Thank you for writing this. I always found the Four Hour Work Week to be offensive to my values, but I couldn't effectively put my objection into words. This has captured exactly how I feel about it.
I hope more people begin to follow this mindset than the vapid, soulless Tim Ferris approach.
A pre-requisite to automating and finding optimizations in the way Ferris describes, is to first be really good at what you do. Tim Ferris himself is good at what he does.
Please elaborate on what he's good at. I know nothing about Ferris, but 5 minutes of searching leads me to believe he's good at selling people on things that are at best unsubstantiated. His fortune was made off BrainQUICKEN - a snakeoil supplement to "help the brain" as best I can tell?
He’s a thoughtful person overall. He is an excellent interviewer. There’s also something to be said that creating a brand as large as he has takes some insight into marketing and understanding his audience.
Your quick impression based on your cursory Google search is likely very reasonable. But I think it's important to note that this (unintentionally) does a huge disservice to the person Tim has grown into since writing the Four Hour Work Week.
Apart from being an incredibly good, humble and thoughtful interviewer, as others have said, I would also encourage anyone unfamiliar with his more recent work to check out his output in the areas of depression, suicide, childhood abuse, psychedelics research, not to mention his later books and countless fascinating podcast interviews with some incredible people.
Whatever you may think of the 4HWW and the almost cult-like following that it inspired, I think that Tim Ferris is a bit of a force for good at this point in time, and quite unique in his ability to tackle any subject head on - even the hardest and most personal ones.
He has a vast audience, and his writings about his own deep personal struggles are incredibly valuable, and I'm sure will have done a lot of good for people in similar positions. This sort of material is hugely important, coming from someone with such a broad reach.
As an aside, I pre-ordered 4HWW prior to it's launch and did find it a very inspiring read as a 20-something wannabe entrepreneur. Everyone gets something different from that book, but I had read The E-myth prior to it, and saw a lot of it as reenforcement of the idea of trying to free up your time to work "on your business" and not "in your business". In that sense, I saw a lot of value in it. But I also understand the flip-side "outsource everything and go live on a beach" view of the book...
It's worth noting that he didn't do the beach thing himself though. He extracted himself quickly out of his day-to-day grind and freed up his time to spend on things that he was interested in, and work hard in high-leverage areas that he wanted to contribute to, on his terms.
I think anyone who calls Tim Ferriss vapid will have to revisit their opinion from the 4 hour workweek book days. His podcast is one of the most insightful I've found, the questions are incredibly penetrating and detailed. He asks questions in a way that I have not really heard of before from other interviewers, ie "Given circumstances A, and B, and that we could consider or discount C here as well, how would you do X?"
I will also note that in 4HWW that he does tell you to delegate and automate only when you've fully understood what to do. And what's wrong with such automation? That's what we programmers do on a daily basis.
I am glad you enjoyed it. I think Tim Ferris is a thoughtful person, but I think people have put too much attention on the hacking part of this particular book, and not enough attention on building mastery.
I hope more people begin to follow this mindset than the vapid, soulless Tim Ferris approach.