The Story
tl;dr: There are less than 48 hours left to become a Four Minute Books Lifetime Member. It will help you become an expert generalist — the kind of broadly skilled and highly adaptable person the world needs today — in just 4 minutes a day. Start learning, stay relevant, and make your dreams come true here »
Heyo, Nik here.
This weekend, I went to an exhibition showing life-size paintings from 4 great Italian masters of art.
All of the artworks were masterpieces. Every single scene came with astonishing details. And each of the 4 masters was a true wizard with a paint brush — but only one of them made an impact on the world that reached far beyond the canvas.
If I tell you the names of the first 3 masters, I'm sure you'll be able to guess the name of the last: Michelangelo, Raffaelo, Sebastiano. And? Ring any bells?
Here's one last hint. This is me admiring the last master's interpretation of Jesus' "Last Supper:"
Guessed it? Of course you did! It's...
Leonardo da Vinci
Like the other masters, Leonardo was a painter who lived and worked during the Renaissance in 15th- and 16th-century Italy.
But what makes him special? Why is he considered extraordinary among his already extraordinary peers?
The answer is that where all the other masters changed the world of art, Leonardo changed the world, period.
Leonardo wasn't just a painter. He was also a(n)...
- engineer
- sculptor
- biologist
- architect
- writer
- designer
...and a lot more. Leonardo made breakthrough contributions not just to how we paint landscapes, inanimate objects, and of course humans.
He also devised early concepts for...
- Flying machines (aka planes)
- Armored fighting vehicles (aka tanks)
- Bundling the power of the sun (aka solar energy)
- Better ship building
- An adding machine that functioned like an early calculator
Leonardo made significant discoveries in the fields of anatomy, hydrodynamics, geology, optics, and plenty of others.
Not all of his ideas and inventions were feasible at the time, but some immediately changed entire industries, like his machine for testing the strength of a wire or an automated bobbin winder for easier sewing.
In other words, Leonardo doesn't just hold the records for painting the most famous painting in history (the Mona Lisa), the most reproduced painting in history (the Last Supper), and the most expensive painting in history (Salvator Mundi, sold for $450 million in 2017)...
...he also had a lasting effect on so many different areas and fields in ways big and small that his real impact on the world is so large, it's impossible to measure.
Of course, this begs the next big question: How?
How can one person make such outsized contributions that last for centuries?
The answer lies in a single word you may have heard before:
Polymath.
Leonardo da Vinci was a polymath, and that's why he played in a league of his own when it comes to, well, everything.
So what is a polymath? How can you become one? And what does all of this matter outside of fame and glory?
The Future Belongs to Polymaths
In a long-lost essay most of the world will never get to read, my friend Zat Rana described the concept of a polymath better than I ever could:
Polymaths see the world differently. The make connections that are otherwise ignored, and they have the advantage of a unique perspective.
Zat wrote this in 2018, long before the term "polymath," or "expert generalist," as it is also called, became popular — even before David Epstein published his seminal book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, which really catapulted the idea into the mainstream.
Zat explained that, historically, specialists were far more common and contributed more to human progress than generalists — but now that more and more specialized work is taken over by machines and computers, that might be about to change.
In the early days of science, generalists like Aristotle kickstarted entire branches of knowledge, from biology to philosophy to psychology, Zat says.
But now, 2,000 years later, these different branches of the same root tree trunk called reality have become highly specialized and separated — and so we tend to think of them in isolation rather than how they interact.
This has been helpful for advancements in medicine, agriculture, and plenty of other fields, but now that we have so much knowledge that we can only process, parse, and work with it using computers, AI, and automation, perhaps the power of human specialization is fast approaching its limitations.
But that root tree trunk of it all, reality, is still the same, and so perhaps being a generalist will once again become the superior alternative, Zat writes:
What polymaths realize by studying the different branches is that many of them have the same foundation, and if this foundation is deeply understood then all they need to do is apply that ingrained knowledge to a different context rather than do the work of surface-level specialization.
Around the same time that Zat published his piece, I was researching for a piece about education, and I discovered some shocking facts:
- In 2013 alone, humanity created as much data as it had in all of history up to that year.
- This ocean of information continues to double every year.
- Because of all these new discoveries, the half-life of knowledge — aka how long it takes for knowledge to lose half of its relevance — continues to decline.
- An engineering degree obtained in 1930 had a half-life of 35 years. In the 1960s, that was down to 10 years. A modern psychology degree might have a half-life of only 3 years — meaning 50% of it is completely irrelevant in fewer years than it originally took you to obtain it.
