- In this video, I'm gonna
summarize the key ideas from the book that's most changed my life, "The 4-Hour Work Week". And then at the end of the video, I'll talk about which bits personally resonated with me the most and how they single-handedly
changed the course of my life. So, I know that the title
might seem a little bit scummy, and you might be put off reading
this because of the title please don't. Really, this book is about how the life that we want is
closer than we think it is. And the first key idea is this difference between the
deferrers and the new rich. On one side, we've got the deferrers which is like the old
school way of thinking. And these are the people
who sacrifice their lives to the idea of retirement. These people might follow
a more traditional path so they might work for 30 or
40 years and then retire at 65. And Tim Ferris would say that these people are living
the deferred life plan which is that, "I'm gonna work
really hard while I'm young and in my physical prime,
and then when I retire, then I'll be able to enjoy life. Then on the other side,
we've got the "new rich." Again don't think too hard
about the word itself, but these are the people who have a more new
school approach to life i.e they try and live
the retired lifestyle throughout their life, and they tend to alternate
kind of periods of work and periods of fun and periods of holiday. And the goal of this group
is to free up their time and their location which automatically makes their
money worth 10 times more. They wanna be able to
travel around the world and learn new skills and spend time doing whatever they want instead of having to rely on their work. Now, this idea of "new rich"
was a pretty radical idea when Tim Ferris first
suggested it in 2006, 2007. This has now become much more mainstream and we have all these digital nomads and the creator economy,
the passion economy. I am to an extent also
living well, the "new rich," it's a bit crunch, living this sort of lifestyle
where the stuff that I'm doing isn't directly tied to a
location and therefore if I want, when it's not locked down, I can travel around the
world and work from a laptop and make more money doing that than I could in my day job
as working as a doctor. And these days there's
like hundreds of thousands if not millions of people
doing it around the world especially with the whole remote working thing being accelerated,
thanks to the pandemic. Anyway, there's eight simple
rules that Tim Ferriss says that you wanna follow to
be part of the new rich. And those are as follows: Number one, interest
and energy are cyclical. I.e we should be trying to alternate between periods of work
and periods of rest. And we wanna try and distribute
these mini retirements throughout our life rather than working really,
really, really hard for 40 years and then saving retirement
up until when we're 65 when we have osteoarthritis
in both phonies. Rule number two, less is not laziness. And the idea here is that we wanna be able to leverage our time so that we can get like
accelerated results with only a small amount
of time actually put in. This is one of the
principles behind my course the Part-time YouTube Academy. The idea is how can we build systems around our content production so that we can actually
spend less of our own time doing the stuff and let the
system do more of the work. Rule number three, the
timing is never right. Lots of us are in this mode where we're kind of
trapped in the life we have and the reason that we say we
don't wanna do something else is because the timing isn't quite right. Oh, it's not the right
time to get married, it's not the right time to have kids, it's not the right time
to switch to remote work and go to vacation whatever. Tim Ferriss is basically
saying in the book the timing is never, ever gonna be right and you just have to do the thing and figure the rest out along the way. And there's a nice quote
where he says that, "waiting for someday we'll
take your dreams to the grave." Rule number four, is seek forgiveness
rather than permission. This is one of my mantras
that I try and live by. That's pretty standard. And then we go into rule number five, emphasize your strengths don't try too hard to fix your weaknesses. This is the one that I
slightly disagree with, but Tim Ferriss' point is that, focus more on the things
that you're good at where you are uniquely placed to leverage up your time and your skills. Don't worry too hard
about trying to be good at absolutely everything. I disagree to an extent,
because I think for example, I was really bad at public
speaking back in the day. I didn't really know how to
talk to girls back in the day. These are things that, if I follow Tim Ferriss'
advice to the letter, I wouldn't be focusing
on those weaknesses. But you know, there is stuff that if we know we're bad
at it, we can improve it. But kind of his main
point is it's all about thinking about what are your
strengths and playing those up. Rural six is a nice one and that's money alone
is not the solution. Lots of us think that I can't do X because I don't have the money, and like kind of the whole
point of this book is that the reason that we want
to be rich generally is because it's not because
of the money itself, it's because we want the rich
lifestyle that people have, where it's like, Hey I can like travel
around the world and stuff. And his main point
throughout the book is that you can actually do the stuff
that you think you want to do a lot cheaper than you think. And that leads on to rule number seven which is that relative
income matters far more than absolute income. Relative income looks
at both money and time crucially as being our resources whereas the deferrers the
old school way of thinking is to just think about
money as a resource. And this is something where I always get into arguments
with my mum about this because she's very much
money is the main resource, and I'm very much time
