Same. The profitable idea is the hardest thing for me. It seems like everything I think of has already been done before.

In the book, Tim Ferris makes his money by selling phoney brain supplements to golfers. That's not a new idea, but it's a profitable one.

I think part of the reason I'll never have a great deal of money is that the idea of tricking someone into buying a useless product makes me uncomfortable. As does adding more plastic and trash into the world.

I think approaching an idea that already has existing solutions is better than trying to come up with a completely new idea. The existing solutions indicate that there is a market for it. Can you improve on those existing solutions, and deliver some value that is lacking in them?

With 7+ Billion people on the planet most people have done something similar to any idea. Isn't the point in the book that you can still succeed by creating your own flavor of an idea or selling that idea to a new market?

That might be the point. I didn't make it that far because after what seemed like 60 pages of the author talking about how he's naturally a world class performer at pretty much everything he's ever tried to do in his entire life I got tired of the bullshit time-share salesman style of writing.

Where does the actual advice start? This book is recommended pretty much every time someone asks a similar question, I might be willing to give it another shot if there's actual content somewhere in it.

Also, did this guy create a successful business outside of his self-help stuff before he started writing these books?

I think the book is worth reading. His inspiration for writing 4HWW was his experience running a supplement business, which he later sold - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Ferriss#Career

Prior to reading the book, I had a retire-early mindset. My idea was to work hard at high paying jobs and save a lot so I could retire early. After reading the book, I had the idea to create multiple streams of income in order to achieve the goal of retiring early.

Others have mentioned that it's not easy to find a lifestyle business that earns you enough income to live off of, and I've also had that problem. However, I've had partial success. I don't think I'd have ever pursued this path without reading 4HWW. It's not an instruction manual, though.

If you interview people about the type of problems they deal with day to day then you start to get tons of ideas. That’s how I started.

The problem isn't to find problem for which you can start a business. The problem is to find a problem for which you can start an automated business. That's much harder.

Every business can be automated. Just find good people to run it for you.

That's not the spirit of the 4HWW. The idea is to make a product that requires not much improvement, and people just buy it from your website, so essentially your 4 hours are spent doing accounting and basic customer support. You might have a part time guy to do server maintenance but that's about it. So essentially most of your revenue is profit for yourself, and you can run a "small" business with revenue in the 50-100K range.

If you start hiring full time workers, then your business has to scale a lot. Like revenue has to go to 500-1M range so you have enough to pay full time workers as well as money for yourself. That's just a completely different beast.

500-1M USD? If you hire full-time US workers then that's probably the case.

For me I hired a few remote part-timers around the world. So it costs me an order of magnitude less. And they're all awesome, so I barely have to lift a finger.

It took me about four years. It would've been faster if I knew then what I know now.

Care to summarize what you know now that you didn't know then?

Go on...

I could write a whole book on what I’ve learned :) As can any other business owner I think. But I’d be happy to chat with anyone wanting advice.

Any tips on finding "automatable" problems?

Pretty much all businesses are automatable. Just hire good people and have good processes in place for them to follow.

For example, WP Curve was even able to automate the process of hiring dozens of developers. You would've that that it would require a very manual intervention by the owner: https://wpcurve.com/hiring-developers/