Tim Ferriss wants me to know that pigs have an extremely high
feed conversion ratio, or FCR. They grow fast. We’re watching a
pair of Balinese pig farmers wrestle a giant seven-month-old pig
into a cylindrical metal cage, hoist it onto their shoulders on a
fat bamboo rod, and carry it off to slaughter. This is taking
place just across a small courtyard from Ferriss’s bedroom for
the next month, a spare room with a cot in a brick-walled
compound shared by several families and dozens of farm animals in
rural Bali, near the famous hippie town of Ubud.

Ferriss has his own version of a high feed conversion ratio, in
which he goes native and absorbs as much of an experience as
possible, as quickly as possible, with a kind of obsessive
discipline. He’s been in Bali only three days, and already he’s
speaking basic Indonesian with a convincing accent, laughing
easily with his host family, waking with the roosters every
morning, and helping feed the pigs. Vacation is hard work if
you’re Tim Ferriss.

None of which should be all that surprising if you’re familiar
with the Ferriss oeuvre. Ferriss is the author of the
mega-best-selling 4-Hour series of self-help books (The
4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, and his
latest, The 4-Hour Chef), which have made him
something of a celebrity among the entrepreneurial set for a
focus on maximizing results while minimizing time spent, whether
in the realm of making money or acquiring skills.

It’s been about six years since the publication of The
4-Hour Workweek, his first and most famous book, and
Ferriss’s life has changed profoundly in the interim, largely
because of the book’s success. When he was
writing 4HWW, as his acolytes call it, Ferriss was
running a dietary supplement company, BrainQuicken. He sold
BrainQuicken to a London private equity group in 2009 and now
spends his days promoting his books (and himself) and advising
and investing in tech start-ups, an existence that earns him, he
says, “comfortably many millions a year–more than three and less
than 100.”

The story of how Ferriss got to this point is something of a
legend by now. After running BrainQuicken for a couple of years,
he was bringing home about $40,000 a month and working nonstop
seven days a week. He realized it was making him miserable and
resolved to remove himself from day-to-day operations as much as
possible, automating or outsourcing everything. He started with a
plan to spend four weeks in Europe to clear his head and wound up
traveling the world for 15 months. His business continued to
thrive without him. When he returned, he kept the company on
autopilot and started the process of writing about how he had
managed to take back his life. Twenty-seven publishers passed on
the book before one finally made a small bet on it and printed a
paltry 12,000 copies. Then Ferriss the self-promoter got to work,
and the book took off.

But if the autopilot version of running BrainQuicken afforded
Ferriss a life of leisure–or at least a lifestyle he could tout
as leisure while he was busy working on his next act–the
business of being Tim Ferriss, Self-Help Guru, is not quite as
accommodating. InThe 4-Hour Workweek, Ferriss advises
taking regular “mini retirements,” ideally a month off for every
two months of work. But he hasn’t had a proper mini retirement in
more than a year now.

Hence the Bali trip, which is an attempt to apply that core
principle to his new life and keep from looking like someone who
doesn’t live by his own advice. Over four weeks, he’s planning to
become fluent in Indonesian, learn to play gamelan music,
exercise or do yoga at least one hour per day, and immerse
himself in the life of the family compound. He didn’t bring a
laptop and swears he won’t touch his phone or email or calendar.
He has a personal assistant in California handling his day-to-day
affairs, and he alerted the founders of the companies he advises
that he would be unreachable. “This is the first real complete
power reset in the past year,” he says. “You can’t just set up
systems and not test them. So this is a stress test.”

It’s not hard to understand why Ferriss’s message has achieved
mainstream success. It promises an easy path to big rewards–in
Ferriss’s case, quality of life as defined by Corona ads, with or
without the attendant riches. What’s less obvious is
why The 4-Hour Workweek became a runaway
success in the technology start-up world and has given Ferriss
vast credibility in Silicon Valley.

On the surface, there’s a disconnect between most ambitious
entrepreneurs and the audience Ferriss seems to target
in The 4-Hour Workweek. The book is about, and for,
people who dislike what their work has done to their lives. A lot
of tech entrepreneurs, on the other hand, want nothing more than
to work.

But there are also similarities between Ferriss’s approach to
lifestyle and the hacker mindset of Silicon Valley. Both are
looking for the shortest path to a desired outcome, and both take
it as an inherent good to exploit an existing rule to your
benefit, or, better yet, to write an entirely new set of rules.
“The 4-Hour Workweek was really about hacking your
time,” says Mike Maples, founder of the venture capital firm
Floodgate and an occasional co-investor with Ferriss. “The book
could have just been called Time
Hacks. 4-Hour Body could have been
called Body Hacks. To some degree, even though
those weren’t the titles, the idea immediately resonated with
that hacker mentality.”