is the main resource. And so she can't fathom why I would order takeaway
every day to save up time and I can't fathom why she would drive three
hours out of her way to save 10% on the whole
meat, to save money. And so that's a place where the two of us don't
really see eye to eye. Finally, rule number eight, distress is bad, but eustress is good. Distress is the type of harmful stress that over a long amount
of time makes us weaker, whereas eustress is that
kind of stretch zone where we're just stepping
outside of our comfort zone but things are not like full on panic mode and so eustress is what helps us grow whereas distress is what
makes us have problems further down the line. So that's sort of the
first key idea of the book. These are the eight rules
for joining the "new rich" or the new school way of approaching life. And then for the rest of the book, he talks about a four-part
method for getting to this point where you are part of the new rich and that follows the acronym D-E-A-L. Now, D stands for define and the idea here is that if you wanna be part of the new rich, it's worth defining your fears and also defining your dreams. Defining what you actually
wanna get out of life. Firstly, Tim Ferriss talks about the idea of mitigating fear. He says that it's fear that's stopping us from trying out new things. And I think he's completely
right about that. And he says that most of us would rather be unhappy than uncertain. Like we're so scared of the unknown. We're so scared of, I don't know, leaving our job or
trying out this new thing that even if we're unhappy
where we are right now, we prefer the certainty of being unhappy rather than the uncertainty
of trying out something new. Tim Ferriss says that if you
wanna be part of the new rich, then you wanna flip this and instead choose
uncertainty over unhappiness. Like I would rather be
uncertain than unhappy. He's got this list of six questions that's useful for us to ask. I don't follow these kind
of like step-by-step, but I've kind of incorporated
these into my way of thinking. And so now whenever I find
myself not doing something because I'm scared, I do kind of run mentally
through these six questions and then I realize, Oh, I'm
just too much of a scared cat and I just need to do the thing. Those questions are, firstly, what are the
things you're not doing because you're scared. Secondly, what are you missing out on by not doing those things? Why aren't you doing those things? What's the absolute worst case scenario, if the worst happened,
how would you fix it? And if you wanna it to go back to how everything was
before you made a change, how would you do it? And these are the thoughts
that went through my mind when I got approached by a
publisher a few months ago asking if I would be
interested in writing a book, I was very scared, I was like, Oh my God, what if it gets bad reviews? And what if no one likes it? And what if people are like, Oh, well, how are you
qualified to write a book and all that sort of stuff. And I partly spoke to a few
friends, booked a few mentors and also ran this through, like what am I actually scared of here? What's the worst case scenario? Like the worst case scenario
is I put out a book, people don't like it
and it gets bad reviews. Is that the end of the world? No. Will I regret not doing
this when I'm older? Probably. Therefore I should just write this book. And it was kind of the
thought process that made me interested in this idea of writing a book. If you wanna follow along my book journey, there's a link to my book, email list which is where every few weeks
I'll post a little update and ask some questions and
give you some sample drafts. If you're interested, it's
in the video description. The other area in my personal life where I was scared recently is, so it's been about six months since I've worked full-time as a doctor. Cause I took a bit of a break
intending to travel the world, but now I'm kind of going
back into medicine part-time which I'll talk more about later but that was really scary initially, because part of me was like, Oh my God, what if I forgotten it all? What if I suck? What if they see through
and they think I'm a fraud and all this sort of stuff? And I kind of asked myself
these worst case scenario fear setting questions
that Tim Ferris suggests and yeah helped me get over my fear of kind of going back into medicine. Anyway, once we've defined
our fears, "is defined," the next step is to define
our ambitious goals. And the cool thing here and a mental model that I still use to this day having read this like eight years ago is that instead of thinking
what'll make us happy, we should be thinking about
what would make us excited, because it's quite hard to
think about what makes us happy. Like I'm quite happy doing
what I'm doing right now, sitting at home making videos. But I wouldn't say I'm
particularly excited by it, but if I'm going by this
barometer of excitement, that encourages me to take more risks and do more risky things that will probably lead
to more interesting things happening further down the line. So optimizing for excitement
rather than just happiness. And he's got a sample exercise here that you guys might like to try out and he says, you wanna list five things
that you want to have, five things that you want to do and five things that you want to be. And that generates 15 dreams for us. Now, from those 15 dreams,
we wanna choose the top four and then we wanna come up
with three action items for each of these dreams and crucially we wanna do the first action right now. Now this process is what I adapted for my 2021 goal setting thing. I've made a video about it, a little pier over there somewhere where I defined that, you know what, this year I really wanna
become good at concept art and therefore, what are the actionable
steps I can take right now? Well, I can practice art everyday, I can get an art teacher, I can sign up for these online courses. And now I've actually
