Such a long diatribe about nothing... How these writers get such a platform? Tim Ferriss's book is one of the most cleverest implementation of popular saying: "If you want to become rich, write a book about how to become rich". Nothing more, nothing less. Ferriss himself never implemented 4-hour work week. The title was invented purely by A/B testing. He is master presenter and his writing can swept you away with confidence but has no real impact or information. His modus operandi is to take few clever counter-intutive bits and expand into 100s of pages of book. This has made him in tune of 10s of millions of dollars. You pay the price to be inspired and that's about it.
Newport (the "author" of the above fluff piece) himself is no slouch either. He implements the same Ferris modus operandi you describe. As I noted it more than two years ago here[1][2], he has been on a multi-book contract on the same theme with minor tweaks. So Newport will drum up attention about them in all subtle ways possible. Same story with the intolerable Ryan Holiday -- he repackages the Greek/Roman originals into breathless "books".
The alternative to the empty books by the above people is to read the original classics, and the actual scholars who did the work (Csikszentmihalyi, Kahneman, Richard Thaler, Timothy Wilson and many others).
Yes, thank you! I'm glad that there are other people out there with the same opinion.
Every Cal Newport article is riddled with links. Links to his podcast. Links to his books. Links to his fucking newsletter, and old posts and time block planner and on and on. Ridiculous from a self professed authority on deep work and focus.
Ryan Holiday meanwhile is the classic American success story isn't he? A sort of Ray Kroc-like entity. The kind of gold-rush chasing huckster in a sea of other hucksters, all alike, but one who just happened to make it big. Nothing about Holiday suggests to me that he's had a single original thougt in his life. Just repackaging with lipstick.
I'll be sure to check out your recommendations.
ETA: Ahh fuck it. Feel like ranting more. Maciej Ceglowski famously called Newport's and Holiday's style books "wooly business books" at airports (Lexus and the Olive Tree). Things that should be blogposts, or better still, an animated dinner party conversation, but are instead padded on and on with plodding, insufferable writing lacking any clarity of thought or lucidity in expression. Gah!
ETA2: Also Maciej: Ferriss is the author of the Four Hour Workweek, the Four Hour Body, the Four Hour Orgasm. Basically if you can't do it in four hours Tim Ferriss doesn't want to talk to you.
Downloading these PDFs somehow magically requires an email address too. I'm no great front end engineer but I have a feeling download doesn't need contact info to make the protocol work...
I forgot to add the caveat -- I don't mean to say just gobble up whatever the said researchers wrote. Read them with a healthy dose of skepticism. Especially all the psychology and "behavioural economics" books.
Yes, some of Kahneman's work doesn't replicate, as he himself admitted. But he's not a "hack". An incredibly hard worker, and an equally fallible human like the rest of us.
> The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.
These sentences alone put Kahnemann at bottom of the list of people anyone should listen to. This is the opposite of how you do science especially when we talk new research in something as difficult to measure as human behaviour. Not surprisingly, a lot of the studies in Thinking, Fast and Slow don't replicate.
Kahneman has acknowledged this and admitted it was a mistake[1] while simultaneously saying:
> I am still attached to every study that I cited, and have not unbelieved them
And the book is still sold with the paragraph saying that disbelief is not an option.
I have seen that retraction comment when it came out, and I've quoted it myself here several times over the years. That said, you are being overly harsh. "Bottom of the list"? Give him a break.
I'm no Kahneman "defender", but you have to read any of this kind of behaviour research as "advanced opinion pieces" by biased humans.
And also bear in mind: it is a 40-year synthesis of his and Tversky's work. Yes, priming-related studies and a few others don't replicate. And that "disbelief is not an option" is of course terribly distasteful and overconfident. That doesn't mean everything in that book is bunkum!
> The alternative to the empty books by the above people is to read the original classics, and the actual scholars who did the work (Csikszentmihalyi, Kahneman, Richard Thaler, Timothy Wilson and many others).
Okay.
What are some your recommended reads from Csikszentmihalyi, Wilson, or Thaler [1], and why? I am part way through Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahnemann, and it's both more idea-filled and harder to read than a Tim Ferriss book – which I agree is good.
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[1] As an attempt to prove good intent, here are some guesses based on Googling: Flow: The Psychology of Happiness, Misbehaving and Nudge by Thaler, and Strangers to Ourselves by Wilson.
(Excuse the length; formatted it for readability.)
