by Carmen Van Kerckhove

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book that fundamentally changed the way I look at the world. But Timothy Ferriss’s book, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich did just that.

Describing the book is difficult, since it combines business, self-development, online marketing, and productivity into one compelling package. So I took a few bullet points from Ferris’s own web site to give you a sense of what it’s all about. Some of the things you’ll learn from his book:

• How to outsource your life and do whatever you want for a year, only to return to a bank account 50% larger than before you left
• How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs
• How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent “mini-retirements”
• How to cultivate selective ignorance—and create time—with a low-information diet
• The crucial difference between absolute and relative income

And here’s a brief interview I did with Ferriss:

One big eye-opener for me was the idea that our traditional ideas about productivity are all wrong. Instead of cramming more work into the same amount of time, we should be paring down our work to only those essential activities that actually generate the most value or revenue. Everything else should either be eliminated or outsourced. Can you explain what Pareto’s Law and Parkinson’s law are, and how they affect our working lives?

Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will sw