The Four Hour Jolt! Part 2
Derived from Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Work Week
New and Expanded Edition Now Available!
RAP1: The 3 Keys to Lifestyle Design
PROFIT : So what do you need to design your lifestyle? Let’s start with a couple of questions to JOLT you out of your current slumber. Then we present the three primary Lifestyle Currencies you need to consider: Time, Income and Mobility. A personalized lifestyle design demands integrity with yourself and others. It requires transparency; always be up-front about how you are living your life.
To shift ‘work’ gears, consider these two fundamental questions that Tim kept front of mind whilst writing The Four-Hour Work Week:
1 What if you cancelled your retirement?
How do your decisions and priorities change if retirement will never be an option?
In other words, if you’re going to have to work in some capacity until the day you die, how do your priorities change, how do your decisions change?
He asserts that you’re way too smart, way to easily bored to ever retire.
Retirement would see you so bored that you’d ‘want to put bicycle spokes through your eyes – remotely of course’.
How would you fill the void after removing work as your identity, after removing job-description as self-description?
That, is something you really want to avoid!
2 Is your lifestyle scalable?
Let’s say that you get what you want in the game that you’re playing.
Let’s say you get 10% more customers, 10% more e-mails. 10% more phone calls every month indefinitely.
Is your business scalable, is your career scalable and, most importantly, is your lifestyle scalable?
And if it isn’t, when are you going to become a bottleneck; and when are you going to face an eminent meltdown?’
We won’t spend much time on the problem(s) here; everyone knows what their problem is, whether that’s time famine, or worse yet, some sense of boredom doing something that is tolerably uninteresting.
A quote by Robert Frost encapsulates the biggest problem:
‘if you work faithfully 8 hours a day, one day you can become the boss and work 12 hours a day!’
Are you in a game worth playing; are you in a game worth winning; is it scalable?
Lifestyle Currencies
Tim has identified commonalities, or principles, among people who are able to really design an ideal lifestyle for them, and that entails controlling three currencies.
In order of importance the TIM model is:
- TIME (non-renewable),
- INCOME and
- MOBILITY.
The strategy he has identified comprises four, ranked, intra-dependent steps that he names:
- DEFINE,
- ELIMINATE,
- AUTOMATE, and then…
- LIBERATE.
It’s TIM’s DEAL.