One of the key ways Ferriss tries to disrupt how people think
about productivity is by urging them not to think in terms of
time management. “I think time management as a label encourages
people to view each 24-hour period as a slot in which they should
pack as much as possible,” Ferriss says. For maximum
productivity, in his view, people should focus on doing less, not
more. The point is to maximize the outcome, not the amount of
work.

One of Ferriss’s more heretical pieces of advice is based on what
he calls the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of your productivity
comes from 20 percent of your efforts, and likewise, 80 percent
of your wasted time comes from 20 percent of the possible causes.
So eliminate the 20-percent time wasters, and spend as much
energy as possible on the productive 20 percent. Ferriss’s
favorite example of acting on this phenomenon comes from his
BrainQuicken days, when he realized two customers were the source
of nearly all of his work stress, and the effect was carrying
over into his personal life. He read those customers the riot
act. One reformed. The other Ferriss fired. Immediately, he had
more time for his healthier business relationships, and his
bottom line grew.

“That passage just leapt off the page for me,” says Tobi Lütke,
the CEO of the e-commerce platform Shopify, another company
Ferriss advises. “If you go into business school and suggest
firing a customer, they’ll kick you out of the building. But it’s
so true in my experience. It allows you to identify the customers
you really want to work with. If you never engage in the process,
it’s very difficult to have such a crisp definition of the kinds
of people you’re looking for.”

Ferriss’s fans tend to cherry-pick techniques from his work,
something he encourages. He himself has had to cherry-pick and
improvise a bit, now that he’s not running a business on
autopilot. His assistant, whom he found through TaskRabbit, still
helps run his schedule, ships books to the cities where he’s
doing readings, and does research projects (she set up the whole
Bali trip, for example–a process that involved a 40-page
PowerPoint presentation detailing his options). But marketing,
for instance, is trickier. “It’s harder now to set up systems,”
he concedes. “In the BrainQuicken days, people wanted a product,
but now they want me, so the key for me is to create products
that don’t require me to be there”–blog posts, say. But he
insists on writing his own blog, and that’s harder and more
time-consuming than outsourcing the manufacture and distribution
of supplements. “There are certain things I will automate, but
when it comes to quality control, I want to keep a very close
eye.”

As part of his ascetic trip, Ferriss is abstaining from alcohol
while he’s in Bali, so one day we spend happy hour at an organic
café in Ubud nursing glasses of turmeric juice, a chalky
concoction the color of ballpark mustard that’s said to have
myriad healing properties. “I feel like they might have blended
some carrot in this to make it more palatable,” he says,
disappointed.

If there’s one idea that ties Ferriss’s three books together,
it’s continuous self-improvement. Ferriss runs his life like a
high-tech Japanese auto factory, in which every move is
evaluated, every input and output is measured for efficiency. (In
the latter case, quite literally: While he was
writing The 4-Hour Body, he even weighed his
excrement.)

Much as he’s planning to learn Indonesian and gamelan in Bali,
Ferriss is constantly pursuing new skills. Among his biggest
education projects in the past few years has been learning to
operate like a tech entrepreneur, despite never having worked in
a tech start-up. The pursuit has paid off handsomely. He’s
invested in or advised (in exchange for equity) about 30
start-ups, many of which make tools that help people be more
productive. It’s an impressive list of companies–in addition to
Shopify and TaskRabbit, he’s invested in Evernote,
Uber,
Rally, and Reputation.com, among others. His co-investors include
Digg founder
Kevin
Rose (now a partner at Google
Ventures), About.me founder Tony Conrad, Instagram
founder Kevin
Systrom, and Mike Maples.

This immersion raises the question of whether Ferriss himself
harbors dreams of his own tech start-up–maybe a suite of
productivity tools or an online life-coaching service–and
cashing in big. But his sights are on less obvious ideas. “I’m
not averse to making a lot of money,” he says. “But where does
that end? I hang out with people with hundreds of millions of
dollars. Is that the standard by which I should measure myself?
Where does that take you if you’re in my business? I think it
takes you to pretty dark, corrupt places. And every time I find
myself stressed out, it’s because I do things primarily driven by
growth.”

Ferriss is toying with the idea of a digital animation studio, to
create how-to videos. He’s interested in pursuing a TV
deal–maybe something focused on “rapid learning with some high
stakes involved.” He’s interested in acquiring rights to foreign
or out-of-print books and other content and selling it to his
audience–creating, in effect, a Ferriss-approved self-help
network.

“I have plenty of money to do what I want to do, and I have the
relationships,” Ferriss says. “Part of this trip is trying to
push back from keeping up with the Joneses. It’s easy to get
caught up in that. But to unplug like this, which a lot of people
in Silicon Valley will not do…. They want to keep up with me.”

This post was originally published on Inc.com

Read more from Inc:

3 Biggest Excuses Of Wanna-Be Leaders

When Not To Join The Family Business

Here Is What Happens When You Focus Too Hard

Read the original article on Inc.. Copyright 2013. Follow Inc. on Twitter.