Review On 4-Hour Workweek

Every once in a while I run across a book or tool having such an impact on my life that I feel the need to shout about it.  The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss is one of those books you could call a game changer.  I read the first version back in 2007 and while it made a huge impact on me, I didn’t implement anything out of the book.  This past December the updated and revised version was released… this time I was ready!

The basic premise in both versions of The 4-Hour Workweek is to answer the question, “Is it possible to go from where you’re at to a four hour workweek, and if so… HOW?”  To answer this question, Tim takes you through a 4 step process…

Step 1: Definition

The mere idea of a four hour workweek sound ludicrous, so only makes sense that Tim starts off by redefining beliefs he thinks most people hold falsely.  Be prepared for some boat rocking information here.  Some of what he says was beyond what I was able to accept at first, but even those topics he won me over on.

“Retirement as a goal or final redemption is flawed [because it is] predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life.  This is a nonstarter – nothing can justify that sacrifice.”

Step 2: Elimination

How to take your productivity through the roof by eliminating low priority time wasters that have no bearing on your goals, in this section Tim Ferriss takes the notion of time management and turns it upside down.

“If you’re running around like a chicken with your head cut off and assign your virtual assistant to do that for you, it doesn’t improve the order of the universe.”

Step 3: Automation

This is where the book really gets good in my opinion.  It is also the section that has caused the most dramatic changes in my life.  In this section Tim details how to outsource and automate not just your income generation, but also those everyday meaningless tasks.  If you are or want to be a business owner, he takes you through the process of finding, testing and automating a “muse”, which is his term for an automated income.

“There are a million and one ways to make a million dollars.  From franchising to freelance consulting, the list is endless.  Fortunately, most of them are unsuited to our purpose.  This chapter is not for people who want to run businesses but for those who want to own businesses and spend no time on them.”

Step 4: Liberation

How to maintain your job or business on four hours a week, then what to do with the 36 hours you used to spend working.

“Being bound to one place will be the new defining feature of middle class.  The New Rich are defined by a more elusive power than simple cash – unrestricted mobility.”

Game Changing Concepts That Will Rock Your World!

Having read both the original and now the updated version of The 4-Hour Workweek, there are some standout concepts I call game changers which have really stuck with me.

Game Changer #1 - Outsourcing

Manage your inbox.  You no longer have to despise researching, writing and proofing reports, emails and web content.  Manage your calendar, right down to scheduling and confirming appointments.  Pay your bills.  Do your shopping.  How would you like to eliminate tedious legal, financial and market research?  Never again spend time on repetitive database and spreadsheet crunching.  These are just a few of the hundreds of things you can outsource.

Who knew that that outsourcing was something any average Joe Blow could do?  Of course big corporations outsource, but you… and me?  This concept is something that I loved from the first book but not until reading the revised version did I implement.  One thing I can tell you from experience is that it will be an absolute pain in the ass at first, but it gets easier and in the end is so very well worth it!

Game Changer #2 – Renegade approach to time management.

It took me some time but eventually I was won over to the fact that I could increase my efficiency at least 100% through the simple elimination of useless daily and habitual time wasters that I don’t even notice.  This section initially had me feeling like a complete moron for not being able to identify things that should have been so obvious but now I gotta tell you it sure does feel good getting 2x as much done without changing much of anything.

The most lasting impact I have from the book is a new ability to think and approach life in a different manner.  Tim has a very myth busting contrarian attitude that is contagious.  On certain topics I would start off thinking that he was full of crap then as I continued to read, his ideas became more believable.  Here are just few such situations…

How to increase personal productivity between 100% and 500% within weeks
How to read 200% faster in 10 minutes
How to reach (or double) profitability in 3 months

One of the nicest parts of the updated version is the extensive list of case studies from readers of the first book that have been able to implement the 4-Hour Workweek.  The ideas you get from these case studies alone are worth the price of the book.

There is no other book that has caused such a radical paradigm shift in my life like The 4-Hour Workweek.  This book will challenge you to rethink so many things you thought to be givens.  In many ways this book is a challenging read because it will expose you for the time wasting, tail chasing and outdated thinker that you are.  The best part of this book is that it cuts to the chase on everything.  Tim is not one to mince or waste words.  Expect to both love and to hate this book.  Once reading it, you can never go back.

