Besides having one of my favorite book covers in recent memory, this book goes deep into the lives of 250 of America’s wealthiest people, detailing their book collections, weird hobbies, time in jail, philanthropic efforts, and more. More in-depth and wide-ranging than any mere podcast! (Buy on Amazon)
📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
The main book recommendation I have for you tonight is Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman, which is just a…spectacular book that made me think completely differently about time and how to spend it.
One of the main arguments he makes in the book is that there will always be more to do, you’ll never get it all done, and even the very act of trying to get it all done is just making things worse.
The (little bit disheartening) part is that, the shortness of human life being what it is, “time management” means not only saying no to things that you don’t want to do, it’s also going to mean saying no to plenty of things that you would love to do.
With so much in the world to see, do, discover…to read…you’re literally never going to have time to “fit it all in,” but Oliver’s brilliant observation is that, when you let go of the idea that you even could fit it all in…life feels lighter.
You start to relax a little bit, breathe a little easier, and give greater attention and focus to what you have chosen.
I just loved Four Thousand Weeks so much, and below I want to share 15 of my favorite quotes and takeaways, my full summary, and a list of other books you might enjoy as well.
And in case you missed it, here are 10 more great books for your TBR.
Now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!
1. This is the book that got me fascinated about space, and going out and exploring the whole galaxy: Cosmos, by Carl Sagan
2. Quite possibly the best productivity book I’ve ever read: Eat That Frog!, by Brian Tracy
3. Definitely the best book on winning arguments that I’ve ever read: Thank You for Arguing, by Jay Heinrichs
4. An astonishing, classic book by a Holocaust survivor about persevering through anything: Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl
5. An intricately plotted and erudite murder-mystery, full of libraries and books and secrets: The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
6. A gripping spy novel that can be enjoyed on multiple (metaphysical) levels: The Man Who Was Thursday, by G. K. Chesterton
7. This is a daily reader, gathering the best ideas and takeaways from Robert Greene’s books: The Daily Laws, by Robert Greene
8. The gold standard when it comes to books on networking: Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi
9. This book made me so much money it’s stupid: The Ultimate Sales Machine, by Chet Holmes
10. A great book about getting what you want in life by cashing in on your unfair advantages: The Unfair Advantage, by Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba
Every recommendation here is from my Reading List, which lists every single book I’ve read cover-to-cover since 2014, separated by year. For my complete notes and summaries of each book, click here. Happy reading!
“Your ability to concentrate is only as strong as your commitment to train it.”
“The best asset we have for making a contribution to the world is ourselves. If we underinvest in ourselves, and by that, I mean our minds, our bodies, and our spirits, we damage the very tool we need to make our highest contribution."
Inside my private business mastermind, Wealth Creators, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.
This month’s book is Essentialism, by Greg McKeown, a fantastic book about identifying those very few things (in life and work) that are actually worth pursuing, and dropping literally everything else.
Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational entrepreneurs!
John Ulsh is easily one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting, and his book is awesome. It’s the story of the horrible car accident that nearly claimed the lives of his entire family, his (and their) recovery process, and how he came back stronger than ever. More importantly, it’s about how YOU can come back stronger than ever too. No matter what you’ve faced in the past or what you’re facing now. (Buy on Amazon)
Alex & Books: My friend Alex writes a wonderful newsletter where he shares a new summary of an awesome book every week. Sign up to his newsletter and receive a list of 100 of his favorite books!
Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn: My friend Ravi is one of the best, most well-read, and genuinely intellectually curious book reviewers on the internet. Sign up to his newsletter for impactful lessons from his favorite books, inspiring passages, reading tips, and more.
The Spark: My friend Jay is an absolute force of nature, and easily one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met. Sign up to his newsletter for timeless ideas on strategy and life.
After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,511 books, including 57 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
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“The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.
Here’s one way of putting things in perspective: the first modern humans appeared on the plains of Africa at least 200,000 years ago, and scientists estimate that life, in some form, will persist for another 1.5 billion years or more, until the intensifying heat of the sun condemns the last organism to death.
But you? Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.”
Adam Grant said that this is the most important book ever written about time management, and I’m certainly inclined to agree!
Burkeman’s approach has always been the “negative” one, by which I mean operating by negation – eliminating rather than adding.
For example, his “negative” approach to happiness outlined in his earlier book, The Antidote, meant embracing suffering, and doing things that are challenging, instead of running from them - which would have, paradoxically, led to more suffering over time.
That book basically dealt with the famous question: “Do you want an easy life? Or the strength to endure a difficult one?” If you’re wise, you’ll take the strength every time!
And here in Four Thousand Weeks, where time management is concerned, he counsels giving up the idea of ever getting everything done.
He says that you’re never going to get to a point where you feel like you’re totally on top of everything; and the very effort is wearing us out, stressing us out, and leading us to waste our absurdly, terrifyingly short lives on trivia and nonsense.
The amazing news he’s delivering is that you’re never going to get everything done!
Productivity is a trap, because the faster you complete the work assigned to you, the faster more work is going to be assigned to you.
There’s always something else that could be done, but if, instead, we embrace our mortality and our limited timescales, we can make the absolute most of the time we do have, and emerge with a life that’s both truly meaningful, and truly our own.
Everything You Need to Read Smarter and Grow Faster is Inside:
*Exclusive Access to 150+ Premium Book Breakdowns
*My Detailed Study Notes from 1,500+ Books
*Personalized Book Recommendations from Me
*Three (3) Free Downloadable Published Books
*Early Access to New Courses and Book Content
*And a Lot More (With New Content Added All the Time)
“The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”
“We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.”
“I started pestering my friends, asking them to guess – off the top of their heads, without doing any mental arithmetic – how many weeks they thought the average person could expect to live.
One named a number in the six figures. Yet, as I felt obliged to inform her, a fairly modest six-figure number of weeks – 310,000 – is the approximate duration of all human civilization since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia.
On almost any meaningful timescale, as the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel has written, ‘we will all be dead any minute.’”
“It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up. As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige.
Which is clearly completely absurd: for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much.”
“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.
Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved ‘work-life balance,’ whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the ‘six things successful people do before 7:00am.’
The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control – when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.
Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news.”
“Most of us spend a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves.”
The Paradox of Limitation:
“The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets.
But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead – and work with them, rather than against them – the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.
I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we’re even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.”
“The more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time.”
“Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem.
Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experience you actually do have time for – and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.”
“I’m already who I am and where I am, which determines what possibilities are open to me. But it’s also radically limited in a forward-looking sense, too, not least because a decision to do any given thing will automatically mean sacrificing an infinite number of potential alternative paths.
As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life – but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever.”
“If you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get – you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time.”
“I don’t want to live on forever in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”
“So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.”
“It’s precisely the fact that I could have chosen a different and perhaps equally valuable way to spend this afternoon that bestows meaning on the choice I did make. And the same applies, of course, to an entire lifetime.”
“Experience life with twice the usual intensity, and your experience of life will be twice as full as it currently is.”
Everything You Need to Read Smarter and Grow Faster is Inside:
*Exclusive Access to 150+ Premium Book Breakdowns
*My Detailed Study Notes from 1,500+ Books
*Personalized Book Recommendations from Me
*Three (3) Free Downloadable Published Books
*Early Access to New Courses and Book Content
*And a Lot More (With New Content Added All the Time)
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OK, that’s it for now…
I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
There’s also my YouTube channel, where I publish book reviews, reading updates, and more each week.
And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 200,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and my profits in 2026, join us inside Wealth Creators and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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