Four Hour Work Week

Reading this book now, and while there are large swaths of it that I don’t agree with, I like his idea of mini-retirements.  This is the idea that rather than working your ass off, hating life, and waiting for retirement when you can finally enjoy life, you should take annual mini retirements of one to three months.  He advocates that rather than playing tourist and just zipping through 12 cities in two weeks, we slow down and stay in one place, learn an art or a skill, and absorb the culture and ambience of a single country, perhaps even one city.  I like the elegance of that. 

I’m not sure I could survive not working for a few months per year; I am a workaholic after all, and it’s because I enjoy it, not because I have to.  Still, I can totally get with the idea of taking a month off and just vegetating in one place, treating it mentally like a retirement.

Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week.