4-Hour Week

The last 12 months I have been thinking of quitting full-time employment permanently. I don’t want to live an unfulfilled life doing things that I don’t like at all and spending my best years working for someone else. Even writing this scares me. So, it is not surprising that there has been a string internal struggle within me. I am not happy at my current job, I don’t enjoy doing things I do, and I don’t like the environment I’m in now. And most important of all, I don’t want to waste my best years on the corporate rat race.

You cannot imagine how delighted I was when I came across the book called ‘The 4-Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferris. The whole book is wonderful, and I highly recommend it anyone who at least occasionally thinks of living a better life without keeping everything to the retirement. The section I will write about in this piece is called “Dodging Bullets” which describes how we fail to take action because of fear. We don’t go to vacation places we’d like to, we don’t move a new country, and most related to this article, we don’t quit the job we hate.

The section begins with the quote attributed to the great Mark Twain: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” Most people choose not to act and always find excuses for not doing something. Uncertainty about your future if you do something dramatic and the fear of failure if you don’t succeed are too strong. Therefore, most individuals, as the author puts it, “will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.” But when you start defining your fears, you’ll find out most fears have no basis. You’ll most likely not starve, you won’t be jobless for years (even though the aim is to quit the job, but if you really need you can return to full-time employment temporarily), and you won’t become penniless when you quit your job. So, to conquer fears you should define them.

The section concludes with seven questions which the reader is expected to answer for themselves. They have been designed to find out your fears, to realize why you are “nervous about making the jump”. This article is my attempt to answer those questions. You can also try putting what is in your mind on paper. Who knows, maybe this one small action will be a giant step into your future?

The next post will cover my answers to those questions.