books!
Four Thousand Weeks and more…
I have just finished reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, and I’m so happy this book found me. It was a truly excellent read.
My first recommendation is that you stop reading this post immediately and go get yourself a copy of Four Thousand Weeks! I cannot convey the same wisdoms to you with my own words nearly as well as Burkeman does, but if you are not ready to commit to the whole book, what follows will be my review-ish of the book… or at least a few of my favorite topics and many quotes. 😊
Four Thousand Weeks
The way Oliver Burkeman approaches time, the finitude of humans (our short lifespans and limited capability), our mindset and awareness of the world and our existence, and many common, overwhelming problems we face today was totally refreshing and revelatory for me.
This book goes far beyond time management, and it is not a “productivity hack” book. It’s really a book about life and humanity.
Now for some quotes and summaries straight from Four Thousand Weeks…
Five questions Burkeman asks:
Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
“Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?”
-James Hollis
In one section I loved, Burkeman wrote about how we are all just winging it, to the best of our ability, pretty much all the time. This is good news because it lets us unstick ourselves from the trap of treating our lives as dress rehearsals, waiting until we think we’re ready, qualified, or know what we’re doing — and instead of using this fear as justification for further stalling on things like parenting or doing our life’s most important work and enjoyment, we can just begin. As Burkeman puts it, “if the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all — to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution. It is even more liberating to reflect that everyone else is in the same boat, whether they’re aware of it or not.”
Regarding bringing meaning and awareness to our lives, in response to the ever-speeding up of time as we get older and everything starts to get routine and repetitious day after day and year after year… “An alternative, Shinzen Young explains, is to pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have. Experience life with twice the usual intensity, and ‘your experience of life would be twice as full as it currently is’ — and any period of life would be remembered as having lasted twice as long.”
…everyday magic!
Wonder is always better than worry.
Burkeman suggests “choosing curiosity (wondering what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a certain specific thing will happen next, and fearing it might not) whenever you can.”
A quote Burkeman used from Carl Jung…
“Your questions are unanswerable, because you want to know how to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way… If that’s what you want, you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what.” By contrast, the individual path “is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other.” Jung recommended “quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So longa s you think you don’t yet know what that is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.”
-Carl Jung
On attention:
“What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.”
-Oliver Burkeman
“Attention, on the other hand, just is your life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life.”
-Oliver Burkeman
“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
-Mary Oliver
“Life is a succession of transient experiences, valuable in themselves, which you’ll miss if you’re completely focused on the destination to which you hope they might be leading.”
-Oliver Burkeman
On time and our measuring of it:
"Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger, it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire."
-Jorge Luis Borges
“The second-order change has occurred: now that you’ve abandoned your futile efforts to dictate the speed at which the experience moves, the real experience can begin.”
-Oliver Burkeman
“Results aren’t everything. Indeed, they’d better not be, because results always come later — and later is always too late.”
-Oliver Burkeman
I hope you will dive into this book! So great!
As for my other reading recently/currently:
I just finished The Bodyguard by Katherine Center, a delightful contemporary adult novel which I devoured in three sittings! Katherine Center is my favorite fiction author (tied with J.K. Rowling!), and her website describes her books as “bittersweet comedies about getting back up.” Totally recommend The Bodyguard — and all her others — for a jolt of joy, fun, light, romance, hope, and wisdom.
I am also in the middle of two Seth Godin books: The Practice and Linchpin. Both excellent.
*see below
I am returning to The Practice now and will probably be finishing that next; I had just taken a break to read Four Thousand Weeks. The Practice is about doing the work you’re meant to, devotedly and continually, regardless of reassurance, and engaging in the courageous and generous act of sharing it with others. (It actually pairs quite nicely with Four Thousand Weeks!)
Linchpin is about becoming indispensable at work and how we can be the kind of people we’re capable of being, making our best contribution. This one got put on hold because I was listening to a library audiobook of it that had to be returned just as I was halfway through… I’m on the waitlist, and as soon as I get it back from the library I’ll be finishing this as well!
Two phenomenal reads, and I am grateful for all the ways Seth Godin’s work inspires me, opens my mind, and helps my life and creative work.
*This last photo is a note from my Dad, inside the cover of The Practice, which he gave to me. He wrote, “Bri, I’m always amazed at the new ways you find to output your creativity. I hope this book is useful. Dad” ❤️ It definitely is useful, and I re-found this note and this book just when I needed it!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this Book Blog with Bri 😎 I love reading! Send any book recs on the Connect page! Stay tuned, I’m sure more will be coming in the future…
Lots of love, ❤️📚
