Week #36 of 2025 has arrived... The zinnias are still beautiful, and I can still smell the roach crap in my nose from demoing old Section 8 kitchens for $19 bucks an hour in college. Both are true!

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

It is strange to think back to all of the hard, dangerous, backbreaking work that I did when I was in high school and college.  It seems so far away, and yet the lessons are part of who I am.  

Why would I think that what I did back then had more of an impact on who I am than the things I am doing today? That is stupid.  It's myth building... You are what you do.  Do awesome things.

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ON WEEK #36 OF 1939...

Surgeon Archibald McIndo established Centre for Plastic and Jaw Surgery at Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, England. The mission was to treat injured airmen.

The band was 12,052.43 weeks or 39.36 years old.

WHAT I CONSUMED THIS WEEK

Read this. This is, of course, a repeat, and I'm sorry, but I'll probably leave it in here for a long time. That's how pivotal I think this book is. Attention... Attention is the most important natural resource in the world right now. And it's important to protect yours and value how other people are using theirs. This book is a result of the Nine Dots Prize. Because of that, this link takes you to the actual PDF of the book. It’s spectacularly relevant reading. A change is coming. The only question is which direction

The Magician King, Lev Grossman I. Love. A. Trilogy! This is book 2, and it is a really striking combo of real world and fantasy world.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action." - Walter Anderson

My son auditioned for a huge role on the biggest stage in our city earlier this year.  He practiced a lot, and wasn't super nervous about the audition.  If he got the role, he would have to act, sing, and play guitar in front of 7,000 people night after night, but he didn't think about that... just how much he wanted to be cast.

Then he got the role... and reality set in.  For a few days, usually right at bedtime, the anxiety about it filled our home.  And so, I told him this truth:  "Whenever I am worried about something I am not working on it, and whenever I am working on something I am not worried about it.  Action is the antidote to anxiety."

From that minute on, whenever he was worried, he picked up his guitar and practiced the songs... It was amazing.  Complete turn around.  He began practicing half of the day, and as a result, totally crushed his performance, and swears he didn't really get that nervous. 

WHAT I AM THINKING ABOUT THIS WEEK

The Future.

OK, bear with me here because this might get kind of complicated. I’ve been thinking a lot about AI and the rise of a potential future where many of us are not needed to be pushing papers around ...people are even talking about 10 years after that when we don’t even need plumbers anymore because of the robot automation revolution

I have a fairly unique path. I graduated with a degree in sculpture and I’ve never really had a "job" as an adult, I went out on my own and started a studio pretty early and I’ve been doing that and other self directed things ever since.

Things have gone well, and so I guess I feel like I know what a future looks like when human labor isn't much needed to drive the economy.  At least, I know what it looks like for an individual who has enough resources to survive and also enough resources to invest in the cool things he wants to spend time doing. That's what I do. Each day, I define the work that I want to accomplish, and do that work.

It's that phrase "enough resources" that is key.  Because a whole bunch of free time is heaven if you have enough resources, and hell if you don't. I've done both... building and trying things takes time AND Money.

Almost anyone who talks about artificial intelligence talks about how it will take over doing all of these jobs that are generating all this income and people will have tons of free time.

Unfortunately, when they talk about that free time, they typically mean they will be unemployed. But in this future, there is plenty of gross domestic product and enough resources for everyone. The problem is under our current system those resources will just be concentrated in a very few (in fact, smaller and smaller number of) people.

I’m such a capitalist that it is kind of hard for me to imagine how this future could be. But frankly, the only reason I’m a capitalist is because I’ve always been a hard worker AND I’ve been pretty lucky. I would imagine if I had been a hard worker and not as lucky as I’ve been, I might be less of a capitalist.

We were at back to school night last week, walking around my daughter's college campus-like high school with hundreds of other parents, and my wife said "I want go to this high school!"  The future could be awesome.  The thing that I see keeping it from being awesome is lust for money and power.

I'm not sure how this relates to making the most of your 4,000 weeks, except to say that everything is changing and the future is going to be way different. And so maybe it makes sense to spend a little bit of your finite time today ensuring that tomorrow is amazing as opposed to terrifying.

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: Bananas!