The Lost Presentation That Launched The 4-Hour Workweek — “Secrets of Doing More with Less in a Digital World” from SXSW 2007 (#548)

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out the routines, habits, et cetera that you can apply to your own life. 

This is a special episode, which features my very first speech at SXSW in March of 2007! I didn’t know that a recording existed, and it was a great surprise when Cal Newport, author of Deep Work and writer for The New Yorker sent it to me. 

He used it as part of his research for a recent article that was published in The New Yorker titled “Revisiting The 4-Hour Workweek: How Tim Ferriss’s 2007 manifesto anticipated our current moment of professional upheaval.” 

And the 2007 SXSW speech was really the event that put everything into high gear. Influential tech bloggers who had heard the SXSW talk wrote about The 4-Hour Workweek, which put it on the radar of bigger media outlets. Eventually, the book made it onto The New York Times Best Sellers list, where it stayed, more or less, for the next seven years. It’s been a wild ride. 

One last thing: Hugh Forrest, if you’re listening, thank you again for giving me a shot way back in the day! 

Please enjoy!

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The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

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SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…

Want to hear my interview with Ed Zschau, the polymath professor who changed my life? Listen to our conversation, in which we discuss the role of optimism in entrepreneurship, meticulous attention to detail, why career planning is overrated, and much, much more.

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss | Amazon
• SXSW Conference & Festivals
• Tim Ferriss’ Four-Hour Work Week | WIRED
• Revisiting “The 4-Hour Workweek” by Cal Newport | The New Yorker
• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport | Amazon
• The Story of “How About Never” | The New Yorker
• The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less by Richard Koch | Amazon
• Pareto Principle | Investopedia
• Parkinson’s Law: The ‘Law’ That Explains Why You Can’t Get Anything Done | BBC
• Email Autoresponders That Work | Tim Ferriss
• Mail Your Child to Sri Lanka or Hire Indian Pimps: Extreme Personal Outsourcing (with A.J. Jacobs) | Tim Ferriss
• Model the ‘Puppy-Dog Close’ Technique | Entrepreneur.com
• BlackBerry
• Cannondale Bikes
• Arthur Jones, MedX, and Nautilus Exercise Principles | Arthur Jones Library
• What Can’t Be Measured | HBR
• Palm Z22 | Wikipedia
• International Kendo Federation (FIK)
• Your Man In India (YMII)
• Brickwork India

SHOW NOTES

• How do your decisions and priorities change if retirement will never be an option, and what do you do to avoid becoming a bottleneck when your business outscales you? Here’s why the pursuit of a 4-Hour Workweek isn’t for lazy people. [06:06]
• Definition: determining what it is that you want to create from a lifestyle standpoint and how much this costs. How Tim applied the 80/20 Rule (aka Pareto’s Principle) to reduce the time he had to spend managing his own business. [13:48]
• “It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” -Cyril Northcote Parkinson. How to ensure Parkinson’s Law isn’t governing your life. [19:01]
• Elimination: how you can focus on the crucial few instead of the trivial many, starting with the way you process email. [20:15]
• Automation: why you should outsource anything that occupies more time than you can afford to pay yourself. [24:14]
• Liberation: creating mobility and taking advantage of the time that you create. [27:14]
• The summary: the point of life is to enjoy it and the three currencies — time, income, and mobility — are vehicles to achieving it. [34:03]
• How do you fire 80 percent of your clients without building bad will within the community? [35:48]
• What happens when the people to whom I’ve outsourced the bulk of my work read The 4-Hour Workweek? [38:21]
• How do meetings work in a 4-Hour Workweek scenario? [39:12]
• How transparent should you be with your customers about how much of your workload is outsourced, and how do you justify increasing rates under these circumstances? [40:59]
• How do auto-responders fit into relationship management? [43:25]
• When eliminating, how do you figure out what’s important and what’s not important? [45:11]
• Tools I used (circa 2007) to leverage my time, and what I consider to be the most valuable skill set you can develop. [48:40]
• How does someone focus on what’s important in an era when distractions are so abundant? [50:27]
• How can an employee implement 4-Hour Workweek tactics and strategies when locked into a traditional 40-hour job structure? [53:28]
• The challenge. [57:40]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

• Cal Newport
• Hugh Forrest
• Robert Scoble
• Robert Frost
• Ed Zschau
• A.J. Jacobs
• Dave Barry
• Arthur Jones
• Peter Drucker

The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than one billion downloads. It has been selected for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it's been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.