(2026-04-02) I Achieved The Four Hour Workweek. So Why Did I Just Take A Job?

Mike Taylor: I Achieved the Four-hour Workweek. So Why Did I Just Take a Job?

In 2023, 12 years after reading The 4-Hour Work Week, I was making enough passive income from my Udemy course on prompt engineering to achieve the Tim Ferriss dream.
I didn’t need a day-job.

Yet I decided to trade freedom for a monthly paycheck again when I joined Every in February full-time to lead tech consulting and write.

My friends are puzzled

Don’t you remember vowing to never take another job?

My answer is that it’s the best time in history to join a company. AI has made it easier to build new products, but it hasn’t made it easier to find customers. (distribution)

On paper, I had it made. I had no boss, could work from anywhere, and made money while I slept. The reality is that solo is harder than it looks.

I make money from my online course because I spent many sleepless (and unpaid!) nights working with GPT-3 for years before ChatGPT was released and AI went mainstream. I gave up lucrative data science retainers to take on AI projects, slashed my day rates 75 percent, and even worked for free, because I was excited by the potential and wanted to learn.

Sometimes I worked on the course every day, other times I went months without updating it, and nothing seems to make a difference to revenue. I’ve created two other AI courses— both flopped. Passive income may sound great, but it is a fickle beast.

Almost all the work I did as an entrepreneur started with months of unpaid work

Then there were the failures. The video editor and content repurposing tool that never got a single customer. The marketing book I wrote that only 200 people read. The product I spent months on and never got released after a cofounder falling-out. The list goes on.

(the rest is premium)