My previous blog post introduces Tim Ferriss’ concept of the 4 Hour Work Week to achieve a series of mini-retirements. It turns on its head the norm of working 30-40 years only to find at retirement, you’ve either not got enough money to live out your ‘retirement’ or you’re not in good health anymore, having slogged your guts out or worst still both!

To be a success at this, start with the end in mind. The first step is to do a little dreaming and come up with what Tim calls ‘dreamlines’ – ambitions or activities you’ve always wanted to do. You could be so wrapped up in your day-to-day drudgery that you’ve forgotten what you REALLY want to do.

Dreamlines could be learning a new skill or language. It could be spending more time with those that matter like family. You give yourself a timeline when this is going to happen. Tim advocates as soon as 6 months.

Dream big and outrageous – that’s allowed too! Dreams so big and outrageous that your friends will laugh and tell you not to be silly. Having children shouldn’t be an excuse to hold you back either as in the book, there are testimonials from families, even single mothers who’ve taken their children with them on world travels, or moved to a different country. It could be changing career, or pursuing /taking up a hobby that doesn’t generate an income or have the possibility of generating an income. The point is anything is possible – it needs to start with a desire.

In Tim’s case it was travelling and experiencing new cultures, learning new languages and skills.

The next step is to actually cost it out and work out how much it’s actually going to cost in money terms and over what time length the mini-retirement is going to take. Sometimes it might be that the costs aren’t nearly as out of reach as you initially perceived, which is great news.

Now’s also the time to discover if there’s anything else mentally holding you back from achieving, fears that need confronting and actually working out what is the worst that could happen and what would you do if the worst case scenario came to pass. Probably not as bad as you feared so worth the risk.

My next blog post is about how you create the time and how you can outsource your personal life.