The 4-Hour Workweek

People don’t want to be millionaires—they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy.

The DEAL making:

• D for Definition turns misguided common sense upside down and introduces the rules and objectives of the new game.
  • If you can free your time and location, your money is automatically worth 3– 10 times as much.
  • Being financially rich and having the ability to live like a millionaire are fundamentally two very 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.
  • Options—the ability to choose—is real power.
  • The options are limitless, but each path begins with the same first step: replacing assumptions.
  • If everyone is defining a problem or solving it one way and the results are subpar, this is the time to ask, What if I did the opposite?
  • By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable.
  • Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness.
  • For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks.
  • If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.
  • Most people are fast to stop you before you get started but hesitant to get in the way if you’re moving.
  • Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.
  • What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.
  • Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase.
  • Living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things and not just owning enviable things.
  • ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.
  • To have an uncommon lifestyle, you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.
• E for Elimination kills the obsolete notion of time management once and for all.
  • In the strictest sense, you shouldn’t be trying to do more in each day, trying to fill every second with a work fidget of some type.
  • The employee is increasing productivity to increase negotiating leverage for two simultaneous objectives: pay raises and a remote working arrangement.
  • Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.
  • What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.
  • Pareto’s Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs.
  • Being selective—doing less—is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.
  • If you’re an employee, spending time on nonsense is, to some extent, not your fault.
  • For the entrepreneur, the wasteful use of time is a matter of bad habit and imitation.
  • Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.
  • Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
  • It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable.
• A for Automation puts cash flow on autopilot using geographic arbitrage, outsourcing, and rules of nondecision.
  • Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees, but that’s just the beginning.
  • It’s about building a system to replace yourself.
  • Lingering unimportant tasks will disappear as soon as someone else is being paid to do them.
  • You can always do something more cheaply yourself. This doesn’t mean you want to spend your time doing it.
  • 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. Using people to leverage a refined process multiplies production; using people as a solution to a poor process multiplies problems.
  • Each delegated task must be both time-consuming and well- defined. On a lighter note, have some fun with it.
  • Create a process-driven instead of founder-driven business. The architecture has to place us out of the information flow instead of putting us at the top of it.
  • Each outsourcer takes a piece of the revenue pie.
• L for Liberation is the mobile manifesto for the globally inclined.
  • Being bound to one place will be the new defining feature of middle class.
  • The new mantra is this: Work wherever and whenever you want, but get your work done.
  • While entrepreneurs have the most trouble with Automation, since they fear giving up control, employees get stuck on Liberation because they fear taking control.
  • Some jobs are simply beyond repair. It’s impossible to sit in the wrong job for the rest of your life.
  • Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner. It’s easier and less painful than you think.
  • There are two types of mistakes: mistakes of ambition and mistakes of sloth.
  • Why not take the usual 20–30-year retirement and redistribute it throughout life instead of saving it all for the end?
  • The mini-retirement entails relocating to one place for one to six months before going home or moving to another locale.
  • Though it can be relaxing, the mini-retirement is not an escape from your life but a reexamination of it—the creation of a blank slate.
  • The mini-retirement is defined as recurring—it is a lifestyle.
  • One cannot be free from the stresses of a speed- and size-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.
• Additional
  • Even when you’re not traveling the world, develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life- changing big things, whether important tasks or true peak experiences.
  • Embrace the choice-minimal lifestyle. It’s a subtle and under-exploited philosophical tool that produces dramatic increases in both output and satisfaction, all with less overwhelm.