Honoring Your Craft – An alternative to the Four Hour Work Week mindset
dantawfik.medium.com
dantawfik.medium.com
That being said, I don't find the book overly ethical. It simply suggests outsourcing most of the work to developing countries, where people work for less.
I don't care if their alternative is a worse job, I'm asking why you, citizen of a first world country who lives daily on more than they live on average in a month, should feel ok paying them miserable wages for work that in your country would be paid 10x. Especially when the return you get is exactly the same, as you sell your product in a first world country by first world prices.
It is possible to outsource work tho third countries for less money, why everybody does not do that and there are still work in developed countries? Because it has some costs that may or may not be apparent. Therefore if you require to pay the same wage, you discourage anybody to give work to people in developing countries.
At a macro level, I’d also like to point at the China - US outsourcing story, and how it’s going regarding hollowing out of industries, IP and know-how transfer, and plain old money transfer. It’s not going too bad for China for the moment...
I can believe the exploitation part. There is certainly corruption everywhere which is often part of the cause.
But citation needed for the western part please.
What makes us exploitative is the fact that we go in poor countries and buy their best resources/workforce for the cheapest price possible, without caring if the money we pay even goes to benefit the population, (as often it only goes to benefit a few corrupt politicans/corporations). It's exploitation because we don't really help them get out of poverty but rather condemn them to a vicious circle of being dependent from us.
Then there are the second order effects, such as the dissolution of the middle class in your own country that everyone who outsources and automates is/will be partially responsible for.
Also culturally, we tend to share the wealth, so what is one job in America will become 6 jobs here.
From what I can see, outsourcing deprives one American of a job, makes one American desperate, and lifts 10 of us into the local middle class.
What can be zero-sum is if no new value is added, but you shuffle around who gets what. If Peter has a way to make $100 himself if someone else helps, and he decides to go from paying Mary $30 to paying Paul $5, he has enriched himself by taking from Mary.
I'm saying it's ethical for Peter to enrich himself as long as he enriches everyone, and it is unethical to take from others to give to himself.
The title of the book makes it sound like you can accomplish more by working less, while in fact the remaining 36 hours worth of work is done by someone else every week.
Think of it that way: How would someone from one of the developing countries the book mentions would benefit from what's written in that book?
I don't really need to outsource most of my daily activities, which was the rest of the book. The big win of the book was to serve as a middleman, but that kind of rent-seeking quickly fills up the niches.
If he's saying "discover a brand new market and develop it before everybody else does", yeah, that's pretty much what we're all doing on HN. It takes a lot more than four hours per week until you find it, and very few people find it. The rest of us labor 80 hour weeks in our startups, or give up and work merely 40 hours.
It's really no secret that Tim himself worked 100 hour weeks for an year before he could streamline his company, he says so himself.
The best idea I took was that of not banking on retirement and constantly upskilling. And the hypothetical questions like if you had 6 months to complete your 5 year plan what would you do. Makes a man think creatively.
I hope more people begin to follow this mindset than the vapid, soulless Tim Ferris approach.
Apart from being an incredibly good, humble and thoughtful interviewer, as others have said, I would also encourage anyone unfamiliar with his more recent work to check out his output in the areas of depression, suicide, childhood abuse, psychedelics research, not to mention his later books and countless fascinating podcast interviews with some incredible people.
Whatever you may think of the 4HWW and the almost cult-like following that it inspired, I think that Tim Ferris is a bit of a force for good at this point in time, and quite unique in his ability to tackle any subject head on - even the hardest and most personal ones.
He has a vast audience, and his writings about his own deep personal struggles are incredibly valuable, and I'm sure will have done a lot of good for people in similar positions. This sort of material is hugely important, coming from someone with such a broad reach.
As an aside, I pre-ordered 4HWW prior to it's launch and did find it a very inspiring read as a 20-something wannabe entrepreneur. Everyone gets something different from that book, but I had read The E-myth prior to it, and saw a lot of it as reenforcement of the idea of trying to free up your time to work "on your business" and not "in your business". In that sense, I saw a lot of value in it. But I also understand the flip-side "outsource everything and go live on a beach" view of the book...
It's worth noting that he didn't do the beach thing himself though. He extracted himself quickly out of his day-to-day grind and freed up his time to spend on things that he was interested in, and work hard in high-leverage areas that he wanted to contribute to, on his terms.
I will also note that in 4HWW that he does tell you to delegate and automate only when you've fully understood what to do. And what's wrong with such automation? That's what we programmers do on a daily basis.
At the moment I'm trying to find a digital ad agency, and it's all just "we'll hack your ads to supersize your growth!" Meanwhile I'm over here looking for someone who will spend the time to thoughtfully and methodically test ads, adjust based on the results and then continue to improve over time. Silly me.