The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss

Ferriss, Timothy. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich. New York: Crown, 2007.

The 4-Hour Workweek sounds like a dream only the independently wealthy and part-time retirees can enjoy. Timothy Ferriss has written about how the new rich enjoy independence now, without spending decades saving up for it.

Ferris describes four steps the new rich follow to achieve their lifestyle. They make a handy acronym: DEAL.

The deal starts with definition. You cannot live the lifestyle you want until you clearly define it. The dream-lining method he describes will encourage you to reach out for those big goals now and not wait.

The next step is elimination. The currency of the new rich is time. They ruthlessly cut out anything that wastes time. If it is not what they want to do, or contributing significantly to their income, they drop it. Ferriss applies the Pareto principle that 80 percent of the results come from 20 percent of the effort. The daring step taken by the new rich is actually cutting out the 80 percent of unproductive activity.

Automation is about freeing up time and making money. The new rich are not interested in accumulating wealth. The idea is to have a stream of income that supports your lifestyle without taking up a lot of your time. Ferriss calls these income sources “muses.” They amount to automatic business that run with very little of your direct involvement.



This part of the book focuses on how to lead the lifestyle you want, especially if it involves travel. Ferriss likes to travel and found it is inexpensive to spend extended periods in other countries. There are many temptations to go back to working for works sake and waste time on things that do no contribute to your lifestyle. The new rich do not allow that stuff to draw them away from the liberation they have won.

The bottom line of the new rich is that it is not about having it all. It is about enjoying what you want most.

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

We may convince ourselves that we are decisive beings, making choices and reasoning our way through problems. Duke University researchers found that 40 percent of our daily activities are habits. Psychologist William James put it more starkly: “All of life, so far as its definite form, is but a mass of habits.” These are just a couple of the sources Charles Duhigg draws from in The Power of Habit.

Habit formation is built into the structure of our brain, as Duhigg describes in the early chapters of the book. It is a matter of efficiency. Thinking and deciding are demanding mental tasks. The brain gains efficiency through automation, chunking together even complex activities into routines we can perform with very little mental effort or attention.

The difficulty with this biological economy is that we form many habits without consciously choosing. Some of those habits may have negative consequences. This is the central point of the book. Habits can make or break us, so it is important to understand habits, how they are formed, and how they can be changed.

There is good news and bad news about habits. The bad news is that the encoding of habits in the brain seems to be permanent. The good news is that they can be overwritten with new, more powerful habits.

Duhigg breaks habits down into parts. A cue triggers the habit. We perform routine. Finally, that routine produces or acquires a reward. Eventually, we conflate the cue a reward, having a strong anticipation of the reward that creates a craving. This craving gives the habit its power. Changing habits involves inserting a new routine between the cue and reward that satisfies the craving (and hopefully producing a more positive result than the bad habit you’re hoping to change).

Changing a habit is difficult. Some habits can only change with much time, effort, and support. There is not one-size-fits-all approach to changing habits, but Duhigg presents a general framework.

·         -First, identify the routine you want to change.

·         -Next, experiment with rewards. By substituting different rewards, and tracking how you feel about it, you can isolate what you are really craving.

·         -Isolate the cue to see what is triggering the habit. Duhigg offers a simple handful of questions that can narrow down your search. Figure out what is happening just before you feel the craving.

·         -Finally, develop plan to implement a new routine that satisfies the craving. It will also be good to plan how you are going to handle the inevitable setbacks you’ll experience as you change your habits.

I was surprised by the moral stand on habits Duhigg took in the latter chapters of the book. He argues that if you know you have a habit that is dangerous or destructive, you have an obligation to do something about it. Fortunately, awareness of a habit puts you on the path to being able to do something about it. Unfortunately, that may be a rocky, uncomfortable, and difficult path.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Changing for Good by James O. Prochaska, John C. Norcross & Carlo C. DiClemente

Mindset by Carol S. Dweck

No Excuses by Brian Tracy

Small Move, Big Change by Caroline L. Arnold

Duhigg, Charles. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business. New York: Random House, 2012.

The Dawn of Innovation by Charles R. Morris

Over the course of the 19^th Century, the United States transformed from a frontier nation dependent on trade with former colonizing nations to a leading manufacturer and exporter of goods. Charles R. Morris describes how America accomplished this change in The Dawn of Innovation.

