Chris Swain Recommends Turning Ebay Into A Cash-Cow Using Timothy Ferriss's Book ... The 4 Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Chris Swain recommends putting Ebay to work for you! Here’s the dilemma, you want more control and freedom in your life, but you don’t have enough time, money or flexibility to pursue your dreams because of you have to pay the bills. What if there was a new way? If you want some new vision and wisdom Chris Swain recommends you pick up a copy of “The 4 Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.”

Timothy Ferriss' new book The 4-Hour Workweek is an in-depth guide to living like the author himself. Ferriss, a 29-year-old Princeton grad, is an entrepreneur with a long string of amusing achievements. To say the least, to his credit he has a pretty interesting life. Even more remarkable, he has managed to string together his disparate ideas on living large into a coherent, readable, motivating whole. The first time I read the book I instantly got dozens of ideas to implement to increase the size of my wallet. And yes, Ebay is a perfect example that you can to use to turn Ferriss’s ideas into reality.

Lifestyle design

The book's essential thesis is that what Ferriss refers to the "deferred-life plan"  -- the path of working for 40 years to fund a 20-year retirement -- is both escapable and worth escaping. Ferriss' escape mechanism is "lifestyle design," a series of tactics through which the aspiring escapee reconfigures his or her life to increase income, create more free time, and spend more time traveling. Ferriss walks through each of these in turn, offering a series of unorthodox time-management ideas both for entrepreneurs and for the employed, a detailed plan for creating an income-generating enterprise that he calls a "muse," and extensive thoughts on long-term travel, or "mini-retirements."

Ferriss' strategies are consistently bold and boundary pushing. Yet, the methods are backed by instructions that are well thought out and ruthlessly streamlined. The book is absolutely crammed with Ferriss-tested strategies for living better and working more efficiently, but the writing is so crisp and the instructions so boiled down that the reader almost doesn't notice just how much is there.

A one-page sidebar offers a full speed-reading course, distilled down to 10 minutes of exercises. Another sidebar, slightly longer than a page, offers a comprehensive PR strategy for establishing one's self as an expert and getting media attention, and it gives only the information you need to get it done. I can tell you from personal and professional experience that both are complete, effective, and correct -- and they omit nothing of importance, despite their extreme brevity.The whole book is like that, for more than 300 pages.

One great feature of his business model is that it's scalable. Need an extra $5,000 for a dream vacation? Use the model to start a sideline business, put a few hours a week into it, raise the money, and then decide whether to keep the business running. Want to quit your job and live large on $40,000 a month? If you've got the idea and Ferriss provides a bunch of brainstorming resources and guidance to help you come up with one -- the structure can handle it, he says, all with minimal involvement from you once it's up and moving.

The upshot

There's a lot to digest, but it can seem almost too thin to make good on the book's numerous promises. For a smart, driven, daring person who is able to improvise on the fly, it's probably just enough, and it should work more or less as he says it will. If you're not sure that "daring" describes you, don't worry -- Ferriss reveals methods for that, too. And for anyone else who wishes to ditch the 9-to-5 regimen, or just wants a little more money and time to chase a few more dreams,  I strongly recommend that you grab this book up and read it. It's an easy and good-humored read, yet packed with out-of-the-box ideas that are just crazy enough to work.

To your new 4 hour work week Ebay style,

Chris Swain