Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I think there are some good things in the 4-hour Work Week but the concept as a whole is problematic: e.g. Tim Ferris himself has more like a 400-hour work week. Rich Dad Poor Dad is a right wing scam. There is a psychotechnology that people call "magic" but The Secret and Think and Grow Rich won't teach you it.

View on HN

The Secret is good for encouraging positive thinking. I think we have been fed fear mongering non-stop by the media and governments for at least ten years.

If you are in a good frame of mind, you will handle bad situations better, turning them into good situations which means you will have more of them. A better way of thinking about it than just saying you will attract positivity into your life.

I liked Ferris explaining that you can validate a market exists by serving ads pretending you already have a product. What a scumbag. Isn't the rest of the book just drop shipping and selling supplements with high margins? I recall snippets of a manual for unethical but mostly legal small business between stories of people making money on such practices.

I like his description of how you could just call up an expert on the phone and often get a quick answer to any question they can answer quickly. I'd learned that one myself.

Like it or not a lot of successful businesses have some bodies buried somewhere, particularly those that have been successful in two-sided markets such as online communities. There have been legendary successes in marketing enterprise software that didn't quite exist but I can say it didn't work when I tried it.

> Rich Dad Poor Dad is a right wing scam.

I think he was actually saying that by calling it fiction, lol.

Yeah, but it's the worst of the four. I remember his advice that you should buy a rental property which is cashflow positive after the mortgage payment on day one. (As opposed to profitable considering that you're building equity)

These were just not on the market except for one that had 8 section 8 apartments and would have driven me crazy trying to manage as a bleeding heart who cares about people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com