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).