The 4-Hour Workweek With Tim Ferriss

Welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today's episode I am so excited for. This episode's called The 4-Hour Workweek with Tim Ferriss. You have a chance to listen in with Bill Glazer, Dan Kennedy talking to Tim Ferriss about The 4-Hour Workweek. This was recorded back in 2007 right after Tim Ferriss's famous book came out called The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape the 9-to-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. I hope you enjoy this exciting interview.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

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Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like.

Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Well, hello everyone. This is Bill Glazer bringing you another one of our Gold Plus monthly teleseminars. Everybody should be pretty well aware of the topic of today's call. Joining me on the call is Dan Kennedy and also Tim Ferriss, who is the author of The 4-Hour Workweek, which is— I guess we'll find out in a second just how high up the charts this has made in terms of bestsellers, but I know it's had a terrific run of book sales. Let me tell you a little bit about Tim Ferriss and really just pretty much telling you a little bit about right out of the flap of his book. A lot of you, I know we've sent you information about Tim, but he's a serial entrepreneur and ultra-vagabond. Which is pretty impressive but not as impressive about some of the credentials I'm about to get to. He's been featured in the New York Times, National Geographic, Traveler, Maxim. I saw him on the Today Show, and I know he's been on a lot of other media since his book has launched. He speaks 6 languages, runs a multinational firm from wireless locations worldwide, and the one that I'm most impressed with is the fact that he's a world record holder in tango. And a national champion in Chinese kickboxing. It also mentions that he was an actor on a hit television series in Hong Kong. And Tim, are you now 30 yet?

I just turned 30, indeed.

Well, it's all uphill from there, Tim, I tell you. So welcome to our call.

Thanks for having me.

When you start to be, when you reach our age, Tim, 3 of the 4 hours of the workweek consists in getting from bed to wherever it is you're going to work.

You know, Dan, we should also mention that that long list of credentials that I just mentioned is a result of just one 4-hour workweek.

That's right.

That's right.

So Tim, you know, listen, your book is extremely meaty and I could ask you questions for days about this. And so what I've done is I've sort of looked through it and I picked out a couple things that I would like to discuss with you today. And then I'd like to open it up for Q&A to all of our members and allow them to ask you specific questions. The very first thing I want to really address, you talk about it really early on in the book. You talk about deferrers and the new rich. One of the things that I really liked that you talked about early and I kind of rallied behind when I read it was you talk about the fact that deferrers, they retire early or young, but the new rich, they distribute recovery periods. And adventures, like what you call mini-retirements throughout life, and they really never do actually exit the workplace. And I'd like— I mean, it's the first time I've ever heard anybody like really explain it, and it's pretty much the way I plan to continue the rest of my life. And I'd like, you know, where did you first come across this in terms of your research? Identify this?

Well, I think that there are a number of different circumstances that led to that. So I've been guest lecturing at Princeton University since 2003 in high-tech entrepreneurship, and I've been living in Silicon Valley since 2000. And Silicon Valley is a very odd, unique, and innovative environment. And what you find is you're exposed to people who really disprove in most cases the viability of retirement as an option. So just as a few options or as a few examples, you'll meet people who have quote-unquote retired at 25 or 35 or 40 with hundreds of millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars, and they realize very quickly that Removing work doesn't automatically create life. It leaves this void. And people come to the conclusion very quickly that if they are in fact intelligent enough and diligent enough to create the nest egg that would be necessary to sustain an acceptable standard of living over 20, 30, 40 years of retirement, that they get bored within 7 days of retirement. And I always remember this story. There was a gentleman named Frank Slattery, a very intelligent entrepreneur, had acquired more than 100 companies in his tenure in one of his companies. And he retired at one point for health reasons. He had to have heart surgery. And I think it was actually the next day, The following day he woke up at 5:00 AM and was getting dressed. He was putting on a suit and tie and his wife asked him what the hell he was doing. And he said, "I'm going out to get a job or start another company." He was already bored. He lasted less than 24 hours. And secondly, many of the concepts and many of the fantasies that we have related to retirement such as let's say sailing on a boat in the Caribbean really have a limited lifespan. And after that we want to engage in something more creative and engaging. So there are many assumptions that we have about retirement that are just completely false when you sit down and test them. And I think that I came to that conclusion more by exhaustion because I realized that the routine I was following which was 80 to 100 hour work weeks in Silicon Valley, as an employee and then as CEO of my own company was completely unsustainable. And if I didn't take an approach that mimicked more of an athlete, let's say, with retirement periods, mini retirements, recovery periods, that the end product was going to be burnout or complete health breakdown. So I think there were a number of factors that led to me coming to that conclusion. And as soon as I tested it, I realized that it really was for me and thousands of other people the most effective way to increase productivity.