- That means if you don't spend a good chunk of your time learning at all times, all of your knowledge will soon be outdated.
- Therefore, the only way to stay ahead and make real, valuable contributions to the world is to learn every day.
In other words...we must all become expert generalists! This is exactly what Zat concluded as well:
The polymath also has a learning advantage. Learning itself is a skill, and when you exercise that skill across domains, you get specialized as a learner in a way that someone who goes deep doesn't.
Specialization will always have its place, and it's good to have the option to go deep on things here and there — but by and large, in a world where machines will soon be (and in some cases already are) the superior mathematicians, surgeons, and pharmaceutical researchers, our advantage will not lie in desperately trying to keep up with insurmountable amounts of information in our field.
Our advantage will be to learn anything, understand everything, and creatively connect the dots.
That's what it means to be a polymath — and that's what Four Minute Books is here to help you become.
Okay, so much for the awesome winningness of polymaths. But what does that look like in reality? What do you have to do every day to develop an extremely fast and high rate of learning, and to cultivate the broad levels of skill, knowledge, and taste it takes come up with unique and creative breakthrough ideas time and again?
That's where our Four Minute Books Lifetime Membership comes in. Let's unpack the road to becoming a polymath!
The 4-Minute Polymath
This is one of my favorite books of all time:
Ryan Holiday. The Daily Stoic. For 6 years in a row, I read this book every year.
How many books have you read 6 times? Me, zero. Other than this one. And you know why? Two reasons:
- Every page in this book is timeless yet always relevant — because every time I re-read it, I'm a different person in a different situation, and so the words now apply to me in a new way they never have before.
- I only have to read one page a day to get through it — and it takes me less than 4 minutes to do so.
The Daily Stoic is a book about, well, Stoic philosophy. It talks about what it takes to "live a good life," as the Stoics called it. A virtuous life.
The book promotes kindness, patience, reason, perception, taking action, perseverance, hope, optimism, and plenty of other values that never go out of style — and so neither does the book.
But the #1 reason it works, like really works, is that I can read a page a day and be done with it.
If I had to spend an hour each day studying Seneca's original texts to get a dose of his perspective, I wouldn't do it.
But since I can read, reflect, and make a conscious change in how I will approach my day in the span of 4 minutes, I can do it every day for years on end, slowly but exponentially compounding the amount of positive change in my life.
This is "the power of tiny gains," as James Clear calls it in Atomic Habits, and it very much also applies to the habit of learning itself that it takes to develop a polymath perspective.
When you become a Four Minute Books Lifetime Member, this is what we're committed to helping you accomplish:
1. Learn a valuable lesson from a different book every day.
2. Immediately take the first steps in really applying that lesson in your life.
3. Do it all in just 4 minutes.
Right now, our Lifetime Membership already contains all the basic building blocks you need to start your 4-minute polymath journey:
- Access to all our 1,300+ book summaries in 2 lightweight, cleanly designed PDF formats for printing, saving, and offline reading
- Audio versions of all 1,300+ titles, which you can listen to offline or via your favorite podcast app whenever and wherever you are
- Real-time access to new titles in PDF-form via Dropbox
- A copyable, customizable Evernote notebook with all our summaries so you can completely customize your notes and highlights and build your own sub-libraries for mastering specific topics
- Access to 10+ high-quality, beautifully illustrated PDF guides to help you become more productive, read better, use your phone and laptop more efficiently, and a lot more
- Free full-length copies of both my books, The 4 Minute Millionaire and 2-Minute Pep Talks
- Human-narrated, full-length audiobook versions of both books for 8+ hours of great advice and inspiration
- A never-before-released, 1-hour course to teach you how to write summaries exactly like we do at Four Minute Books
- Unlimited lifetime updates, meaning you'll be grandfathered in at the top tier of our new monthly membership going forward
...and in the next, monthly iteration of our new membership, we'll provide even more unique formats to help you specifically master powerful ideas from great books in just 4 minutes a day.
It's $99 for lifetime access. But after those 48 hours, we'll move to the new monthly subscription, and there'll be no more lifetime options.
If you want to explore all kinds of fields like Leonardo Da Vinci, future-proof your life and career by becoming an expert generalist, and build a daily learning habit to become a polymath in just 4 minutes a day, join Four Minute Books as a Lifetime Member today.
The #1 Reason to Become a Perpetual Learner
Okay, so early polymaths like Aristotle, Da Vinci, and Archimedes had a huge learning advantage and could thus come up with huge breakthroughs across a variety of fields.
