Escape the rat race: work less, travel more, spend your life on things that are really important. The content of this self-help book may be a revelation to some - for me it mostly hammered home things I already knew or felt, but having them stated so clearly helped crystalize the ideas in my brain.

First, he defines "New Rich" as a person who is mobile and able to fulfill their life dreams when they are young, and in fact continuously throughout their lives. Compare this the old view of someone who is "rich" - they slave away to accumulate great wealth their whole life, and then retire to a life of leisure. Unfortunately, the result of this second approach tends to be that people are miserable while they work themselves to death between 20 and 60, and then they are bored when they retire. Life is about a healthy balance between work and play, not trying to shove all your work into one span of years and all the play into another.

He suggests that you sit down and brainstorm to come up with your wildest and most ambitious dreams. Like: travel the world in a yacht; become a championship kickboxer; scale Mt. Everest; own a Porche 911; hike the entire distance of the Great Wall of China; become fluent in Japanese. Then, you'll pick two or three of these, and lay out a plan for achieving it in the coming 6 - 12 months.

Most people would respond with "I don't have the time or money to splurge on something like that!" What Ferriss suggests is that we redefine what it means to splurge. Owning a Porche may cost $500/mo for car payments - but you probably spend more than that on many other things in your life that you don't consider "splurging." Climbing Everest may only take a few months of intensive training. You're able to spend a few months working your job, why not reallocate those months to chasing a dream?

There are a lot of reasons you'd say you can't do things like this, and Ferriss effectively demolishes them all. Even the biggest one of all - "I have kids" - he manages to knock down.

The second quarter of the book is probably the most generally valuable. Even if you don't go traveling around the world, the points made here are golden for anyone. The all center around eliminating and reducing anything in your life that is not of extremely high value. In fact, most of what is found here is a repackaging of The 80/20 Principle, but that book is pretty dense. 4-Hour Workweek communicates the essence in a light, fun, and highly readable style that will make this material accessible to a broader audience.

In short, it asks you to analyze each and every thing you spend your day on and ask how much value you get from it. For example, many people spend an hour reading the paper in the morning. How much does this help you? Does knowing the details of the car bombing that happened in Pakistan yesterday advance your life goals? Does it bring you happiness? An hour a day is about 6% of your waking time. Can you think of a better way to spend 6% of your life?

When it comes to work, the author advises a ruthless approach to cutting out distractions and non-value-providing activities. He suggests techniques for avoiding meetings and other mostly valueless interruptions. He suggests not answering your phone (and changing your voicemail to suggest that they send you an email instead - funny, because this is something I decided to do a while back) and checking your email only once or twice a day. Don't respond to every little crisis that people throw at you. Make it clear that your time is limited and available for only truly valuable ends.

He coins a useful term here: "procrastubation". Checking email every ten minutes, writing email replies about unimportant topics, checking your bank's website every day or paying bills as they come in (as opposed to batching them up for optimal efficiency), and really anything that is doing small tasks that are easy but not very valuable qualify as procrastubation. It's a combination of procrastination (using this busywork to avoid the things we really should be doing, but perhaps are afraid of) and masturbation (it's compulsive and makes you feel good in the short term, but does not produce long term satisfaction). Next time you find yourself checking your email obsessively, think to yourself "I'm procrastubating." The label is quite effective. :)

As you spend your time on various items throughout your workday, ask yourself: "If this was the only thing I got done today, would I be satisfied with my day?" You will be surprised how often the answer is no. If not, then why are you doing it? If you change your habits to being each workday doing something highly valuable, it's a surprisingly easy transition to only working a couple of hours a day, yet being just as productive (or moreso) than you were back when you worked 8+.

The third quarter of the book deals with entrepreneurship. The summary here is that he suggests creating a direct marketing (aka infomercial) product. I was familiar with this world due to a company I started (TrustCommerce) that provided payment processing to direct marketers, and in fact TC even gets a mention in the book. Nothing here was very surprising to me - I know there is a lot of money to be made in this world - but others may find it more of a revelation. I do question how valuable these types of products really are in the long term, and don't know that I would feel satisfied trying to create one. That said, he's suggesting it only as a bootstrap to pursuing your dreams (which could include entrepreneurship of more interesting and complicated ventures) so it may be a reasonable course of action for many.

The final portion of the book deals with how to "fill the void" of your newly liberated time and money. For this we come full circle: the dreams brainstormed in the beginning can now be fulfilled. The author suggests travel as the best way to break free of the constraints of your old life and engage in this process of continual mini-retirements interspersed with work. This works the same way whether you're employed or an entrepreneur. (In fact, the latter category may have more trouble switching to this sort of lifestyle, because they become so emotionally bonded to the businesses they create.) He gives lots of tips for traveling, working remotely (i.e. finding wifi hotspots or using remote desktop services to access your home or office computer), living inexpensively in exotic locations, and so on.

One of the most important points here is the difference between these mini-retirements and vacations. Vacations tend to be fast, focused on fitting as much experience into as short a time as possible, and they tend to be expensive, because you're still paying for an apartment and car back in the states, staying in hotels, and paying for flights etc constantly. The mini-retirement approach is to move out of your apartment, sell most of your stuff and put the rest in storage, lend your car to a friend or put it in storage (so that you can cancel the insurance), and then relocate to another country where you can get an apartment (probably cheaper than your one in the states) and otherwise actually live there for, say, 6 months.