I’d like to invite you to leave your personal mark on The 4-Hour Workweek. After 31 printings (!) and more than 25 languages, you can put your signature on a global phenomenon… and travel the world for free…
Your ideas, collected via this open wiki, will play a massive part in influencing the future of 4HWW and an “expanded and updated” edition in 2008 or early 2009. The password to make edits is [see below].
[Postscript: Please note that the wiki is no longer accepting changes, as the experiment has ended. Thanks to all of you for lots of fantastic suggestions and changes!]
The backlash I hoped for is gaining speed, even among the Fortune 500, and I want an improved and expanded 4HWW to help propel the critical mass needed for large-scale institutional, and even policy-level, change. The book alone won’t do it, obviously, but I believe it can play a small part as instigator.
To my knowledge, this is the first time a NY Times bestseller has ever been made open to public editing. In fact, I haven’t seen any traditionally-published book ever crowdsourced on a global scale.
Why am I doing this?
1. I’ve been blown away with the innovation I’ve seen among readers in lifestyle design, both derivative of 4HWW and 100% original. In all respects: “we” is smarter than “me”.
2. Book editing is ridiculously anachronistic.
When I was in Florianopolis, Brazil learning to surf last winter, my publisher informed me that the “second pass” manuscript was ready for me to review. Great! Just send a PDF, right? Not quite. I was mailed 400+ pages of printed matter with changes indicated by different colored pencils used by different people. I had to find another color, scribble in my edits, and mail it back.
“Please tell me you have another copy of this,” I said via the Vonage-wired beach house with a nervous laugh. The response: “I don’t think so, so please don’t lose it.” Talk about author heart attack. I felt like Clive Owen in Children of Men.
Here are a few incentives. The top contributor as subjectively determined by me (quality over quantity) will get:
1) A roundtrip ticket anywhere in the world (using Continental or a partner airline of OnePass)
2) Their name in the acknowledgments of the 4HWW
3) My help planning the mini-retirement, whether a romantic trip to Bali or touring the hidden temples and Bladerunner-like coolness of Japan. I’ve already sent readers to do both.
The due date for suggestions is March 23rd at 5pm PST but early birds have a big advantage, since you don’t get credit for making suggestions someone else has already made.
Don’t let other people alone shape the future of the 4HWW. Make sure you’ve left your mark…
[Postscript: Sorry for accidentally publishing a draft of this post first! “Save” is right next to “publish” in the WP admin :)]
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Reader Poll:
Many of you have complained about how I sometimes put multiple topics in single posts. Here’s why I’ve done it: I don’t want to clutter people’s RSS or e-mail with separate posts just to make announcements, so I append them at the end of posts (a la “(Plus: Competition Winners)”). Lots of you dislike this or find it confusing for good reasons. Which do you prefer? If the below poll doesn’t work for some reason, please tell me in the comments:
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