IF THE CONTEMPORARY REBOOT of the prosperity gospel can be said to have apostles, the lifestyle guru and angel investor Tim Ferriss is certainly among them. His self-help empire, which includes five bestselling books and an eponymous podcast, has touched millions of readers and listeners. Videos posted to his YouTube channel reach more than 400,000 subscribers. It is fair to say that Ferriss is a celebrity of unique prominence, particularly among entrepreneurs.
Ferriss rose to fame in 2007 when he published The 4-Hour Workweek, a self-help manual that instructs readers in the ways and means of a “quiet subculture of people called the ‘New Rich.'” This is Ferriss's term for the category of disgruntled workers who decide to trade fat law firm salaries and C-suite perks for whimsical lifestyles as surf instructors and passport stamp–collectors. He sets the New Rich in opposition to conventional “Deferrers,” who confine leisure and pleasure to weekends and geriatric retirement.
When The 4-Hour Workweek debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, Ferriss was just another twenty-nine-year-old Princeton grad from Long Island. After several failed ventures, he'd finally started a successful sports-nutrition company—BrainQUICKEN—only to become dissatisfied with the responsibilities its management entailed. Ferriss realized the daily grind at the office would eventually turn him into the “fat man in the red BMW convertible”—his archetype for the sort of nominally successful person who is rich in possessions, poor in spirit, and downright impoverished in life experiences. To avoid this grim fate, Ferriss outsourced and automated his daily tasks at the company and took a long vacation to mull things over, checking up on things for just a few hours each week. He soon found that the business got along just fine without him, perhaps even better, and that the passive income stream could finance his dalliances indefinitely. Others might consider these results to be evidence of failed management. Ferriss saw things differently: he believed that if it were successfully marketed, his story could make him a self-help celebrity.
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