If I can jump over to Dan a second, because Dan, you're famous for, and almost in most cases, circles, it's said very much tongue-in-cheek, the fact that you celebrate your last ever lots of different events on your way to a retirement. And just out of curiosity, do you very much agree with Tim's thinking on this or do you have a—

Pardon me?

You know, first of all, you know, the late great Gary Halbert during the series of those last hours at one point suggested that when it was all said and done, I'd be down to the point of holding the last ever marketing boot camp for typewriter repairman, you know, that we'd be category by category by category proceeding for another 4 decades. But one of the guys that was on the Peter Lowe tour with us a lot for a number of years was Jack Groppel. And because Tim just made the athlete analogy, Jack works with professional tennis players and professional golfers and marathon runners and all all sorts of different pro and Olympic athletes. And his biggest point was that a lot of entrepreneurs do not follow that athlete model of building in necessary recovery into their schedule day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, project to project, company to company. And how essential it is. And it's one of my objections to the 24/7 connected to cell phone, email, BlackBerry, blueberry, greenberry, so that, you know, there's— you're walking to lunch, 4 people together are all on the phones, and while they're eating, they're checking stuff. And, you know, so there's no recovery built into the daily schedule. I mean, I think that fundamentally when you reach a financial position that you no longer have any need to work for money, you wind up working for other reasons and other purposes, including purely either to avoid boredom or out of entrepreneurial compulsion. And so most entrepreneurs fail miserably at classically defined retirement, and I never intended mine to be classically defined. I think you want to retire to do certain things, and while they may include the shoeless cruise around the Caribbean, Tim's very astute to point out that those sorts of things don't have a lot of staying power. My first publisher I know a woman CEO who built Self-Counsel Press that published my first books. She sold the company exactly to do that. She said to me at Book Expo, I'm never wearing shoes again. And sold everything, company, house, whatever, in order to buy a big sailboat and go sail around the world. And when I saw her at Book Expo the next year working in the booth, I walked in and said, "Gee, you're not barefoot." And, you know, she lasted about 6 months before it was driving her crazy. So I think it's very astute that, you know, work, however you define it, is sort of a synonym for purpose. And the last thing anybody ought to have is a purposeless life.

And actually, I just want to jump in because that's a very important point, and I want to I want to emphasize it early in the call is that people who haven't read the book often assume, and even if they have perhaps just taken a quick glance at it, that it's a promotion of idleness, which is the last thing it is. So it's important that we define work up front. So I would say that the type of work we want to avoid is the type of work that is financially driven and very time-consuming. Which focuses on the trivial versus the critical. And the type of work that we want to pursue is that which is more purpose-driven. And Suzanne is exactly right. The last thing I would want to mention before we jump into another question is that many of the justifications people use for retirement, the retirement-based model, this deferred life plan, is based on the assumption that things they want to do are very expensive. So they are looking at life in terms of financial currency and ignore time and mobility and other currencies that are equally if not more important for enjoying some of these things early rather than later. So I'll give you a perfect example. A former roommate of mine, brilliant, brilliant guy, met up with me in San Francisco. And he was graduating from one of the best business schools in the country. And I asked him what he was planning on doing next. And he said, well, I'm going to go back to investment banking, which astounded me because he hated investment banking. And those of you who may not be familiar with the workload of investment bankers, it's just atrocious. I mean, it's 100+ hour work weeks, working on holidays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, you name it. And he said, well, coming home at midnight really sucked, but if I weren't I work really hard for let's say 6 years or so, I could be pulling in $3 to $10 million a year. This is a guy who is guaranteed to make a few hundred thousand a year no matter what he does. I asked him, I said, "Dude, what on earth would you do with $3 to $10 million a year?" Now this is in his particular case, mind you. He sat there for a second. He looked up and he said, "Well, And he sort of stammered for a second and said, "I would take a really long trip to Thailand." And I can tell everybody on the call that a really long trip to Thailand living like the Sultan of Brunei costs about $1,500. So really sitting down and actually financially calculating the cost of some of these dream scenarios I think is very important as well. Okay.

