The Four Hour Work Week For Writers
A lot of internet marketers, lifestyle gurus and other associated dream-salesmen talk about the 4-hour work-week.
This movement is based on a book; the 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. (Guru and lifestyle salesman.) Pretty much everyone involved in internet marketing took it to heart for a good few years, and luckily, the fad is almost starting to say goodbye to the world. Almost.
Can A Writer Work A Four Hour Work Week and Make Stacks of Cash?
No.
(That’s a wrap for this article folks, see you tomorrow.)
(Just kidding.)
If you can write at the writer’s equivalent to the speed of light, you might hit 2000 words an hour. Let’s imagine you’re outsourcing everything other than the writing.
You can write 8,000 words a week.
You could almost play a game where you say, “I have eight thousand words a week. What will I do to become a successful multi-millionaire with this word-count?”
The answer is that there’s not a lot you can do with eight thousand words.
I mean, you could write a ninety-nine cent e-book.
You could write a short-story and release that on Amazon for $2.99. Do that every week. You’d make some pocket change.
If you write a 6000 word “e-book” and a sales page, and then drove PPC traffic to it, you could make maybe enough to cover a car payment or something.
Or I suppose with ten weeks’ of work, you could write the next 4-hour workweek, which seems to be a lot of people’s plans.
The Problem With a Four Hour Work Week For Writers Part I
You’re going to be outworked.
I’ve written before that word count is the ultimate determiner of what makes a writer, and I’d argue that the output level of a writer probably determines their success as well.
A person who works on writing part-time is going to develop slowly compared to someone who writes full time, and Tim Ferriss might sell the dream that you can run a business in four hours a week, but realistically, you can’t.
You are going to get outworked.
“But it’s all about working smarter, not harder Jamie.”
That’s the rally cry of the “life hacker.” On the face of it, sure, you can work smarter than someone else and overtake their hard work.
On the face of it.
In reality, life hackers would have you believe that everyone else moves sand one grain at a time, but realistically everyone knows what a shovel is.
It’s the same in business. You can only work smarter when compared with people who don’t know what they’re doing. In reality, most businesses know what they’re doing.
In writing, there are a lot of people who don’t know what they’re doing. There are a lot of people who “work on their novel” and never publish a word. There are a lot of people working for the Fluffington Post for free in order to gain experience” and you can work smarter than them and get more success than them.
But you don’t really want to get more success than people with no success. What’s the point?
It’s a whole different league when you do your daily copywriting practice and realise that there are copywriters pulling in millions of dollars with a single sales letter. Or, you read about modern-day pulp writers who write a novel a week and make six-figures a month.
You can’t “hack” writing a novel a week… I should know, I’ve tried.
The 4 Hour Work Week model simply can’t outcompete someone who writes a hundred thousand words a week and works eighty hours.
The Problem With a Four Hour Work Week For Writers Part II
Long term writing success is cumulative.
“Jamie… I want to make profits while sitting on a beach. That guy you mentioned above is spending the best years of his life in front of a computer… I want lifestyle design.”
Ok.
If that’s your goal, then fine. You need about $400 a month to sit on a beach in a third world country with the life-hacker expat crowd. (Or, so I’ve been told.)
The fact is though, the guy who sacrifices and writes a book a week is going to make a lot more money than someone who works twenty hours a week.
And money from books doesn’t expire until seventy years after your death.
If you write one book a year, you’ll possibly get lucky enough to live off the royalties in retirement.
If you write fifty books a year, then that’s an insane amount of passive income. (I can’t fathom it really (yet.) One person I talk to is in exactly that position though, and they’re preparing to retire by 2018.
You can’t do that with the Tim Ferriss plan.
Do You Wanna Be A Writer?
You can outsource a minion army and they’ll do all the writing for you. If you want to create an info-product empire, then you don’t really have to do any of it yourself. There’s someone to write your content. There’s someone to write your sales pages. There’s someone to do the SEO tricks and treats and cover your social media. Plenty of people who succeed in online business operate like this; they do next to nothing themselves.
That is possible.
But they aren’t writers.
They’re not writers in the same sense that those dreamy types in the coffee shops who are “working on their novel” aren’t really writers. Writing output is what determines writers.
If you don’t like writing, then you probably aren’t going to succeed… no matter how much outsourcing and how many tricks you have up your sleeve.