Ask your boss if you can start working from home. If you follow Tim’s instructions and your boss refuses to let you work from home – just quit your job, you’re meant to be an entrepreneur – brilliant!

That’s called an upper. He claims that he was a success in Silicon Valley…he sold the company for an undisclosed amount, and he was based in San Jose, not SV. I look at the price and tell her I do not have enough money with me to purchase it. She looks at me un-phased and says, “Use your credit card.” After that the book turns into a “lifestyle-for-dummies” book on setting up a shell company to sell someone else’s products. This works well unless his book becomes a best seller and many people decide they want to do the same thing (can you say, We Buy Ugly Houses”). There’s almost nothing original in it. You’re just reading summaries that might have been written by a $5 an hour researcher in India.

As for creating a new lifestyle, well this book applies if you already have money to burn and resources to fall back on and can afford to receive the pink slip that will surely come your way if you deal with people – particularly managers – as the author suggests. This book is just another ‘sleight of hand’ of the sort he brags of throughout.

Being at one-time an adjunct college professor of Economics I was naturally intrigued by the notion of a four-hour workweek, as the title suggests. So I purchased this book and I read it. Especially since there is never a guarantee that a business you attempt to start will work out. That is why it is not often done.

There are already a lot of businesses this can be done with. The other idea is not to wait to live your life or take vacations and do what you want. I was actually quite upset for spending the money on a book like this, which I deeply regret. Folks, come on, it is impossible to work 4 hours a week and actually make ANYTHING successful or as the author claimed to “lead a balanced happy life”. But after a few chapters, the book seems more like an infomercial than a literary work. Ferriss spends the first four chapters of the book redefining success in his own terms.

Like another reviewer said, “life is short”….why waste your time and money re-reading the same material twice. Want a life changing book” He achieves a 4-hour workweek by simply skimming the cream of a business model that any one of two billion literate people can implement at some level. Are we to believe this business model will be highly profitable for the next several years” It was during this portion of the book that I realized two things. Tim Ferriss was not the type of person I wanted to look up to. This book gets off to a good start, by making the valid (if trite) points that one should not defer all gratification indefinitely; and making money should not be an end in itself, but rather a means towards making it possible for you to do the things that you want to do. It also offers some useful (if basic) ways to save time, such as not checking email constantly, but rather dealing with it all at once at fixed (and not too frequent) times.

Those four people, even if they read this book, will probably throw it in the fire. Best Portable Gas Grills.

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