• Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time.
• Do not let people ramble.
• Do not check email constantly--”batch” and check at set times only.
• Do not over-communicate with low-profit, high-maintenance customers.
• Do not work more to fix overwhelmingness--prioritize.
• Do not carry a cell phone or crackberry 24/7.
• Do not expect work to fill a void that non-work relationships and activities should.
• A big part of GTD (Getting Things Done) is GTP--Getting To the Point.
• There is no sure path to success, but the surest path to failure is trying to please everyone.
• If you don’t prioritize, everything seems urgent and important. If you define the single most important task for each day, almost nothing seems urgent or important.
• Work is not all of life.
• Your co workers shouldn’t be your only friends.
• Time is the most expensive asset a start-up has, and chasing delinquent accounts will prevent you from generating more sales.
• Well-designed and well-target advertising works the first time.
• Never make the first offer when purchasing. Flinch after the first offer, let people negotiate against themselves, then “bracket”.
• Being busy is not the same thing as being productive.
• Invest in duplicating your few strong areas instead of fixing all of your weaknesses.
• Not all customers are created equal. “Fire” high maintenance customers.
• Skills are overrated.
• Perfect products delivered past deadline kill companies faster than decent products delivered on time.
• Test someone’s ability to deliver on a specific and tight deadline before hiring them based on a dazzling portfolio.
• Products can be fixed as long as you have cash flow, and bugs are forgiven, but missing deadlines is often fatal.