I'll tell you, the next thing I'd like to do is I'd like to move on to— Tim, in your book, which you talk about some of the fundamental differentiators that you want people to keep in mind as they go through the book. And you list 10 of them, and certainly we don't have time today on the call for 10 of them, but I'd like to talk about a few of them and get sort of your expanded comments on them. And the first one is one that I really enjoyed reading about because— and it's your number 4 one, which is called "The Timing is Never Right," because I mean, as you know, Tim, you know, Dan and I, we pretty much work with entrepreneurs day in and day out. And oftentimes when we see entrepreneurs, not necessarily the entrepreneurs that we would— that Dan has actually labeled as as renegade millionaire entrepreneurs, but let's call them entrepreneurs and/or would-be entrepreneurs. They always have these great plans to do things, but the timing is never right for them to actually get them done. And I'd like to hear sort of your expanded comments on that.

So the extended comments would be, The timing is never good to do anything important. And what I mean by that is that the important things are inevitably the most uncomfortable things, whether that's an awkward conversation, a sales call, quitting your job, starting your own company, having a child, any of those things, breaking up with a long-standing relationship. It's very easy and seductive to find the many small reasons not to take action. So the timing is never good for any of these important things, and it never will be. And since, you know, sometimes, some days, never now, it's important to recognize that up front so you can overcome that paralytic effect. And as soon as you sort of adopt that as a rule, then you are able to take action because you realize that the scenario is never going to change to present you with a perfect set of circumstances. And that came about, I remember at some point I just asked my mom. I asked her how she decided when to have me. I was the first child in the family. And she just said, "Well, you know, it was important to us, and we decided just one day that's what we were going to do because there's really no reason to put it off and every reason to do it now. And the timing would never be good." And so just recognize that with any important decision, there are going to be corrections that you make after taking that leap. But that there's no real practical reason to put it off.

I love one of the sentences that in your book you wrote about this, which is, and I actually highlighted it when I read this, which was, "Someday is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you." I thought it was just a great explanation of that. And Dan, you may or may not remember this, Years ago, we had a Platinum meeting in Baltimore, and that evening I was able to get the Camden Yards skybox for the Platinum Group, and there was a reporter that we invited to come there and with the hope and expectation that he would write a story about the Platinum Group. And so while he was there, he was telling people the fact that, you know, he has all this entrepreneurial ideas, but he just doesn't have the money to implement them right now. And these 18 platinum guys just jumped all over him and said, "If you're waiting for the money, you'll never get this thing off the ground." I think that, Dan, I think you would agree that that's pretty much a commonality with the most successful people that we know in terms of they don't wait for the timing to be right.

Yeah, and you know, in fact, I had a call just earlier today with an old client who hasn't been around for a while, and so much of the conversation is about, I want to do this, but I got this resource problem, or I got this timing problem. I got, you know, as Tim said, you know, 21 small reasons to delay. And one of the points that it misses— and he asked me at the end of the call, he said, you know, you've known me for a lot of years, what are the things that, you know, get in my way? And you can be brutally honest. And, you know, and I said, because you're constantly waiting, you know, whereas we go out and make a big mess and throw 6 or 7 things off the diving board and jump in after them and see, you know, and and deal with it. And I think that the point that a lot of people miss is that whatever the set of circumstances is at this moment that is causing them to delay action, they change the circumstances the minute they take the action. Everything starts starts to change as a result of that. And so what the circumstances are today won't be the circumstances tomorrow as soon as you've thrown a new, you know, a card into the game. And so the waiting thing is endemic to people who— I won't get— Tim's quote that you just read was brilliant. Is endemic to people who just sort of have everything ever so slowly peter out and die on the vine and never advance the ball. Every year they're wondering why they're in the same place after 12 months.

