Waking Up to Relax
Over the weekend I read The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss. There are sections of this book (especially the parts relating to personal assistants) that remind me a lot of The Power of Focus by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, and Les Hewitt. However, while the latter book was all about focusing on your strengths so you can put in more work, the former is about focusing on your strengths to work less and enjoy life more. Sorta.
I think the biggest takeaway from The 4-Hour Workweek is this point: You don’t need a million dollars in the bank to live well. You just need to control your time and make enough to live the life you want now–instead of deferring your life indefinitely into the future.
I’m so out of the self-help loop these days that I missed this book when it first came out in 2007. I bumped into it indirectly a couple weeks ago, through an article in the NY Times and a blog reference. The premise intrigued me, so I requested it from the library.
I’m not the primary demographic for this book. In fact, once I started reading it, I realized I had achieved a lot of what the author was advocating:
- I quit my last full-time job in the previous century [1];
- I make money independent of my time spent working;
- I can do what I do anywhere there’s an internet connection; and
- I can choose to work on this or that or, sometimes, nothing at all.
What did strike me, though, is how much I had begun to re-enter my old full-time-employee mindset. I blame myself and how I approached work on The Journal 5. I worked on that project exclusively for a solid year. Except for taking a week to shoot GDC last March, I focused on The Journal 5 day in and day out. I even let the project encroach on my weekends. Worse, even after releasing The Journal 5 last August, I’ve never really let it go. I tried to participate in Nanowrio back in November, but I just couldn’t shake my must-work-on-TJ5 habit.
It was that renewed FTE mindset (“time to make the donuts”) that had made the book appeal to me when I heard about it. I wanted to escape.
Which is almost funny. I’m the only one walling me in. Which means it’s not funny at all. It’s eff-ing sad.
Now I’m reading a very different book, My Life in France by Julia Child. One aspect of this book that jumps out at me is the very different approaches to lifestyle and living between the US and France. Granted, this book is referring to a period of time over 50 years ago, but I think some of the differences remain firmly in place. I especially loved this paragraph:
The individualistic, artisanal quality of the French baffled the men … from the USA. When American experts began making “helpful” suggestions about how the French could “increase productivity and profits”, the average Frenchman would shrug, as if to say, “These notions of yours are all very fascinating, no doubt, but we have a nice little business here just as it is. Everybody makes a decent living. Nobody has ulcers. I have time to work on my monograph about Balzac, and my foreman enjoys his espaliered pear trees. I think, as a matter of fact, we do not wish to make these changes that you suggest.”
The 4-Hour Workweek advocates a similar, less-stressed approach to work, though less eloquently.
So now I’m forcing myself to take a few deep breaths and remember how much I enjoyed myself before I went head-down-death-march on The Journal 5. I want to get to that point again. Plus, I want to try to remember this and do better on my next projects, whatever they may be, and not imprison myself in a gray cubicle of my own making.
This might totally reconfigure my goals for 2010. I can live with that. 
-David
[1] I love being able to say that. 
