I’ve been a fan of the 4-hour workweek (4hww) by Tim Ferriss for a long time.

I think that the 4hww is ideal for empaths. Because we are more sensitive than average people, we need a lot more recovery time, and a lot more work-life balance. We need to really cater our lifestyles around having a healthy nervous system. So the less time we work, the more time we can spend on self-care. I don't think a normal work schedule is conducive to the balance we need at all, and I think it’s time for a change. Humans weren’t designed to work 8 hours a day, and that affects us more than anyone.

Things have changed a lot since that book came out. More people than ever are working online from home, but we want more. We want to make our own schedules so we can work from any time zone, or when we feel the most energetic and most creative. We want passive income, so we’re not staring at screens all day. The 4-hour workweek sold that dream. 

As someone who hates authority, hates 9-5 jobs, and hates spending all day inside in front of a computer, I was obsessed with figuring out how to make the 4-hour workweek work for me.

And eventually, I did.

My Story

I started my self-employment journey as a Google trusted photographer, but that wasn't passive enough. I had to sell photoshoots that people weren't even asking for. I had to be at appointments on a schedule and I had to edit photos by hand.

So then I switched to virtual assisting, but that wasn’t passive enough either. Now I could travel and work remotely, but I was tied to wifi for multiple meetings a day. I couldn't explore as much as I wanted to.

So then I decided to take the services I was performing as a virtual assistant and start a marketing agency. And as that grew I just started outsourcing to more assistants.

It got to the point where I was working less than half an hour a week invoicing while my team did everything else, and I was making six figures a year.

One thing I really liked about that was my team set their own hours, they set their own rates, and we barely ever had meetings, so they were able to have a lot of freedom too.

But marketing isn’t meaningful to me. I hate having to constantly chase changes to algorithms in order to get results for my clients.

And now after over 5 years of self-employment, I’m back to re-reading the 4-hour workweek through new eyes.

In the past few years, I have been on a deep self-discovery journey. And now that I have spent so much time realizing my true identity, learning about my strengths, and deciding what's really important to me,  I’m realizing that while the tools in the 4hww are priceless, they can be better adapted for intuitives, empaths, and highly sensitive people who need to find deep meaning in their work to feel fulfilled.

If you’re dreaming of starting your own business and working for yourself and it seems like no matter what you do it is always out of reach, I’m here to tell you this: there is nothing wrong with you. It’s not that you’re not working hard enough. It’s that the standard advice doesn’t work for us. The standard advice was crafted by people, for people with an entirely different set of strengths.

Our ideal job doesn’t exist. Our ideal job is not found but created. Our ideal job is as unique as we are. It is an extension of ourselves.

Fear setting

One of the things that Tim Ferris talks about is fear setting; defining what your fears are, and defining the cost of not facing those fears. What would you do if the worst-case scenario happened? What about the outcome of more likely scenarios?

The one problem, I think with fear-setting, is that logic doesn't work on a dysregulated nervous system. For highly sensitive empaths, our nervous systems are burnt out all the time. Most of us grew up in unpredictable environments where we had to hyper-focus on the most triggered, reactive, or disturbed person in our surroundings. This is a defense mechanism we still use without realizing it. Logic doesn’t work on the part of our brain that triggers this hyper-vigilance.

So for fear setting, what I would tell people is; instead of using logic to define your fears, learn to heal your nervous system. Learn what it feels like when you’re triggered.

We spend so much time in our heads, that we often forget to listen to our bodies.

And once you start listening to your body, you’ll notice that certain people make you tighten up, or certain interactions drain your energy. And there are a lot of tools you can use like mindfulness and diaphragmatic breathing and cold showers to start regaining the trust of your nervous system and teach your body that it is safe.

Finding the muse

Tim Ferriss also talks about the types of products you can sell that will help you live this ideal lifestyle. He says to look for products that you can sell for $50-$200 at an 8-10x markup. I think there’s one key to his success that he doesn’t mention, though. Tim’s product was also consumable, which means his customers had to keep buying more. They weren’t spending $50-$200 once. They were spending $50-$200 over and over again. So in my opinion, Tim’s formula needs to mention that the income should be recurring.

