Recognizing leverage in your life... concepts of the 4 hour work week by Tim Ferris

SHARING ALL SBD'S EARNED WITH 1 GOOD COMMENTER AND 1 RESTEEMER! I recently wrote a post to defend Tim Ferriss' "4 Hour work week"
I recommend it often ...just as often nobody bothers to read it...
As I said in that post, the main problem is that it is in the "Get rich quick schemes" area and it is understandable that it's perceived as a bit shady.

I think it is actually a very important book because it is an awesome curated toolkit full of tools that allow you to apply leverage in your life.

Most people don't understand why this is
so important, most don't even understand what leverage is !

First of all the word. It is most often used in financial instruments etc.
But basically you need to understand that leverage is about a multiplication effect.

In the physical world, if you need to move a heavy object, you can try to do it either with brute force or with ingenuity...

By choosing well where to put a lever and a place to support it (the fulcrum) you can multiply your own force and move the object easily.

That is the idea in a more abstract sense in many other fields in life.

Instead of leverage, think "multiplier" effect.

If you look around a bit, using leverage is what makes us uniquely human:

The first way we obtained leverage as humans was through being social.
Collaboration is how we got much more done than working on our own.
By organising ourselves in groups, collaboration became ever more efficient.
In the end a natural consequence of collaboration was specialisation. A
few people are extraordinarily good at something for some reason so
they dedicated most of their time to that. And got even better and smarter.
Note that the result of collaboration, if done well, can be much greater than the sum of its parts. It is a big multiplier!

The second way we obtained leverage is through tools (technology actually) from very
primitive (say a stone axe) to now highly sophisticated (say a chainsaw) we are able to get much more done that we would be able to through our own puny physical power alone.
By harnessing energy from our environment and focus it through technology we got huge multiplier effects.

But even more interesting, once we started to combine tools and social organisation , we started to create systems.

The process we use to do this is design.
Systems usually are optimised through design to perform a function.

Say you have a pile of rocks, that pile does not perform any function.
Say you build a house by deliberately stacking rocks into an igloo shape: great!
You have a tool to protect you from the elements!
This fundamentally means you can save your energy because you won't be cold at night. That is a multiplier effect #1.

But a system is much more powerful than that !
Say you build 20 of these rock igloos and fill them with 20 families, now you have a village ! That is much more useful than 1 house!
It generates security for everyone, improves ability to gather & store food and the exchange of ideas helps to develop even more sophisticated tools !
That is the difference between tools and socio-technical systems !
(Steemit is such a system by the way! It is much more than say a blogging tool.)

Design is not just about making your Iphone look cool !

Lately design has gotten a bad reputation, people think design it is about how pretty we can make something.

The ability to intelligently choose how to arrange elements, use tools
to manipulate them or focus their energy and where we need to apply our
own energy is how we got where we are now.

[to design]
From http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-definition/design
1 to work out the structure or form of (something), as by making a sketch, outline, pattern, or plans
2 to plan and make (something) artistically or skilfully
3 tr to form or conceive in the mind; invent
4 tr to intend, as for a specific purpose; plan

The problem with tools and design is that they require effort to make,
use and execute. Or if you are not making them, they areexpensive to buy (how much was that Iphone again?)

So there are trade off's involved !

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."

• Abraham Lincoln quotes from BrainyQuote.com

Well that all depends on the size of the tree doesn't it? It is a
clever quote that demonstrates that your return on investment for your
efforts can be much greater if you invest upfront in improving your
tools.

HOWEVER. He never said how big the tree was did he?
What if he was only cutting down a sapling? Or a 5 Inch tree?
Does it still make sense to sharpen that axe for 4 hours?

This is something I see in a lot of areas in life: we get too obsessed
with the tools, that we forget one important thing: "good enough".

Optimization: good enough

As important as tools are, it is much more important is to choose the appropriate tool for the job.
This is part of the design process, as an engineer understands it, not an interior decorator.
Jobs, houses, education they are all mere tools to satisfy certain basic needs, but have we optimized them to the right size?

Tools are expensive
The key with anything is the return on investment.
Tools are expensive and a pain in the ass to maintain.
(4 hours to sharpen an axe? Dude... !)

Better tools only make sense if we are going to use them intensely.
If we only need them once, why bother owning an expensive tool? (other than that it looks great of course). Can you borrow, rent or improvise with stuff you already have lying around for free?
The great news of the sharing and digital economy is that tools are becoming more and more accessible, in some cases even "free".

Tools: Return On Investment

This is the genious of the Four hour workweek.
It questions everything from this perspective: jobs, cars, houses, education, food, news & media... they are all tools of potentially great utility but they have inherent costs too.
(For those "free" tools, they cost most of all: your attention!** Using and maintaining might take so much time they are simply not worth it)

Many people are blind to this aspect, the assumption seems to be that if having one tool is good, more tools the better right?

