Utah Bar Journal

With the extra time that Ferriss created from drastically reducing the number of hours he was working, Ferriss has accomplished an amazing array of tasks, including: (1) world-record holder in tango; (2) Princeton University guest lecturer; (3) championship cage fighter; (4) fluent speaker in Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and German; (5) national Chinese kickboxing champion; (6) researcher regarding the Glycemic Index; (7) break-dancer in Taiwan; (8) actor on a successful TV series in Hong Kong and China; (9) TV host in China and Thailand; (10) participant in motorcycle races; (11) shark diving enthusiast; (12) bestselling author; and (13) ultra-successful blogger.

In accomplishing these tasks, however, Ferriss has followed different, counterintuitive rules. For example, to win a gold medal at the Chinese Kickboxing National Championships, Ferriss discovered and successfully implemented two loopholes in the rules that allowed him to win all of his matches by technical knockout. In The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, Ferriss emphasizes the importance of some counterintuitive principles that he claims are followed by a term he has coined: the “New Rich.”

In general terms, the New Rich focus on time and mobility: they work significantly fewer hours, generally work remotely, and take a lot of vacations. The New Rich build systems to replace themselves professionally, and which allow them to do the things about which they are most passionate. According to Ferriss, the New Rich (among other things) don’t set retirement as a goal and instead take regular “mini-retirements” throughout their lives, believe that less work does not equate to laziness, ask for forgiveness instead of permission, emphasize their strengths instead of trying to fix their weaknesses, believe that having more money alone is not the solution, and believe that relative income (income per hour) is more important than absolute income (income per year).

In one example of the New Rich, Ferriss profiles a Los Angeles lawyer, Hans, who had consistently dreaded the prospect of working heavy hours at his law firm for the next 40-45 years when he did not particularly enjoy the nature of his legal practice. After pulling several all-nighters at his law firm over a period of time, Hans took a vacation in Brazil where he went paragliding and decided to take more risks in his life. Hans subsequently quit his law practice and founded Nexus Surf, a surf adventure company located in Brazil. Hans apparently now sits under palm trees and helps his clients live their dreams about adventure. When overworked professionals tell Hans that they wish they could do what he does, he always responds that they can.

According to Ferriss, the New Rich begin by defining specifically what it is they want in terms of happiness, income, and lifestyle. Their goals consist of defined steps, could be considered “unrealistic,” and focus on activities that will fill the void created by working fewer hours. Thus, the New Rich determine their specific dreams, set a 6-month or 12-month timeline for those dreams, calculate a monthly target income for those timelines, determine the steps toward those dreams, and take the first step toward each dream.

According to Ferriss, following “Pareto’s Law,” or the 80/20 Principle, is key. The 80/20 Principle states that 80% of one’s results come from 20% of one’s activities. The New Rich focus on the 20% of activities that produce 80% of the positive results, or the 10% of activities that produce 90% of the positive results. Ferriss recommends that employees jettison the 9-to-5 lifestyle and instead negotiate a remote working relationship where they can focus on the critical 20% or 10% of tasks. He supports this idea by citing Parkinson’s Law, which states that a task will expand in perceived importance in relation to the time allowed for its completion. The implication is that employees should both shorten their work time by limiting their tasks to the important, and shorten their work time so that they only perform important tasks.

As a means of joining the New Rich, Ferriss proposes one of the more counterintuitive and controversial points in his book: the necessity of a “low-information diet.” According to Ferriss, living the lifestyle of the New Rich requires more time and more action/output. He argues that increasing output requires less input in one’s life, and that most information is counterproductive because it takes too much time, is irrelevant to one’s goals, is negative, and cannot be controlled by the person receiving the information. Thus, Ferriss claims that during the last five years, he has never watched the news and has purchased only one newspaper. He claims that he sees newspaper headlines and becomes generally informed through what others report to him about the news, but that his selective ignorance has not caused any problems for him.

Ferriss does not recommend that one give up reading and information altogether. He reads an industry and business magazine each month, as part of what he calls “results-oriented” reading. In addition, he reads fiction for an hour before bed as a means of relaxation.
In addition to reducing one’s consumption of information, Ferriss recommends avoiding interruptions and things that waste or consume one’s time. One example is e-mail. Ferriss advocates turning off all audible e-mail alerts and only checking e-mail twice (and eventually once) per day: once at noon and once again near the end of the day. Rather than checking e-mail first thing in the morning, he suggests completing one’s most important task of the day before 11:00 a.m. The key is to set up an e-mail autoresponder that alerts those e-mailing you of the times when you will be checking e-mail. Ferris further recommends screening incoming phone calls, limiting outgoing phone calls, avoiding most meetings, and personally checking one’s e-mail infrequently (e.g., once a week).

