Because the point of reading the book is not to exactly replicate his life. Only to be aware of ways of reducing the amount of work in your own life.

Edit: it's the same idea as when I boxed competitively, and watched a Manny Pacquiao documentary. I wasn't going to wake up at 3 am to drink a 1000 calorie shake or do a 1000 sit ups everyday. I wanted to get into the mindset of optimizing my training within the reasonable constraints of my student life.

Have you ever bought something, say software, to make some work task easier or better fit how you work?

For example, I've started using a fountain pen and really like it better than the pens at the office and use it for minor work tasks. Four Hour Work Week isn't different from that but presents an extreme.

The hyperbolic subcontracting seems like a pain in the neck to manage to me, but I appreciate the challenge to think of work in terms of those activities in which I can personally add value and those that I can source value. How much of the time do we miss opportunities to do things better by forgetting to take a moment and think out the build vs buy implications?

I think most people reading it don't realize this. I thought it was pretty obvious when I first read it that the odds of replicating what Tim did was very low. It's about as likely as those people who lucked out on some affiliate keyword and now making $500k+ a year with a static html page with affiliate links and consistently places in first place on google. Plenty of stories of this happening, even on HN