Your guesses are all good (and by "classics" I meant the works of Seneca, Cicero et al). You'll also find many gems in the bibliography section of any book with real substance. A good author will share their sources. On why I recommend these: Many of these researchers spent years grappling with the said topics. They are "invested" in it, and to be charitable, were/are trying to arrive at truth, however imperfectly. Even when they get things wrong, these books are more likely to make us think than the vapid "books" by charlatans.
On Thinking, Fast and slow being hard to read: it is a hard read. For Pete's sake, the book asks you to grapple with probabilities, which we humans are terrible at. If you're trying to read Prospect Theory (a key idea from the book) in bed when tired, or in a noisy train station, you will be frustrated. Read it when you are fresh and are able to concentrate well.
Note though, none of these books are "perfect"; there will be things in them that might irritate you. Read them anyway, for the mental nourishment they provide.
* * *
More broadly, if you're interested in psychology, primate behaviour, neuroscience, philosophy, game theory, and linguistics, here are a selection of books that I've found helpful:
• Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio
• Neuroscience: Exploring the brain by Bear, Connors, and Paradiso (this is a fantastic illustrated text book with great explanations; fully worth the 72 euros I paid for it)
• Behave and Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Sapolsky (I wrote my "why" for Behave here[1])
• Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene
• The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod
• Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal
• Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga
• Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
• Becoming Human by Michael Tomasello
• For Stoicism, I wrote a detailed guide here[2] on good quality English translations by foremost scholars
• Not least of all, read some of Plato's dialogues—they're immensely fun, even if you don't agree with anything he says. Here's[3] a few recommended English translations.
Consider that reading your post gives a similar rush as a popular book by Ryan Holliday. Most won't read old books just because they read your post. You're doing the same thing. It's fun to rant, but like most topical rants, the speaker is contributing to the problem in some way.
I took the time to write constructive recommendations of people who have spent decades thinking about the said topics. Most of these books have stood the test of time.
Your comment and comparison doesn't make sense. If you do your research, you might grasp it better. But what I wrote is plain and clear as it is. (And judging by the off-thread responses I've gotten, many people appreciated it as I intended.)
Sure, that’s fine. It’s just the same thing Ryan Holliday et al are doing, in comment form. So the ranting is ironic. It makes sense you would receive a proportionate amount of appreciation as well relative to Holliday’s popularizations.
Assuming someone who points this out hasn’t read the thread, done research or read many of the same books feels good, I’m sure.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. [...] Please don't post shallow dismissals."
I've read the guidelines before and would consider posting this link without comment to be the only shallow dismissal in this thread. I've been careful to stick to the matter. Again, I will clarify that there is merit to popularizing serious reading or classics. Just not in ranting against popularizing classics while doing so. I sincerely think you'll come around on this as you accumulate more reading and teaching.
I recently bought "Courage is calling", the newest book from Ryan Holiday. I actually quite liked "Obstacle.." and "Ego.." having read them some years ago. But I do not know. I feel like I somehow has gotten older (scary thought :) ) I think the content in Courage is somewhat of the same type and quality, but I have only read a few chapters and it somehow comes off as trying too hard.
I am sure it is more me, than the content/author that has changed. But the original comment is so right in saying "You pay to be inspired".
> His modus operandi is to take few clever counter-intutive bits and expand into 100s of pages of book.
A lot of books that I routinely recommend are like this. Other popular books are like this. Books on communication, persuasion, sales, negotiation etc. come to mind. The Black Swan is like this. The Innovator’s Dilemma is like this. Non-violent Communication couldn’t fill more than one slide in a slide deck if you distilled it down… it’s basically a notecard’s worth of information stretched across a book with repetition, discussion, and examples.
The non-fiction books which aren’t like this are things like history books (it can be deeply unsatisfying that there is no unifying narrative for a particular topic in history), textbooks, and guides.
Add How to Win Friends and Influence People to the list. It's easily distilled down to a few notecards at most.
That said, I tried an experiment - I read half the book, and read a summary of the second half. After all, it was getting repetitive. I remember the first half of the book, but not the second. (I should probably go back and read it at some point now.) That repetition, the stories and examples, really helped drive the points home, even if they felt excessive at the time.
This is called "self-help" genre. It's designed to make you feel positive, may be less depressed. These books communicates to you emotionally via anecdots. But their effects wears off and you are not really going any where.
