How to Cook Like a Pro (And Learn to Live the Good Life) in Four Hours

What’s the Big Idea?

It takes roughly 4 hours to roast a fairly large turkey. How many life skills can you learn in that amount of time? Tim Ferriss has a blueprint for meta-learning that he says you can use to obtain a diverse set of skills in an extremely short timeframe. That is why Ferriss’s new book, The 4-Hour Chef, published by Amazon and boycotted by Barnes & Noble and other booksellers, is as much about how to live and learn as it is about cooking. 

The French Culinary Institute in New York City, one of the best culinary schools in the world, offers a 6 month program. Ferriss’s book compresses that into 48 hours. 

How is this possible?

In rejecting Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, Ferriss says he looks for anomalies — people who are able to master skills in a remarkably short amount of time — and then Ferriss tries to figure out how to replicate these accelerated learners’ methods and results. The aim of Ferriss’s books, therefore, is to create “the step-by-step process that produces results over and over and over again that those people use.”

What’s the Significance?

In the video below, Ferriss says he hopes to replicate his results 20 million times, in order to create a macro trend that will change the way we engage with food. After, all, Ferriss says, we vote three times a day by choosing what to eat. 

“We need to move from a few enormous food suppliers to many smaller food suppliers,” Ferriss argues, “if we really want to have a sustainable, healthy future.”

Watch the video here:

What’s the Significance?

Editor’s Note: If you have trouble viewing the video above, try this one:

Image courtesy of Tim Ferriss

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