Retire Today Using the 4 Hour Work Week
Retire Today Using the 4 Hour Work Week
In his current bestselling book, “The 4 Hour Work Week”, Timothy Ferris boldly suggests that most people suffer from A.D.D., that is, Adventure Deficit Disorder! He says that the traditional format of working unhappily at a career for 30 to 40 years to earn a ‘retirement’ is all wrong and that we should all enjoy several ‘mini-retirements’ along the way. He then goes on to reason how this is possible today.
The days of the corporate employer being committed to provide a lasting good work environment and rich retirement plans have gone the way of the pay phone booth and rotary dial phone. A person just starting their career today cannot reasonably expect to work for a company for more than a few years or to accumulate much of a pension from the company toward their eventual retirement. (Those retirement funds will only come from developing a savings discipline early in life!).
Mr. Ferris suggests that a person just starting their career should become more committed to themselves than to a company or to a specific job. By utilizing today’s technology to capitalize on time and resources, a young person can use his or her entrepreneurial skills to create a ‘cash machine’ to automate the process of providing the necessary income to support their desired lifestyle. With the requirement to provide for income taken care of, he says that one can then break up their life into several custom designed ‘adventures’. These ‘adventures’ need not be laying around on a beach somewhere; they can be performing humanitarian projects, pursuit of personal goals, or whatever it is that particularly excites you. Would you enjoy such freedom to do what you really want instead of what an employer or a career dictates to you?
The routine that most of us employ has become very inefficient and many people find themselves working 40 or more hours each week in order to produce about 4 hours worth of results. Our culture has created an expectation that we be at our desk for 8-10 hours each day and to stay busy. When all time wasters and inefficiencies are eliminated from a person’s life, and technology is fully employed, they are able to produce good results quite efficiently in about 4 hours per week.
If this is possible, that leaves us with lots of time to do whatever activities we desire that we find enjoyable or exciting. Mr. Ferris suggests that taking a fresh look at our current lifestyle and making some critical changes can enable us to better utilize our time to create more excitement in our lives.
Obviously, few people will be able to completely buy in to the “4 Hour Work Week” philosophy because of our commitments. Depending on our age, family obligations, and career status, it would be extremely difficult for most of us to totally embrace such a radical approach. That does not mean that we cannot step back and evaluate our current place and explore other possibilities, at least in our plans and dreams.
Many of the concepts presented by Mr. Ferris are based on the Pareto principle, better known as the ’80/20 rule’. An economist of the 19th century, Pareto developed mathematical formulas that confirm that in most endeavors, 80 percent of the results are derived from 20% of the effort. Also, 20% of the people will likely own 80% of the wealth. There are many areas in which the Pareto principle has been found to apply.
Don’t you think that most of the results that you produce in your work come from a small percentage of your activities? I think that this holds true for me. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could structure our lives to use 20% of our career to produce 80% of our income? What a difference that would make! Instead of working for 40 years to earn our retirement, we could produce similar results in about 8 years and use the remaining 32 years to activities that we find exciting and adventurous. On the surface, this seems unreasonable, but when you really get into it after reading the Ferris book, I would bet that your mind will be opened to considering some new alternatives.
Resources:Don Seibert is a retired business executive who, as an Expert Author, writes timely articles on many issues concerning sources of retirement income. Having retired three times, he now is the host of http://www.RetireToEasyStreet.com
Visit the site for a complete discussion of Retirement Income Options