been doing the art thing since January and I've
definitely noticed an improvement and it's really fun doing art. So art is one of those areas in which I set this ambitious goal of wanting to be good at art. Having never really done it before and now I'm seeing progress and now it's actually really, really fun. And the final part of his
process here is quite important because he says we should do
the first action right now. And I think that is one area in which like new year's
resolutions and this sort of stuff generally falls flat because
it's very easy to set goals. But if we force ourselves to
take the first action right now as soon as we set the goal, it really accelerates our progress. And there's a nice quote
from the book here. Tim Ferriss says that, "for all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. The stars will never align
and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn't conspire against you, but it doesn't go out of its way to line up all the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. Someday is a disease that will take you dreams
to the grave with you. If it's important to you and
you want to do it eventually just do it and correct
course along the way." So that was yeah, D for define. The next part of our
acronym is E for eliminate. And this bit is all about
eliminating the thing that take up too much of our time and don't add very much value to us. Now, again, this came up 15 years ago so a lot of these are
fairly standard affair in the productivity world. Now, things like Parkinson's law which is one of my
favorite laws which is that "work expands to fill the
time allocated to it." And so with this video, for example, I was meant to film this video last week but because I gave myself
a whole day to do it I actually never got it done. Whereas today I've given myself
one hour to film this video and now it's being done. Next we have the Pareto principle, which is that 80% of the results come from 20% of the inputs. Again, the first time I heard about this was reading The 4-Hour
Work Week eight years ago, but it's now it's pretty standard. It's this idea that, the crucial few leads to
the majority of the results and so we wanna be optimizing
for those as much as possible. What is the 20% of actions that is gonna give us the 80% of results? And I found myself using
this in all sorts of areas when it comes to overcoming perfectionism in anything that I do online. When it came to studying
for my medical school exams, there's loads of like minutia that will give you like maybe
an extra 10% of the marks, but the bulk of the marks the 80%, comes from the core 20% of the content. And so the more you can
kind of focus on that, the more efficiently
you can get stuff done. And the third thing that
he talks about a lot is the idea of batching. So, doing tasks that are similar together. So for example, instead of
doing laundry every day, you would do it like once a
week or once every other week when you can do it all in one go. That's like a really simple example, but there's so many areas in our life where we can apply this. For example, my housemate and I do
grocery shopping once a week via Click and Collect. And this is a productive and efficient way of doing the groceries rather than going to the shops everyday like some of my friends do. Also with emails. Like emails are the sort
of thing that we just check basically every hour of the day, but we can batch our checking emails in the morning and evening
if we really want to and chances are nothing really important is gonna slip through the cracks if we only check email twice a day but it does free us up
to be more productive in other areas of our life. So that's defined and eliminate. Then we have automate. Now, this is really interesting because this is all
about building a system that automates the results that you want. And he talks a lot about building a kind of
internet business in this and how you can automate
things so that either computers or other people are
kind of working for you rather than you having to put
in all that work yourself. And one way of doing this is as he suggested the book,
to hire a virtual assistant. Now again, this has become more popular
in the last 15 years, but still is kind of underrated. And I think Tim Ferriss was the first one to really mainstream and define this idea of having a virtual assistant. And that's the idea
that you can pay someone to do the sort of things for you that you'd rather not do yourself. And if you're paying someone
in a different country like for example, in the
Philippines or in Pakistan or Bangladesh or something, where if you pay them five or $6 an hour, that's like absolutely huge and like a ridiculously
high salary for them but it's also probably a lot less than you make in your
own job if you have a job. Therefore, you can take
advantage of this geo arbitrage, where you can get a virtual assistant who can help you do stuff, which frees up your own
time to make more money or do more of what you love. This is a bit controversial. I've tried using virtual
assistants in the past when I was building my company 6med, we used a lot of virtual
assistants in the Philippines to help out with stuff and
now these days it's great cause I have a non virtual
assistant who's based in the UK. I will link her YouTube channel down below because she started a
YouTube channel recently. Yeah man, it's just great
having an assistant. This is a bit of an advanced point. Most people are like, Oh my God I can't afford
to have an assistant. And definitely before getting
one, I was like, Oh my God what sort of person is
it who has an assistant? But really like if you're an entrepreneur or if you have a business or something and your time is worth a certain amount you can and should pay someone
who makes less than that to take stuff off your plate that lets you focus on
the most important things. For example, my time is worth quite a lot when I sit down and film a video, my time is not worth very
