★★★★★ 3
Overpromises and underdelivers but has some good advice
Format: Hardcover
The idea of this book is not necessarily to make someone rich overnight, but to help some get just rich enough to abandon full-time work and maximize profit over a shorter time so the individual can enjoy whatever he wants to do the rest of the time. In the author’s case, that seems to involve a lot of travel and beaches and that sort of thing. In my case, that involves…different work. I really don’t want to work just four hours, but I was hoping the book would have some good insights into methods of automation and streamlining that might help move me toward dedicating more time to DIFFERENT kinds of work than the mundane things that unfortunately seem to dominate too much of our lives.
All in all, I’d call the book a mixed success. It’s a good mix of some ideas that ought to be self-evident to anyone with a working brain, some genuinely good insights I hadn’t necessarily considered before, and some motivational stories to “prove” the ideas really can work.
Unfortunately, the motivational stories don’t really prove much of anything except that certain ideas worked for certain individuals in certain circumstances, and very few of those are applicable (or even interesting) to the vast majority of readers, so we can immediately dismiss a good chunk of the book as mere filler. But what about the rest? Is there really good information here?
Well, yes and no. The book does commit the same sin just about every business book in the world (certainly all the popular ones) commit: it overpromises and underdelivers. If you’re working a nine-to-five, even perfect execution of 100% of this book’s ideas will never get you down to four hours per week unless you invent something that completely automates your job (but of course without your employer finding out about it) or generates plenty of passive income. The author’s selling a pipedream.
That said, if you look past the exaggerated claims and put on an entrepreneurial hat, there actually is plenty of good advice in here about managing your time more effectively and plenty of resources to tools and services you can use to take some of the burden of the mundane off your own back and place it (sometimes at surprisingly low cost) somewhere else.
At the end of the day, I found plenty of useful information in here. But for a book largely about liberating oneself from wastes of time, it really should’ve been half as long at the longest.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2025
