November 29, 2009
Design Your 4-Hour Workweek
Serial Entrepreneur & Ultravagabond
Timothy Ferriss, author of the 4 Hour Work Week, is a self-described “serial entrepreneur and ultravagabond” who lives a lifestyle that most of us could only dream about — until now.
Ferriss presents a step-by-step guide to his free-wheeling lifestyle, allowing us to follow in his footsteps and realize lifelong dreams. Some people consider Ferriss to be an “Indiana Jones for the digital age”.
This challenging book has been a #1 Wall Street Journal Best Seller, a #1 NY Times Best Seller, and a #1 BusinessWeek Bestseller.
Replace Obsolete Assumptions
His basic premise is that we need to embrace the “Rules of the New Rich” instead of obsolete assumptions.
Entrepreneurs need to replace limiting assumptions and learn to enjoy life now. We need to be able to manage our businesses, and our lives, from anywhere, anytime.
Ferriss encourages us to abandon deferring a luxurious lifestyle and instead, build the life we want right now, using the currency of freed-up time and increased mobility.
Rules of the New Rich
According to Ferris, the “Rules of the New Rich” include the following:
- Retirement is Worst-Case Scenario Insurance
- Interest and Energy are Cyclical
- Less is Not Laziness
- The Timing Is Never Right
- Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission
- Emphasize Strengths, Don’t Fix Weaknesses
- Things in Excess Become the Opposite
- Money Alone is Not the Solution
- Relative Income is More Important than Absolute Income
- Distress is Bad, Eustress is Good
The 4HWW Model
His model provides us with a roadmap for realizing our own lifelong dreams. He shows us how to:
- Live like a millionaire
- Free time and automate income
- Outsource our lives to overseas virtual assistants for $5/hour
- Travel the world without quitting our jobs
- Eliminate 50% of our work in 48 hours
- Trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and mini-retirements
He uses the DEAL acronym to describe his model, where:
- D = Definition
- E = Elimination
- A = Automation
- L = Liberation
He encourages us to use “Dreamlining” to design our own luxurious lifestyles. We need to focus our current efforts on elimination, simplification and outsourcing if we want to find ourselves among the New Rich (NR).
Lifestyle Design (LD) incorporates elements of both art and science. Lifestyle Design (LD) relies heavily upon automation, i.e., creating systems and processes that remove ourselves as bottlenecks. But never automate anything that can be eliminated, and never delegate anything that can be automated or simplified.
Carpe Diem!
Follow Ferriss’ guidelines and you’ll be able to recognize opportunities that others miss, and sieze them. Having options; i.e., choice gives us real power in life.
This is a very compelling book and presents a plan that is easy to understand and apply.
Our courage and self-confidence, we can realize our dreams quicker and easier than we ever expected. I plan to implement many of his ideas into my own life.
A very good place to start for gathering all the knowledge about internet marketing that you will need to be successful is to sign up for the Online Success for Beginners program.
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November 27, 2009
Gain Leverage for Your Home-Based Business by Outsourcing
The intent of leverage is to obtain the biggest advantage with the lowest effort. Specifically, for us, that means most return on investment with smallest personal involvement, and we can make this happen via outsourcing.
Prior articles discussed providing leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content. In this article, we’ll focus on developing leverage by outsourcing routine, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply isn’t a match with our unique skills, experience and/or personality.
Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman recounted some interesting findings from more than 25 years of research by the Gallup organization - initially in their book, First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, and subsequently elaborating on those findings in later books. Two of their most important findings for online marketers and home-based business owners in general are these: 1) Emphasize your strong suits, not your negatives, and 2) Acquire workers for talent.
Online business has a large learning curve and involves many different abilities. But, few people are personally skilled at all of those areas - and even those who multi-talented, probably are not making the best use of their available time and other skills should they focus on their weaknesses.
William of Occam, noted for “Occam’s Razor,” has stated: “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” As affiliate business owners, Occam’s Razor has much to teach us relative to our own time allocation.
Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a huge supporter of the use of virtual assistants to handle recurrent, low prioritiy activities or those for which he does not have either the time or inclination to perform.
It may come as a surprise to realize that outsourcing is not limited to large businesses, but recognizing the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, internet organizations can now afford to outsource a lot of tasks to virtual assistants.
One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is writing articles. Many see the importance of article marketing, but either don’t like to write, don’t have the skills, don’t want to spend the time, so they release article authoring to ghost-writers.
You also might want to consider outsourcing to a call center (or virtual assistant) all the telephone and email follow-up required for lead generation and sales closings.
If you improve your areas of strength, you gain the benefits of leverage and multiply your results, whereas, focusing on your weaknesses willonly marginally improve your results.
Would you rather multiply your results, or simply see incremental improvements?
If you would like to learn how to leverage your resources, sign up for the Online Success for Beginners course.