"He preferred to spend his time learning the tango in Buenos Aires or archery in Kyoto." (Image by Olivier Ezratty.)

If you haven’t had a chance yet to read Rebecca Mead’s great New Yorker profile of souped-up self-help guru, Timothy Ferriss, don’t let it slide. Ferriss is the best-selling author behind the 4-Hour Workweek and other similarly alluring titles. The article is hilarious and sums up the age we live in, the desperation people feel to find some way to the other side of this very discomfiting paradigm shift we’re experiencing. An excerpt;

“Ferriss’s first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, was turned down by twenty-six publishers before being accepted by Crown, and he recounts this statistic with pride. But it’s easy to understand the caution of those twenty-six. Ferriss’s aesthetic is a pointed rejection of the culture of constant BlackBerrying, corporate jockeying, and office all-nighters that is celebrated in most business-advice books, and in films such as The Social Network. The 4-Hour Workweek was inspired by a personal epiphany. In 2004, Ferriss, feeling burned out as the C.E.O. of a sports-nutrition company, where he worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, discovered that he preferred to spend his time learning the tango in Buenos Aires or archery in Kyoto. He also found that, by automating his business operations to the largest extent possible, he was able to pull this off. (To a point, at least. Kane Ng, a Hollywood executive who is Ferriss’s friend, told me, expansively, ‘Tim is a total fraud, you know. ‘Four-hour workweek’? He is constantly busting ass.’ Of course, it was Seneca who said that hyperbole ‘asserts the incredible in order to arrive at the credible.’) Ferriss advises would-be members of the New Rich to check e-mail no more than twice a day, and to set automated responses advising correspondents of the recipient’s unavailability. (Anyone who e-mails Ferriss these days immediately receives in her inbox an automated response, with the cheery sign-off ‘Here’s to life outside of the inbox!’) The book counsels readers to take what Ferriss calls ‘mini-retirements’ now—a month in Costa Rica, three months in Berlin—rather than saving up the prospect of leisure for the final decades of life. And it recommends funding all this by discovering a ‘muse,’ which Ferriss defines, as Seneca did not, as ‘an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.’

Finding one’s muse, like catching one’s rabbit before cooking it, is more easily said than done, but Ferriss’s advocacy of liberation from the workplace has had a wide appeal, especially among younger people to whom the workplace may be unattainable in the first place, given the unemployment rate. Similarly, his latest book, The 4-Hour Body, speaks to the peculiar obsessions and insecurities of the young American male. Ferriss tells readers how they might lose twenty pounds in thirty days without exercise—eggs, spinach, and lentils are crucial—and how to triple their testosterone levels. (Gentlemen, put your iPhone in the pocket of your backpack, not the pocket of your jeans.) The book, which is five hundred and forty-eight pages long, contains a lot of colorfully odd advice—he recommends increasing abdominal definition with an exercise he calls ‘cat vomiting’—but it also reassures readers that they need not go so far as to have Israeli stem-cell factor injected into the cervical spine, as Ferriss did in the name of inquiry. Nor need they necessarily incorporate into their regimen Ferriss’s method for determining the effectiveness of controlled binge eating: weighing his feces to find out exactly what kind of shit he was full of.”

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“The four-hour workweek is possible, but you need to completely unplug and reset”: