Isn't Tim Ferriss' belief the opposite of overworking? I thought that was the whole point of the 4-hour Work Week.

The Four Hour workweek is a dream reached either by working really really really hard to build a business, or by basically strong-arming your employer into letting you work while you're relaxing on a beach.

It's all right there in his book, but like anything that inspires people, most people read what they want to read and not the actual words on the page.

I think the key lesson in the 4 hour work week and skill you need to be a successful entrepreneur or capitalist is delegation and outsourcing. You need to learn how to scale yourself and your processes by hiring others and profiting from their labor. That's the key to the 4 hour work week and capitalism. You're not going to get the crazy results everybody wants until you learn how to build, hire a team, and profit off their hard work.

The secret to this is that this doesn't require capital at all. You don't need anything to learn how to arbitrage, money, goods, or time.

Where is the capital to pay the people you hire?

My partner worked as a developer to someone who served as a middle man. People would give the middle man tech projects and he'd split them up between developers he knew and profit. I think Steve Jobs actually did this when they wrote a game for Atari.

People do this all the time with 14 day invoices etc. You have to be a little creative and very skilled but it's possible to make something out of nothing because you're providing value- especially when you get paid up front with a deposit.

That's the theory. But isn't the premise that by working 8 hours a day à la Ferris you'd end up working 10 times more than the others in the rat race ? (at least that's the vibe I got back then).

It's still about being super efficient though (4 super efficient hours a week. Let's be honest anybody who could do that would do it more than once a week).

Hey - I've never really heard about the "Church of Pavlina", and Google isn't really forthcoming. Do you mind explaining what you mean a bit?

Sure (sorry about being cryptic).

Steve Pavlina is one of the first superstar of the online self-help world (dating back to 2004 or 2006). It started with an article on a famous website for programmers (can't remember the name atm) about how he dig really deep with his first game and so others were playing catching up but he was raking in a steady monthly income (see where we are going and who would be interested ?).

Then he started his personnal weblog (yeah, we used to call'em weblog in my days) about self help and how he experimented with polyphasic sleep (sleeping 3 or 4 hours a days in twenty minutes increment, see the kind of folks that would bite that bait ?). So far, so good.

Then he went full crazy with psychic powers like talking to bird, being a telepath, reality shaping (aka the secret), etc.

His article were 10 or 12 A4 pages long (wonder how that goes nowadays) and it was kind of mesmerizing to see all that happening in real time (I admit I got first intrigued with his time management article and I kept reading for the crazy).

There was a funny experiment with polyamory and it ended with a divorce.

See http://edificial.blogspot.com/2006/08/church-of-steve-pavlin... for the church of pavlina and https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Steve_Pavlina for links and stuff.

Of course they guy was kinda successful (financially).

His forums were a pure gold mine of fun. There was the same kind of diverse mix of people you'd see on a huge site like 4chan or Reddit, but it still felt really intimate. Like the Tucker Max forum but not quite as hyper-masculine.

The overwork culture certainly predates blogs.

Steve Pavlina is/was a programmer turned motivational(?) speaker.