This was the book that launched Tim Ferriss to fame in the mid 2000’s. The promise in the subtitle is pretty huge: “Escape 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich.”

The main purpose of the book is to show you how you can escape the rat race, either by negotiating a remote working agreement with your employer, starting an online business (or as he calls it, a “muse”), or by taking “mini retirements” throughout your career.

There’s pretty detailed explanations of how to do all that, including sample scripts that you can use to negotiate a remote working agreement.

Tim is very concerned with trying to get you out of what he calls the “Deferred Life Plan,” the default path that most of us are on where we slave away during the best years of our life and have to wait until retirement to give us the freedom that we want.

Tim thinks there is a better way to approach things, and his book has a lot of good ideas and valuable lessons to help you come up with a better plan.

Here are some of the notes that I took:

• A big predictor of your success in the number of uncomfortable conversations that you are willing to have
• Often, there’s less competition at the top because fewer people try (Tim says that if you’re raising money, it might be easier to raise $1,000,000 than $100,000 because fewer people are trying to do it).
• “Price  high, then justify” – most people when they initially offer a product or service price way to low. You should think about pricing higher than your comfortable and then thinking what you can do to justify the high price.
• Lose-win guarantees: to make customers pull the trigger on buying, you should make your guarantee generous such that if they take you up on it, you lose and they win. This is actually a great way to keep returns down.
• “It isn’t enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. You need to get used to acting outside the box.”
• He says there are two main categories of mistakes: mistakes of ambition and mistakes of sloth. Mistakes of ambition are usually caused by incomplete info, and are tolerable. Mistakes of sloth are the result of inaction and should be what we are afraid of.
• “Be focused on work or focused on something else, never in between.”
• “It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it, it matters how many people do.”
• “‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.”
• “Most people are fast to stop you before you get started, but hesitant to get in the way if you’re moving.”
• “The most important actions are never comfortable.”
• “Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.”
• “The world has agreed to shuffle papers from 9am to 5pm.”
• “Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?”
• Information is useless if you forget it before you have a chance to apply it, so try to prioritize “just-in-time” information over “just-in-case” information.
• Never automate something that can be eliminated. Never delegate something that can be automated

This was a great book. Since it was written a decade ago and has a lot of content centered around technology, parts of it are slightly dated. Overall the philosophy of the book as a whole and the many good principles found therein are definitely worth your time.

I listened to the audiobook for this one, but like most audiobooks that aren’t read by the author, I think the print version is probably the way to go.

Here’s where you can find both versions: