I’ve been around a while and I’ve been trying to get better with my finances, start a side hustle, and start looking into the idea of eventually retiring. I thought this might help figure out how to streamline my hours for Scrap Paper Entertainment, but instead I found what might be the source of a certain type of influencer.
While The 4 Hour Workweek does have some good advice about streamlining your work, such as limiting email and eliminating or automating tasks that are annoying, there’s a lot of unfortunate things in here too that I ended up paying more attention to. Mostly because it sounded really familiar. For instance, outsource your tasks1 to cheap labour in India. Cut your costs by moving to a third world country. There is good advice in here, but it’s undercut by the exploitative nature of the solutions offered.
It also really advocates for dropshipping. This was likely good advice in 2010, but now that market is saturated and this illustrates something that’s pretty well known in my circles at least. Business ideas are great if you get in early, but anything that works will not work for long.
If you can find the advice buried under the solutions, there’s some good stuff in here. Minimize the fluff and focus only on the important tasks. Delegate and eliminate as much as possible. Find an income source that involves as little attention as possible. Just maybe skip over the solutions offered.
- Including emails to your wife? Divorce this man. [↩]