How To Learn Internet Marketing

How To Learn Internet Marketing

There is so much information online about how to learn internet marketing. You need to be careful though to make certain that you don’t read junk. Some information online is just absolutely crap, but some are useful.

In my opinion there are several ways you can learn internet marketing.

These are the steps you need to follow:

1. First learn how to do keyword research. The reason why this is so important is that you can use this skill to discover new and emarging niche markets. Not only that, you can also use these skills to dominate other competitive niche markets. You see, when you know about keyword research you can use these keywords to develop videos for marketing whereby you use these researched keywords as your title for your videos. You can use these keywords as titles for your articles in article directories.

2. Learn to research your chosen niche market. You need to know how to find niche markets where you have losts of searches but very little competion. You can use your skills which you develop from keyword research to find these.

3. Once you have found your niche market you then find forums where people who are absolutely passionate about your niche market hang out. This is really easy to do as all you have to do is google it by searching for your desired keyword plus forum. Once you have found a suitable forum just register to join. Most forums are free to join. Once accepted just read a few conversations in the forum and see what questions people are looking to get anwsered. Once you can provide a solution for them, then you are on to something great.

4. Automate your business. What I mean by this is that you must find a way to automate your business. Get an autoresponder, program your messages and place this autoresponder on your landing page for your wesbite visitors. You can find more information on this at my website.

5. Market your offer. Use articles, ppc, forums, facebook, twitter, off line, newspaper ads, classified ads. Think of other dynamic ways in which you can get people interested in your niche market to your website.

Once you can learn to do these then you are truly on your way to making serious money online.

My latest product Winning Profits! which you can find at my website on sale for USD.00 offers all these details indepth. I teach you keyword research, how to spy on your competition, setting up your website, automating your business, outsourching, and then finally the GURU Secrets on how they make tons of money and get tons of traffic to their websites!

Hope you have found this article helpful. You can also email me for more information at info@imrisinternetmarketing.com

To Your Success,

Mark Imris

Outsourching Linux Support Is A Good Idea

Linux operating systems have come a long way now. Many of them are quite easy to operate. Corporations and government agencies have now started using Linux. One of the attractive factors for choosing Linux is that it is license free – apart from the fact that there are plenty of applications that work on Linux now (and they are license free too). Can you imagine all your staff using efficient and licensed business applications that are equivalent to MS Office, Photoshop (or other graphics package), utilities such as Zip, Emails….all this without paying any license fee to the vendor. Yes, you can run a business with very little, if any, license costs for the applications. Companies in Europe now favour Linux more. Linux support still looks like a black box.

While the Linux is attractive for any business, it requires different skill set; even different thinking to maintain Linux servers, some would argue. In a company that has a mix of machines with Windows operating system and Linux operating system it is often not justifiable to have a separate resource/engineer to help with Linux operating system. In those cases, it is worth outsourcing the Linux support.

Nowadays, students are coming out of their education institutions with Linux skills but not many of them. As the popularity of Linux seems to growing faster than the availability of skills, it makes business sense to consider outsourcing the Linux support. Linux support companies typically can work on all the flavours of Linux – Red Hat, SUSE, Fedora, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu etc. Generally, you will find that Linux support companies can NOT only work with the Linux infrastructure but help with a lot of development (programming) jobs too.

By the way, if IT maintenance is not core business for the organisation, then of course, it will make sense to outsource the IT management to a company. Outsourcing has its own benefits and one of them is cost-reduction.

I’ll give you an example of the cost-reduction. We all know that many American companies went overseas – typically, India – to establish their own offshore support centres. Now they are selling them off to other “outsourcing” companies. For instance, if an American company called Acme Builders had its own support centre in India, it is selling the Indian operations to an IT outsourcing company. Do you know the reason they gave? Cost. Yes, they said it costs 25% more to run their own offshore support centre than outsourcing to an outsourcing provider. Isn’t that interesting?