A long while ago I got a promotional copy of the 4-hour work week by Tim Ferriss on Audible.  Now that I have the audible app on my iPhone I had rediscovered that I had purchased (for nothing) this book and I thought I would give it a try.  My first encounter with this book was through a classmate's wall on Facebook - he had written a rave review of the book.  Personally, back then, I thought that the book was a bit of a BS book, but I thought to myself that I got it for free, and I had the commute time, so why not give it a try (despite some of the bad words on amazon reviews).

The first couple of chapters were annoying. In plain English, what the author does is to look for loop holes and exploit them - an example of which being that the won a few mixed martial arts championships by (1) dehydrating himself to be weighed into a lower weight class, and then rehydrating himself before the fight so as he wouldn't be sickly, and (2) exploiting the "you're out of the ring" T.K.O in the rules of the game, so he didn't need to be the best fighter, just the one that pushed you out of the ring.

Now there is one sound principle in the book: don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today, carpe diem!  When I was growing up the phrase "don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today" usually meant work that you had to do, but in this case the phrase should also be thought of as equally applicable to leisure activities. So how do you prevent abuse of leisure activities to ensure that some work is done?  Here's another thing (again that isn't new): Πᾶν μέτρον ἄριστον or "everything in moderation" as the ancient Greeks use to say.

In the end, the book isn't horrible - it does have some valid points, but you really need to dig through the BS, and really separate the wheat from the chaff as far as advice goes.  There are probably better self-help books out there.