DAY 8 : IS THE 4 HOUR WORK WEEK POSSIBLE?

Reinvent Yourself

Published in

Re-Invent Yourself

6 min readJun 23, 2017

There is no one who built something significant by working 4 hours a week

Hey Re-inventors!

This is DAY 8 of this series and if you have no clue what “this series” means, click below:

30 DAYS OF DOING THINGS THAT I WAS ‘GONNA’ DO

WHY DO I PREFER 80 HOUR WORK WEEKS?

So about an year ago, I was in high school and used to watch a lot of YouTube videos. The content was basically speeches by successful people, how they have achieved success and how I can too.

I also used to watch 2 Ted Talks every day before going to school.

In my journey to figure out how to be successful, I also read a couple of books like:

“Dream with your eyes open” by Ronnie Screwvala

“Power of habit” by Charles Duhigg

“The power of positive thinking” by Norman Vincent Peale

“The magic of getting what you want” by Dr Schwartz

“Think and Grow Rich” by Napolean hill

“The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries

“Zero to one” by Peter Thiel

“JAB JAB JAB RIGHT HOOK” by Gary Vaynerchuk

“Yuva India” by Ray Titus

“You can Win” by Shiv Khera

“Modi Demystified” by Ramesh Menon

“The Four Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss

When the last book, i.e the four hour workweek came to my sight, I immediately ordered it because of the lucrative subtitle “Escape the 9–5, live anywhere and join the new rich”.

One glance at the book made me believe that this book will help me to learn how to work less and earn more. I was excited. I read this book avidly.

I went through the book and liked it alot. I was then just figuring out how can I do the same thing.

But this feeling stayed only for a few time. As I kept on watching videos on YouTube, I came across Elon Musk’s speech which he gave in 2015. I came across Gary Vaynerchuk, Casey Neistat and Patrick Bet David. I also came across Brendan Meyers who became my go-to fitness expert and I liked his Daily vlog. I then heard a couple of speeches from Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs (and even read his book) and Jack Ma.

ALL these speeches and books had one thing in common and that is an exceptional work ethic.

I then asked myself : What do I want to be? Do I want to travel the world and make myself enough money to do that or do I want to achieve astronomical success like the people I mentioned above? Whom do I want to emulate?

And my answer is NO ONE. I don’t want to be the next Steve Jobs or the next Elon Musk. I want to be the FIRST me. And yes, I wanted to leave a mark of something that I created in this world. Something that helped millions of people better their lives.

Now, it was clear what I want, THE NEXT STEP IS, WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

Can this be achieved by working four hours a week? NO. I don’t think so.

And so I have made a commitment to work as hard as possible and never fall into the trap of working less and succeeding more because it’s a myth. After all, it depends on your definition of success. If you have an ambition as big as or bigger than mine, you wouldn’t do the four hour work week thing.

That’s what I am trying to achieve. At this stage, my focus is definitely not money. I am just focussed on putting my head down and work.

DAY 8 :

4:57 : Wake up

5:30 : Gym

7:10 : Back from the gym

7:10 : Shower and post-workout meal

7:30 : Work

9:15 : Break

9:30 : Work

1:26 : Break

1:40 : Work

2:10 to 2:20 : Lunch

2:20 : Work

3:00 to 3:20 : Nap

3:20 : Work

5:35 : Tea Break

5:50 : Work

6:20 : Prepare for a video call

7:30 : Video ends

7:45: Resume work

8:30 to 8:45 : Form Filling(Finally finished today)

9:00 to 9:15 : Dinner

9:15 : Family Time

9:50 to 10:20 : Bill payments (Phone and electricity)

10:25 : Sleep

THE DAY

If you read my last post, I mentioned that I installed a new alarm app and set the ringtone as “Holiday” by Green Day. The music was loud af and woke me up like anything. I was happy that I woke up 3 minutes before time and beat the sun. Hurray!

Moving on, it took some time for me to get to my senses but after brushing my teeth, everything was awesome! I worked for like 10 minutes on my laptop and then went to the gym. Today was arms and I blew them. I worked till I couldn’t do one more rep and it was pretty awesome. For the record, I am working my abs everyday these days.

I then came back around 7 :10 and then started working after taking a shower by 7:30. I ate the breakfast while doing my work. I pretty much worked till 1:30 and took two breaks.

The different thing about today was that I took a nap for around 20 minutes. I was way too exhausted to focus and so I had to take that nap. I think that happened because I worked at a stretch in the morning without taking much breaks. I got up and worked pretty much until it was 5:30 after which I had tea with my mother.

Fast forward to 6:20, I remembered that I had a Video Conference at 6:30 and so I made the necessary preparations, cleared my room, checked all audio and video and then waited for 5 minutes for the call to begin. The call was awesome!

I took a break for 15 minutes after the call had ended before starting work. Finally today I finished all the necessary documentations that I had to fill and thus no more time-wasters!

Then you know guys, it was the usual dinner and family time. BUT just before I was going to sleep, my father told me to pay all the bills online. And just so you know it means paying 10 bills(electricity, mobile, internet etc.) which took half an hour. So finally I was able to go to bed by 10:25 and I guess I slept till 10:40.

On the face of it, the day was awesome, specially the uninterrupted chunk of time that I got in the morning wherein I was able to do a lot of work.

That was Day 8 of the series guys!