I'd read about Tim Ferriss on the internets and picked up his book yesterday. I've read about 1/3 of it and actually its pretty good. The stuff about outsourcing your life is probably not for me at the moment but the core truths that we make give ourselves 'busywork' and that there are much more efficient ways to work is right. I'm checking into the internet mostly once a day instead of being on the internet for hours and hours and really my life is better. And I'm checking in mostly to get info about how my friends are getting on back home. And the other core is making money automatically instead of trading time for it. Something I'll have to thinkabout a bit more but definately a path I want to go down. As for his idea of mini- retirements I'm all for it !  I mention the book because one of the biggest stumbling blocks to being creative is the work we do for money. Not that itself is normally the problem but that we turn it into the 'problem'. If only I didn't have to do X then I could paint/write that play/become a poet. The reality is that the work is our hiding place, our excuse so we don't have to face our fears. 'What if I'm not really creative at all' 'What if I'm just kidding myself?'What if I do what I want to do and people hate me' instead of dealing with these fears the core problem we say that work is our problem. Its not  - its our crutch in many ways.