Many recent comments on my 4-Hour Body review have largely missed the point of my article. I’ve grown tired of responding to each in turn, so I figured I’d write a summary response here.
Tim Ferriss appears to me to have a history of misrepresenting himself (see evidence in previous article). All of his claims to fame and tips for self-improvement should immediately be suspect as a result.
Ferriss advocates for ruthless, self-serving, borderline unethical tactics to get ahead in life. Yes, this is relevant to the kinds of tactics he promotes in his new book, The 4-Hour Body. It is relevant because there are two basic approaches to personal development:
In his new book The 4-Hour Body, author of The 4-Hour Workweek Tim Ferriss makes the giant leap from get-rich-quick guru to extreme fad diet guru. As you can see from the above graphic describing his book’s principles, taken from the book trailer, something doesn’t quite add up here.
Ferriss original book took the idea of leverage from The Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule) to extremes. The original notion is that 20% of one’s efforts (e.g. customers) lead to 80% of one’s results (e.g. revenue). Ferriss’ version was that you should be utterly ruthless and hyper-competitive in order to create your own small business that gives you the free time to brag about how much free time you have while endlessly promoting yourself. This book launched the entire “lifestyle design” cottage blog industry (Ferriss himself coined the phrase). But in the NEW! and IMPROVED! The 4-Hour Body, Mr. Ferriss claims that one can do oh so much more with oh so much less (and leaving 2.5% mysteriously unaccounted for to boot).
This is a long post. Here’s the tl;dr version: Tim Ferriss is a fraud*. But you already knew that, didn’t you. *sigh* Such is the foolishness of critiquing such figures.
So what exactly can one do to hack one’s body into superhero levels of fitness in an instant with Ferriss’ magic bullet secret information never before released to the drooling, gullible public? Here is a summary taken directly from the Amazon product page (with my snarky comments in red): (more…)
Beyond Growth is a collaborative blogging project focused on critiquing and expanding the personal development field. Noting a lack of critical discourse in personal development, Duff McDuffee and Eric Schiller founded Beyond Growth in the hopes of using it as a platform to foster growth and responsibility.
