Quotes from the 4 Hour Workweek.

How do your decisions change if retirement isn't an option?

What if you could use a mini retirement to sample your deferred life plan reward before working 40 years for it?

Is it really necessary to work like a slave to live like a millionaire?

The commonsense rules of the real world are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions.

Reality is negotiable, outside of science and law all rules can be bent or broken and it doesn't require being unethical.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. -- Richard P. Feynman

If you can free your time and location, your money is automatically worth three to 10 times as much.

Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W.'s you control in your life.
The W.'s are: What you do, When you do it, Where you do it, and With Whom you do it.

Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them. -- Bill Cosby

There are always lateral options.

Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life. -- John F. Kennedy.

I can't give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everyone all the time. -- Herbert Swope.

Everything popular is wrong. -- Oscar Wilde.

Different is better when it is more effective or more fun.

Retirement is worst-case scenario insurance.

Doing less and meaningless work so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance is not laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity. Less is not laziness.

Focus on being productive instead of busy.

The timing is never right. For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks.

Get good at being a troublemaker and saying sorry when you really screw up.

Money alone is not the solution. There is much to be said for the power of money as currency, but adding more of it just isn't the answer as often as we'd like to think. If I only had more money is the easiest way to postpone the intense self-examination and decision making necessary to create the life of enjoyment now and not later. By using money as the scapegoat and work as are all consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves the time to do otherwise.

Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours. The whole per year concept is arbitrary and makes it easy to trick yourself. Let's look at the real trade. Jane Doe makes $100,000 per year, $2000 for each of 50 weeks per year, and works 80 hours per week. Jane Doe thus makes $25 per hour. John Doe makes $50,000 per year, $1000 for each of 50 weeks per year, but works 10 hours per week, and hence makes $100 per hour. In relative income John is four times richer.

Many a false step was made by standing still.

Named it must your fear be before banish it you can. -- Yoda.

Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scanty list and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while. Is this the condition that I feared? -- Seneca.

Don't save it all for the end. There is every reason not to.

What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. A person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.

Don't only evaluate the potential downside of action. It is equally important to measure the atrocious cost of inaction.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw.

Having an unusually large goal is an adrenaline infusion that provides the endurance to overcome the inevitable trials and tribulations that go along with any goal.

The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is -- here's the clincher -- boredom.

This is how most people work in till death: I'll just work until I have X dollars and then do what I want. If you don't define the "what I want" alternate activities, the X figure will increase indefinitely to avoid the fear inducing uncertainty of this void.

The worst that could happen wasn't crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo.

Remember -- boredom is the enemy, not some abstract failure.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in the state of boredom. -- Viktor Frankl

Life is too short to be small. -- Benjamin Disraeli

To have an uncommon lifestyle, you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.

One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity. Bruce Lee.

Just a few words on time management: forget all about it. In the strictest sense, you shouldn't be trying to do more in each day, trying to fill every second with the work fidget of some type... being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. The options are almost limitless for creating busyness. In fact, if you want to move up the ladder in most of corporate America, and assuming they don't really check on what you're doing, just run around the office building, holding a cell phone to your head and carrying papers. Now that is one busy employee! Give them a raise.

Being effective versus being efficient. (A huge concept I learned through this book.)

What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.

What gets measured gets managed. -- Peter Drucker.

Dissection of business and personal life through the lenses of two questions: which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness? Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?

More customers is not the goal and often translates into 90% more housekeeping and the paltry one to 3% increase in income.

Slow down and remember this: most things, make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness -- lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

The key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities.

It is the magic of the imminent deadline. If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials.

There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other: limit tasks to the important to shorten work time, and shorten work time to limit tasks to the important.

Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and very clear deadlines.

Am I being productive or just active?

Am I in venting things to do to avoid the important?

Begins a focus on demonstrating results instead of showing dedication.

If this is the only thing I accomplish today will I be satisfied with my day?

If you had a gun to your head and had to stop doing 4/5 of different time-consuming activities, what would you remove?

If you prioritize properly if there is no need to multitask. Divided attention will result in more frequent interruptions, lapses in concentration, poorer net results, and less gratification.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and the need to allocate that attention efficiently among the over abundance of information sources that might consume it. -- Herbert Simon.