much when I am booking flights or ordering groceries online, or doing the laundry, ironing my clothes. These sorts of things are things that I can
very easily outsource, because it frees up my own time to do the high leverage
things in my business. Obviously there are caveats here, you don't wanna outsource
every aspect of your life. There is something to be said for, doing manual labor and washing the dishes and washing clothes and stuff. But personally, I don't
particularly enjoy doing the dishes, I don't enjoy doing the laundry, which is why we have a dishwasher and why I've recently
outsourced my laundry as well to an external provider. Anyway, all that a side. The second part of
automating is finding a muse. Now this is again, this
terminology hasn't really caught on in the last 15 years, but Tim Ferriss' idea of
muse is like a business, a sort of lifestyle business. So a business that doesn't
take too much of your own time to operate but that
makes reasonable money. And this is sort of related
to the idea of passive income. Really, there's no such
thing as truly passive income which is why I always air quote it whenever I say the phrase "passive income" but really the key is
to find a niche market and offer a service to that market and then build systems and people in a way that means you don't have
to spend your own time in delivering that service. And it was when I read
this, that really helped me get to the point of setting
up my first company, 6med which helps people get into med school. That was very much a lifestyle business. I was probably working
less than four hours a week at the business and it was making like a
very reasonable full-time living for me while I was in med school. And that was basically directly thanks to all of the advice
that Tim Ferris shared in The 4-Hour Work Week. So thank you for that, Tim
if you're watching this. And then the final part
of the deal acronym is L for liberate. And this is when you've
got all the pins aligned up with your automated mews
and your virtual assistants and the fact that you are
now 10X more productive because of Parkinson's law and the Pareto principle and batching. And so now you can liberate yourself from the shackles of your full-time job, if that's what you want or you can liberate yourself from the shackles of
working in your business rather than on your business. And to an extent, this is
what I did a few months ago when I quit medicine. As I said, I intended to take
a break and travel the world but obviously that didn't end up happening but it was kind of nice having a business that could very comfortably
support my lifestyle, while not having to go to work every day. And again, The 4-Hour Work Week, this idea of financial
independence, passive income, this is for me has
really been my north star for the last like eight years
ever since I read the book. And as I was going through med school, I always had this in the back of my mind thinking okay, my dream life
is where medicine is optional and where I can work as
a doctor if I want to, but where I don't have to. And it was basically like all the stuff that I learned in this that helped me get to this point where I've now got these multiple
streams of passive income, these multiple muses or lifestyle business or whatever you wanna call it. And so if you're interested
in doing the same, I would recommend you read the book. It does have a lot of
like tools and services and apps and stuff in it and so it is a little bit out of date and there's lots of sections where he recommends a lot of tools, you can easily skip over the sections. Like the book looks quite big, but if you skip over those
like now outdated sections, the advice in it is still
really, really good. But you do have to look past
the somewhat arrogant tone that a lot of people say he comes across and he's admitted this himself. I listen to his podcast
religiously and he says that, "you know, I wrote this 15 years ago, I had a different style of writing." So, look beyond the superficial stuff and you'll find like a treasure trove of absolute gold in here. If you're not so good in reading the book and you wanna check out a
very good summary of it, I would recommend the service Shortform and Shortform is this new service which is now my favorite way
of reading summaries of books. It's a lot more detailed than Blinkist or other things that
I've tried in the past. And actually we use the short
form summary of this book to construct the script
for this video partly. And so I started using
short form a few weeks ago and really, really liking it. And then I became friends
with the founder of it and they've created this like really nice affiliate partnership for us. So, if you go down video description got a shortform.com/ali you will get some freebies and
you will get like a discount or something like that. They keep changing what the deal is, but check it out link
in the video description if you care about reading
summaries of books. What a warning, reading
a summary of a book is not a substitute for actually
reading the book itself. And again, this is a very good book which you should read a
link it down below as well. But often what I like to do
is before reading a new book, I will read the summary
of it on short form first and then I'll say, okay
cool, now I can read this, but I've got more of a big picture idea of what the whole book is about. Anyway, this is one of the three books that has most changed my life. The other two are "Show
Your Work" by Austin Kleon and "Anything You Want" by Derek Sivers. And I have a video over here that will summarize those three books that changed my life for you. So, definitely check that out. Lots of people have watched that video and said that they've
got those recommendations and that video has changed their life. So check it out over there. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video. Bye bye.