Throught my years, I have moved from fiction books to popular science (also "non-fiction"). Nowadays I like to read textbooks and research papers. Once you get used to that level of information density, it's hard to go back.
Depends what you're looking for, but I found most of Michael Lewis' books to be quite information dense and highly entertaining. The Big Short in particular takes goes very deep down the rabbit hole of finance.
I think the big value from presenting valuable ideas in the form of a book instead of a slide deck is that the reader is more likely to remember and implement the ideas they read from a book versus a slide deck, simply due to span and depth of exposure.
Eh, Nonviolent Communication is a lot more than that. It's a set of skills you have to practice, so having a book that breaks down each skill with lots of worked examples and scenarios is quite useful.
7 habits isn't like that. So, there are some that have detail, and you need to read them to figure it out. The good thing is you get faster at identifying this over time. I used to have to read every page (perhaps a bad habit from school-years quizzes on books?). Now I can skip through to what I'm interested in and go back for more detail when I want.
The thing is, people judge (non-fiction) books by their width. They'd rather pay a significant amount of money for a merely useful 300 pages book than for a life-changing 10 pages booklet. So, as you say, turn your 10 pages booklet into a 300 pages book with lots of repetition, examples, pictures and testimonials, and buyers will be happy.
When I was a kid more than a half-century ago, I always used to see magazine ads for get-rich-quick books. I picked one that sounded promising, saved up a few dollars, and stuffed the cash in an envelope with the order form.
I only remember one concrete piece of advice from the book. In those days, the shipping and handling fee was where your profit was, but if a customer forgot to add it, send them the book anyway. You're not losing any money, so it's free advertising.
It did make me realize what I really needed to do. Unfortunately, I only got as far as the title, but I was proud of this title:
How to Get Rich Quick by Selling Get Rich Quick Books
A few years ago I was genuinely going to do that, other than the first page which would just say something like "Write this book" in massive letters
I decided not to, mostly because of how blantantly wasteful it is (I guess blank pages which no information is less wasteful than filled pages with useless information, at least your not wasting ink, but its more blatant)
For some reason I'm under the impression that an ebook wouldnt sell as well, and it'd be pretty humiliating to have this grand statement of "you can get rich just by making a get rich quick book, like this one" only for people to find out I made like £2 off it
I responded to a get-rich magazine ad too, in the 80's. A book arrived from overseas called 'Practical Guide to Direct Marketing', by J.C. Frost, all about how to make money from ads in magazines.
“The author didn’t actually work for four hours” is the most tired argument and seems to come up repeatedly. The point of the book is getting you back as much time from work as possible so you can then focus it on things you enjoy - which could be leisure or some other type of work. The point is efficiency. It also has nothing to do with getting rich. Sure Ferriss got rich from the book but he was running a successful business before hand. The book is quite clear that “getting rich”’should never be a goal you should look at the things you want (inc. material things) and figure out how much money you need to achieve those (usually it’s less that you think - e.g. you don’t need $250k to buy a Ferrari when you can lease one monthly).
Actually one of the main takeways from the book is that efficacy (elimination of non-critical tasks) is more important than efficiency (optimizing a task). I have been doing this since reading the book, and helped my life tremendously (also went into early retirement).
When Elon Musk was interviewed at SpaceX about Starship, he said the same thing actually: they are launching non-optimized vehicles and iterating by simplifying the design. Also Tesla almost went bankrupt through the Model 3 ramp up phase because he was trying to make manufacturing more efficient instead of simplifying it.
Or in Knuth’s words: early optimization is the root of all evil.
It might be more comfy for HN/engineering types if all book titles were completely dry and precise like that, but most 'real' people enjoy a bit of hyperbole, and have no trouble seeing straight through it. It's all part of a game that helps engage them, and they are willing participants in that game – if you can't differentiate this from deception, it's you who has an incomplete picture of things.
To most people, the fact that the title "4 hour work week" is a bit of attention-grabbing hyperbole is completely obvious, including those who actually read it and got some value from it. If you think anyone who reads a book like that must be some kind of idiot who takes a literal interpretation of an obviously hyperbolic title, then you probably have a cynical and incomplete understanding of how smart most people are. The truth is, identifying the most literal possible description for something is usually just an aspy trick we engineers like to pull when we are confused by something nuanced.
