The 4-Hour Workweek

The 4-Hour Workweek

*Tim Ferriss, 2008*

A 28-year-old in a pinstripe suit, sweating in Buenos Aires

It is the last day of the Tango World Championship semifinals. Ten couples line up under blinding lights inside La Rural, the biggest exhibition hall in Buenos Aires, and the announcer calls out "Pareja numero 152, Timothy Ferriss y Alicia Monti." Fifty thousand spectators erupt. Cigarette smoke hangs over the floor. The other couples have danced together for fifteen years on average. Ferriss has trained for five months, six hours a day, and he is the first American ever to compete this far at this level.

This is the moment he opens the book with, and the choice is deliberate. He wants you to ask the same question he asks himself just before the music starts: what on earth would I be doing right now if I had not left my job and my country a year ago?

A year earlier, Ferriss had been the founder of a sports supplement company called BrainQUICKEN, working twelve-hour days, seven days a week, pulling in roughly forty thousand dollars a month and hating his life. He had taken a one-week "vacation" to Florence with his family and spent ten hours a day in an internet cafe, panicking. He was the kind of entrepreneur who looks successful from the outside and feels imprisoned from the inside. He had built the cage himself, and now he could not figure out how to leave it.

So in June 2004 he walked into JFK with a backpack and bought the first one-way ticket to Europe he could find. The plan was four weeks. The first morning in London he had a nervous breakdown in his friend's apartment. The four weeks turned into eight. He limited email to one hour every Monday morning. As soon as he removed himself as the bottleneck, BrainQUICKEN's profits jumped forty percent. He stayed away for fifteen months. He learned tango. He raced motorcycles. He turned a sales-driven kickboxing champion's instincts toward a single problem: how to design a life around freedom of time and freedom of location, instead of around a paycheck.