Then, specialization took precedent on the stage of history and human development, but now polymaths are having a renaissance, and being an expert generalist might be more important than ever to stay relevant and push humanity forward.
The way to become a polymath is to start small, learn widely, and don't give up. To spend as little as 4 minutes a day mastering great ideas and then compounding them into exponential creativity over time.
Now, you might say, "Okay Nik, that's great and all, but what if I don't want to change the world? What if I don't care about making it into the books of history?"
And to that I can only say: "Well, even if it's not the world, you want to change something — and chances are becoming a perpetual learner is still the best way to make the change you seek to make."
Here's the thing:
Only half of all Americans read 1 book or more each year.
And of the remainder, less than 30% read 1 per month or more. That means the vast majority of people in the US reads less than 2 books a year, let alone 10 — and the rest of the world doesn't look much different.
Now just imagine what might happen if you read not 1, not 10, but 100. Or 200. Or even 365.
Every day, you learn 1 new idea from 1 great book. You reflect on it. You compare it to other ideas and concepts in your mind. And you even try to apply it directly to your own life, if only in a small way.
What would happen? Well, you'd be a completely different person in 3 months, let alone a year.
Your career will improve dramatically. Your business is going to thrive. Your relationships will benefit from all those new connections — the one in your brain and the ones you make in the real world because of them.
Because your knowledge will multiply tenfold across all areas, you'll move past average and into the top sector of many different categories of knowledge.
And because you're connecting many different fields where most people are looking at just one, maybe two, you'll see opportunities and solutions most other people can't even perceive.
This is exactly what being a polymath is about:
Asymmetric, exponential personal growth built on a broad, ever-expanding network of ideas and concepts in your mind.
And that growth will help you accomplish much more than academic success or getting a raise. You can use it to become a better parent. You can use it to be a more thoughtful partner. Or you can use it to make art the world has never seen before.
At some point, every next idea you add to your mental network will get you disproportionately more results because each next good concept will combine with all the others for something that is much larger than the sum of its parts.
When you become a Four Minute Books Lifetime Member, we'll get you those ideas, and we'll get them to you in a way that you can consume them in just 4 minutes a day.
We know you don't have time to read a whole book every day. We know you don't have thousands of dollars to spend on books. That's why, for over 8 years, we've been working hard to filter those great ideas out for you and deliver them to you on a silver platter — and the Lifetime Membership takes that work to the next level.
Will you get every tiny nuance from each book? No. Will you hear all the stories straight from the author? No. But you'll get thousands of key ideas with the right stories, and those will completely break open your thinking in a way that then unlocks a wealth of options.
Just imagine two people, Paula and Norm.
Norm closes this email and goes about his day as usual. He starts reading three books in the next quarter, but he abandons all of them less than 100 pages in.
Norm is on the internet a lot, like all of us, but he mostly consumes funny cat videos on Instagram and the news. In October, Norm will get fired because his position of writing copy for social media posts will now be taken over by ChatGPT.
Norm doesn't know what to do. He's been writing social media copy for the last 3 years, and he doesn't feel qualified to apply for a role outside of that field. Well, if only Norm had started learning something new every day before life happened and he got into this pickle...
Then, take Paula. Paula is a nurse, and so she never has to worry about losing her job, because, well, nurses are in short supply wherever you go.
However, her job is demanding. The hours are long. The conditions sometimes brutal. And so Paula doesn't want to be a nurse forever.
Paula doesn't have a lot of time. In fact, her schedule is way too busy every day. But she does take 5-minute breaks and, like all of us, go to the toilet from time to time.
Whenever she has the chance, Paula fires up a short audio summary inside the Four Minute Books Lifetime Membership. She reads PDFs of new summaries early whenever the topic sounds interesting. And she picks up at least one new idea every day.
After getting ideas from several books on mental health, habit-forming, and product design, Paula realizes she might be able to help out her fellow nurses. She builds a small app one weekend that reminds nurses to take their breaks for their own health and personal wellbeing at just the right times throughout the day.
Paula shows the app to some coworkers, and they love it. They start using it religiously. Eventually, Paula gets to roll out the app to her whole hospital, then another, and another. She slowly monetizes the business, and a few years later, she quits her nursing gig to run a wellbeing company for nurses full time.
These are just 2 of a million potential examples of how things could go, but I think the lesson is clear:
Whatever you wish to accomplish in this life, building a daily learning habit is one of the best things you'll ever do in order to achieve it.
Happy reading,
-Nik
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