What Tim brilliantly highlighted is that most people have poorly designed their lives.

Not in the sense of "cool" factor or fashion but in the engineering sense of optimizing your life plan (design) for the outcome you want.

In aviation we are obsessed with optimisation, because you can't afford to overengineer. Anything on an aircraft that is not optimised for its function will add weight and cost.
E.g. choose the wrong engines for the job and that can be the difference between an airline failing or succeeding.

In life, the problem is that we often don't challenge our assumptions behind an our design decisions. For many people they kinda happened...

When starting with the wrong or outdated assumptions, we are forced into involuntary lifestyle decisions
These are trade-offs that aren't designed to optimize for our life goals, but to follow the logic that comes with the "standard recipes".

An example:
A default design might start like this ;

"I am getting a job : well duh! I need an income right ?
So better get a high paying job!
Great, found one ! Uf, this city is pricey !

(Let's look at how much a "high" paying job really costs...)

Where am I going to live? Better start looking at the 'burbs. It's a longer drive but we get more house for the money, and the kids can go to a ''better" school. House costs 750K, oops, better get a loan...but it's all right! House prices will keep going up, good "investment", right !

Now I need a car right? Why not get a "nice" one. It "will keep its value better" and l will be spending 10-15 hours a week in it, so l'd better like it. (20-30K, + 400 USD/month to run it)
Only get 2 weeks holiday, but we don't have the money yet anyway to go somewhere!
But if I work hard, I'll get that promotion and then ... but to get that promotion I am expected to work 60hr weeks !
Pity, don't see the kids before they get to sleep ... Damn, childcare is expensive!
But I'll work hard now to make a bundle and enjoy when we retire, right? Oops, college is expensive too! Better add some more years to that career..."

That was the logic for many people, and like any bubble , it worked well for a while.
But many of the underlying assumptions are based on quicksand!

When things go wrong, it turned into:

"Damn ! Lay-offs in the company, promotion freeze! Pay cut ! Argh ! Need a better job ! Can't ! Stuck here because housing values plummeted, we're upside down on the mortgage ... if we just can hang on until the kids graduate..."

There is a saying I like very much and I use it often : "When you find yourself in a hole, first stop digging !"

In the end, money itself is a tool too, it is only one method of obtaining what we want, but by no means the only one.

Overoptimising for money, can generate tradeoffs that go directly against your long term interests.
I am not saying money is bad, it is a great tool which is universally useful, but how much is it really costing you ...
Your ultimate resource on this planet is time :
are you happy with what you are getting in return ?
Few people can answer "Yes" to that question... in fact many are not comfortable at all with this question and prefer to bury their head in the sand and hope for the best.

Guess what? If you don't change a thing, things stay the same!

The whole argument of the 4HWW is that you should be obsessive about optimizing your life and its design to suit your needs.

Sometimes you might needs some radical design choices...
There is a saying I use often in coaching: "When you find yourself in a hole, first stop digging !" EDIT already said that! Though! I 'll say it again!

Does that mean you have to become a beach bum, like the digital nomad stereotype ?

Of course not! The whole point is not to have to follow generic recipes anymore, you can fully optimize and customize your life to suit your needs.
The principle of location independence is a huge multiplier though.
Separating your income from a physical location allows you to optimize a lot of factors in your life and will create a whole bunch of options which can re-enforce other leverage techniques!

As any financial guru will tell you, you need to know 2 things:
How much is coming in vs how much is going out...

But you can make that exercise much more interesting by exploring different aspects:

Can I drastically reduce money going out while maintaining or improving my lifestyle ?
(Hmm, might need to move but in principle yes)
What is it that I want? What is the minimum amount to achieve that cutting all the fluff?

Can I improve my money for time exchange rate? (Improving USD/hr. Hmm yes, but will need to get creative...)
Can I do both so I have to work way less for equivalent or better lifestyle? (Mmh might need to read the book)

In short, the bad news is that lifestyle design will go from a luxury to a necessity because of the transition of our economy to our innovation economy... there will be a lot of change and crisis.
2008 was probably only the beginning...
Automation, technological progress and outsourcing will only increase, and normal life will suffer as a result.

These trends will reduce the income of many people in many industries ... and rather than a life of leisure they will need to adjust to doing more with less.

The good news; it is more and more accessible and feasible, the abovementioned factors make a 4 HWW style life easier to achieve.

Steemit.com can be one more tool in the arsenal of the 4HWW lifestyle designer!

My other articles might interest you too;
My defence of the 4HWW
The idea economy, why everything will change and why I am betting on Steemit.com

About the standard assumptions people have and why you need to check them...

Of course ALL the SBD's I earn from this post will also go to

1 re-steemer with a good reason in the comments why you re-steemed it
1 commenter who has a constructive (positive or negative) answer to my logic or questions in this post.

I UPVOTE good commenters too!
I am seeding the pot with @randowhale to get a good start!