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Comment by tstegart | Hacker News Reader

I skimmed the book and it made no sense. Almost everything I read skipped at least one step in logic. "You can work less and be rich. I worked less and became rich." The "how" seemed to be left out of many of his examples.

Anyways, to provide a real answer and not to just diss the book, I doubt many start-ups work a 4 hour work week. The fact is, there is a lot of work to get done in a start-up. If you only worked 4 hours a week, and you needed 2000 hours to get it done, well, that would take you over 9 years to get done. You can't magically make start-up work go away. Outsourcing only works if you have capital to pay for it. So if you don't have capital, and 9 years is too long, then you might just need to work harder, longer, and with more people to get it done.

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He explains a lot of that stuff in detail in later chapters. I was kind of annoyed about that for the first half of the book, because he hints at it a lot... but if you stick with it, there's some very interesting and possibly useful information (depending on what you want to do). I was surprised by his very specific insights about running online ad campaigns, doing market research, managing manufacturing and shipping, etc. Some of the advice is so specific as to be a little bit unsettling (the stuff about how to appear to be an "expert" in something without actually being an expert in it), but overall I'm glad I stuck with it.

I skimmed the book and it made no sense.

I read the book, and it did make sense. Amazing, that!

> The "how" seemed to be left out of many of his examples.

If you purchased the book, the how should be self explanatory.

Ok, that doesn't make sense.

The point of those late night "here is my yacht, here is my house, here is my trophy wife. Call now and be like me!" infomercials is that they're making money from selling the money making system, rather than from real estate or chinchilla farms.

Skim less, understand more. :-)

But aren't you skeptical? Sure, those infomercials are selling the system, but if you'd bought it, you'd expect the system would explain how to do it, right? I'd expect the book to explain how to do it too.

But I found it very conclusory. It never really explained how. It seems like almost everything I read was "I saved more money and did less work, thats how i did this." But there was no explanation exactly how he did it. Most of the examples I read did not fully explain the nuts and bolts of how to do it. Sure, if you want inspiration, go ahead. But you don't need a whole book to say you work less and earn more. He can say that in one line and be done with it. I expected more, and I found it lacking. To me it was the equivalent of writing a book on stocks and filling up 300 pages with "I bought high and sold low, thats how I'm rich."

I'm quite confident my skimming did not result in a lack of understanding, but more. I skimmed a lot, and each part I skimmed lacked substance. If it consistently lacked substance, it told me not to waste my time.

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