This reminded me of how the early novels had incredibly long titles that correctly summarized the plot
For example Robinson Crusoe’s title was:
“ The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pirates ”
When I read the 4HWW (probably close to 10 years ago now... time flies) what I got from it was a story of someone who went from his business owning his time to him owning his business. I agree there's nothing particularly "complicated" in the book but all in all it left my life in a net positive. E.g. the first time I even considered hiring a virtual assistant was from reading the book.
I was a lot younger than I was now when I read it, but since then I regularly listen to Ferris's podcast and generally enjoy the content he produces.
I'm with you here. Did I change my approach totally? No. But it did force me to be more explicit about the time/money tradeoff, and accept that I might at times be better spending on things that would make me more productive, or take away pain points.
Likewise his podcast is generally excellent. I now have to be more judicious in which guests I listen to, but he has amazing people, and really does get in to detail, not just glib highlights.
He has a super positive vibe about fixing things that irritate you.
You said it yourself:
"You pay the price to be inspired"
For me, that was the whole point of reading the book. I enjoyed how it affected my mood. It's the same reason why I spend so much time with the Discworld books. In a similar vain, that's why I avoid depressing "everyone will die" horror movies.
$10 for the ebook is a great price for 4 hours of feeling good.
For sure, but it's better to be open about the fact that it is just for inspiration and entertainment, it can never be a good thing to spread ideas and visions as made up stories about how it actually works.
Have you actually read the book? Or are you responding to the title and the hype that's grown up around the book? Because the book itself is full of specific, actionable advice.
You are super harsh and low key condescending to the people who like the book.
There are a lot of good things in the book. One food example is when he tells you to write done what would be your ideal life and how much it would cost to get there and what step you could take. Its a really good exercise that helps you project yourself and write down / organise random thoughts you've had along the years. It helped me so much have a macro vision of what i want in my life
The has the value you make of it. If you feel its not good for you then too bad but its not the case for everyone.
Most self help books just make me anxious that I'm not doing something. I've become sick of the genre. There are a few that are worth while though. (Four hour week is shit though, I gave up reading it it)
> His modus operandi is to take few clever counter-intutive bits and expand into 100s of pages of book
I felt like that reading “the subtle art of not giving a fuck”. Great first chapter, and the rest feels like fillers. Is tim ferris book like that? I was really looking forward to read it.
That's the problem with self-help today - inspiration/consumption is overrepresented and action is underrepresented. The problem stems from misaligned incentives - creators make money through engagement, regardless of actual change created.
I created a platform [0] to solve this problem - for creators to develop programs (example [1]) that are aligned with their audience's best interests.
I've spent about 7 years being "digital nomad" and while I've never read the book I've met many very successful "nomad" entrepreneurs with 7-8 figure businesses (usually also physically fit) who credited their journey and even foundation of their business to this book. Maybe anecdotal or perhaps they took away something others fail to spot in it?
The 4HWW book changed my life when i picked it up randomly while waiting for my flight at the airport nearly 13 years ago and it's not just because of the remote working bits (i've been working fully remote for the past 7 years) or the parts on creating an income autopilot muse (i have a handful of content sites) but because of the journey it took me on to eventually discover the financial independence crowd, which strangely, intersects very prominently with the people that are into 4HWW. I've met loads of people in the FIRE community where the 4HWW concepts being always the common ground that brings us all together.
Not sure if Tim reads comments on HN but he really should acknowledge the FIRE bit more and the impact his book has brought to that community. Most critics of the book focus too much on the outsourcing endeavours, the remote work shift, the digital nomadism culture, the income muse pursuits, etc but it is the FIRE component where most readers ultimately end up at and i, will vehemently argue, has the most impact to his readers.
I think in a world so focused on working hard, or at least sitting at a desk for long enough to make it look like hard work; The 4 hour work week resonates with so many people because it is possibly their first exposure to the idea that there might be another way to live (even if very little in the book is actionable as a means of achieving that).
When I first read his first two books was when I had just left university and moved to a big city and gotten a 'proper' job, and I didn't get how you were supposed to organise your time in an office and what you were supposed to pay attention to and what you should ignore, what you should worry about and what you should not care about at all, and I recall that my second job where I applied his advice about not reading or responding to emails, and searching to automate and avoid meetings as much as possible resulted in better performance and reviews and relationships with my manager, such that I ended up able to save enough money to quit and backpack around the world for ~two years.
