⏳ How to Master a Language in 4000 Weeks

Hey Reader,

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by your to-do list? Or too busy for the non-urgent projects most important to you?

If your answer to either of these questions is yes, you might have a toxic relationship with time.

Nurturing your relationship with time can change those answers. It can make you a better learner, creator, and traveler, too. All you have to do is forget everything you've been told about efficiency, productivity, and time management.

That's no small task. But you can give yourself a headstart with Oliver Burkeman's eye-opening book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

Consider some of Burkeman's contrarian takes:

Missing out gives your life choices more meaning
Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed
Conventional time management kills your productivity
Convenience is rarely the most valuable thing to consider
Productivity is a capitalist trap that incentivizes you to trade the present for future use

In Burkeman's point of view, effective time management isn't about getting a million things done in the least amount of time. It's about making peace with your limits, focusing on meaningful action, and forgetting how long it'll take.

Whether you're an overcommitted hyper-consumer stuck in the rat race or a self-employed, nomadic minimalist that optimizes for freedom, this book will challenge your beliefs on time and productivity. I know because I've been both.

So if you think your relationship with time is preventing you from living a meaningful life, add this book to your reading list.

In the meantime, here are 5 of my main takeaways, plus a bunch of ways that you can incorporate them today:

🧘🏻‍♀️ mindfulness

Pay Better Attention

"Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention."

– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

If productivity is a capitalist trap, then attention is its currency. Pay better attention and you won't fall victim to the trap.

That's simple enough. But it's not easy.

Every habit serves a purpose. Even the bad ones. And according to Burkeman, the reason you allow distractions to steal your attention away is that they relieve the discomfort of confronting your limited time (i.e. your mortality).

If you think about the beach at work, you'll think about work when you're at the beach 🏖️

That might sound great (ignorance is bliss, right?), but it's bad news if you value learning, travel, or creativity.

Think of the traveler who spends an hour capturing the perfect sunset photo to post later but misses the moment they daydreamed about for months. Or the language learner waiting for their turn to speak instead of noticing the nuance of a native speaker's pronunciation.

My best students, on the other hand, have one thing in common: They work hard to become world-class noticers.

They focus on the task and pay close attention when they read books, listen to podcasts, watch YouTube, and attend business meetings. That's why they pick up new vocabulary and pronunciation every week.

Paying attention can be exhausting, so it's important to remember that you can't notice everything. But you'll never capture anything if you're always distracted. Identify the things that mean the most to you and pay close attention to them.

🐢 slow growth

Harness the Power of Patience

"As you dive into life as it really is, in clear-eyed awareness of your limitations, you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience."

– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

If you can pay better attention and stop time-traveling out of the present, you start to benefit from the power of patience.

If that doesn't convince you, perhaps this paradox will: The faster you try to do something, the longer it takes. This is why slow growth is the best. It's the speed that all meaningful practices demand.

Harvard Professor Jennifer Roberts hammers this lesson into her students' heads in their first art history assignment: Choose a work of art at a local museum and look at it for three hours straight.

Why three hours? Because it gives them permission to reject their previous programming and exercise the presence and patience that a work of art demands.

Some language schools guarantee fluency in three months, but their promise is counterproductive and misses the point.

Language is a practice, like yoga, jiu-jitsu, or meditation.

So unless you're Neo in The Matrix, it will be a lifelong pursuit. The only way to persevere is to harness the power of patience.

Here are a few ways to develop that power:

Re-read a book you loved and go deeper
Set limits and stop when your daily time is up
Binge a series in your target language with no subtitles

I promise it's not that bad once you get used to it. Give it a try. 🍿

🏗️ habit design

Reject Convenience Culture

"Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results."

– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Convenience is the enemy of patience.

It makes things easy, and easy is addictive. Less effort means more time for more stuff, or so it seems.

In reality, it's a slippery slope. There's always more low-hanging fruit to pick. And if you're not careful, convenience will dominate your decision-making and prevent you from pursuing the out-of-reach stuff that fills your life with meaning.

Dyson One Step Closer to Creating Paradise Where Humans are Catered to by Robots, as Predicted in 'Wall-E' — The consequence of over-optimizing for convenience for centuries in Pixar's *WALL-E*

Language learning, for example, is very inconvenient. It's a painful process that requires a lot of patience, failure, and uncertainty. But for those who choose to reject convenience and its paths of least resistance, the rewards are huge.

Here are three ways to avoid the convenience trap:

Make it easy to start, but challenging to finish
Design a daily practice out of your comfort zone
Start associating inconvenience with higher meaning

🥋 self-mastery

Surrender the Craving for Control

"We have to give up. You surrender to the reality that things just take the time they take, and that you can’t quiet your anxieties by working faster, because it isn’t within your power to force reality’s pace as much as you feel you need to, and because the faster you go, the faster you’ll feel you need to go."

– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Here's a spoiler alert from the book: The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control.

Not only is that true but the more you try to control everything, the more you'll get in your own way. You'll stress out over "using time well" and compulsively manage your time to hang on to the illusion that you're in control.

The solution is simple: Surrender.

The Germans have a concept called eigenzeit, which roughly means "the time inherent to a process itself." In other words, things take the time that they take, so you should surrender to the process and accept the fact that there's little you can do about it.

So how can you apply this to language learning?

Enjoy the plateau and surrender to the process
Forget what others think: Accents are signs of courage
Lean into the mystery of language and mastery will follow

🚫 minimalism

Commit to the Joy of Missing Out

"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."

– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

FOMO (i.e. the fear of missing out) makes overwhelm and busyness look like the most desirable things in life. But until you accept 'missing out' as a necessary part of life, it will only make you delay the decisions that give life meaning.

It doesn't matter if your FOMO is caused by workaholism or hedonism, either. The treadmill works the same, and it only gets faster.

The smarter alternative is to embrace JOMO: the joy of missing out.

Making commitments and deliberately 'missing out' liberates you to take action and enjoy your choice and its rewards. And when you stop second-guessing yourself about the stuff you say no to, you can fully focus on the ones you say yes to.

Here's how to practice JOMO in your language journey:

Think in seasons
Choose one tool, method, or course at a time
Make it a priority or put it aside until you can commit

Each choice eliminates infinite others, but it also creates infinite new ones ✈️

school cafeteria 🍕

Things I consumed consciously while writing this

"Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by."

– Austin Kleon, Steal Like An Artist 📚

📺 Why Patience is a Superpower Oliver Burkeman (TEDx Talks)

Still not sure whether Four Thousand Weeks is the right book for you? Watch the author's TED talk about time management, presence, and meaning and see if it resonates.

🎧 Oliver Burkeman on Making the Most of the Time that We Have The Daily Stoic podcast with Ryan Holiday (Spotify)

Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of a handful of books about stoicism, a philosophical operating system that pairs well with Burkeman's findings. Memento Mori and enjoy.

📥 Japanese Homes Aren’t Built to Last—and That’s the Point Lucy Alexander (Robb Report)

Speaking of the effects of confronting our time limitations, here's the introduction to this enlightening article:

"The cherry blossom famously represents the fleeting nature of human life, a beauty meant to be admired, enjoyed and let go. But in Japan, the brief, bittersweet cycle of death and rebirth also applies—surprisingly—to houses."

📚 Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals Oliver Burkeman (Amazon)

My takeaways above don't do this book justice, so you should still read it and reach your own conclusions. It's packed with wisdom, stories, and prompts that will make you question your relationship with time management and productivity.

🔂 Monument Röyksopp, Robin (Spotify)

Playing this on a loop is still the most hypnotic way I've found to enter a flow state and let things take the time they take.

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Have a great week!

– Juan

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