Mike Taylor is the head of tech consulting at Every and a co-author of "Prompt Engineering for Generative AI" (O’Reilly).
I Achieved the Four-hour Workweek. So Why Did I Just Take a Job?
After years of self-employment, I went full-time at Every. Here’s why.
Mar 23, 2026 · 8 min readUpdated Jul 7, 2026
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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 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. Isn’t the course making more money than ever (despite what the prompt engineering haters say)? What will it be like having a boss after five years of self-employment and six years building a company before that? 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. Entrepreneurship has arguably gotten harder. Deploying AI within a company that’s already working beats building the fifth version of a product that nobody will use. Plus, you can learn things inside a company that never get shared on X.
Making money the hard way
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.
Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock this piece and learn about:
- How Mike achieved the four-hour work week, but the downsides it came with
- The reason being in the room now beats owning the company
- How AI is making succeeding in entrepreneurship harder
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Meetings aren’t the problem. The challenge is everything that comes after them.
With Granola, the AI Notepad for people with back-to-back meetings, you can avoid context switching, the cognitive load of remembering what you promised… and the stress of knowing something important slipped through.
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