Many years ago when I read “The Four Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferris, I was turned off. At the time, I was in the early phase of my tech sales management career dealing with the challenges and rewards of working for a startup during the dot-com boom.
I was striving to become a multimillionaire and waned it to happen “overnight”, like it has for many people whose rags-to-riches stories I read about in the tech industry magazines.
Tim Ferris’s book was supposed to teach me how to become wealthy quickly while working an absurdly low amount of hours. But, as soon as I began reading it, I realized it was based on hacks, cheating and shortcuts. From the snake oil supplement he sold, to winning a martial arts competition by taking advantage of a rule technicality, to “how he “sold” his ideas for working less, to “selling” his idea of working earlier hours to his boss to outsourcing his work to low paid, third-world service providers – it was all a cheat of sorts.
Some of his ideas were good. Others, like his offshoring/outsourcing model, sadly became standard practice for businesses over the next 30 years.
I didn’t like Ferris back then, because I considered him a cheater and a con man. I never became a fan of his.
Today, Ferris is not an outlier. Everywhere on the Internet are articles, videos, courses and hucksters promising instant success from their “hacks”.
Hacking is pervasive throughout American society.
It misses the point.
Shortcuts come with short-changed results. Hacking delivers results that are suboptimal.
Even worse is that when you hack something, you have denied yourself the opportunity to learn, grow and develop that come with effort, repetition, frustration and incremental progress.
Even thought I know this and believe it, I’m not immune to hacking.
Here are two recent examples:
- I “framed” my bathroom mirrors using vinyl “wood grain” tape like I saw people do on YouTube. It looked so bad, I tore the tape off within an hour and then spent more than a week building custom frames.
- I eyeball and freehand things all the time that require a ruler, measuring tape or level. 100% of the time, I have to redo whatever I eyeballed (eg. hanging pictures, cutting wood, assembling an item) using the proper tools.
And even though I despised Ferris’s advice, I was always looking for shortcuts that would result in better efficiency and productivity at work and home.
What I learned is that shortcuts can be helpful, but only after I’ve put in the time and effort to learn how to do something properly.
So today, when I come across a headline offering a “30 day program to fix your…“, I ignore it and move on.