The Four Hour Work Week
I recently read the Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. The book lays out the case for ‘lifestyle design’, where you, me and Joe the Plumber can become financially independent and use our time to do the things we really want to do–like ballroom dancing, kickboxing, meaningful charity work or otherwise become a Renaissance Man–rather than being chained to a desk in the most fruitful years of our lives. If you detect a faint note of disdain in my description, you are not too far off because that’s how I initially greeted the book and how it was marketed.
The initial chapters of the book reminded me of Aleksey Vayner and of tons of spam that poses as advice on how to become a PUA. If you’re willing to overlook the almost-intentional hokeyness of the early chapters, you can walk away from the book with several thought-provoking ideas on simplicity, the value of time and the virtue of being more effective by working smarter rather than harder.
More than anything else, the book emphasizes the value of time, once the time-money trade off shifts in favor of time. Ferriss ruthlessly condemns conventional wisdom, which advises people to defer enjoyment until they have retired, at which point the change of pace is a big shock and might lead to regrets and aimless time-wasting anyway. He lays out some techniques that will help readers become fully detached and mobile from one’s work; to become financially secure in ways that will help them accomplish their dreams; to trim the fat of unnecessary possessions, ties and expectations from their lives and to take advantage of labor arbitrage to aggressively outsource mundane tasks to others. The last theme especially might give some food for thought to entrepreneurs running Atomized Enterprises.
Above all, Ferriss emphasizes active living, i.e. imbuing everything you do with intentionality, self-awareness and explicit volition. The man’s effort is commendable–what starts out sounding like a tacky, get-rich-quick book winds down sounding like it came out of a Zen text.
It’s good for Tim that he has been in sales roles for much of his life, because those roles can afford a reasonable amount of mobility. At my current workplace, several of the top-performing salespeople are perfectly fine working out of a home-office so long as they are ’smiling and dialing’ enough. As part of the Generation Y ethos, I hope for a flexible work environment, varied activities and travel in my career, but I still expect to spend several more years in a traditional office environment for the kind of work I want to do. But Ferriss’ exhortations on the value of time–the fierce urgency of now if you will–are definitely something to keep in mind as I strive to live a fulfilling life.
I’ve started my next book, Getting Things Done by David Allen, which takes a whole different approach to time management and efficiency. There is a huge online cult following for the book already, but I might report back with some of my own thoughts.
Benkler on transactional frameworks
As some of you may know, I am reading Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. Within the context of my thinking around innovation and Atomized Enterprises, I will quote particularly illuminating excerpts from the book as I work through it. I highly recommend you buy the book (or just read it from the full-text online edition). Today’s quote:
(p. 107-112, all emphasis mine)
The first thing to recognize is that markets, firms and social relations are three distinct transactional frameworks…
The point is not, of course, to reduce all social relations and human decency to a transaction-costs theory. Too many such straight planks have already been cut from the crooked timber of humanity to make that exercise useful or enlightening. The point is that most of economics internally has been ignoring the social transactional framework as an alternative whose relative efficiency can be accounted for and considered in much the same way as the relative cost advantages of simple markets when compared to the hierarchical organizations that typify much of our economic activity–firms…
This does not mean that social systems are cost free–far from it. They require tremendous investment, acculturation and maintenance. This is true in this case every bit as much as it is true for markets or states. Once functional, however, social exchanges require less information crispness at the margin…
The difference between markets and hierarchical organizations, on the one hand, and peer-production processes based on social relations, on the other, is particularly acute in the context of human creative labor–one of the central scarce resources that these systems must allocate in the networked information economy… pricing of individual effort can be quite crude. More importantly, as aspects of performance that are harder to fully specify in advance or monitor–like creativity over time given the occurrence of new opportunities to be creative, or implicit know-how–become a more significant aspect of what is valuable about an individual’s contribution, market mechanisms become more and more costly to maintain efficiently, and, as a practical matter, simply lose a lot of information.
The above is an important and refreshing call to bring in the transactional framework based on social relations into the realm of economic analysis in a knowledge-based economy. What I like best about the excerpt above is its balance: neither does it denounce present day capitalism and economic analysis as obsolete in the face of new models of value creation, nor does it define these phenomena of the edge economy as born of a ‘hacker’ mentality driven to subvert all that free-market capitalism has cultivated and cherished. Traditional economic models have fallen short in accounting for social relational transactions in a wide variety of situations (if value creation at the edge these days isn’t a compelling enough example, consider how GDPs of developing countries are often underestimated because they never incorporate nonmarket services–such as socially transacted childcare–which nonetheless generate utility). By giving the social relational transactional framework an even-handed analytical treatment, Benkler does contemporary economic thinking all a great service.
two Benkler quotes
I have just begun reading The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler. I’ve read less than fifty pages of the mammoth 515-page tome (set in 10pt Garamond, no less!) and have already been thoroughly impressed. Benkler’s ideas are important to my own ruminations here about Atomized Enterprises. As I work through the book, I will post brief excerpts here that I think are interesting. This post contains two quotes from the Introduction:
p. 17-18:
Different technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or harder to perform. All other things being equal, things that are easier to do are more likely to be done and things that are harder to do are less likely to be done. All other things are never equal. That is why technological determinism in the strict sense–if you have technology “t” you should expect social structure or relation “s” to emerge–is false…Neither deterministic nor wholly malleable, technology sets some parameters of individual and social action. It can make some actions, relationships, organizations and institutions easier to pursue, and others harder…The same technologies of networked computers can be adopted in very different patterns. There is no guarantee that networked information technology will lead to the improvements in innovation, freedom and justice that I suggest are possible…The way we develop will, in significant measure, depend on choices we make in the next decade or so.
I like the above quote [emphasis mine] because it indicates that Benkler’s analysis goes beyond the naïve technoutopianism that we as geeks are somewhat prone to.
p. 8-9:
As collaboration among far-flung individuals becomes more common, the idea of doing things that requires cooperation with others becomes much more attainable, and the range of projects individuals can choose as their own therefore qualitatively increases. The very fluidity and low commitment required of any cooperative relationship increases the range and diversity of cooperative relations people can enter, and therefore of collaborative projects they can conceive of as open to them.
The above quote is a terse statement of the loosely coupled nature of Atomic Enterprises. With apologies to Mark Twain, this passage seems to say in essence, ‘don’t let your job interfere with your career’, something with which I am in strong agreement.
There will be many more quotes from Benkler here, so watch this space. If you prefer, you can peruse the full text of the book online. TCall me old fashioned, but I’m reading from a hardcover edition — this seems like a book I want to own physically.
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