I think very much related to waiting is it's easy to look at the potential downside cost of action, but people very seldom look at the definite cost of inaction. And there is an expression in fighting. I train with a lot of professional fighters from the UFC and so forth. And there is an expression borrowed from boxing that is used a lot in UFC training which is, everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face. And the point being that you can theorize work on the speed bag and work on your jab and on the mitts and everything else and just wait and wait and plan and plan and prepare and prepare and then you get in the ring and you have this perfect, you know, 27-point strategy and then some guy punches you right in the face and it just all vanishes. And I think it's important to recognize that that's the rule rather than the exception and that the important point is getting the ball into play and then adapting to it and that In my experience and the experience of most of the ultra-successful— this is referring to finance— entrepreneurs I've spoken to, their most critical decisions that set the stage for, let's say, selling their company for $486 million, which a friend of mine just did to Yahoo, were a result of getting in over their head and then figuring it out because that's the only way that you can take advantage of fleeting opportunities. That would just be, I suppose, a closing comment that I want to make related to waiting. Really look at the definite cost of inaction as opposed to just looking at the potential downside of taking action.

Well, let's move on to the next rule of what you call fundamental differentiators, and not one that has not been heard by almost everybody. On this call, which is ask for forgiveness, not permission. And one of the comments that you wrote about, he says most people are fast to stop you before you get started, but hesitant to get in your way if you're moving. And actually, Tim, putting you on the spot just a little bit, don't be too concerned, it's not too bad, is if you could sort of give an example from your own personal life experience when you sort of did exactly this, which is ask for forgiveness instead of permission?

Well, I can give you a few examples. One, I think, where this concept is very important is in any type of sales position. Certainly, you know, solo entrepreneurs and anyone who's in an operational role in a company is in sales, whether it's making sales internally, that is persuading people inside the company to cooperate, or external sales, acquiring customers and so forth. And my first job in Silicon Valley was in mass data storage, so storage area networks. So I would deal with movie studios or the United States Geological Survey or NASA or companies of that type who had massive data storage needs. These were expensive systems, in many cases well over $1 million. And my first job was in sales. And I was in outside sales. So you essentially have the inside sales team who would make the initial contacts and set the meetings. Then I would go in with an engineer and we would make the product explanation and pitch. I happen to be very good at getting meetings also in collaboration with the inside sales guys. And there are certain accounts that I was told I shouldn't handle because I was a junior member of the team. I was inexperienced. And they would say, okay, well, the experienced guys need to handle these types of accounts. But if I managed to actually get a hold of one of those people whether by accident or by design, I would just book the meeting. And then I would explain afterwards, these are the circumstances. I felt it was in the best interest of the company to book this meeting whether you take it from me or not. I didn't want this particular whale, so to speak, potentially huge account slip through our fingers. So I have a meeting set for Tuesday. And the management would usually listen to that rationale. It caused friction with some of the other sales guys, but you know what? Screw them. I mean, at the end of the day, everyone had stock options, and it was in the best interest of everyone to have revenue coming into the company. And I think it's important to establish a reputation as someone who takes initiative early on so that that becomes your recognized MO. So it's like, oh, well, he's just being Tim, or oh, that's just Jason. Oh, that sounds like Jason. And to do that as early as possible so that that people develop a certain expectation that that's going to be your behavior. But that would be just one example.

Well, let me, I want to be very mindful of the clock because I got a bunch of things I would like to go with you today. So let me move on to the next one, which I found again very interesting and kind of made me take a step back and think about a a lot of clients that I work with when I saw this specifically, which is money alone is not the solution. And I'm going to ask— let me first sort of ask you to sort of explain what you mean by that, and then I want to, you know, I'd like to, you know, throw in a few comments, and I'd like to ask Dan to share a few with that as well.

Sure, I'll keep it very short. So income is one currency. In a digital world,. And Dan alluded to this earlier where you have the potential for infinite interruption and infinite minutia. The currencies are in descending order of importance: time, income, and then mobility. So time determines the lifestyle output of your income. So it is one ingredient, one currency in successful lifestyle design. And that is universal. And especially in a world where the current new benchmark, the new 40-hour workweek is 70 hours according to Forbes magazine for those in executive positions, or that would include sort of corporate knowledge workers. Diminishing nonrenewable resources time more than income. So that would be my short explanation.

