[blueyes]

For a lot of people, 4WW was a "think and grow rich" kind of pressure cooker. Sure, you may be able to do with if you combine the highly marketable skills of being a certain kind of programmer with a low-rent country. Those folks are corner cases. The main beneficiary of the book was Ferriss, who's just selling the dream, like a lot of people in the "information business".

[BjoernKW]

While he probably indeed was the single biggest beneficiary of his book Tim Ferriss likely also helped a lot of people to change their respective lives for the better.

Who cares if you're not "living the dream" as long as you're doing better than before? 4HWW can be a real eye-opener in many respects and it's certainly not just about selling cheap info products while making use of cost of living arbitrage.

In fact, Ferriss has stated several times that the 4HWW is neither about literally just working 4 hours nor is it necessarily about constantly travelling through low-rent countries (though that certainly can be a beneficial option). It's much more about making efficient use of your time and doing so according to your own standards instead of somebody else's.

Some of the comments here depict him as some kind of snake oil salesman. I think he genuinely wants to teach and help people but that's just my personal opinion.

Consider this though: Who are the real snake oil men here? The one who tries to teach you to live a better life by your own standards or the ones that try to sell you a "> 40 hrs of work per week; consume as much as you can; don't enjoy life until you're too old to actually enjoy it;" lifestyle as the 'proper' way of living your life?

[blueyes]

The best conmen are the ones who fool themselves. In a sense, his sincerity is beside the point. But if he really was sincere, why did he title his book The 4HWW unless it was to sensationalize his work, and draw more attention to himself, and make more money. Tim has other aspects of a conman, and it's not just the way he practices martial arts. Rebecca Mead wrote a great profile about him here:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/05/better-faster-s...

[BjoernKW]

> The 4HWW unless it was to sensationalize his work, and draw more attention to himself, and make more money.

It's called 'marketing'. That title was specifically chosen for its performance in a Google AdWords experimental run, which is a commonly recommended approach for testing MVPs.

[Cthulhu_]

The TL;DR of the book is basically "If you want a 4 hour work week, write a book about achieving a 4 hour work week"

[mattm]

And even that will take more than 4 hours per week.

[tonyedgecombe]

I have a deep loathing for the whole self-help industry, 99% of it is nonsense and the majority of their customers seem quite vulnerable.