It’s been a month since I started my new bucket list goal, a project if you will, to read 52 books in 52 weeks.  At this point I’ve completed four, and have started on two others.  Next to exercising, this is probably the most therapeutic task I could do.  I’m loving it, and I feel more at peace than I have in months.  It’s amazing what happens when you turn the world off for significant periods of time to focus on a muse.

The four books I’ve read thus far are Gordon Rugg’s Blind Spot, Paul Miller’s A Praying Life, Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Work Week, and Bill Schultheis’ The New Coffeehouse Investor.  Are any of these the best book I’ve ever read?  Well, no.

Blind Spot and A Praying Life I’ve already discussed, which you can review by clicking the linked titles.

The 4-Hour Work Week is a book I’d recommend everybody to read in their spare time.  But who has spare time these days?  That’s a large focus of the text.  Ferriss writes about his lifestyle and the lifestyles of what is termed “the New Rich.”  Whereas the norm is to work hard and stock as much money away for retirement as you can, Ferriss’ point, though not organic to himself, is to live a lifestyle of mini-retirements rather than leaving it all for the last 15-30 years of your life.  Okay, so what’s a mini-retirement?

A mini-retirement would be where an individual or family does some form of travel or relaxation that lasts a period of months rather than for a weekend and is during their working career rather than after it.  But is this feasible?

How most of us live and work, not really.  The framework to having this opportunity is to create automation and mobility.  Obviously if you want to spend 6 months backpacking through Europe you’re going to need to pay for a few things.  If you love your job, you’re going to need to make it mobile, too.  Ferriss goes through, quite well, different practical ways to make most positions more hands-off.  He does this himself and references dozens of fan letters from people doing the same.  It seems to be possible in many situations.  The 4-Hour Work Week is NOT about getting rich quickly, or getting rich at all, for that matter.  It’s about creating steady income that will allow you to balance and handle full-time employment around doing the things you really want to do.

One of the underlying messages, why wait ’til you’re old when you can do it when you’re younger, is great insight, particularly for its simplicity.  My thoughts — why spend our entire lives working hard to plan for retirement, when we won’t even be able to enjoy those same endeavors as much because we’re less physically capable, and because we’ve taught ourselves over the last 40 years of our lives that spare time is time that should be used for increased productivity.  We spend too much time programming ourselves to be busy to enjoy the world around us.  40 years of the same ill-focused thought process is difficult to break.

Does Ferriss shoot for a literal 4-hour work week?  Yes and no.  The goal isn’t to be lazy, the goal is to create automation – where you can do what you want and only focus on the things to which you are vital.  In some cases, being able to cut out emails, phone calls, and unnecessary management can allow for a 4-hour work week, but more commonly you’d be looking at working a bit more, potentially a lot more, but you have the freedom and flexibility to disappear for an extended period of time should you want to.

Even if you don’t care about any of what I just went over, Ferriss does a great job of keeping the content easy and humorous, and anybody, even teenagers, can learn a lot through it.

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In The New Coffeehouse Investor, Bill does well at keeping things simple, and writes something that I’d recommend to individuals and families just beginning to pay attention to their finances.  That said, he speaks as a stockbroker, not as a financial planner, so there are several topics, such as insurances and taxes, he leaves out that I think should be topics of focus for his intended audience.  However, it took me four hours to read the whole thing (and I’m a surprisingly slow reader), so it’s not exactly critical thinking at its finest, nor, so it seems, is it intended to be.

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This is just a snapshot of where I am in my year-long reading and writing goal.  Among other things, I’ll start having excerpts and blurbs from a book I’m writing on a family experience (my mother was adopted from Germany at birth, and her German family found her 55 years later – it’s really fascinating), as well as from a book on finance (first steps to take when planning).  My ultimate goal, as you may read here is to be able to support my family through writing.  I’m in the process of writing books, reading large amounts of them, drafting a game plan to make this website top notch, and all in all creating something enjoyable for the English-speaking world at large.

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Kenneth D. Burke