Okay. Actually, Dan, let me sort of turn that over to you if I can, and then I'll just make a few closing comments on that topic.

Well, I mean, I think if you— like, if you read Tim's book and you really pay attention to what at what Tim's saying and doing and you look at No BS Time Management and you pay attention to, you know, what I say and do, I think we're— there's a lot of overlap there. I mean, I long ago recognized that first of all, no matter how much money you stack up, you can't repurchase the hour that got away from you yesterday and that there's a direct relationship between how you handle that hour and how much money you stack up. And I sort of have a worldview that says that, you know, I get out of bed in the morning and everybody on the planet is in this vast conspiracy to steal as much of my time as they possibly can and screw up my plans and get in my way. And, and I go out of my way to, um, you know, to, to design defenses and fortresses and strategies and behaviors, um, you know, to prevent that interference and so that when I'm working, I'm working liberated from distractions and, you know, 1 hour of mine is probably equivalent to 10 or 20 or maybe even if you look, if you take that stat that Tim just quoted, if the new 40-hour, like Iacocca told me once that in a work week he figured he averaged half an hour of truly productive time. You know, was dealing with all of the demons. So if that's now up to a 70-hour week, then maybe an hour of mine is worth 20 or 30 of the typical executive or entrepreneur, but that's because I don't let people screw with any of the minutes of that time. The last thing I I would say about that is, you know, again, most people don't value time as a currency. It's really good language. Most people don't value it as a currency, and so there's a very physical thing of taking money out of your pocket or writing a check or even using a credit card. And, you know, it's why, for example, the casinos take your money away and they give you chips and slips of paper. Paper and things that sort of distance you from the experience of what it is that you're losing. And there's— so people are real conscious of all the decisions they're making about their money, but they're not very conscious of all the decisions that they're making about their time because they don't have a physical, you know, currency for it. I mean, I organize And hey, different strokes for different folks. I mean, Tim likes to go beat people up and travel the world. I like to race horses, but you know, so I organize my life to facilitate that. And I mean, I got a shirt in the closet that says I work for oats. And that, you know, is really the deal. So the consulting day has to end at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. So I have enough time to have a little rest if I'm in an early race. And I completely rearranged my business a few years ago to strip out all the travel. And I just think people let the whole time issue and the idea that they can control all the choices about it completely slip away. And I think this book does a great job of kind of whacking people around in different places in their head about that very concept.

You know, specific to this money alone is not the solution, you know, one of the things that crossed my mind when I read that was how often I work with entrepreneurs is typically in some kind of consulting or coaching environment. Where they believe that by just throwing money at something they can fix the problem. And I find that there are oftentimes, they're very, very lazy on places that they cannot allow money to fix. One of them is, and this is going to sound somewhat selfish, but one of them is an understanding the fact that you really can't outsource the marketing of any business. You need to minimally understand and have control of how your business is being marketed. There's a whole bunch of different tentacles that come off of that which I don't want to spend time going into today. But again, there's a lot of people who just think that money is the solution and just, you know, I can go— I mean, they'll hire me and they'll say, "Okay, write me a sales letter." and they think that my sales letter is going to totally fix their company. And although it may do the job of bringing them customers and prospects, it's not necessarily going to do the job of doing what they really wanted to have happen unless the person is really understanding the total marketing concept of that company. So that's just one example of how I believe that money just can't fix, just can't be the overall solution. Tim, I want to move on to something else you said because at our events, Tim, I have a big banner. We have a bunch of banners that we put up at our events with a lot of sayings that we want to make sure that our members totally embrace. One of the banners that I put up is that the entrepreneur is the loneliest person on the planet. You mentioned in your book, you said that it's lonely at the top. 99% of people in the world are convinced that they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for mediocrity. Which was really interesting because as I mentioned is that the entrepreneur is the loneliest person on the planet. Do you believe that a lot of people are held back because of the loneliness of the entrepreneur and because of that they are forced to be mediocre in what they do?

