Martin Hähnel

4000 Weeks Of Optimization - But For What

Changelog

  • 2025-06-20 - Created this note
  • 2025-06-20 - Corrected some typos and tried to clean up some muddled writing

You know, I can be surprisingly petty, if I want to. My notes system is relatively big and so it happened that I stumbled upon a note from a negative review of a book I found really valuable. The title of said review reads:

4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman - my notes (tldr an unconvincing feel-good book for the lazy and unambitious)

Here are its main points:

  • His [Burkeman's] whole theory revolves around the idea that all productivity problems are rooted in human tendency to avoid facing the reality that our lifetime is finite. Procastination? Avoidance strategy. Problem committing? Avoidance strategy. Workaholism? Avoidance strategy.
  • That theory is obviously flawed. Tons of people have solved the problems he described and none of it had anything to do with facing the fact that their time on Earth is limited. They simply found something worth commiting to. When you’re convinced that you’re working on something that needs to exist in the world and will not exist without you, you have zero problems commiting to this project and won’t struggle with procrastination. Also workaholism becomes a non-issue since you’re simple what needs to be done without having any second thoughts about if it’s truly worth it.
  • There are tons of logical errors like this in the book. [...]
  • Most of his advice boils down to “chill, drop your ambitions, don’t try to do so much, work less and focus on the things that truly matter”. Quote: “You almost certainly won’t put a dent in the universe.”. So why even bother trying? Also please just accept that things move at a certain pace. The very simple counter points here are 1) the only people who ever achieve anything big are the ones who are crazy enough to believe they can, 2) most speed limits are an illusion and there is absolutely no reason to move at the same glacial pace as everyone else, 3) if people know what to focus on they have absolute no problem doing so. The key issue is not that people don’t know that focusing on things that matter is a smart idea but rather that they don’t know what these things are.
  • [...]

It's written by Jakob Greenfeld who is still included in my feed reader, because I sometimes do enjoy wrong takes like this, especially if they are written in an apodictic voice.[1] And so this recent post of his arrived in my feed reader the other day:

Optimization is sucking the soul out of everything

In which he goes on to share this observation:

Watching a team coached by Pep Guardiola is as exciting as watching paint dry.

He took the idea that the opponents can’t score goals if your team has the ball to extreme levels. His teams keep passing the ball around with no attempt to create anything.

It’s not uncommon for his team to have the ball 70%+ of the time.

His team keeps passing the ball, minimizing errors, and waiting for statistically optimal opportunities to shoot on the goal.

When you practice little else but passing the ball around and remove any element of “play” from the equation it is impossible for the other team to steal the ball from you.

When his team scores a goal they could keep passing the ball around, back and forth, from left to right until the other team became too tired to keep chasing them.

This statistically-optimal strategy is undeniably efficient. The trophies keep piling up as his system grinds opponents into dust.

So of course coaches everywhere started copying Guardiolas’s methods.

But it’s neither fun to play like this, to play against a team playing like this, or to watch a team playing like this.

He ends it with this sentiment:

The imperfections, rough edges and unpredictability are where the soul lives.

It’s what makes the human experience human.

Everyone wants frictionless experiences these days. But smooth experiences are boring. Rough edges are where personality lives.

When you do find something with actual soul, the payoff is way bigger than optimized alternatives.

Now, I won't put words in his mouth, but I will give my interpretation: That Four Thousand Weeks was such a success is precisely because it is a book with soul! It is very funny to me - in a grim how in the fuck does he not get it kind of way - that Derek Sivers' "There's no speed limit" is brought to bear on Burkeman's observations. The meat of that essay:

In our three-hour lesson that morning, he [Kimo Williams] taught me a full semester of Berklee’s harmony courses. In our next four lessons, he taught me the next four semesters of harmony and arranging classes.

When I got to college and took my entrance exams, I tested out of those six semesters of requirements.

Then, as Kimo suggested, I bought the course materials for other required classes and taught myself, doing the homework in my own time. Then I went to the department head and took the final exam, getting full credit for those courses.

