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Hi there. I am Daniel, the author. The post wasn't intended to be a slight at Tim Ferriss or the 4 Hour Work Week. I think Tim, is an interesting guy and he immerses himself in his craft, which underlies why he is as successful as he is. As other comments have suggested and what the post tries to make explicit is that the mindset of shortcuts and silver bullets is what is really what I found objectionable.

Hi Daniel, thank you for taking the time to comment. I appreciate your view that shortcuts and silver bullets aren’t a recipe for success, and probably agree with you. However, I don’t recall anything in 4HWW promoting shortcuts or silverbullets, and I would have found your essay on craftsmanship stronger if you’d left 4HWW out of it.

Edit: Also, you sparked an interesting discussion & reached the front page of HN, so that’s pretty cool!

You are going against a strawman. The author only had the following to say about the book itself:

>>>The book itself is not really the issue. Ferriss indeed outlines some interesting tips on managing resources to get the highest ROI on your work.

While I still get random snake oil vibes from stuff Tim F. says this is a great breakdown of that first book and the essence of what one can take away from it. Create a flow of income that requires less of your time so you can do the things you want to do (even if those things take 30-40 hrs/wk).

Yeah but that’s the snake oil. How many people are going to succeed at doing that? How many such businesses can possibly exist? You’d say I’m not creative, but I’d say I’ve seen the scope of what sells and there is little of anything you can earn passively. There’s no “set it and forget it” beyond informercials. Anyone with common sense who’s not in the business of self deluding themselves will see this. If you try playing a passive role in a business, that business will flounder and fail. If you have a successful cash flowing business, you’re a fool to be passive with it. You should be marketing it and growing it or get into some other business. The idea that entrepreneurs should seek work/life balance is some real Last Man stuff.

Do you work for a salary? If you do, the shareholders (or private owners) of the company you work for earn a passive income off of you.

The point of the passive income idea is that you can earn marginally more by increasing your salary, or you can package your efforts in a product and earn exponentially more by scaling the sale of that product.

> Do you work for a salary? If you do, the shareholders (or private owners) of the company you work for earn a passive income off of you.

This is a straw man. Yes, you can invest in something and earn dividends. But someone is very actively managing that company. If someone was managing that company for 4 hours a week, you probably wouldn't want to be an investor. The people who are earning "passive" income from such an investment aren't just paying me the salaryman, they're also paying my salaryman manager.

> or you can package your efforts in a product and earn exponentially more by scaling the sale of that product.

Right, but as I said in my GP, if you have a cash flowing product—which is already a huge and rare accomplishment—and you decide to spend 4 hours a week on it, you're a fool because your company is either growing or it's shrinking. So you want it to be growing.

Well, I don't think he ever argues for set it and forget but the actual work you put in is the "4 hrs/wk" or whatever number you want vs being tied to 40+ working for someone else. There's also the concept of 'geoarbitrage' meaning setting up a business in a good currency to be able to afford you a cheaper life elsewhere (which isn't a new idea but 'digital nomad' stuff really blew up the past few years).

I think a lot of it comes down to working as little as you need to to make as much as you need to fund the lifestyle you want, especially within the concept of funding experiences vs general consumerism.

At least, that's what I took away from that book. I can't really get on board with some of recent ones where he essentially compiles the transcripts from his podcasts. Sometimes he also seems too in awe of someone to question things like a real interviewer. Not to mention everyone and their pet products of the day.

Thanks for your comment.

You’re coming from a more informed position. I haven’t read the books.

> I think a lot of it comes down to working as little as you need to to make as much as you need to fund the lifestyle you want

To me this sounds like having a job. Because while I haven’t read the books, things like geoarbitrage just sounds like an entitled Western pipe dream harkening back to colonialism. It’s 2018, everything is global, everything is changing rapidly. Where there are arbitrages, they’re not for solo entrepreneurs to exploit, they’re for megacorporations. Honestly it’s pretty 19th century to think people in India or Asia will work for us and won’t wise up and support our “lifestyles”. It’s a pipe dream. A good developer in India or Asia knows his worth.

I’m sure some people can pull off this lifestyle, but it’s snake oil to suggest this is even remotely turnkey, approachable to anyone. You have to be the motherfucking man, the boss of bosses, to make this work for you. You have to be great on the phone, charming, intelligent, creative, visionary even. So what I totally don’t understand is why such a person who could pull this off would simultaneously lack ambition and interest to grow their business further, because the kind of person who can actually execute this sort of thing would not look for work life balance, they would continue kicking ass and taking names in the global market for the sheer fun of making more and more money and being awesome.

That’s why I think all of this is a scam targeted at tired people. If a person wants work life balance they should find a decent job.

There's definitely that aspect of it.

I think what has evolved out of the book, especially as connectivity has gotten better across the world, is the 'digital nomad' jobs you see. People working remotely at US wages while living in Chiang Mai or Medellin and using the value of the US dollar to really extend their visits. Retiree expats were already doing it and now people can actually do that while of working age.

The ones that fall into a snake oil or other sort of category are the folks that are funding these trips via selling you e-books about how you can do the same thing. It has an MLM feel about it. I also, as someone that has lived and traveled abroad for long periods of time, wonder about burnout. Some people can keep up that life for a while but it can get pretty tiresome.

As to creating 'turnkey' businesses...I have a friend whose wife works at a startup that they've "built to sale" aka the pipe dream of growing fast and trying to cash out in x number of years as if they were flipping a house vs building a viable business that someone would actually want to acquire (or that makes money). It relies mainly on overseas programmers to build it and, given the very little amount of cash I know they have, I doubt they're of the highest or most consistent quality.

Tim Ferriss isn't the only one selling the snake oil. SV does a pretty good job itself, as we know from hanging out on HN.