The worst book you could ever read: 4HWW

The 4-Hour Work Week is a popular book with a raving fan base.  A lot of people have read the book and are die hard supporters of it's movement.  If you read the book it's obvious that the author, Tim Ferris, is a brilliant person with a lot of great insight to give the reader.  However, If you havn't read it yet, I strongly reccoment you DON'T READ IT until you read through this blog post first.  You could waste years of your life trying to recover from the mind f*$k this book will do to your brain if you don't read it in context.  

Here's a quick summary of the book:

You can work minimal hours if you just start an online business selling your chosen "muse" to people.  The "muse" can be any product or service. 
Step 1: Find someone else who already builds the product or provides the service your muse site will sell. 
Step 2: Use online advertisements to drive traffic to your site and match buyers to the product or service you have chosen.  
Step 3: Set up your pricing to have a high enough profit margin to cash flow the ads.  Continue tweeking your landing pages, ads, and pricing until your online business cash flows enough to support your life style.

Sounds great, hun?  Easy enough.  Why not read the book and get started on your own "muse" website today?  Because Tim Ferriss (the author) glosses over some very important peices that you need to focus on if you want succeed.  Don't get sucked in, and don't try it, because it won't work as just outlined in his book. 

The book starts with defining your ideal life and then creating a muse business to fund it.  From my own experience I am convinced the focus needs to be on creating value for others, followed with using the proceeds to materialize the missing parts of your ideal life.  

To sum it up, my biggest rub with the 4HWW is my belief in the following statements:

The thing you are most qualified to provide for others is so engrained in who you are, that your ideal life is likely experienced through creating value for others with that thing.  The "thing"  you provide for others is NOT just a muse to create money and free up your time to experience your ideal life.

Here are the critical peices the book overlooks:

1.  To be successful in any business, the focus needs to be on solving a problem for your customer.  Your focus shouldn't be on finding suckers to pay a premium for something you found wholesale pricing on.  It may work in the short run, but it's not sustainable for any significant amount of time.  "Easy money" is the hardest money to make over the long haul.

2.  If you do get your muse website to cashflow, over time competition will drive prices down to the point were your muse website will no longer cashflow.  Since you don't produce the product, there will always be someone else who can step in and compete with you online to reduce your profit margin below the cost of driving online traffic.

3.  What makes you more qualified than anyone else to sell your "muse"?  Were you put on earth to be the guy/gal to provide your "muse" website to the population?  The answer might be "Yes", but I doubt it if you started your muse with the mindset laid out for you in the 4-Hour Work Week. 

Have you read the book?  Have you tried to create your own muse?  Please comment on how it went.