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What Are Your Thoughts on the Book, "Four Thousand Weeks"?


Chapters

0:0 Cal's intro
0:10 Cal answers a question about #FourThousandWeeks by Oliver Burkman
0:31 Cal read it and told Tim Ferriss about it
0:44 Premise of book
1:35 Choose a few things that matter

Transcript

All right, I think we have time for one more quick question. Richie asks, "Have you read 4000 Weeks Time Management for Immortals by Oliver Berkman? If so, what are your thoughts?" Yes, Richie, I've read it. I blurbed it. Now look at the back of the cover. There's no one read the blurbs anymore.

I gave it a nice quote. I then told Tim Ferriss about it, and Tim read it on my recommendation, and he actually excerpted the whole first chapter and played it on his podcast, and wrote a blog post about it. So I've been trying to do what I can to spread the word.

I like 4000 Weeks a lot. I think it's a great book. And the premise of the book is we have 4000 weeks, roughly speaking, to live. You can't do all the things you think you want to do. So having a value-based system of productivity in which I got to nail all these different things done, and that's where I'm going to get my self-worth, through the quantity of high-end accomplishment, is a sucker's game because you can't do all those things.

All right, so what next? And that's the question that Oliver addresses. Once you realize, when you're his age or my age or Jesse's age or all roughly the same age, that, like, "Okay, well, I'm not going to do this, and I ran out of time to do this, and if this was going to happen in my life, I already would have had to have been on the road to this about 15 years ago.

So what next?" And that's the question that he tackles. And I think it's a really big question. Most things you can't do. You've got to choose a few that matter and do them and enjoy them and go along for the ride and be resilient when that ride doesn't go exactly where you think it would be, and course-correct when you can, but also recognize that, you know, maybe this vision you had is not going to quite be that vision and still be able to enjoy the wonder and grace of life nonetheless.

And I think that was the message Oliver was making, and it's a message that a lot of people were ready to hear, especially in this post-pandemic moment where everyone got disrupted and are asking these questions about, "What is the deep life? What do I actually want to do?" So it was a perfectly timed book.

It did very well. If you have not read it, check it out. 4,000 weeks. And if you want to hear the first chapter, look at Tim Ferriss's podcast from last month, I believe, and you can actually hear the whole first chapter online.