Well, I think that loneliness, if we are talking about it in a social context, isn't generally what holds people back. Although I know that there are some people— I think it's harder for employees to jump to self-employment for that reason. For many people, they have that built-in social environment that an office provides, and they want that and need that more than the entrepreneurship or that departure would necessarily give them. But I think for the entrepreneur, what holds them back is loneliness in the sense of a lack of role models and allowing that to stop them from setting their sights high enough. In the sense that, I'll give you an example from my book experience. So I was in Argentina when a Princeton student suggested that I take the content of the class and put it into a book. He said, look, I think you should just take this and put it in a book and be done with it, because the class had gone over very well.. And it was just one of these, yeah, you should really put it in a book, hahaha moments. And that hahaha just wouldn't go away and it kept me up for a few days. So I sat down. I did my homework online. I put together a book proposal and I sent it to Jack Canfield, the co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul, more than 150 million books sold. And basically I asked Jack, I said, look, am I full of crap? Please be honest with me. Or is there something here that I should pursue? And as soon as I decided to publish the book, I set New York Times bestseller as my target. And I knew the stats. I knew the likelihood. I looked at all the numbers. It was very daunting from a numbers standpoint. And I didn't have any experience. I didn't really have that many role models for the type of book that I wanted to write, which is really sort of a business crossover book. There just aren't that many. I set that as my goal. It wasn't just isolation, meaning there weren't that many role models I had direct access to. But secondly, people would actively discourage me from aiming at New York Times bestseller. I think there are a lot of reasons people do that. But it went so far as one president of one of the top book resellers, wholesalers online, sent me a PDF, 2 or 3 PDFs essentially proving that I could not make it to the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. And he said, look, I think you need to readjust your expectations and shoot for something a little more achievable. And I think the words he used are very important. I didn't expect New York Times bestseller, but I did aim for it. I think those are 2 very different things. So people ask me like, did you ever expect the book would do what it's done? And the book is number 1 on the New York Times business list right now, and number 1 in the Wall Street Journal Business List and has been for the last 6 or 7 weeks. I wouldn't say I expected it. I didn't think that would necessarily be the outcome with 100% certainty, but I certainly aimed for it. The aim is all that mattered. I aimed for the top. People ask, "Well, what if it doesn't happen?" The question I would ask is, "Well, what if it does happen?" Then it's a life-changing experience, whereas if you aim for mediocrity and you get it,. It might just be a nice pat on the shoulder and then you need to get back to the grinding stone.

Well, the next thing I want to talk to you about is that you mentioned, this is about midway through your book, you made a statement of recognize and fight the interruption impulse. And one comment that I heard early on when I when I first met Dan Kennedy, I was probably sitting in a seminar listening to him talk. He made a comment called the interruption of minutes. I was sitting at the time, I was running my menswear retail stores. I was thinking that immediately it just sort of took me right to where I was the day before, which was sitting in my office and then throughout the entire day My employees would walk into my office one after another with the biggest problems that they could possibly have in their mind and they needed me to fix it right on the second. As soon as I heard that, I said to myself, "That's an interruption a minute." I'm living this nightmare myself because I'm constantly fixing their problems, which I guess, Dan, is sort of similar to what Iacocca meant by he only had half an an hour productive work week. Yeah, exactly. I guess, Tim, were you in that? I believe when I read your book you talked about where you came from in terms of your entrepreneurial career and how you were kind of fighting that yourself. At what point did you just sort of identify that and move from it?

I would say I really moved from it, and this is another good example of making the decision and then coping with the consequences of that decision. In June, okay, on June 14th, 2004, to be very specific date.

Do you have like the hour?

Yeah, you know, it was probably about, I'd say 11 AM Eastern Standard.

This is a moment that went down in infamy.

