Four minute work­week would be too much for some… (pic­ture of Vicky Pol­lard from Little Bri­tain cour­tesy of the BBC)

If this is actu­ally just a small-minded rant, feel free to tell me in the com­ments.  I need to know if I’m just an idiot who hates some­body doing well and rais­ing money for charity.…

I appre­ci­ate, right away, that by writ­ing about Tim Fer­riss I’m going to give him the oxy­gen of pub­li­city.  That in dis­cuss­ing him we all encour­age him to con­tinue to use atten­tion seek­ing devices to increase his influ­ence and marketability.

And boy, does he know how to market.

Here’s a guy who’s writ­ten a book with an inter­est­ing concept.  It’s titled The 4-Hour Work­week.  Very inter­est­ing it may be.  But I haven’t read it.  Nor will I.

Because to read it would mean giv­ing money to someone I find incred­ibly irrit­at­ing.  I mean, the guy gets every­where.  But he’s a fas­cin­at­ing study in pop­ular­ity.  Just like the most pop­u­lar kids at your school prob­ably weren’t the most cap­able or inter­est­ing, neither is he.  Let’s go through some things:

1. Use of emo­tional black­mail to increase influence

Basic­ally, the more people who fol­low your tweets on twit­ter, and the more people who fol­low your blog, the more influ­ence you carry.  Tell 100,000 people what you think about some­thing, and you’ll influ­ence them.  Some will blindly take on-board your opin­ions, while oth­ers will be a little more cau­tious.  But 100,000 people who treat you almost like a God?  That’s power, that is.

Any­way, his latest way to build fol­low­ers is to use a not-so-subtle form of emo­tional black­mail.  He will raise for char­ity $3 for every­one who fol­lows him on Twit­ter with a limit of 50,000. Now, you’d have to be pretty mean-spirited not to click that Fol­low but­ton.  That’s all you have to do to raise $3 dol­lars to help edu­cate some US chil­dren.  I mean, if you hear about this ini­ti­at­ive and don’t click then you must be a truly hor­rible per­son.  For five seconds work you can raise $3 dol­lars.  That’s, like mak­ing $2160 an hour for char­ity!  Wow!

I believe this guy is using the tricks reli­gions use to gain fol­low­ers.  The upside of fol­low­ing their instruc­tions may not be massive, but the down­side could be huge.  And he uses this approach All The Time.  It’s hor­rible to see.  See, in reli­gion you can say things like “fol­low the guidelines in this book in order to receive eternal sal­va­tion” and “if you don’t fol­low us you could be cast into eternal dam­na­tion.”  It’s like Pascal’s wager — if the reli­gion is cor­rect, then a small amount of invest­ment of time and effort leads to a massive pay off (ie. etern­ity in heaven) but if you’re wrong and death is just death… well, you haven’t lost much, have you?  Ratio of cost to poten­tial gain is ridiculous.

2. Four hour work­weeks don’t appeal to me

I mean, I enjoy my work.  Simple as that.

3. But per­haps one of the things that turns me off is the over­bear­ing air of smugness

Look at the guy’s header pic­tures.  You can tell he isn’t Eng­lish.  You couldn’t go into an Eng­lish pub and face your mates if you had a pic­ture of your­self strik­ing a sort of zen-style kar­ate pose on your website’s header (care­fully reveal­ing your muscles, of course) unless per­haps all your friends were just like you.

4. In the end though, it’s the emo­tional trickery

The prom­ises are high.  The head­lines beguil­ing.  And you know, to someone work­ing a dreary job or with dif­fi­cult people what he dis­cusses sound attract­ive.  But a lot of it reminds me of me when I’d dis­covered I could make lots of money as a PeopleSoft developer.  I really had it all — I could work mod­er­ately hard for short peri­ods, tak­ing plenty of breaks between con­tracts, trav­el­ling, fast cars, and sleep­ing with beau­ti­ful mod­els.  Ok, for­get the bit about mod­els, but really, life looked good.

And boy was I happy to let people know this.  But when I thought about it, I got into cor­por­ate sys­tems because at 18 I wanted to get a job cod­ing and the only suit­able job I could find around here was at a cor­por­ate.  I trained up and, one day, took my skills out onto the open mar­ket.  But the truth is, I was just lucky.  How was I to know, in 1987, that ERP developers would be highly sought after in highly paid roles that the uni­ver­sit­ies were fail­ing to train for?  I’d much rather have been a games developer — but truth be told, I wasn’t that good… Good for my wal­let and life­style, because game coders typ­ic­ally earn less than ERP coders, but this was all pure chance.

In sum­mary, Tim Fer­riss is prob­ably little fur­ther ahead of the curve than a lot­tery win­ner releas­ing a book called “How To Choose Lot­tery Num­bers and Become Super-Rich Like Me.”  That would be pat­ent non­sense, but no more or less manip­u­lat­ive than his own life­style guruness.

So when this rich young man tries to pres­sure me into try­ing to find more people who can learn about him and adore him by tweet­ing about his new scheme, I find myself feel­ing ever so slightly sick.  The idea sounds, ini­tially, excel­lent.  But why doesn’t he just give the money dir­ectly to char­ity?  Why does he make it into con­di­tional love?  Why does he make it feel like a psy­cho girl­friend or boy­friend who says “if you loved me you’d do it.”

Maybe I’m Wrong

In a way I’d like to be.  But I always want to look at the motives behind people.  Maybe I’m just an ideal­ist.  But if I’m right, it might just dis­suade people from post­ing some of the self-promoting junk that clut­ters up Twit­ter, for­ums and blogs.  Not just his junk, but other people’s.  There’s a grow­ing tide of the stuff.  It’s annoying.

Any­way, just a final call to action — you can fol­low me on twit­ter too if you like.  I just won’t pay any­body any­thing.  I also prom­ise to try not to sell you any­thing, or retweet mar­ket­ing gumph, com­pet­i­tion announce­ments and so on.  I may how­ever, com­plain vehe­mently about whatever ran­dom irrit­a­tion that cropped into my head that day.

Edited to add a link above to the Tim Ferriss’s blog post on the mat­ter.  And tags.

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