One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not the daily increase but the daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity. – Bruce Lee, as quoted in The 4-Hour Workweek
I stopped reading The 4-Hour Workweek one page before Chapter Two, “E is for Elimination,” page 62. It was 2007, Crown had just published the book, and I had moved to New York to open video tech company DivX‘s New York office. Jordan Greenhall, DivX’s then-CEO, had invited author Tim Ferriss (@tferriss) to speak to the company in San Diego. He saved a copy for me, and I started reading about how to plot your escape from the 9-5. Correction! It was Ben Cote (@thekid) who invited Tim.
A year later, Jordan left. So did a good piece of the founding team and my boss Chester Ng (@chest), who went on to found VC-backed OpenCandy. What better time to make the jump? I retired the book mid-chapter, along with other recommended reading (The World is Flat, Good to Great, The Long Tail, Crowdsourcing) and an unopened set of Japanese language DVDs, and embarked on my adventure.
For the next few months, I consulted for digital media companies, freelanced for trade publications, and traveled with Greenlaces.org founder Natalie Spilger (@nspilger). It felt very 4-Hour Workweek. For the first time in my professional life, I literally understood the value of my time and was making more money working less hours. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next, and through a dinner hosted by venture capital firm (and now Solvate investor) DFJ Gotham I met Mike Paolucci. Shortly thereafter we partnered on Solvate with the mission of connecting top professionals to meaningful part-time work for businesses in need across the country. We call it microstaffing.
I picked my copy back up this weekend. How timely. The next page read:
Believe it or not, it is not only possible to accomplish more by doing less, it is mandatory.
I had just returned from meeting Tim Ferriss at SummitSeries, a mutual aid society for young entrepreneurs.
He came to speak about lifehacking and increasing your productivity, and I took the opportunity to talk to the man behind the book, the tango world record, the breakdancing videos, the Houdini record-breaking breath-holding…. you know, Tim Ferriss stuff. Talk about delegating. He has delegated everything from reading his email to finding a girlfriend, explaining he used an ideal girlfriend profile and a team of virtual assistants to line up forty-something coffee dates in something like 20 hours. My math might be off but he did confirm he got a girlfriend out of it. Pretty cool innovation on the traditional professional mentality of More Work = More Results.
Turns out Jordan’s invitation to speak at DivX was one of his first post-book speaking engagements. Also turns out it was originally entitled Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit (legal, I assure you, he covers it in the book) but had to change it to The 4-Hour Workweek. I told him about holidating, this emerging lifehack for jetsetters where you date someone in another country by meeting up on vacation, a concept recently picked up by SoapTV with reality show Holidate. I peppered him for health advice on a nagging hamstring injury. He showed me some kind of monitoring device he had just implanted in his side.
At Solvate we think we are democratizing the life shift that Tim Ferriss represents. Work smarter. Spend less time getting more done. Hyper-efficiency for the hyper-ambitious.
But it’s hard to do. Try delegating a simple task to a stranger on the other end of the world. Try using oDesk or eLance to do your monthly expense reports. You’ll have to start by writing out a requirements document on exactly how you like it done. Then you need to post the job, review candidates, judge who’s qualified, engage them, figure out how much to pay them, how you’re going to do the thing, and rinse-repeat to delegate the next job you need done to a new stranger. By the time you are done, it would have been faster just doing it yourself – and that’s assuming that the stranger you hired did it to your 100% satisfaction.
People like Tim who have become experts on leveraging remote labor have highly tweaked, but frankly inaccessible systems in place for how to use them. Not so easy for your average overworked executive. Not so easy for millions of people trying to connect to millions of others across the globe on oDesk, eLance, Livework, Guru.com, Freelancer.com, LinkedIn, HotJobs, Craigslist.
Solvate is democratizing the work smarter message by taking care of the delegating for you. You tell your dedicated team what you need done. Solvate is responsible for asking you when it’s due, and whether you need to submit your receipts in an Excel template or Concur. We are responsible for soliciting feedback and learning. We are responsible for recruiting and managing only the top professional talent in the country, from interviewing, to background and reference checks, to payment terms, to verification of certifications like Salesforce Certified Consultants to Intuit’s Quickbooks ProAdvisors. We are responsible for staffing your project with the appropriate expertise, project-managing it to completion, and delivering the actual work to your 100% satisfaction. Often, a single project has moving parts that are best handed by a coordinated team of several specialists.
10, 20 years from now when we tell our kids about the start of the internet, laptops, Google, Facebook, cell phones, what will we tell about the way we worked? When we started leveraging our own networks of professionals to work smarter? When the Mad Men-era personal assistant was traded in for the on-demand, remote office? When outsourcing your life was still the subject of a session with early adopter entrepreneur types in a hotel meeting room?
In the meantime let’s try to simply reduce four hours from our workweek.
