Does The 4 Hour Work Week Work
So you’ve read or listened to the book the 4-hour workweek and you want to have kind of a second opinion. You want to know, did that really work? it’s really possible? well John Jonas here he’s the one that really made this reality for me so… Does the 4-hour workweek work? Yes. I guess it does! but only under certain conditions that certain circumstances and you have to create those circumstances in order for it to happen. So let me do a story. Let’s see, she is nine now. So nine years ago, my wife was seven months pregnant with our third daughter, our third child. And she semblance pregnant she goes into the doctor’s office of doctors and run some tests and he says to my wife and I was there, he says, “you have preeclampsia and if you don’t go on strict bed rest for the next three to five weeks, you’re gonna lose this baby”. And I was there and it was like a shock and what do you do? you know you’re just told your wife’s on strict bed rest or you’re gonna lose this baby or die. I just remember like the feeling like I can’t work. I got two other kids I got to take care of them so my wife can be in bed. She’s on strict bed rest. So on the way home I’m thinking, how am I gonna deal with this? cause I’m working full-time like this is the I’m probably working 60 hours a week. I got home and I sent an email to two of my guys in the Philippines who are working for me. And that’s one of the critical things about this. I told that, look guys here’s the situation, my wife is on bed rest I can’t work and I don’t know how long it’s going to be I need you to take over everything I’m currently doing. Our website, our software, our my blog, our customer support, our marketing forums, and Craigslist, and my AdWords account everything that we were doing in the business of I was running, I told them I need you guys to take this over and I’m going to step back here for a second and let you know before this, these guys have been working for me for about 18 months. I had trained them all kinds of stuff. I’ve taught them how to do things. So it’s not like I’m pulling these guys off the street they’re making about $400 a month full time. I got home, I sent this email and I worked with them through the day and then for the next three weeks I literally worked one hour. And my wife and baby three weeks later, this beautiful little girl and for the next two months I worked about an hour a week because when it was time to come back to work I realized I don’t have anything to do because these guys are taking care of stuff. I don’t want to take those things back on. and my business hadn’t collapsed. It had actually grown since I was away. That’s not because they were running it. I had set the business up to make money regardless. The point is, it didn’t fall apart. And I was working an hour a week. I had replaced myself in my business and I was living the lifestyle. So I started golfing every day. Actually I started golfing every day as soon as I, as soon as my wife went on bed rest. I would take my other two kids who were just little they were like three and five. I’d take them to the golf course with me every single day. And that was the start for me of the reality of the 4-hour workweek. Where I could, I could do what I wanted. And since then, today I work about 17 hours a week because four hours or an hour a week or four hours a week isn’t enough for me. I get bored and I found like after the two months after she has a baby, I found like I need to do something. I need to do that. I’m just, I can’t just sit here and do nothing. So I work about what I want is about 70 hours a week. A couple hours a day, maybe not Friday, and maybe not Monday, maybe not the whole week. So is it possible? Yes! do you have to work to get there? obviously. My experience is, in order to get there you have to have full-time help working on your business and full-time long-term help. Everybody that I’ve seen accomplish this which I have seen numerous people live the 4 hour work week. Every one of them has permanent full-time people in the Philippines working for them. And that that allows them to step away and start to work on the business instead of in the business and then it allows them to gain start to gain time freedom by outsourcing little tasks because now when when it costs $3 an hour, you can afford to give this task that is silly and doesn’t matter if it takes them eight hours to do one hours worth of work. It doesn’t matter. It’s worth it. As soon as you got the people in the Philippines, that starts to become the mentality. And now you can start it. Doesn’t matter if I have to pay. If I have to have another person full-time for this it saves me one hour it’s worth it. 4 hour workweek is totally reasonable. I don’t agree with what some of the things Tim Ferriss talks about. He talks about hiring a company called ask Sunday. Where that company is, it’s a company with a whole bunch of employees and you say, “hey us Sunday I want you to do this for me”. And then they go and find someone in the company who might be able to do it and my experience with that and it’s just painful. It doesn’t, it didn’t work for me. For me, I required automating entire systems. But, man what Tim talks about, it is completely legitimate. We’ve taken many retirements where we left for a month with three different Clients. We’ve gone for a month or five weeks and sat on the beach and each time I thought I would work, while I was there I’m going to find out that the internet in Costa Rica sucks or the internet in the Philippines sucks or I just didn’t want to work when we’re in Florida for a moment. I didn’t have to. It was amazing. So in order for this to work you have to have a mindset shift in how you make decisions. So one of the things that I do very well is I evaluate every decision based on, who’s going to do this work? because if it’s me that has to do this work, if this process that we’re about to take on in our business requires me to be involved, we’re not going to do it. I don’t want to do it. Because that requires me to increase my work time and I don’t want to increase it. If this process can be done by someone else, great let’s do it. Not always. I’ll still say no to a lot of things. But that’s my criteria for us taking on another is, am I gonna have to do the work or if someone else can do the work? because if it’s me, we’re not doing it. And that is something that I have always made every decision based on that. I like my time freedom. You know, that the 4-hour workweek is it’s important to me and if you’re not willing to make those hard decisions, I’ll give you an example. We have people that come to me all the time saying, “hey you should set up an office in the Philippines and I’ll help you with it and we’ll, we’ll lease people, we’ll mark up people salaries” and and I would say no. Because I know that process is going to require me. I know it is and I don’t want to do it. Even though we can make a lot more money doing it I’m not looking to do. So to summarize, you want to live the 4-hour workweek there’s couple things you got to do. One, you got on your own business. I’ve talked about starting a business in another video, or how to become a millionaire in another video. In my experience, I’ve never seen someone live the 4-hour workweek without an online business and that’s pretty critical and I talked about that in another video. Two is, you got to get help. You’ve got you’ve got to find full-time, long-term people in the Philippines. And maybe there’s another way to do it and I just haven’t seen it and I’ve talked about how to hire people the Philippines in another video. Three, you have to make decisions based on who’s going to do the work? is it going to be you? or it’s gonna be someone else? if it’s a service based business, it’s hard, it’s hard to pull yourself out of it. To not be the one doing work in the process. I think you need to be selling a product. A digital product, a physical product via an automatical website. I hope you enjoyed watching Hero TV today and thanks so much John for everything you’ve done in sharing these videos but in helping me create the type of business that allows me to do what I do. Outsourcing is absolutely amazing. I don’t live the 4-hour workweek but I definitely have full control of my time. 100% control of my time and I love that. So I’ve put a lot of details down in the description below. Be sure to subscribe. 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