Tim Ferriss is the author of The 4-Hour Workweek, first published in 2007. After his speech at SXSW that same year, the idea spread through the blogosphere like a particularly ambitious virus. Soon, aspiring entrepreneurs and restless travelers everywhere were dreaming of firing their bosses, outsourcing their lives and running vaguely defined Internet businesses from hammocks in Thailand.
The subtitle, “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”, certainly knew where to aim. Ferriss comes across as a sort of human laboratory rat who has somehow taken control of the laboratory. He tries things on himself, measures what happens, throws away what doesn’t work and keeps whatever appears useful. In that sense, his philosophy reminds me of the old quote often attributed to Bruce Lee: “Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”
That is probably the healthiest way to approach Ferriss as well. The 4-Hour Workweek contains plenty of ideas about what he calls “lifestyle design”. Some are excellent. Others may make you raise an eyebrow and quietly back toward the exit. As with most grand theories about how to live your life, cherry-picking is advisable.
It’s also worth remembering when the book appeared. The early 2000s were years of frantic digital optimism. More websites, More emails, more hours, more everything. Working yourself into a medically interesting condition was occasionally treated as evidence of commitment. Long days at the office and near-burnout lifestyle was sometimes worn as a badge of honor. Busy was good. Exhausted was better. Ferriss asked an inconvenient question: are you actually productive, or are you merely busy?
Many people describe The 4-Hour Workweek as a productivity book, but I think its more interesting argument is about the meaning of work itself. Most people don’t necessarily want to be millionaires. They want what they imagine millionaires have: freedom, options and control over their own time.
Beneath the life hacks, outsourcing tricks and productivity systems lies a more philosophical idea: free your time and use it for something you actually care about. Decide what kind of life you want instead of automatically accepting the standard package handed to you at birth with school, career, mortgage, retirement, death. Preferably with a few interesting detours before the last item.
Creative session at a motel somewhere in California.
Of course, digital nomads existed long before somebody gave them a marketable name. I remember reading travel blogs a decade ago where dusty backpackers sat on balconies in distant countries with laptops balanced on plastic tables. Palm trees swayed somewhere behind them (at least as much as palm trees could sway in a 480-pixel jpeg) while they uploaded dispatches from wherever they happened to be.
At the time, this felt extraordinary. Someone could be sitting in Kathmandu, Cairo or Buenos Aires and tell you what had happened that afternoon. You could read it almost immediately and leave a comment. Today this sounds approximately as revolutionary as indoor plumbing, but back then it felt like the future had accidentally arrived early. Typing that makes me feel roughly a thousand years old.
Writing a blog post on a dubious computer in Yazd, Iran.
Blogging itself wasn’t always taken seriously either. Traditional news organizations tended to look at bloggers the way respectable restaurants look at someone arriving barefoot.
Then reality intervened. I remember sitting in a hotel room in San Francisco in 2005, watching CNN’s coverage of hurricane Katrina. With professional reporters struggling to reach some of the disaster areas, journalists were suddenly browsing blogs and Flickr photographs on live television. The barbarians weren’t merely at the gate anymore. CNN was using their pictures.
The photographs of the digital nomad lifestyle were always seductive: laptop, beach, palm tree, cold drink. What the photographs generally left out was the work. Ten years ago laptops were heavier, batteries were worse and Internet connections in many places moved at speeds normally associated with continental drift. There was something deeply absurd about traveling halfway around the planet to experience a beautiful foreign country, then spending the afternoon staring at a progress bar while a modem attempted to upload jpegs, so slow it seemed to be sending the IP packages by homing pigeons.
Writing a blog post in Marrakesh, Morocco.
I’ve done plenty of this myself. I’ve sat alone in hotel rooms in foreign cities, hammering away at a laptop while an entire country waited outside. There are moments when dedication starts looking suspiciously like stupidity. Fortunately, I usually regain consciousness eventually, close the computer and head outside. That’s one reason my posts written while traveling tend to be short. The street usually wins.
And that’s the part of digital nomadism that glossy photographs don’t always advertise. You still have to work. You still have clients, bills, laundry and the occasional spectacularly useless Wi-Fi connection. On top of that, you’re trying to maintain friendships, eat something that didn’t come from an airport kiosk, exercise occasionally and remember which country you’re currently in. Freedom requires maintenance.
Long-term remote travel can look like a golden goose riding a shiny unicorn across an Instagram sunset. There are, unfortunately, complications. What happens when travel becomes ordinary? If every week brings another beach, another ancient temple and another rooftop bar overlooking another beautiful city, does any of it eventually become background noise?
And it leads back to one of the more interesting questions raised by Ferriss. Suppose you actually escape the treadmill. Then what? You have liberated yourself from the office, automated the business, packed the laptop and flown somewhere warm. Monday morning arrives. Your friends back home are commuting to work. You’re sitting alone on a beach. Congratulations. Now what are you going to do with your life? Freedom without purpose can become just another kind of trap.
Writing a blog post in Hiroshima, Japan.
Lifestyle design is fascinating territory. Just be careful that optimizing your life doesn’t become another full-time occupation preventing you from actually living it. Having said that, I still recommend The 4-Hour Workweek. Read it skeptically. Steal the useful parts. Ignore the rest.
Ferriss also wrote The The 4-Hour Body in 2010, dealing with diet, training and various experiments performed upon the author’s apparently long-suffering body, and The 4-Hour Chef in 2012, which uses cooking as a vehicle for exploring accelerated learning.
For more inspiration on your journey, you may also be interested in the works of Richard Koch (The 80-20 principle is a whole book devoted to one of the principles mentioned by Ferriss), Tony Robbins (start with Unlimited Power, even though it is less business-oriented than The 4-Hour Workweek), Richard Branson (check out Like a Virgin, which is more business-oriented if you prefer that), Brene Brown (Daring Greatly), Simon Sinek (Start With Why), and Derek Sivers (Anything You Want).
Take what you need. Then close the damn laptop and go outside.
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