The British television presenter and lifestyle coach Amanda Hamilton shares her views on health and nutrition. Under a stern editorial admonition that in no way should I do "yet another sanctimonious piece about 10 resolutions for a wonderful new year you", I thought I'd write nevertheless about a bit of inspiration that came my way at the end of 2009. If you're sitting there wondering what to do as the world seemingly spirals rapidly out of control, then I recommend you order an intriguingly titled book by Tim Ferriss, called The Four Hour Working Week.
Now, granted such a title may strike you nauseatingly as yet another mini-triumph of wishful positive thinking, but bear with me a little further. Ferriss is a young American with entrepreneurial aspirations who took a few years in the corporate machine to realise that there was more to life than status according to your cubicle size, aggressive time-wasting clients and a life that provided a little more money at the end of the month. His goal? To "escape the nine-to-five, live anywhere and join the new rich". Not unambitious, I think you'll agree.
It caught my eye, because one of the things that my husband and I - both entrepreneurial types who love business but frequently despair about the hours we spend working - have found is that unless you have a laser focus, creating and running your own business can take over your life. Last year, even nine-to-five, Monday to Friday, came to seem a wistful pipe dream, despite our best intentions. The result? The things that matter (to us: family, exercise, friends, travel, reading) have tended to be compressed into second-rate times of the day, if not squeezed out altogether; so much for being the mistress and master of our destinies.
An irony that has not escaped us is that in a business predicated on the need to detox, de-stress and calm down, we have often fallen short of our own precepts - not quite slaves to the machine, but getting there. As regular readers of this column will know, hammering away at work all the hours of the day (and frequently night) rarely brings good health. So, remembering the proverb "Physician, heal thyself", we decided to apply some of Ferriss's youthful but surprisingly good wisdom to our lives in 2010.
Ferriss's premise is: test the most basic assumptions of the work-life equation. First, how do your decisions change if retirement isn't an option? Second, what if you could use a mini-retirement to sample your deferred-life reward before working 40 years for it? And, thirdly, is it really necessary to work like a slave to seek to live like a millionaire? As he says, asking these questions often leads to the inescapable conclusion that common-sense rules of the real world are a "fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions". Such as? Well, who came up with the rule that a person's best economic contribution comes from a five-day, nine-to-five working week? Who came up with the belief that you should spend all your healthy middle years slaving to enjoy the benefits when, in all likelihood, you won't have the health to enjoy them properly when retirement comes? You no doubt get the drift.
So what is Ferriss's answer? Underpinning it is a world that has been turned upside down by the internet, the potential of which to unlock the four-hour working week is within all of our grasps, or rather our laptops. Ferriss challenges prevailing notions of work with a new approach that seeks to deliver "relative wealth" and "eustress" (a term coined by the endocrinologist Hans Selye referring to stress that is healthy, or gives one a feeling of fulfilment or other positive feelings rather than absolute wealth and stress). How?
First, by elimination: delivering more time by killing the "obsolete notion" of time management with techniques wonderfully entitled "selective ignorance", a low-information diet, and - I love this - "ignoring the unimportant". Second, automation: delivering more money by creating an automated cash flow using arbitrage, outsourcing and so-called "rules of non-decision". Third, the grandly titled liberation, which Ferriss calls (and you have to laugh here) "the mobile manifesto for the globally inclined", in which the concepts of mini-retirements, flawless remote control and escaping the boss are enthusiastically outlined.
Where does that leave us? Well, our focus this year is to follow The Talented Mr Ferriss's system (check his very entertaining blog, www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog) and see if we can deliver the time (Fridays off, at least, to go mountain-biking), income (obviously) and mobility (a year's winter in Aspen and summer in Sicily, anyone?). If that is not a rather enticing recipe for dealing with stress and everything that goes with it, I don't know what is.
