You may have heard of the American lifestyle guru Tim Ferriss. This is the man who won a Wired magazine competition to find "the greatest self-promoter in the world" thanks to fans who organised a campaign to ensure victory (thus justifying Wired's decision, when you think about it). His first book, The Four-Hour Workweek, promised near-infinite leisure time by checking email once daily and outsourcing chores to "virtual assistants" based in India. The sequel, imminently to announce itself loudly in British bookshops, is The Four-Hour Body, subtitled "An uncommon guide to rapid fat loss, incredible sex and becoming superhuman". It's a cacophony of unrelated tips: how, allegedly, to gain 34lb of muscle in four weeks by eating vast quantities of protein; how to save time sleeping by replacing a night's rest with half-hour naps around the clock; how to become a sex machine, if you're male, using brazil nuts. The overarching principle, if there is one, is a radical embrace of the "Pareto principle", the economic idea that's interpreted by self-help authors to mean that 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. There's wisdom here: not all effort is equal, and it pays to focus on what matters most. Does that mean scary diets and brazil nut-fuelled orgies? To each their own. I imagine the brazil nut importation industry approves.
There's a terrier-like eagerness to Ferriss that renders me unable to scorn him as I otherwise might. But he annoys many others. The careers expert Penelope Trunk once wrote an essay entitled Five Time Management Tricks I Learned From Years Of Hating Tim Ferriss; the usually sober BeyondGrowth.net, which critically analyses pop psychology, called him "self-absorbed, antisocial and ruthless". Fortunately, Ferriss has a readymade response to the haters: they show he's right. "Doing anything remotely interesting will bring criticism," he says in a blogpost, The Benefits Of Pissing People Off, quoting Colin Powell. "Pissing people off is both inevitable and necessary."
The notion that having many detractors proves you're doing great, jealousy-inducing work is an article of faith among motivational authors. "Being a success," says one blogger, "means people hate what you do." "Getting a lot of people to hate you is easy," says Hugh Macleod, author of Ignore Everybody, And 39 Other Keys To Creativity. "All you have to do is become really successful at doing something you love."
True, this provides encouragement to the timid. But as a logical principle, it's akin to what I think of, perhaps unfairly, as the Burchill Fallacy: enraging people on both sides of an issue doesn't prove you "must be doing something right". You could just be wrong. Pleasing people may not be the path to success. But whatever self-help gurus say, it doesn't necessarily follow that you can't be successful and nice.
Ferriss, to his credit, notes that being irritating shouldn't be the end goal. But in other hands, the blanket dismissal of critics is a too-easy argument-ender, a way to promote quack remedies and dodgy philosophies by defining all counter opinions as envy. "Let the critics criticise," writes Ferriss. "It's the builders who count." Well, yes and no. But then, a hater would say that, wouldn't he?
• A collection of Oliver Burkeman's columns, Help!: How To Become Slightly Happier And Get A Bit More Done, is published by Canongate at £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39 (including free UK mainland p&p), go to theguardian.com bookshop, or call 0330 333 6846.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