Looking back now, I have a similar feeling that I can't recall anything specific (apart from only checking email at 10:00 and 16:00), but I do seem to have absorbed by osmosis some of his approach of almost obsessive application of 80/20 analysis on everything, and I think that's had a significant positive effect on my life of habituating the regular identification and shedding of negative things (I still use Twitter and Instagram, but on on the PC - the apps are removed from my phone). I've actually just realised while writing this that I also still do a weekly 80/20 review, which is where I identify that kind of thing.
I think I also found his super positive vibe about taking matters into your own hands to be great, and it was the first time I'd encountered the idea that you could have that much control over your own life. The thought-space of being able to change whatever aspect of life you want didn't exist before then.
I think this is the best take on it. It's actually full of specific actionable advice, it's just very little of it is stuff I'd actually use (IIRC there's a fair bit of "how to outsource technical bits of having a web presence" which probably isn't recommendations the HN crowd's looking for). And if I was convinced my mailbox was busy enough to benefit from a personal assistant in the Philippines, the advice on where to find them is probably a bit out of date, though IIRC the advice on evaluating freelancers is solid enough.
But it's core thesis is "Pick a side project in a niche you know and like. Charge money for stuff in it. Value your time. You don't need hockey stick growth followed by a seven figure exit to have most of the tangible lifestyle benefits of being rich if you have low-maintenance recurring revenue" which is actually much better advice than the "how I quit my job to work twice as many hours for less money building a loss-making business propped up by VC money" blogs for many of the people browsing HN. But it's written by a pill-selling huckster with some dubious anecdotes, and somehow the four hour claim gets more attention than PG's even more exaggreated claim that startups are about compressing your entire working life down to four years!
I get the feeling if instead of being a bestselling book written by a guy with a background in the shadier areas of ecommerce it was a series of Medium blogs written by a web developer, it'd be a lot more popular here for its messaging, even if nobody purchased a single service from his long list of recommendations.
As much as people deride it, and I'm not trying to defend the book or Tim on what's on the page - but it definitely started a little ember in my head on thinking about WLB more seriously. I guess I'd be happy with a 4-day work week as a first step. I'd be happy to give up the salary for that day if that's what it takes.
Firstly, I would bet many people who trash on the book haven't actually read it.
Beyond that, I imagine many people who did read it thought that simply reading it would magically make them have the idyllic life of travel, few hours worked, and good income. It still takes a lot of work to setup an income system, and it probably takes multiple attempts and variations before finding some success.
For me, the most valuable section of the book was about worst case scenarios. The author also had a TED talk, "Why you should define your fears instead of your goals", which basically gives you an exercise in a series of "what if?"s.
What if I quit my job and try to do my idea? What if that fails? What if I run out of money? ...
Eventually you arrive at the bottom, where the only two paths are death (which I don't think he goes into :P) or getting back up. And this is where the illumination comes - once the fears are defined, and recovery is imagined in some detail, it becomes clear that the fears are probably way overblown and scary. In reality, especially if you have some talent which you can convert to some kind of income (even working a regular job), then you can recover. It's not the end of the world if you fail.
There are other nuggets in the book, just as there are in many of his other books. Just don't expect that reading one of his books makes you him (or some other successful figure).
Writing a self-help books is extraordinarily lucarative business. They are like drug which makes you feel really good about that you are improving while you read them but then effect stangely wears off and after a while you will have no memory of what the book even said.
I enjoy reading self-help books. Usually on airplane trips when I'm on my way to a business meeting. Makes me feel good and empowered for a few hours.
In the past, I'd never read books like this. What changed? E-readers! I can now read these books without being embarrassed because other people will see the covers. (I'm old -- 58 -- so eBooks are still fairly "new" )
Do assembly line workers also get to leave after four hours? Of course not. Even if there was a untapped ten fold productivity increase, the work force would be reduced or the output increased ten fold, not the hourly wage increased ten fold. If you can live from four hours of work, that just means you are heavily overcharging your time. And if the market works, you will just go out of business.
Your comment doesn't really make sense in the context of the book; the advice offered in the book boils down to 'hire some dude in India to do your work for $5 an hour'
Irrespective of the book, might we have reach a point where our productivity is so high that we are not fully occupying the operational needs of a 9-5?
Thus allowing time for a side-hustle ?
I.e., We work salaried for 30+ ours per week and have time to spend on other activities for the remainder.
I thought the article would concern the results of 4 hour workweeks in companies or some sort of data to back it up. But it's just another ego massage piece filled with enterpreneur buzzwords and get-rich-quick schemes.
