Week #29 of 2025 has arrived... You likely get this email because you bought a poster from us.  Why do you still read it?

Time to walk over to your 4K Weeks poster and fill in another square.  Done?

I'm serious about that question above.  I write this email each week, and record the podcast, and for all I can see in the metrics, 20,000+ of you consume it each week, and I don't know why.  I don't know if it disappeared next week if you would miss it, I don't know if it is valuable to you, or just one more bit of noise in your feed.

I ask this, because everything changes, and only if we are aware of that can we hope to have any affect on how things change. Things are changing, and I am focused on trying to help them change in the right direction!

ON WEEK #29 OF 1968...

Semiconductor pioneer Andrew Grove founded the Intel Corporation in Santa Clara, California.

He was 1,667.57 weeks or 31.98 years old.

WHAT I CONSUMED THIS WEEK

	Philosophize this, #232 "Byung Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration". I hope you have smart friends who send you thoughtful podcasts.  My good friend John G. sent me this. It's great!
	The Ezra Klein Show, "How the Attention Economy is Devouring Gen Z and the rest of us."   There are millions of dollars to be made if you can understand this podcast and find a way to leverage it... or, you could use it to save the world. Up to you! (How very postmodern of me to say!)
	I left this in, because I have gotten so much benefit from these... it is eye-opening to see this play out in the real world... It has helped me notice the stories we are telling, and what they say about us. Ok, I had an itch, and I decided to scratch it.  Modernism, Postmodernism, and MetaModernism.   Here is a list of the pods I consumed to learn. Deep Talks, MetaModernism Pt.1 Deep Talks, MetaModernism Pt.2 Deep Talks, MetaModernism Pt.3 Deep Talks, What is MetaModernism Stuff You Should Know:Postmodernism Art is Dangerous: Nazi Degenerate Art Exhibition

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein

There are a lot of different roads that run towards success, but they all have some common threads. Curiosity is one of the most often overlooked threads. The obvious ones are talent and hard work.

Talent you have no control over.

Hard work you have 100% control over, and it is a big lever... I have made great use of it myself. It turns out if you decide that you will die before you quit running sprints, you often make the basketball team. But hard work is a blunt force instrument, and it is easy to waste a lot of energy almost dying, just to succeed, and it's a hard habit to modulate.

Curiosity is a middle path. Find a thread and start pulling... and then keep pulling, and pulling, and pulling until you understand something, cradle to grave. I said a few months ago that you could likely spend the next six months learning about (anything, but let's be specific) Artificial Intelligence, and make yourself a top 10% expert in that time.

Six months is less than .7% of your life. It seems like that is a reasonable price to pay to change everything.

WHAT I AM THINKING ABOUT THIS WEEK

Friction and what it means.

The digital world is almost totally frictionless. You can generate 100 years of strategic plans in PDF format for your business in five minutes with ChatGPT. You can scroll delicious short videos (accidentally) for 45 minutes before you look up and wonder why it is suddenly dark outside.

You can email directives, and initiate orders, and summarize essays, and connect with thousands of people on LinkedIn, all before 9AM each day without breaking a sweat.

AND, the modern physical world gets more "frictionless" every day.  Grubhub, streaming release movies, drive-through coffee, spaceship-like grocery getters... Many things are getting easier and easier and easier.  (But there ARE conspicious outliers.)

And yet, for all of this easy "productivity", I, for one, still feel a bit more empty than I used to.

I think back to not too many years ago when I was starting the sculpture studio, and I didn't really even have a desk. I spent most of my time in the "friction-full" world of manual tasks nearly the whole day. I think it was better.

What if just the fact of something being hard gives it meaning?

I don't know what the meaning of life is. Duh.

But I do know that I feel more meaning in life when I am working hard at something. It's a plus if I feel like that "thing" matters to the world, but let's be honest... almost everything does and doesn't matter.  

Putting up a fence matters... to my dogs, and me, and my neighbors, but it doesn't "matter" matter.. to my city, to my culture, to my country, to my universe. Hell, it will have to be replaced in 25 years!

But I notice that I look at the length of fence I built differently than the length I paid someone else to put up.

We are all so focused, in our personal lives and our world-building lives, on making every damn thing easier, smoother, more reliable... frictionless.

And yet... It is so damn gratifying to, after sweating in the summer heat for an hour, look down at the big hole that you just dug in the yard.

Maybe all the meaning is in doing things that are hard, and the harder they are the more they mean to you.

Until next week!

Spencer,

Owner of 4KWeeks

P.S. Click on this reward if you feel like letting me know you read the whole newsletter: My son called this band "Band Aid Box" when he was younger.