The problem with all of that is that we need our work to feel meaningful. To stay engaged and for it to be sustainable, for us to stay interested in it, we need our work to feel meaningful. That is far more important in keeping us motivated than the price tag or the profit margin. Some people are ok with working a job they’re not emotionally connected to, as long as it supports a lifestyle that allows them to chase meaning in other ways. But for empaths, I don’t think that works.

There’s a problem, though, with doing work that’s important to us. The more importance our work has, the harder it is for us to promote it. The more we care about our work, the more doubt, and perfectionism, fear, and procrastination come in. The solution is taking your ego out and thinking of your work as its own entity. You are simply a bridge, a servant, here to manifest this living, breathing idea out of the ether and into reality.

My advice for empaths is this; you cannot start with the end in sight. You cannot start with a product and work backwards. Helping the world starts with helping 100 people, and helping 100 people starts with helping yourself. Your first job is healing yourself and living a beautiful life. The art you create and the tools you find on that journey are what you will eventually deliver to other people who are just like you, but a little more lost.

We are introverts. Many of us don’t want to be the face of our brand. But we are also creative. Our business needs to change and morph as we learn and grow. Too often, we box ourselves into one idea; a company built around a single offer or niche. My advice is to be brave, and let your brand be you, so your business can thrive as a living, breathing, thing. Our businesses are gardens where our ideas can grow and breathe and die and be harvested and change with the seasons. 

Don’t build your business around a niche or a product. Think of our business as a lemonade stand, and your ideas as the lemonade. One month you might sell strawberry, and the next month you might sell blueberry. Let it be fun and loose and creative and let your community request flavors before you make them. Your business, the stand, is always there, but it is free to change with you and your community in a way that it will never have to be rebuilt.

Goal setting

Tim also talks about goal setting. He talks about breaking goals down into 6 and 12-month timelines. What do you want to have in six months? Be in six months? Do in six months? Then you add price tags and calculate how much you need to make per day to get there.

I think goal setting is great. I love setting goals, and making vision boards, and journaling about the things I want as if they are already here. Tim approaches goal-setting from a very logical point of view. But empaths make decisions based on what feels best and what feels right even if we can’t see the path to get there.

We make our decisions with our hearts, with feeling, with emotion, with intuition. And that’s not a weakness, it’s a strength. It’s a superpower. And it's hard when the rest of the world keeps telling us to use thinking instead of feeling, our weaknesses instead of our strengths. 

So I like to start with any kind of goal. I like to start where Tim is starting, making a list of all the things you want and desire in this life, but then I like to turn them into intrinsic goals.

Extrinsic goals are things like;

“I want to look good and have a nice body”. 

That’s an extrinsic goal. An intrinsic version of that goal would be:

“I just want to feel good in my body. I want to feel strong, I don’t want to feel sluggish, I want to feel just strong and like I have energy. I don't want to have aches and pains. I want to be healthy”. 

That's an intrinsic goal. You’re not really worried about what you look like, or what other people think, you just want to have a healthy body that feels good. 

So it’s ok to start with having, being, and doing goals but then turn them into intrinsic goals. And I don’t really like putting a timeline on things, either because we need to use the creative, right side of our brain to solve problems. And Tim is talking about using the logical left side, which works for people who have thinking as their strength, who operate in concrete reality, but that’s not us.

We have to intuit our way through problems and the more structure you put on solving a problem, the less room that leaves for intuition to work. So when you put a timeline on your goals, you’re handcuffing the intuitive side of your brain that is so good at creative problem-solving.

Another thing I think gets in our way here is perfectionism. If I’m thinking about planning a trip to Ireland then I have a habit of being like…

“Ok I need to pick out every single place I want to see, and I want really great pictures, so I have to plan on getting there during the golden hour, but I have to pick the day when it’s the least crowded, and I don’t want to waste all this time and money going to another country and miss seeing something, so I have to make sure I do all the things. This trip, I have to plan it perfectly”. 

