4 Hour Work Week Review: Skepticism Abounds

Although the author’s primary purpose of writing this book isn’t to eliminate your Anxiety , it’s a goldmine of principles, tactics, and philosophies that will drastically reduce the Anxiety in your life.  Let’s get your first burning question out of the way: no, you CAN’T make a living working only 4 hours a week.  Even the author, Tim Ferriss, admits to that and if you read the book, he’ll explain why he chose that as the title.  But if you don’t interpret the book title as a literal promise from the author and listen to his stories and advice with an open mind, I’m sure you can glean a ton of life-changing advice from this book.

So How Does This Book Help With My Anxiety?

One of the main themes of the book is finding ways to eliminate relatively meaningless work in order to free up time for more meaningful work and other activities.  Ways to accomplish that include (discussed in the book in detail):

• Eliminating distractions
• Negotiating out of relatively unimportant obligations
• Delegating or outsourcing tasks.

A lot of people who suffer from anxiety are either completely overwhelmed with their daily lives or are lacking activities that they find purpose and meaning in.  For the former group, Tim discusses the lessons he learned the hard way that eventually helped him reclaim the little free time he had available in his life.  For the latter group, Tim also offers practical exercises to determine your interests, aspirations and fears in helping set your goals going forward.

In the early 2000s, Tim was beyond overwhelmed with his sports supplement business, working 80+ hour weeks and on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  His plight eventually pushed him to take drastic action and test ways to improve his productivity and time management without letting his business suffer.  A few years after that, he was working less than 4 hours a week and living a dream life traveling the world, exploring new hobbies, and even setting various world records.  Those drastic actions he took plus the new insights he gained in the process gave birth to this book.  While his results may atypical, if it’s good enough for him to live this dream life, then it certainly can some add value to yours by mitigating your anxiety and overwhelm.

Where to Learn More?

For less than 2 bucks, you can purchase the Kindle version of this book from Amazon.com.  Traditional paperback and hardcover versions are available as well.  Please click the green button below to be taken there.  If you’d like to learn more about the author Tim Ferriss and his latest developments, please head over to his blog (I highly recommend his new podcast series, the Tim Ferriss Show, started in 2014.)