I recently read a book called "Life in 4,000 Weeks."
I think it's great and would recommend it to you.
The title of this book is actually a shock bomb:
Assuming you live to be 80, your life is only 4,000 weeks.
This number seems like a lot, but if you think about it carefully, it doesn’t seem that much?
If you are like me:
- I feel anxious every day that I can’t get things done.
- Every day I look for tools that can improve my productivity
- I feel like I live a mediocre life every day
Then you must read this book!
Why do I think 4,000 Weeks is great?
I personally think this is a book that transcends the past and explores our understanding of the concept of time.
There is a sentence in the book that I really like:
"Until you look back at the end of your life, the thing that grabs your attention at every moment is the life you have lived."
This sentence makes me feel even more in this day and age.
View of time as a child vs as an adult
When you were young, you might be more accepting of focusing on something.
But I think it may be that when I was a child, my concept of time
I don’t have as strong an understanding of the concept as I do now when I grow up.
It should be after work,
The scale of time, the whole concept of time or the whole becomes very instrumentally oriented.
So you will feel that you should not waste too much time, and you will want to do a lot of things at once.
This kind of thinking actually makes us lose the ability to enjoy the present moment.
We are always rushing, always thinking about the next thing, but forget the importance of living in the present moment.
Conflicts brought about by technology
Technology accelerates the efficiency of our work.
We may want to keep speeding up all our work and making the entire work more and more efficient.
But paradoxically, when we succeed, we only feel busier and more anxious.
In a way, this is even more frightening.
You may even want to take more time to fill that void when you’re done.
It’s like a never-ending cycle where we keep striving for efficiency, and then more unimportant things are added to the mix.
Are we doing it to live a better life, or to be efficient for the sake of efficiency?
Is relaxing a waste of time?
Sometimes it seems like I'm useless just trying to relax.
You will want to say, wait until a certain point in time, I will do this again!
For example, you often want to say: I will learn to paint after I leave my job? Will I go to Australia when I retire?
You base all your goals and dreams on the future.
But the book hopes that you can pretend that this is the last day of your life,
The point is that today may really be the last day, and you can't rely entirely on some point in the future.
In fact, relaxation and rest are also important parts of life.
In order to live fully in the life you only get one shot at, you must avoid spending all your free time on personal growth.
A few quotes from "4,000 Weeks of Life" that impressed me deeply
I have compiled a few good sentences for everyone to see.
If you feel overwhelmed after reading these wonderful sentences, maybe this book is suitable for you too:
"You are consuming your limited time in an unwanted way."
"The spirit of our times is boring mediocrity"
"We prepare ourselves and our children to become tools and work hard for illusory goals, but in the end nothing is ours."
“You get to fully enjoy the drop in the ocean that you actually have time to experience, and you’re more free to choose to do what’s most important in each moment.”
"In order to live fully in this one-shot life, you must avoid spending all your free time on personal growth."
“When your relationship to time is almost entirely instrumental, the present moment loses its meaning.”
Several action suggestions from the book
When you know time is limited, we have to decide wisely what not to do and then not feel guilty.
So we should carefully choose which things are the most important and which ones can be postponed.
Here are a few points to help you:
1. Invest in yourself first. In the first hour of the day, do your most important projects first.
Stop putting the most important things last.
You may want to do some urgent and trivial things first, so that you will have enough time to do what you want to do later.
"If you don't take some time for yourself, do it now,
You won’t magically do everything at some point in the future and still have a lot of free time on your hands. "
In the first hour of every day, start working on your most important projects.
And protect your time well, book your time in the calendar, and don't let others disturb you.
It’s like the safety instructions on an airplane: take care of yourself first before you can take care of others.
Only when you invest in yourself first will you be able to accomplish other things.
2. Limit work in progress to three things at a time
Have you ever experienced this? I feel like there is a lot to do.
You might as well do it together, put it all on your to-do list, and make yourself super fulfilled.
But it’s actually very easy to jump around and end up not accomplishing anything at all.
I feel very strongly about it, I just love people who are half-hearted!
I want to do everything, but I can’t do anything well XD
There is a method mentioned in it that I find very useful: it is recommended not to do three things at a time.
After selecting, you must complete one of the things 100%, otherwise you cannot add more projects!
(But if you really can’t do something, just give up and add a new project. The point is just don’t put things aside again!)
Really don’t think you are superman! Concentrate on doing one thing well!
3. Resist activities that are of equal or lesser importance
There is a story in the book that asks you to list 25 things that you think are the most important things in life.
You rank them in order from most important to least important and find the 5 most important things.
Then you should try to avoid doing those 20 things at all costs.
Because they are not important enough to make up your life, but they are attractive enough that they may distract you and prevent you from doing important things.
This was also very enlightening for me because I have been so easily distracted in the past.
But it made me think about what I have to say no to and what matters most.
This actually teaches us how to say "no".
We often agree to many things that are actually not that important because we are afraid of missing out on opportunities or fearing offending others.
But if we really want to live a meaningful life, learning to say “no” may be more important than learning to say “yes.”
Purchase link for "4,000 Weeks of Life"
If you like the above content, I really recommend you buy this book and read it.
The purchase link is here:
Finally, what I want to say is that when I first read the title of this book, I was actually very anxious.
I want to say Oh my god! With 4,000 weeks left, I must live a super accomplished and fulfilling life.
But after reading it, I actually found that this book is not intended to make us more anxious.
It is to help us know how to cherish time and how to live a meaningful life.
I hope everyone can find their own rhythm of life!
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I will share my thoughts on this book with you further ~