Yeah, I was in Brooklyn at a friend's apartment. And this is when I reached the breaking point where I was just, I had just gone through 600, 700 email and there was more coming in every minute. And I just said, you know what, enough is enough. I need to kill this monster, referring to the design of my own business. It was just entirely owner based as opposed to process-based. And I mean, that's not entirely true. There was infrastructure, but I was the bottleneck for decision-making. I was a toll booth through which every decision had to pass. And so I decided that I was going to take 4 weeks to decompress, and I didn't know where I would do that, but I knew it had to be outside of this familiar business context where I would just be checking email every second of every day and never get to the hard thinking that I needed to do. So I went to JFK and I had a backpack with about a week's worth of clothing and bought the first ticket that I could get out of the US to Europe. And it happened to be to London. So I landed in London, called a former classmate of mine and said, "Hey, I'm in London. I need a place to stay. Can I crash at your place?" And he said, "Sure.". And I was planning on being there for 4 weeks. Ended up that that was the beginning of my 15-month trip. I just didn't go back. And I set a rule for the first 4 weeks that I wanted to do this redesign of my business. And the rule was that I could check email once per week for no more than 2 hours on each Monday. And in order to achieve that, I made the decision first. I said, "Okay, I am going to do this. Now what are the actions I need to take to prevent my business from completely collapsing if I do that, since that is already a foregone conclusion?" I would say as soon as I pulled off the first week and I realized that far from damaging my company, I had just absolutely pulled a 180-degree turn from an efficiency standpoint, and that I was actually in a position to create greater income because of putting in processes in place of my own small low-level decisions. That's when I started really actively creating more and more barriers to interruption. So I would say that would be the specific point. It's when I tried something half expecting it not to work, I made all of the coping decisions after the fact, so I got in way over my head and then struggled to get my head above water. And it worked. And as soon as I realized that it worked, I did that proof of concept, then I went full bore.

You know, this is such an important point. I mean, the first thing that popped into my mind is, you know, I always thought we had to have a receptionist at our office. And the receptionist was my mother and she died. And so that forced us not to have a receptionist. And by the time I started to work on hiring a receptionist, 2 weeks had gone by and you discovered, well, shoot, if we haven't needed one for 2 weeks, maybe we won't need one for 3 weeks either. You know, and we never got another receptionist again. I mean, and so Many times you'll sit with somebody and, like our phenomenon article in the September newsletter was Rob Minton, who was a realtor, so he'd sit and tell me the 18 things he hated about being a realtor. I said, "Well, why don't you just redesign your business to eliminate all those 18 things?" Then everybody tells them why you can't. He can't do that in his business. And I assure you, if you had gone to a group of your peers and advisors and, you know, people in similar businesses and told them you were going to start checking email once a week for 2 hours and that was it, they would all have a long list of reasons why you couldn't possibly do that in your kind of business or position.. Everybody goes through this. The mortgage broker who's going to turn the cell phone off and not take any calls on the weekends when realtors are doing open houses. The list in our world is long of people who defy all the norms and redesign their businesses to suit them. But the list is not nearly as long as it should be because so many people won't do what you did. Is make the decision about the way they want it to be, do it, see what happens, and deal with the consequences.

Exactly. And I want to give one more example of that. So I came into the publishing industry with a beginner mind, so to speak. That's a Zen term that I don't want to even get into that. Simply meaning that I didn't have the experience to bring a lot of preexisting assumptions with me about publishing. So I would look at something and I would say, that doesn't make any sense at all. Why the hell would I do that?

You don't have to look very far in publishing to see why. Yeah.

It caused a lot of friction early on. But I'll give you an example. So I spoke with I interviewed a number of best writing authors, so to speak, like Pulitzer Prize winners and such, about the writing process. How did I get them? I just emailed them and asked them for 5 minutes of advice. So I used that experience to set my schedule and so forth for writing. And I also interviewed a few best-selling authors. And one of the questions I asked them was, what was the biggest waste of time and money? In the marketing of your books? And almost without exception, every single one of them said book signings, bookstore tours and book signings. Just demoralizing, physically taxing, killer schedules that take you from God knows which town to what town. And the type of traveling that I absolutely abhor. So early on I decided I'm not going to do any physical book touring. So everyone would ask me, "When are you doing your book tour?" I'd say, "I'm not doing a book tour." They'd go, "Oh my God, you have to do a book tour. You have to. That's how people make bestsellers. They go from place to place with books in their trunk." And I said, "That sounds miserable, and it doesn't sound effective. So I'm not going to do that." There's a lot of skepticism, but it's one of the best decisions I made. It really allowed me to focus on other things that were measurably effective for selling books. Times are changing, especially with some of these tactical things. So not high-level strategy, but tactical things like these bookstore tours just as one example. Times are changing quickly, so a lot of these rules become obsolete, but there is a legacy of that type of thinking.

