In Part One of WEALTH magazine’s spotlight on best-selling author Timothy Ferriss, we took a look at how Ferriss entered his 15 minutes of fame and came up with what he calls his “lifestyle redesign.” In Part Two, we see how Ferriss recommends that others can redesign their lives and businesses to get the most out of every minute.
Ferriss found that his life changed when he combined the Pareto Prinicple and the adage known as “Parkinson’s Law,” which loosely purports that the demand for a resource tends to expand to match the supply of that resource. By putting the two together, Ferriss asked himself — and encourages his readers to ask — the following two questions from Pareto’s Principle. When they get the answers, it’s time to apply Parkinson’s Law:
First,
1. What are the 20 percent sources that are causing 80 percent of your problems?
2. Which 20 percent of your sources are producing 80 percent of your desired outcomes and happiness?
Then,
Give yourself less time for a task you need to do immediately, and you will get results that are just as good or better than if you allotted more time, because you will be more focused in accomplishing it.
By combining these two strategies, Ferriss says he limited his to-do list to the most important to shorten work time AND shortened his work time to limit tasks to the most important. Does he always work only four hours a week? No, because Ferriss despises laziness and advocates always learning, always doing something. It’s just that the “something” doesn’t have to be “work” in the traditional 9-to-5, too-much-overtime, taking-it-home-on-the-weekends formula applied by so many Americans today.
Lifestyle design
For Ferriss, applying Pareto’s Principle and Parkinson’s Law retooled his “lifestyle design” in a way that enabled him to travel for extended periods, learn new languages, immerse himself in new cultures and get the kind of pleasurable experiences in life he desired. But — and this is an important distinction for those whose desire is to generate wealth — he did not do it in the style of the ultra-rich. While he is living a life packed with rich experiences, he is not always doing it by flying on private jets, sitting on yachts drinking mint juleps, buying diamonds, and hobnobbing with the most famous people in the world. His goal is not to make millions of dollars a year and spend it.
Instead, his lifestyle redesign was to travel for months or even a year at a time with little to no luggage (he believes in buying what you need locally and leaving it — or selling it — when you’re about to leave) and stay in apartments or even hostels to get to know the local culture. He biked around town rather than choosing a limousine and driver and spoke to local people he met on the streets. He wasn’t always dining at the five-diamond-rated resorts and restaurants but was more likely to be found at a local café.
“I could be racing motorcycles in Europe, scuba diving off a private island in Panama, resting under a palm tree between kickboxing sessions in Thailand, or dancing tango in Buenos Aires. The beauty is, I’m not a multimillionaire, nor do I particularly care to be,” Ferriss says in the first chapter of The 4-Hour Workweek.
The bottom line for Ferriss — through his book and his blog, www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog — is creating a lifestyle that is satisfying and rich without deferring it to old age. And he wants others to redecorate their lives, too.
“Tolerable mediocrity leads you to wake up one day and ask, ‘What happened to the last 20 years?’ That’s no way to spend the prime of life,” Ferriss told Fast Company magazine in a recent interview.
The New Rich: Living better on less
Ferriss defines people like him, usually younger, globally minded entrepreneurial spirits as the “New Rich.” They are people who live and work free of time and location restrictions. They can get the job done on their PDAs, through their virtual assistants (even better), and on the hours that work best for their body chemistry and mental acuity. For Ferriss, that’s typically writing between 1 and 4 a.m., posting occasional (weekly) blogs and Twitter posts and outsourcing much of his company.
The point is to create a lifestyle that gives you the opportunity to live anywhere, work when it fits your schedule and still make a living. Part of it for Ferriss involved “leveraging currency differences,” meaning that he could pay someone around the world in a developing country a lot less to do some of his tasks than it was costing him in time and money. He also discovered that living in other parts of the world for an extended period of time can cost much less than he would have spent at home, making these learning experiences (He doesn’t like the word “vacation”) actually pay.
“People don’t want to be millionaires — they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy,” Ferriss says in The 4-Hour Workweek. “$1,000,000 in the bank isn’t the fantasy. The fantasy is the lifestyle of complete freedom it supposedly allows. The question is then, ‘How can one achieve the millionaire lifestyle of complete freedom without first having $1,000,000?’”
Blogging to the top
One way Ferriss did it was by being dedicated to self-promotion. And he did it in — where else? – the virtual world. Before his book hit shelves, Ferriss found out where top bloggers go – and set out to meet them. He posted comments and stories immediately after new postings on their blogs, went to conferences and conventions where he could take the bloggers to dinner and sit with them at lunch, and immersed himself in this new word-of-mouth marketing.
He also found out what story ideas public relations professionals were looking for and transformed himself into an expert who could be quoted. And he advocates paying for media training so that you look and sound professional and have your message down when approached for a radio, TV, print or web interview.
The results of his efforts were not only a book that has sold more than 5 million copies and been translated into 33 languages, but also Ferriss’ reigning title as “Greatest Self-Promoter of All Time,” an award he was given in 2008 by Wired magazine.
Does Ferriss mind the award? Not in the least. He’s enjoying his new lifestyle design all the way around the world.
Creating your new Lifestyle Design
So just how do you retool your Lifestyle Design?
Here’s the “DEAL,” as outlined by Ferriss:
D – Dream (The first thing you have to do is decide what you want.)
E – Elimination (Get rid of everything that drains time, money, energy, etc., from your life)
A – Automation (Outsource as much of your life as you can. Let other people do anything that is not producing high enough returns in money or fulfillment so that you can spend your time on the things that are producing those high returns.)
L – Liberation (Create your new life, whether it is contributing in a big way to a charitable cause or taking a major spiritual journey.)
Tags: 4-Hour Workweek, lifestyle redesign, Pareto Principle, Parkinson's Law, self promotion, Timothy Ferriss