Sivers' text is itself part of his own collection of writing called "Hell Yeah Or No". And Sivers himself has also a note on Four Thousand Weeks, which funnily enough subverts Greenfeld's take completely:

Give up hope and embrace your limits. Everything you do means giving up something else. Say yes to less. He’s one of my favorite authors, so wonderfully thorough, but I already agree and am living this way. (My “Hell Yeah or No” was about this subject.) Still, I’d recommend it to anyone.

Because Sivers point - which is spelled out very clearly in his Berkeley commencement speech 6 things I wish I knew the day I started Berklee that also talks about the no speed limits mindset - is precisely that you have to choose and embrace that you can't be both distracted and laid back on the one hand but also successfully test out of a bunch of classes and graduate from Berkerley after only 2.5 years on the other. You have to instead apply yourself to the things that matter. Both are impossible to do at the same time.

Greenfeld strikes me as a Sahil Bloom type, who in a recent newsletter had shared this quote about AI in the workplace - here quoted with a little surrounding context:

In a recent note, Axios CEO Jim VandeHei offered the following (emphasis mine):

“Employees need the hard truth that entire classes of jobs could be wiped away, especially if people don't quickly adapt…We tell most staff they should be spending 10% or more of their day using AI to discover ways to double their performance by the end of the year. Some, like coders, should shoot for 10x-ing productivity as AI improves.”

Urgency is no longer a nice to have—it's a necessity. A requirement for survival. The new oxygen.

This is just a version of what Sam Altman - yeah, the OpenAI CEO - is claiming in [How To Be Successful](How To Be Successful):

Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation.

A medium-sized business that grows 50% in value every year becomes huge in a very short amount of time. Few businesses in the world have true network effects and extreme scalability. But with technology, more and more will. It’s worth a lot of effort to find them and create them.

You also want to be an exponential curve yourself—you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory. It’s important to move towards a career that has a compounding effect—most careers progress fairly linearly.

Back to Sahil Bloom, whose anxiety and desperation comes through in his writing:

Last week, I went on my first “Think Week” retreat.

Three days. Limited connectivity. No meetings. Just reading, deep conversations, journaling, and thinking.

I typically try to take a “Think Day” about once a month—but with the utter chaos of my book launch and tour over the last 12 months, I hadn’t been able to create the space necessary to zoom out and properly engage in this ritual.

If I’m being completely honest, I’d grown increasingly overwhelmed during that period. I'd felt the steady buildup of stress, anxiety, and tension that thrives in a reactive environment of constant stimulus and response.

So when my business partner proposed a “Think Week” retreat at his home in Cabo, I blocked my calendar and eagerly awaited its arrival.

Burkeman's book is making a dent, because it dares to pose the question: "What are you trying to be oh-so-successful for my dear guy?"

A couple more of my points:

  1. There will almost certainly be more things that matter to you than you have time for, too. So you will have to choose.
  2. I do agree, brainless or joyless optimization - compounding for compounding's sake is a form of that - is soulless. And success without soul is soul-sucking. So if you attempt to compound - compound something that matters at least (but see 1).
  3. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to chill either. But if you chill, actually chill.
  4. I have a visceral reaction to anyone who is putting thinkers, like old dead philosophers, on a pedestal. Judge their ideas in the context you use their ideas in. Do they actually still work? If Burkeman writes that Schopenhauer might've overlooked something maybe he had! Conversely: Using philosophical ideas for self-help is not an attempt to fake "depth" it's just engaging with philosophical ideas. Of course, Burkeman (or you!) may be wrong. But please, let's stop giving impressive sounding names or jobs too much credit.
  5. Wouldn't it be nice if everything was clear? No. Embrace the resonance. And enjoy the ride.

Motivation is weird. I get it. Driven people tend to brainwash themselves into doing things that they might otherwise not manage to do. We see it everywhere in productivity and business advice circles. But brainwashing yourself is not the same as coming to grips with our real, finite lives. Things take time and soon - way too soon - you won't be anymore here (or anywhere, really). Making sure you don't forget that while you still are around, is one of the big lessons of Four Thousand Weeks.

  1. It must be a mix of schadenfreude, astonishment and masochism on my end. ↩︎