4 Hour Work Week of Tim Ferriss

Previously, I posted about chasing a thousand rabbit holes, when I spent almost 24 hours on the Internet jumping from one interesting topic and website to another. Whatever I said about it, it was simply about information overload, a sickness best articulated and obliterated by Tim Ferriss's "low information diet", one of the many invaluable concepts from his book "4 Hour Work Week".

Tim is unbelievably successful at such a young age (30, a year older than me). He has the very profitable BrainQuicken company, he travels around the world regularly, he is a Kickboxing champion, his book is a bestseller and on and on...

To save time I'll bullet point some of his most important ideas as I understand them:

DEAL
Define - what you want to achieve, your dreams and where you are right now
Eliminate - non-essentials, things that waste your time.
Automate - processes for your business and personal life. Delegate.
Liberate - yourself from your comfort zones and from physical, environmental limitations

ON TIME MANAGEMENT and PRODUCTIVITY
Refuse unimportant information. Read only what you need to read and act on immediately.

Combine Pareto's 80/20 principle and Parkinson's Law:
a. limit tasks to important to shorten work time
b. shorten work time to limit tasks to the important

Multi-tasking is stupid. Do one thing at a time with full focus.

GET OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONES
Identify and do the things you avoid, most probably they are the things you have to face and learn. For me they are talking to strangers, studying accounting and finance, etc. Act outside the box.

DREAM BIG, IT'S MORE REALISTIC
Goals that are seemingly "impossible" have more power to inspire you to move and act on than goals that are "achievable, feasible".

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Stop chasing a thousand rabbits

This will take some courage and deflating of my ego to say I have been wasting more than two weeks of my life searching what to do next. I love the Internet and know in my heart part of my success would be derived from this medium.

However, I have to admit I have spent too much time following a thousand white rabbits running in all directions throughout this ocean of information. Indeed, I have found a couple of jewels and treasures along the way. But as one of the important advices I have just found, the most significant factor to succeed is take action and focus. This is by far what separates losers from winners.

My difficulty, for one, lies in having read too little of too much but never took time to apply one approach before moving on. I need to focus as much as everyone who needs to succeed and have succeeded.

In my most recent haphazard search and journey, I was very lucky to find a few essential points:


From “Other Side Entrepreneur"
If I want to make real lasting money from the Internet I must get into "Information Publishing and Marketing".

In relation, the important concepts are:

There is already too much information out there.

People want advice not information, advice how to succeed, feel good, be healthy and wealthy.

Any personal hobby and interest, no matter how specialized, can be turned into a million dollar business if it is developed with an "Information Publishing and Marketing" strategy.

In the same manner, any business, however small, can profit hugely by augmenting its business with this strategy.

Make Up Your Mind Already By Rich Schefren found in a "Early to Rise" newsletter:

1. Take action and focus. Crystallize your goals. Organize your thoughts to daily actions and do them daily and consistently. Close the laptop and do what you must do today.

2. Rise above fear and doubt. Its ok to make mistakes but learn from your mistakes.

3. Keep it simple. Stop mulling and dabbling with thousands of ideas. Learn and master an approach, only then you move to the next.

4. Know where the money is. Open your eyes and learn to take the pulse of your market.


That all for now, I'll close my laptop and decide which rabbit to chase.

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Science of Getting Rich

I've been so swamped with dozens of books on wealth creation that I have been jumping from one to another. But suddenly this book "Science of Getting Rich" by Wallace D. Wattles caught my attention and so far I think it will be the focal point of my small library. Written in the early 1900s, its lessons and ideas seem to have reverberated to every other related texts that I have been reading.

And there's something about the tone and usage of words that is so alive, hypnotic and mysterious yet somehow so undeniably truthful.

You have to read it...

Some links to check out:
http://wallacewattles.wwwhubs.com/
http://www.wallacewattles.com/
http://www.scienceofgettingrich.net/wally.html

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Neuro Lingusitic Programming

Funny, with my interest in Psychology and self development all the way back from High School and ever since, I never came across Neuro Linguistic Programming. At least from what I have seen so far, too many established schools of Psychology violently reject NLP as being without scientific evidence and research. Another thing is, no one can really define it or agree with a definition for it.

I came across NLP first from hearing it a lot from Anthony Robbins (and later he used the term Neuro Associative Conditioning, his own brand of NLP). Often he talks about this when he reasons out that people do or do not do things because of the automatic "gut feelings" they get whenever come across situations that their mind and bodies associate with a familiar situation. So if we want to improve ourselves we must get into the bottom of behaviors, replace those meanings behind them with those that would help us behave in a positive way that we want to behave. Something like that.

For believers, the results they say about NLP are astounding as it can permanently cure anything from neuroses to addictions in a few sessions and sometimes instantly compared to years of therapies of traditional schools of psychology.

Strange thing is it makes a lot of sense without making much sense. At the heart of it, and how some described it, NLP is the focus of whatever works and the hell with the theories. Other may have same experience that when I read certain techniques of NLP I was reminded of times I effectively communicated with people but took it for granted.

An example is whenever I get a cue (non-verbal)from girlfriend that she wants (unconsciously) to relive an awful argument we had years ago (she widens her eyes and starts with a distinct voice and phrase), I interrupt her pattern of thought by suddenly kissing her or tickling or reminding her how much I love her while she is in mid-sentence. It works like a charm and I feel it's not manipulation because a big part of her knows what I'm doing and I think she appreciates that I actively save the both of us from a useless fight.

Another example is whenever I tutor my niece and nephews, I start out preparing them for a tutoring session by asking them why they need to study (outcome focus) and what good feelings they can have if they get high grades (associating pleasure to studying). I also do very simple pattern interruptions when I see them starting to wander in their heads.

I'll read more about NLP as soon as I finish Robbin's Personal Power tapes.

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Tony, David and Robert

I have with me three major self-development courses in books and audio (some bought, some borrowed) that may dramatically change my life.

They are Anthony Robbin's Personal Power 2, Robert Kiyosaki's Choose to be Rich and David Allen's Getting Things Done Fast. I've covered the books on these guys before but these courses with step by step plans and assignments would need a lot of scheduling and effort (not to mention notetaking), compared to the usual reading and rereading of their books.

I have started them all already but this shotgun approach is not effective. I guess I have to focus on them one at a time so as not to be overloaded with information and end up with just dead knowledge.

Ideally I should start with Getting Things Done because I feel David's system should be the backbone of how I go about my daily life. But as I have been into Tony's stuff lately, I see a need to use his conditioning techniques to help me make David's GTD a permanent life management system and then that would relax my mind to completely absorb Kiyosaki.

Will see.

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