The forces that led to the development of an American system of manufacturing were practical and cultural. There were labor shortages, especially for skilled labor. Americans in every field were interested in mechanizing work to get it done with the people and skills available. Americans were also largely middle class, at least in their way of thinking. They had to have the means to cross the Atlantic, and once here wage pressure and the availability of resources quickly made many people middle class. The middle class valued improvement and economic independence. In the U.S. they were free from the limiting class structures of Europe.

The middle class were also consumers. They were interested in the goods and lifestyle associated with wealth, but at prices they could afford. And there were a lot more of them that the handful of rich people who were the consumers of traditional luxury goods. Americans wanted to produce, market and distribute goods on a mass scale that was hard for Europeans of the time to even imagine.

The cloth-making industry was one of the first to bring together the aspects of modern manufacturing: specialization, organization of work flow, mechanization and automation. American cloth makers took—sometimes stole—these things from the British. A leap that the Americans made, but not the British, was to apply these same concepts to all kinds of production.

The organization of work was especially helpful in the U.S., where the skilled workers needed for precision machine making were few. Morris uses the arms industry as an example of American leadership in the transformation from craft piecework to an organized workflow with uniform standards.

Morris also undertakes some myth busting. Eli Whitney is associated with first rifles—really the first manufactured goods—to have interchangeable parts, which is a hallmark of modern manufacturing. Whitney and others promised interchangeability to win contracts with the Army, but he never achieved it; it took him a while to even become a good gun maker. It took decades of work by others to achieve interchangeable parts. This was both a matter of organizing work and developing more precise machining equipment.

Morris shows how innovations accumulated over time to create American manufacturing leadership. He shows how the culture and natural environment were incubators for such development.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Gentleman Scientists by Tom Schachtman

Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

The Society for Useful Knowledge by Jonathan Lyons

Waste and Want by Susan Strasser

Morris, Charles R. The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution. New York: Public Affairs, 2012.

My Inventions by Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla’s autobiography, collected under the title My Inventions, originally appeared as six articles in issues of Electrical Experimenter in 1919. It is a surprisingly thin book, especially in light of the several biographies that have been written about him, and the possibly greater volumes propounding the mythology of an almost demi-god genius.

To be fair, Tesla was a very creative and productive inventor. His AC motors, and the power systems that support them, enabled a new level of industrial power and automation. In many ways it was the technological foundation of the power grid we have today.

Tesla was ahead of his time and he realized it. He knew that the success of AC motors was greatly aided by coming about at the right time. Even so, it took many years from Tesla’s design to become a prototype and for that to become a commercial product with an infrastructure to support its use. At the time he wrote My Inventions, the value and practicality of his later inventions were still hard for many to see.

One of these later inventions was the radio. Tesla didn’t use that term “radio.”  It’s probably fair to say that he misunderstood the phenomena he was working with. Even so, he could produce radio transmissions and put them to practical use. As a demonstration, he built radio-controlled boats. It’s a stretch to say that Tesla envisioned smart phones, but he foresaw the possibility of using radio to transmit many kinds of data and signals, sometimes to devices “not bigger than a watch.”

“The pressure of occupation and the incessant stream of impressions pouring into our consciousness thru all the gateways of knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways,” Nikola Tesla, My Inventions

These articles were written at the end of World War I. Tesla reflected on the potentials of technology in peace and war. He imagined that wireless communication could shrink the world, leading to the kind of cultural exchange, common ground and commercial connections that would reinforce peace. He also imagined a rocket that could be guided to its target by radio control or internal mechanism; we could call it an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

Though visionary, he was not an infallible genius. He held to notions of physics that were not supported even by the science of his time. He had some wild ideas about psychology, biology and other fields, though some of these were no more far-out and off the mark that many that were popularly accepted by his contemporaries.

Tesla wrote very much from his own experience and perspective. Though he speaks of his upbringing in eastern Europe, his education and his career in Europe and the United States, he spends little time reflecting on the places, cultures and broader events he experience. You’ll learn more about Tesla’s peculiar ailments than about the life of youth in late-19^th Century Croatia. Perhaps that wouldn’t have sold many issues of Electrical Experimenter.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Tesla, Nikola. My Inventions. 1919. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1995.