The 4-Hour Work Week
I just finished to listening to The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. Although the things he proposes won't work for everyone, it's still a fascinating book for the ideas it contains about how to rearrange your life so you enjoy your working years more.
I've heard the term "Deferred Life Plan" recently and it pretty well describes the way I used to think about life. It refers to the idea that you work for ~40 years, then retire and enjoy life.
Problem is by the time you retire, you're old and frankly not in as good a position to enjoy life as you are when you're younger. "Youth is wasted on the young" and all that.
But the problem with his book is he assumes you hate your job. He constantly refers to the misery and wasted time at your current job, and in my case, it's just not like that. I like my job. So quitting my job so I can travel the world working remotely doing a job I can mostly outsource (which is basically his plan in a nutshell) just doesn't apply.
My wife's idea of life is much different from mine, and has been influencing my vision of the future quite a bit. Enjoying life now is as important as planning to enjoy it later. Neither of us really wants to spend 6 months living in Pakistan or doing any of the crazy things Tim's book talks about, but we do have our plans. The challenge is arranging things so we can enjoy the benefits of our long term plans, without the long term.
The one thing I did get from the book is the power of outsourcing at a personal level. I'll write a separate post on this sometime soon.
(The narrator reading the Audible.com version of the book has a very arrogant tone, that occasionally distracts from the content - I think it might actually be easier to read the book than listen to it in this case. I've heard an interview with Timothy himself and he doesn't come across that way in person).