Four Thousand Weeks (book review)

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Likely one of the best books I’ll read this year.

I have soft spots. For movies it’s one last job. For books it’s This is Water.

There’s this thing that everyone talks about but everyone talks about it wrongly. That’s a soft spot.

That’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. According to author Oliver Burkeman, we are doing time management all wrong. We are swimming through water without really knowing what it is.

And water is a good analogy because water, like time, isn’t something we can grasp. It’s something we have to accept. We can scoop water. We can vacuum water. We can pour water – but these are on water’s terms. To paraphrase high school science: water does what water does.

That is also how to think about time. We act like we manage time, “time management”, but only in the same way we manage water: creating spaces for it to be.

You should read this book!

It’s difficult to review for the same reasons productivity feels important. We check things off a list. We progressed. We got-things-done. But are these the right metrics or just the easy ones?

Productivity isn’t the goal. Accomplishment isn’t either. Living. L-I-V-I-N (a similar book) is the goal.

How to live is a messy question relative to How to be productive.

But here’s a tip. An honest-to-goodness fact. This is as close to a guarantee as you’ll ever get.

Spend time with people. Optimize community. Aim for togetherness. Move from ‘me’ to unity. Move from ego to love. Less get more done, and more to-get-her.

Be that way. That’s a productivity hack.

The Algebra of Wealth (isn’t really about money)

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“The whole shooting match,” Scott Galloway ends his book, The Algebra of Wealth, “Everything meaningful in life is about others.”

It’s not a great personal finance book. It felt like Galloway looked at his bookshelf, categorized the books he’s read into sections, found some news and research, and put it together.

But it’s an interesting personal finance book.

It’s interesting because Galloway is a brand. It’s a flavor I don’t care for, without nudging from J.F., I never would have read this book. Even then, I didn’t love it. Until that last line when it all came together.

We get personal finance wrong. We think of it as a thing people do, a distinct part of their life. We have the marriage part. We have the work part. We have the parenting/childhood parts. We have all these buckets, but they aren’t buckets. These are not different parts. It’s one life.

Any message (like your choice of personal finance) is like an organ transplant. The organ might be good (advice), but if the receiver rejects it, it doesn’t matter how healthy it is. There has to be a match.

This is why personal finance is full of gurus. Scott, Dave, Suze, Ramit, don’t persuade. They select. It’s a sampling effect. Ramit’s book: I Will Teach You To Be Rich brings in people willing to hear the message. Scott’s book brings in people familiar with his schtick.

And this is what Galloway gets so right. It’s not about money, it’s about the meaning and, “everything meaningful in life is about others.” That’s the seed to a successful transplant.

We miss this in our message. Maybe the medium isn’t the message. Maybe the meaning is the message. What does this mean to us? To our tribe? To my history?

People want meaning. They find it thru gurus.

It’s not the weather

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Growing up, my dad took my brother and I duck hunting. The worst the weather for humans, goes the rule of thumb, the better the conditions for ducks. So, we grew up, sitting in cold, windy, wet marshes around northern Ohio and southern Michigan. It was miserable.

It was miserable, for me. My brother actually liked it a lot, and we think it’s because of the clothes.

When I was young and out with my dad, it was a lot of cotton and some wool. When my brother started there was Gore-Tex, Under Armour, dry fit, and a whole list of synthetic fabrics that repelled water, retained warmth, and didn’t cost too much.

We came to joke in our family, it’s not bad weather, it’s the wrong clothes. 

Now I’m the parent, not duck hunting, but travel volleyball, and we spend a lot of time in the car. Car time can be a little aggravating. 

But isn’t it a little like the weather?

The problem isn’t the traffic and other drivers the problem is me. Both weather and traffic are out of my control, and both have solutions in my control.

And unlike my youth, driving is nice. There are podcasts and audiobooks. They are comfortable chairs with heated lumbar supports. There’s adaptive cruise control. A lot to be grateful for!

Pause more. Be grateful. Don’t focus on the uncontrollable, be creative, and find things you can do. It’s not the bad __________, it’s the wrong ________.

