HALF Book Review: Four Hour Work Week
I read a Forbes review about this book that started off saying “I dare you to read this and not get a little fired up and action-ready”. To show how effective the book was at getting me “fired up and action-ready”, I was only able to re…
- Date
- January 30, 2013
- Collection
- Journal
- Reading time
- 2 min read
- Type
- Essay
- Archive status
- Written by Fiifi
From the archive: Originally shared on 2013-01-30 through mrfiifiappiah. Language, links, and opinions reflect their original context.
I read a Forbes review about this book that started off saying “I dare you to read this and not get a little fired up and action-ready”.
To show how effective the book was at getting me “fired up and action-ready”, I was only able to read this book half way through-this isn’t meant to be a sarcastic testament to the effectiveness of the book or the converse for that matter. Admittedly the book got me a “little fired up” every time I picked it up to read a few pages, until it all accumulated to the point where I begun to wonder why I was wasting my life reading the book. Mind you, this wasn’t because its was an arid read, it actually isn’t bad, but if I could crudely sum up the book’s thesis, it would be: Stop wasting your life doing boring shit and tirelessly working yourself to death and get a life. So I finally listened to the author half way through the book, stopped reading the book altogether to go “live out my life” because I didn’t think reading the book was the most interesting and fulfilling use of my time.
But on a more serious note, this book is a paradigm shifting book that forces you reassess priorities and reason against societal norms. The biggest take away’s from reading this book halfaway without giving much away was: it doesn’t take much to live a fulfilling life, you can plan for it (the book tries to shows you how), to make the required time and money for leisure pursuits (The New Rich). The second takeaway point is that, you have to incorporate retirement into your working life: The bliss of retirement shouldn’t be reserved till you are 60 something years old; you should have semi-retirement sessions through out your life.
On the critique side, I didn’t appreciate the way this new expanded edition of the book seemed to over explain points and also failed to fully explain things by suggesting they will be “discussed in detail in later chapters”- reminds me of a calculus textbook. And still on the calculus textbook comparison, the practicality of the author’s suggestions sometimes seems to make theoretical sense, but I’ll leave the pragmatics of it to people who have tried it to debate.
In all, give the book a try.
