Timothy Ferriss has been able to gain quite a lot of publicity through the release of his New York Times best seller ‘The 4-Hour Workweek‘.

In it he claims to be a productivity guru and created the buzzword ‘geoarbitrage‘ (which is simply another word for outsourcing), sharing how he was able to create an $80,000/month business working 80 hours a week – and then how he turned those 80/hrs into just 4 hours of work a week!

If this all sounds too good to be true to you, then you are probably here to have me confirm your suspicions the Timothy Ferriss scam – but not so fast.

Before we start criticizing Timothy Ferriss, let’s first take a look at some of the accolades he has claimed:

1. Created a $40,000/month Income From BrainQuicken
   I know there is a lot of debate on whether he actually achieved these figures and if it was gross or net income, but seriously, people are building $40,000/month businesses all the time – so why is it so hard to believe?

   Wikipedia notes that Tim sold BrainQuicken in January 2009 and is now a fulltime angel investor (If anyone can confirm this, please comment below).

2. Timothy Ferriss Cheated His Way To Becoming The National Chinese Kickboxing Champion
   A lot of people bring up his kickboxing story when the call Timothy Ferriss a scam.

   For those of you who have not heard the story, Tim found a technicality that meant that if people went outside the ring multiple times in a fight – they would be disqualified. Using this to his advantage he proudly boasts how he literally shoved his competitors outside the ring for a technical knockout.

   The fact that he publicly boasts about the way that he did it, and that there was nothing against the rules in what he did – it is hard to call him a scam because he found a technicality and exploited it.

3. Timothy Ferris Claims To Only Work Four Hours A Week
   Now while I highly doubt that Tim actually only works 4 hours a week with all his speaking and writing gigs now, I think the point he is getting across is that if you are doing what you love, then technically you are not working, and recommends that you start outsourcing jobs overseas and get rid of the time consuming, technical jobs and start doing the things that you love.

So I definitely do believe that Tim has done a little bit of exaggerating (story telling), but there well still a lot of things that I got out of ‘The 4-Hour Workweek
‘ , such as:

• The Way That Timothy Approaches Problems
• The Answer Isn’t To Do More….But To Do Less (Focus)
• The Importance Of Enjoying Life All The Time (Not Just In Retirement)
• The Ideas I Started To Get While Reading The Book!

So whether you believe that Timothy Ferriss is a scam or not, there are definitely a lot of things that you can learn from his lifestyle experiments and I highly recommend ‘The 4-Hour Workweek
‘ to anyone wanting to get away from the hold of a 9 to 5 job!

If you are interested in the ideas that Tim puts forward in his book then you may way to download my free ebook ‘GEO Arbitrage‘ that will take you through the steps to getting started with outsourcing.