Wheaton Scales

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In 2010, Paul Wheaton created the Wheaton Eco Scale. He begins by noting our perceptions of other people. Those one or two steps ahead in a similar FESPE (financial, ecologic, spiritual, personal, etc.) journey look “pretty cool”. Those four or five steps “downright crazy”. While, “one level back are ignorant and two levels back are assholes”.

We’re all on our own journeys, coming across shamans, oracles, and gurus at different times. Part of this is why there are no bad books.

The importance of Wheaton Scales hit home during two successive days. First, reading the philosophy/finance forum of Early Retirement Extreme. Commenters noted how communicating about FIRE is such a challenge. Part (maybe most!) of the burden comes down to talking to someone in their language. It’s not about all the things I know so much as it’s about all the things they’ll understand.

Second, sitting in church and listening to the pastor talk about debates, agreements, and conversations among theologians. I know who he’s not talking to – me! He’s talking to the two guys who fact check, give feedback, and have studied the Bible for years.

Wheaton Scales snuggle up nicely in our mental models, like a pet on a cold afternoon, because they match JTBD. The aim of Jobs is moving from supplier language (how I see the world) to demand language (how other people see it). Wheaton gives a model for thinking through that.

And scales like this are nice. And helpful. It’s better to be mostly right than precisely wrong.

Reliable means redundant

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Practical engineering presented this video about the Hawaiian islands power grid. Like a lot of questions of the form: Why can’t we just… the answer is, it’s complicated.

Host Grady Hillhouse offers a new definition that helps to frame the issue (Words matter!).

Instead of talking about reliable power, talk about redundant power. If we frame things this way it sounds a lot better, and things that sound good are perceived as more true. Redundant power needs a rebranding. Rather than think about waste, the people of Hawaii can think of it as reliable.

3 Steps for Life

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Step 1: Pause

Pause in life. Stop. Take a moment. Life is busy, fast, cluttered, and chaotic. Life is Mario Kart at 1,000 cc. Think about it all. Relationships. Work. Hobbies. Books to read and podcasts to listen to. Points of friction. Surprises good and bad.

We have to pause. We’re uncoupled from reality. We yell at our spouse when it’s the person we love the most. We chase investment gains contrary to our investing plan. We get off-track on projects by being on-line.

Take a breath (or sigh). Sit in a church. Meditate.

Step 2: Accept

We must accept the world as it is. You must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. No wish casting. No re-roll requests.

Who made you manager of the universe? Don’t think about control. Instead, accept and orient. You’re lost. We all are, only to different degrees at different times.

Step 3: Hope

This requires faith in the connection between past and present. Stocks go up over time, stocks are down now, but stocks will rise again. Consider your myopia, and find your glasses.

Hope is crucial because without hope we have no action. Enter a game you can’t win – how hard are you going to try? Instead, think about the rules of the game, the past turns, how others have played. Did someone win? Did someone not lose? There’s hope: the connection of past to future that leads to action.

It’s a feature, not a bug. Book edition.

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I have long advocated for the efficiency of podcasts. This blog has been published for over 10 years on that very idea. The seed was that idea.

But I might have been wrong.

Much of early podcasting, was authors talking about their book. For years, and it might still be so, Podcast interviews with the best driver of book sales.

The friendly medium to authors, combined with most books having a limited set of ideas, made podcast interviews feel like a thorough and efficient summary.

Lately though, I’ve been listening rather than reading books. Dog walks. Drives to school and volleyball tournaments. House projects, and cleaning.

Audiobooks are a different experience from reading. Narrators offer inflection. Following along, takes more focus, especially for visual people like me. And it’s more difficult to skip around, accelerate, or change the cadence.

So when I listen to books, I spend more time in them. It’s six hours, eight hours, even 14 hours or so.

And that time might be the point!

Baking a cake at 700° doesn’t make the cake cook twice as fast. And the same might go for this. The key factor might not be the information, it’s in a podcast summary, it might be the time thinking about those ideas.