So definitely it's a key point to test assumptions instead of just following the herd. Tim, 2 more quick questions and then we're going to get to Q&A from our members. And you can make these answers abbreviated so that we can give our members maximum time to ask you a question. But the first— the next question is really pertains to your book, the success you've had. If you had to give away the one sort of deep dark secret that you think was the number one thing that that led to the great success that your book has had in terms of sales? What advice would you give others who want to achieve similar success?

I would say that selling around my product was the most effective approach. What I mean by that is I did a lot of my work online because it was the only piece of the puzzle that was left for me to play with. The publisher was going to handle TV, print, etc., reviews. And the only hand that I had left to play really was online. They really didn't have that much planned, at least with blogs and things like that. And I knew nothing about blogs, but I set out to decide how I could try to leverage that. And basically what I did was what everyone else, or what no one else was doing. So instead of emailing bloggers, instead of pitching bloggers, so forth and so on, and so on, I went to these high-level tech events and I would meet them just over a beer or at some type of not really networking event, but just where a bunch of techies would be drinking beer and I would hang out and ask a lot of questions. And I wouldn't even mention my book. I would sell them on me. And I think that is very important to realize. And this is also true of just general media in general. But I would talk to them. I would ask them a lot of questions and then demonstrate that I was smart and I didn't have any ulterior motives. And then at some point I would bump into these bloggers let's say for the second time at an event or third time and they would go, what the hell do you do? I don't know anything about you. And I would say, oh well, I'm working on my first book. And they would say, oh really? And then it would go from there and they would say, well yeah, why don't you send me a copy? That would be cool. I would say, you know, if you want, I wouldn't expect you to write about it or anything like that, but I could send you a copy if you want to check it out. I think you'd find chapters this, this, and this kind of interesting. And then they would take it. So number one is I wasn't pitching them anything because with the most influential people, at least in my experience, especially if you are at a point where you can't offer them a quid pro quo like you mail to my list, I'll mail to mine type of thing. If you can't offer that, don't try to twist their arm or pitch them because you will get you'll get the opposite response. They'll decide they don't want to do it if they feel like they are being manipulated. And secondly is selling around that. So really focus on developing these personal relationships in person because everyone is emailing them. Everyone is making phone calls. And then when the opportunity presents itself, let's say a few months later, and I could give dozens of examples where the book comes out they see it, they say, "Oh, I remember that guy. He was pretty cool. Yeah, we had vodka together in Austin, Texas," or whatever. Then a lot of them would just throw me a bone. They would be like, "Okay, I'm not going to write an entire blog post about him, but yeah, I'll be writing a post about email and I'll just put a link to his site." Boom. And then that would get me to like number 3 on Amazon. So I just felt it was important for me to give a little bit of background on that.

Selling around the product I think is a very important concept that works very well. Last question is sort of just for the record. The name of the book is The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9 to 5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. Obviously people look at this book and they say, "Gee, this guy is going to teach me how to just work 4 hours a week." Is that really your message?

No, it's not. It's a good headline though. And I'll tell you just quickly, I didn't just decide on that. That wasn't a gut decision. It wasn't an emotional decision. We had about 12 potential headlines and subtitles, and I used Google AdWords to test all of them. So I had one landing page. I had already reserved all the web addresses. So I put up Google AdWords to test each title and then the subtitle. And the one that had the greatest click-through rate was 4-Hour Workweek, so we went with that. So it was all micro-tested beforehand.

That was a great secret you just gave away.

Yeah, yeah. I test everything. I am absolutely compulsive about numbers. I really don't feel like you understand something unless you can measure it. So I'm very anal about measurement and metrics. But the message of the book is that time is a nonrenewable resource and a currency just like income, and that the objective should be lifestyle design which means creating time and controlling time and spending time on what it is that you want to be doing. That's it. And The 4-Hour Workweek is one example of that. There are examples of people who have done that. Iacocca said 30 minutes a week. Richard Branson has said that he can get all of his business done if he prioritizes properly in the first 15 minutes of each day. It comes down to prioritizing and focusing on the critical few.

That's really the message of the book. Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow, and the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. Now this free gift gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free, just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at NoBSLetter.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month, one from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.