Problems, as a rule, solve themselves or disappear if you remove yourself as an information bottleneck and empower others.

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace. -- Robert Sawyer

Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.

It's time to stop taking information of use.

Never check e-mail first thing in the morning. Instead, complete your most important task before 11 a.m. to avoid using lunch or reading e-mail as a postponement excuse.

Response to voice mail via e-mail whenever possible. This trains people to be concise. Help them develop the habit.

For the entrepreneur, the goal is to grant as much information and independent decision-making ability to employees or contractors as possible.

Empower others to act without interrupting you.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. -- Henry David Thoreau

This is a hurdle that is hard for most. If I can do it better than an assistant, why should I pay them at all? Because the goal is to free your time to focus on bigger and better things.

Unless something is well defined and important, no one should do it.

Eliminate before you delegate.

Price high, and then justify.

I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow. -- Woodrow Wilson.

If you aren't an expert, don't sweat it. First, expert in the context of selling product means that you know more about the topic than the purchaser. No more. It is not necessary to be the best -- just better than a small target number of your prospective customers.

Be sure to speak with an intellectual property attorney before using a parent public domain material.

Hot recorder.com records any phone calls, starting from or received by a PC and can be used in conjunction with Skype and other programs.

Expertclick.com is the secret of the PR pros. Put up an expert profile for media to see, receive an up-to-date database of top media contacts, and send free press releases to 12,000 journalists all on one website which gets more than 5 million hits per month.

Here is why Internet testing is better than real world testing: focus groups are equally misleading. Ask 10 people if they would buy your product. Then tell those who said he asked that you have 10 units in your car and ask them to buy. The initial positive responses, given by people who want to be liked and aim to please, become polite refusals as soon as real money is at stake. To get an accurate indicator of commercial viability don't ask people if they would buy -- ask them to buy. The response to the second is the only one that matters.

Reject first offers and walk away before performing this exercise, if possible read the bonus chapter house to get $700,000 worth of advertising for $10,000 on a companion site, and then set aside two hours on a consecutive Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Free stock photos.com: Photos are available in categories ranging from animals to ancient ruins for both personal and commercial use.

I have a MBA. My MBA is a management by absence.

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. -- Warren G. Bennis.

The goal isn't to create a business that is as large as possible, but rather a business that bothers us as little as possible. The architecture has to place of us out of the information flow instead of putting us at the top of it.

I am not a toll booth through which anything needs to pass. I am more like a police officer on the side of the road who can step in if need be, and I use detailed reports from outsourcers to ensure the cogs are moving as intended. I check fulfillment reports each Monday and monthly reports from the same the first of each month. The latter reports include orders received from the call center, which I can compare to the call center bills to gauge profit. Otherwise, I just checked bank accounts online on the first and 15th of each month to look for odd deductions. If I find something, one e-mail will fix it, and if not its back to kendo, painting, hiking, or whatever I happen to be doing at the time.

Set up an interactive voice response remote receptionist.
www.Angels.com.

It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains. Thomas Huxley.

The guard is changing. Being balanced to one place will be the new defining feature of the middle class. The new rich are defined by a more elusive power than simple cash -- unrestricted mobility.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. -- George Bernard Shaw.

All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger, but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer. -- Niccolo Machiavelli.

Most people aren't lucky enough to get fired and die a slow spiritual death over 30 to 40 years of tolerating the mediocre.

The average man is a conformist accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain. -- Colin Wilson.

If, in looking for a new job, there is any question of why you took a break or left your previous job, there is one answer that cannot be countered: I had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do ____________ . (And in the Blank fill in an exotic and envy-producing experience.) I couldn't turn it down. I figured that, with 20 to 40 years of work to go, what's the rush?

There are two types of mistakes: mistakes of ambition and mistakes of sloth. The first is the result of the decision to act -- to do something. This type of mistake is made with incomplete information, as it's impossible to have all the facts beforehand. This is to be encouraged. Fortune favors the bold. The second is the result of a decision of sloth -- to not do something -- wherein we refuse to change a bad situation out of fear despite having all the facts. This is how learning experiences become terminal punishments, bad relationships become bad marriages, and poor job choices become lifelong prison sentences.