And that type of thinking is really going to paralyze you.

I could just find a group trip, and sign up, and let someone else do all the planning for me. It’s not going to be perfect, I'm not going to get the most stunning pictures, and I’m not going to see every single last thing I want to see, but I actually get to go, instead of over-planning a trip that never happens. If your goals just always seem out of reach, then settle on a smaller, easier version of that goal. That sense of accomplishment will only propel you forward. The more wins you can give yourself, the more you will achieve in the long run.

Timelines and deadlines get in our way. Putting a timeline on a goal is handcuffing the intuitive side of your brain, your ability to intuit and feel through the right choices versus pushing yourself. When you push yourself, that’s going to trigger your nervous system more, because your nervous system sees anything that’s new and different as a threat. So give yourself permission to aim for comfort. With practice, patience and grace, you will get more comfortable being uncomfortable.

Budgeting can also complicate things. With a person who’s based in logic, they’re going to say…

 “This is how much money I need, and this is how much time I need to make that money”. 

With us, we kind of work in the opposite direction. The picture is too big for us to see it all at once and the path we need to take doesn’t reveal itself until we’re already on the journey.

Human beings are also terrible at knowing what we want. So often, when we finally get what we thought we wanted, we realize we aren’t any happier. Imagine budgeting and planning for 6 months, just to find out that you didn’t really want that bike or car or trip after all. Empaths need to try things and experiment to decide if we will like something. We have to feel our way through it in the moment. It’s very hard for us to predict if we will enjoy something until we try it. Smaller goals and smaller investments of time and money remove that large energetic risk, and lets us approach life from a more experimental and less committed mindset.

So instead of having timelines or budgets what I like to do is assign priorities to each month or each day of the week, where I’m saying maybe this month I want to plan a trip. And instead of saying well I want to travel to this place within 6 months or a year, instead of having a deadline, I just devote time to planning something, anything in reach. I’d look at what I can afford now, at this moment. Maybe I can only afford to spend a few hundred dollars, but I can go camping. That’s going to give me that adventure energy I’m craving without poisoning the experience.

80-20 Principle

Another thing Tim talks about is using the Pareto principle to simplify your life. The Pareto principle is this phenomenon where 20% of the input accounts for 80% of the output. If you’re talking about a business, for example, usually 20% of your customers account for 80% of your profit, and another 20% of your customers account for 80% of your headaches. 

The way I would adapt that for empaths is to think about the people who drain your energy. Think about the energy vampires, versus the people who are energy-giving. Energy-draining people might not be bad people, they might not be doing anything wrong exactly. They just might be kind of angsty or negative or sad or anxious and we absorb all of that. Especially if you haven’t done work with energetic boundaries, it’s really hard to protect your energy when other people are in a more negative space.

That doesn’t mean that you have to be mean or cut those people out of your life, but at least be really conscious of who is draining your energy and how much time you want to spend engaging with those people. Maybe you can just spend less time with them. And if you do need to set boundaries and they have a big reaction to that, then that’s just validation that they are toxic and you do need those boundaries there.

Whether it’s customers or friends or family, empaths usually have a lot of guilt around this limiting our contact with certain people, but it’s really nothing to feel guilty about. The better you take care of yourself, the better you can show up for other people. And you’re actually doing them a favor because you’re taking away that resentment that you would have otherwise. Whereas if you did just set boundaries or limit your contact you’re actually protecting them from that resentment and when you do engage with them, it will be from a more genuine place.

Conclusion

My advice to you my fellow empaths is do not start with the end in mind. Set an intention for a journey to heal and express yourself, and then take the first step not knowing exactly where your foot will land. Heal your soul, make art, write, go to therapy, get coaching, share your experiences, and then teach what medicine you learn. Your project at the beginning is you.