There’s no single best book to read, and there are no bad books. And there’s no bad form of learning. But if you’re like me, and you’ve discounted the time books take, let’s be good busy together, and update our ideas about reading. 

Would you buy a ski chalet? 

MIKE6 Comments

How much money do you need? Make sure it’s at least at least one million. Now, double your number (I will move the goal posts for you). If it’s not at least $20 million, raise your number to that.

Would you buy a ski chalet?

A form of this question regularly rises on a sub-Reddit. 

Business sellers (occasionally it’s sunny stock situations) come into a large amount of money and ask strangers on the internet: *How do I…*. What a time to be alive! Bags of money bring baggage. So, would you buy a ski chalet?

On Reddit answer is no.

And it’s not even close. 

Potential purchasers make three assumptions that posters point out. First, that they will always enjoy skiing and the attractions of a single place. This is unlikely. Retired wealthy Redditors reply that they want to travel more and wider, now that they have more time. That they might get injured while skiing, which takes the shine off. Or their children, who they now want to spend more time with, will lose interest or get injured.

Second, ski chalet’s are in mountains, and mountains are not the most accessible places. It’s probably a plane ride, a rental car, and maybe even connecting flights. The sweet spot, per the commenters, is two hours. Vacation places within two hours get used and enjoyed. It’s logarithmic.

Third, vacation homes away from home are inconvenient to manage. Imagine spending a large amount-though you can afford it and then paying someone the lowest price to keep an eye on it. This is not a recipe for success.

Ultimately, the advice breaks down to three points: do things you enjoy, with people you love, and not too much stress. This is the main point of the story.

And this advice supplies to people who are not in the market for a ski chalet. One of the maxims for thinking analytically, is to take things to an extreme case. If we had all the money we thought we ever needed, How should we spend it? This is an actual question being answered by people who answered correctly and incorrectly.

Do things you enjoy, with people you like, and not too much stress.

It’s not the price of the ski chalet that’s the problem, is that it doesn’t fit with this advice.

Teaching in Verbs rather than Nouns

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There are two ways to teach chess, a master explained.

The first, is to teach chess principles that may apply to life. And the second, is to teach life principles that definitely apply to chess. 

“Could you give me an example of one such principle? Because I love in biology teaching not names, not using nouns, but instead teaching verbs. Because ultimately, if you want to understand, for instance, how the nervous system works, or the immune system, you teach the verb actions of molecules.

And the names of the molecules are important if you decide to go into that field professionally. But otherwise, the principles and verbs are what’s most important. So what’s an example of a principle of chess or a mode of action on the board that you think transfers?”

Yet we teach with nouns and employ nouns because nouns have a lower cost, even though they may not be the right tool for the job.

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From Huberman Lab: Josh Waitzkin: The Art of Learning & Living Life, Jan 27, 2025
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/josh-waitzkin-the-art-of-learning-living-life/id1545953110?i=1000685629066&r=5936
This material may be protected by copyright.

Circle of control

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This is Jared Dillian taking a brief detour in a post about Resentment.

I want to take a brief detour here and talk about how unproductive it is to try to control the entire universe with our minds. We worry about bad things happening, thinking that if we worry hard enough, that if we pray for a bad outcome, then it won’t happen. We resent other people, thinking that if we resent them hard enough, they’ll change and we will get what we want. Virtually all forms of non-heritable mental illness come from a desire to control other people and our surroundings. Virtually all forms of non-heritable mental illness come from an inability to accept other people and the world as they are. You can’t control your kid dropping out of college. You can’t control your husband letting out a loud fart when he gets out of bed in the morning. You can’t control the county when they hand you a property tax increase. You can’t control the airport that just rerouted flight patterns over your house. You can’t control who becomes president. The number of things you actually can control is shockingly small. You take the action, and you leave the results up to somebody else. That’s how this game works. Read this paragraph a few times. If you understand it and internalize it, you will never need a therapist again

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Mike again, I just love that framing, control the entire universe with our minds. Right out of Maxims for Thinking Analytically.