If tolerating a punishing working environment for years at a time is a pre-requisite for promotion in your field, could it be that you're in a game not worth winning?

Only those who are asleep make no mistakes. -- Ingvar Kamprad

In the world of action and negotiation, there is one principle that governs all others: the person who has more options has more power. Don't wait until you need options to search for them. Take a sneak peek at the future now and it will make both action and being assertive easier.

The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, then research. -- Rolf Potts.

There is more to life than increasing its speed. -- Mohandas Gandhi

Why not take the usual 20 to 30 year retirement and redistributed throughout life. Instead of saving it all for the end?

The alternative to binge travel -- the mini retirement -- it takes relocating to one place for one to six months before going home or moving to another locale. It is the anti-vacation in the most positive sense. Though it can be relaxing, the mini-retirement is not an escape from your life but a re-examination of it -- the creation of a blank slate. Following elimination and automation, what would you be escaping from? Rather than seeking to see the world through photo ops between foreign but familiar hotels, we aim to experience at a speed that lets it change us.

Most excuses not to travel are exactly that -- excuses. I've been there, so this isn't a holier than thou sermon. I know too well that it's easier to live with ourselves if we cite an external reason for inaction.

Extended travel is the perfect excuse to reverse the damage of years of consuming as much as you can afford. It's time to get rid of clutter disguised as necessities before you drag a five piece Samsonite set around the world. That is hell on earth.

The over packing impulse is hard to resist. The solution is to set what I call a settling fund. Rather than pack for all contingencies, I bring the absolute minimum and allocate $100-$300 for purchasing things after I arrive and as I travel. I no longer take toiletries or more than a week sports of clothing. It's a blast. Finding shaving cream or a dress shirt overseas can produce an adventure in and of itself. Pack as if you were coming back in one week.

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot.

Decide on a schedule for routine batch tasks such as e-mail, online banking etc. to eliminate excuses for senseless pseudo-work procrasterbating.

Escapeartist.com: second passports, starting your own country, Swiss banking, Cayman Islands.

Gridskipper.com

Universal plug adapter www.Franzus.com

Home exchange international www.homeexchange.com.

Inter home international www.interhome.com.

Rent villas.com www.rentvillas.com

Gold lantern wifi finder www.Goldlantern.com/homepages/wifinder.html

Become a travel writer www.writtenroads.com.

Teach Engrish www.ESLCafé.com.

Accelerated language learning www.fourhourworkweek.com.

Isn't it more time or after? Isn't that what this book is all about? No, not at all. Too much free time is no more than fertilizer for self-doubt and assorted mental tail-chasing. Subtracting the bad does not create the good. It leaves a vacuum. Decreasing income-driven work isn't the end goal. Living more -- and becoming more -- is.

People say that what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think this is what we're really seeking. I think what we are seeking is an experience of being alive. -- Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. -- Viktor Frankl

I tend to focus on language acquisition and one kinesthetic skill, sometimes finding the latter after landing overseas. Language learning deserves special mention. It is, bar none, the best thing you can do to hone clear thinking.

If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. And that is a big mistake. -- Frank Wilczek.

Striving for and less perfection rather than great or simply good enough weather in your personal or professional life is a slip up. Recognize that this is often just another work for work excuse. Most endeavors are like a learning to speak a foreign language: to be correct 95% of the time requires six months of concentrated effort, whereas to be correct 98% of the time requires 20 to 30 years. Focus on great for a few things and good enough for the rest. Perfection is a good ideal and direction to have, but recognize it for what it is: an impossible destination.

If you cannot find meaning in your life, it is your responsibility as a human being to create it, whether that is fulfilling dreams or finding work that gives you purpose and self-worth -- ideally a combination of both.

Surround yourself with smiling positive people who have absolutely nothing to do with work. Create your business muses alone, if you must, but do not live your life alone.

I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself if today were my last day of my life, would I want to do what I'm about to do today? And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row I know I need to change something. Almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. -- Steve Jobs.

The Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss