There are only a handful of books worth rereading.

We tend to gravitate toward the same books that teach us things we haven't yet mastered.

For me, that has been the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

I’ve been reading this once a year, every year, for the last four years. It’s a philosophy, anti-self-help book that helps me make wiser decisions on how to spend the 4,000 weeks we have on earth.

Usually that means doing fewer things, being less efficient, and lowering my expectations. All the things that you wouldn't expect from a typical "self-help" book.

I’m rereading it on my solo retreat, and I've included my biggest takeaways in bullet points below.

Accept Your Limitations

• The blunt truth is that we cannot do everything, have everything, and solve all the problems in the world.
• No matter how many productivity hacks we employ, being efficient is actually a trap because we’ll always move this goalpost, keeping us in a state of never doing enough.
• Instead, a happier and more fulfilling life is when we accept our limitations.

“You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.”

• Even if we live forever and we could do EVERYTHING, it would all be meaningless. The things we choose to do are meaningful BECAUSE we will have a limited time on earth. So we must choose what is most valuable to us.

“It is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything.”

• There’s freedom in commitment. When people finally do choose what they want, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result.

“When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there’s only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice.”

Letting go control of the future

• We live our lives full of stress and anxiety because we are trying too hard to control the future. But no matter how much control we get, this feeling will never be thoroughly quenched.

“We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is–all it could ever possibly be–is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.”

• A more resilient way to approach life is to be accepting of whatever life gives you–good and bad.

“A life spent ‘not minding what happens’’ is one lived without the inner demand to know that the future will confirm to your desires for it–and thus without having to be constantly on edge as you wait to discover whether or not things will unfold as expected.”

Be present where you are now

• The “when X happens, then I'll be happy / calm / successful” trap is alive and well. But this kind of thinking removes us from being present.

An unfortunate truth: “the more you focus on using time well, the more each day begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually arrives.”

• You’ll never be fulfilled because you’re treating the present solely as a path to some superior future state–and so the present moment won’t ever feel satisfying in itself

“As long as you believe that the real meaning of life lies somewhere off in the future–that one day all your efforts will pay off in a golden era of happiness, free of all problems–you get to avoid facing the unpalatable reality that your life isn’t leading toward some moment of truth that hasn’t yet arrived. Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now–that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order. And that therefore you had better stop postponing the ‘real meaning’ of your existence into the future, and throw yourself into life now. “

Slow the f*ck down

• We cannot expect the world to move at our desired speed. It’s out of your control.
• Good things take time - we must develop the superpower of being patient and letting things take the time they need to get done, instead of enforcing our own timeline to everything to feel like we have control (in reality, we don’t).
• We have an addiction to speed. Or a modern disease of accelerated living.

“We grow anxious about not keeping up–so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are under control, we move faster. But this only generates an addictive spiral. We push ourselves harder to get rid of anxiety but the result is actually more anxiety, because the faster we go, the closer it becomes that we’ll never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as we feel is necessary.”

“Speed addiction tends to be socially celebrated. Your friends are more likely to praise you for being 'driven.'”

“When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed.”

“We're made so uneasy by the experience of allowing reality to unfold at its own speed that when we’re faced with a problem, it feels better to race toward a resolution–any resolution, really, so long as we can tell ourselves we’re ‘dealing with’ the situation,' thereby maintaining the feeling of being in control.”

Three Ways to Develop Patience

#1 - Develop a taste for having problems

“Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires–that the presense of problems in your life, in other words, isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one.”

#2 - Embrace radical incrementalism

• Focus on just improving 1% each day, not massively transforming your life or projects over a weekend. It’s more sustainable and effective to be consistent than to sprint and burn out.
• One way to do this is to stop working when your daily time is up, even when you’re bursting with energy and feel like you can get more done.

“Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career.”

#3 - Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality

• Don’t quit too soon–stay on the f*cking bus.

“To experience the profound mutual understanding of the long-married couple, you have to stay married to one person; to know what it’s like to be deeply rooted in a particular community and place, you have to stop moving around. Those are the kinds of meaningful and singular accomplishments that just take the time they take.”

Fall into the shared rhythms of community

• Having complete control of your time sounds like a dream. But the freedom of a digital nomad falls out of sync with the shared rhythms required for deep relationships to take root.

“The value of time comes not from the sheer quantity you have, but from whether you’re in sync with the people you care about most.”

“We get to decide whether to collaborate with the ethos of individual time soverignty or to resist it. You can push your life a little further in the direction of the second, communal sort of freedom. For one thing, you can make the kind of commitments that remove flexibility from your schedule in exchange for the rewards of communities…you can experiment with what it feels like to not try to exert an iron grip on your timetable: to sometimes let the rhythms of family life and friendships and collective action take precedence over your perfect morning routine or your system for scheduling your week. You can grasp the trust that power over your time isn’t something best hoarded entirely for yourself: that your time can be too much your own.”

Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

• What you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much–and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.

“To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place.”

“It’s the feeling of realizing that you’d been holding yourself, all this time, to standards you couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet. And this realization isn’t merely calming but liberating because once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a ‘life well spent’, you’re freed to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. You’re freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you’re already doing with it are more meaningful that you’d supposed–and that until now, you’d subconsciously been devaluing them, on the grounds that they weren’t ‘significant’ enough.”

5 Questions to Ponder

1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
3. 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?
4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

10 Tools for Embracing Your Finitude

#1 - Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity

• Don’t try to get everything done. Prioritize the three most important tasks and don’t do anything else until you’ve completed them.
• Another strategy is to set time boundaries for your work like not working past 5:30pm no matter what.

#2 - Serialize, serialize, serialize

• Focus on one big project at a time (or at most, one work project and one nonwork project) and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next.

#3 - Decide in advance what to fail at

• Instead of trying to be perfect and balanced at everything you do, accept that you’ll suck at baking or golf or whatever it is.
• You can even fail at things on a cyclical basis: like letting your fitness goals temporarily lapse while you apply yourself to election canvassing. Then after that’s done, get your fitness back in order.
• This way, you've removed the expectations that you need to have everything in order. And just accept that you'll underachieve, which will liberate you to fully lean into your strengths.

#4 - Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete

• Be proud of all the things you’ve already done. Celebrate the wins, even if they’re small.
• Really celebrate. After a hard workout, I literally give myself a pat on the back and say, "Good job, Tam."

#5 - Consolidate your caring

• You can’t care equally about all the world’s pressing problems. Consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics. Not because you don’t care about other issues. But because you understand that to make a difference, you must focus your finite capacity for care.

#6 - Embrace boring and single-purpose technology

• Choose devices with only one purpose like the Kindle e-reader to just read books. It’s a lot better to resist checking social media when the first twinge of boredom or difficulty arises.

#7 - Seek out novelty in the mundane

• 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.

#8 - Be a “researcher” in relationships

• Adopt an attitude of curiosity towards other people. In more casual words, let's “figure out who this human being is that we’re with.”
• Using the same attitude, you can also choose curiosity about the future, wondering what might happen next over worrying or hoping that a certain specific thing will happen next.

#9 - Cultivate instantaneous generosity

• Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind–to give money, check in on a friend, or send an email praising someone’s work–act on the impulse right away.

#10 - Practice doing nothing

• “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”
• If you can’t bear the discomfort of not acting, you’re far more likely to make poor choices with your time, simply to feel like you’re acting. So training yourself to do nothing really means training yourself to resist the urge to manipulate your experience or the people and things in the world around you–to let things be as they are.

Thanks for reading. Let me know your thoughts when you DM me @mrtampham.