Another cornerstone of Ferriss’s philosophy is the art of outsourcing most of one’s tasks. The 4-Hour Workweek contains an amusing, lighthearted account of a writer who literally decided to “outsource” his life by contacting two companies in India that provide remote executive assistants. The writer used one of the companies to outsource his business tasks, and the other to outsource personal tasks. In her first assignment, the remote executive assistant for business provided an impressive amount of research regarding the individual about whom the writer needed to produce an article. The remote executive assistant for personal tasks began paying the writer’s online bills, ordering online medications for him, locating a “Chicken Dance Elmo” for his son, and researching a cell phone plan for him.

When the writer’s wife was angry with him because he had forgotten to withdraw some cash one day, the writer e-mailed his virtual assistant at “Your Man in India” and asked the virtual assistant to apologize to his wife for him. The next morning, the writer’s virtual assistant had e-mailed the writer’s wife on behalf of the writer, apologized to the writer’s wife (cc-ing the writer), told the writer’s wife that the writer loved her, and sent her an e-card on behalf of the writer. Rather than being angry that she had received an e-mail and e-card through a virtual assistant in India, the writer’s wife was pleased and told her husband that she forgave him.

Finally, and somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the writer claims that he decided to try to outsource his therapy through his virtual assistant. He had planned to give the virtual assistant a list of his neuroses and some stories about his childhood, have the virtual assistant speak to his psychiatrist for 50 minutes, and then have the virtual assistant pass along to him the psychiatrist’s advice. When the psychiatrist understandably refused to take part in such an exercise, the writer decided instead to outsource his worry. He first had “Your Man in India” research and send him a thorough memorandum on stress with some visualization exercises. He next asked his virtual assistant if she would spend a few minutes each day worrying about some of the things that were causing the writer stress. The virtual assistant replied that she would worry every day for him about his particular stresses, and that he should no longer worry about them himself. According to the writer, outsourcing his worries alone was worth the price of a virtual assistant. Ferriss claims that a virtual assistant in India can cost between $4 and $10 U.S. per hour.

One of the primary goals of the New Rich, according to Ferriss, is to create what he calls a “muse:” a profitable business that you own, that creates a stream of income for you, and on which you spend little time. In other words, the key concepts in creating a muse are cash flow and time freedom. To create a muse, one needs a niche market that can be accessed in a relatively inexpensive way. One also needs a product.

But will Ferriss’s ideas work in the legal profession? After all, the product that most lawyers sell is their time. It is difficult for lawyers to create a “muse” if the backbone of their business is the billable hour. Many lawyers, due to the structure of their law firms, apparently cannot reduce the number of hours they work. As a result, taking additional vacations and mini-retirements can seem impossible to some lawyers. In addition, the scheduling demands of legal cases and transactions can make it prohibitive for some lawyers to leave their work for an extended period of time. On the litigation side, which is the area in which I practice, scheduling orders and the unpredictability of how a lawsuit will pose major obstacles for implementing the concepts in The 4-Hour Workweek.

Ferriss’s concept of the “low-information diet” may also prove unworkable for some lawyers. Lawyers need to stay current on changes in the law affecting their areas of expertise. Many clients also demand that their outside lawyers be consistently available via e-mail and Blackberries. Although some legal work in the U.S. is currently being outsourced to lawyers in India, there are limits as to the types and amount of work that lawyers can reasonably outsource.

Ferriss’s counterintuitive and unconventional ideas, however, should cause introspection among lawyers and a reexamination of how many lawyers manage their legal practices. As I documented in Overcoming the 6-Minute Life, lawyers have comparatively high levels of depression and are twice as likely as the general population to engage in substance abuse. An alarmingly high number of lawyers are unhappy with their work, claim that they would not choose the practice of law if they could start over again, and claim that they would not recommend that their children become lawyers. By the year 2000, less than half of the Class of 1990 at Harvard Law School worked in law firms, and approximately twenty-five percent of those with entries in the class directory were no longer practicing law.

Perhaps more lawyers could focus on finding ways to reduce the number of hours they work. For lawyers in private practice, alternative billing might provide part of the solution. Parkinson’s Law and Pareto’s Law, which Ferriss references, imply that lawyers might be able to shorten their work time by focusing on and limiting their work to crucial tasks. Some lawyers could consider reducing their incessant checking of e-mail and could consider outsourcing certain tasks.

Regardless of one’s belief about the extent of its applicability to the legal profession, The 4-Hour Workweek is a fun, quick, and exhilarating read. Ferriss’s writing style is humorous and irreverent. I recommend that everyone listen to the recording of the “virtual book tour” for The 4-Hour Workweek in which Ferriss explains in detail many of the concepts contained in the book. The recording of that virtual book tour is free and can be accessed via streaming audio or MP3 for downloading to a computer, iPod, or other portable media device at http://www.bentleytolk.com.