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Tomorrow Is Tomorrow
The last 48 hours have felt like 48 years.
It's been less than 3 days since English sailor John Blackthorne has arrived in feudal Japan of the 1600s, but those days have been rather eventful.
From getting imprisoned, humiliated, robbed of his ship and crew to almost being both executed and assassinated, John hasn't had the best week. Neither has his host, Lord Yoshii Toranaga of Osaka Castle, whose head his fellow regents have been gunning for for weeks.
Cast into the midst of both an international and domestic political nightmare, the unlikely pair has already been forced to save each other's life several times from enemies within and without.
After an epic boat escape from Osaka harbor, our heroes finally catch a brief moment of reprieve, in which Toranaga watches John dive off the side of their ship in elegant fashion.
Eager to learn, Toranaga asks John to teach him. John begins to explain how diving works, but Toranaga would rather he repeat the action.
"Ah. Observational learner," John notes and obliges. As soon as he climbs back on the boat, however, he hears the next prompt: "Again." And again. And again.
After dozens of demonstrations, even John's translator Mariko feels bad for him. "Perhaps he can try again tomorrow?" she asks Lord Toranaga.
As John catches his, Toranaga, too, takes a deep breath. It's been a long few days to say the least.
The regent has lost several of his most loyal samurai. He has discovered that the Christian settlers in his country are plotting behind his back. And to top it all off, Toranaga has been evicted from Osaka Castle, the place where he lives, reigns, and fights for his people — when the fellow lords on the Council of Regents aren't trying to kill him, of course.
After a long exhale, Toranaga looks out across the ocean. With his eyes firm on the setting sun beyond the horizon, he finally answers Mariko's request:
"Tomorrow is tomorrow. Today, I will learn how to dive."
Before time runs out, I'd like to recap everything we've shared and learned together over the past few days. That way, you'll have all the data points you need and can make the best decision for yourself.
Deal? Deal!
The Future Is Scary
18 months ago, ChatGPT didn't exist. Today, it gets over a billion visits every single month.
More than 100 million people now rely on AI to complete tasks that, less than 2 years ago, you needed a trained human to do.
*Poof!* That's the sound of entire industries disappearing overnight.
The speed of technological progress is now so fast, it's impossible for us to keep up with traditional education, let alone get ahead in our careers.
2013 was the first year in which humanity created more data in a single year than in all of history up to that point. And guess what? Since then, the amount of yearly data we create has gone up by another factor of 20.
That's 20x the information captured from 200,000 BC to 2013 — EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR.
As a response to the data and technology explosion, years of schooling have more than doubled in the last 100 years.
Over 90% of people in the US now finish high school, and over 60% have at least some college education.
In Germany, it's common for people to be 25, 28, sometimes even 32 years old before they enter the workforce. That's a third of a person's life or more they spend training for a career that might disappear less than 5 years later.
The half-life of knowledge — how long degrees and specific knowledge last — has totally disintegrated.
Where you could comfortably bank on your engineering degree from 1930 to last you until you retire, modern degrees are often entirely outdated within less than a decade.
Even the markets and industries that traditionally had room for many players to thrive are becoming more like "winner-take-all" games.
When MrBeast posts one of his Youtube videos on X, he gets $250,000 for the same amount of impressions that net other people $500.
When your product or service is available online, people will compare it not just to what else is locally available but to everything on the web — competition is becoming more global by the day.
Spotify pays $4.5 billion per year to hundreds of thousands of individual musicians — but the top 10 alone take home $1.8 billion, 40% of the entire pot. If you're not in the top 1,000, you'll barely make anything.
So, what do we do about all of this? Do we just sit back, wait for the robots, and hope for universal basic income?
As early as 8 years ago, my good friend and extremely prolific researcher Michael Simmons identified what the best of the best are doing to deal with our impossibly fast-changing world:
They learn more, yes, but most importantly, they learn differently and constantly.
Michael captured this new, 21st-century mode of learning with a simple theorem he called "the 5-hour rule:"
You probably need to devote at least 5 hours a week to learning just to keep up with your current field—ideally more if you want to get ahead.
Since new jobs and career paths appear and disappear ever quicker, we need to make learning itself a constant habit.
Moreover, we must learn broadly across a wide range of disciplines, and then dive deeper into specific topics and skills based on what we want to master for a certain phase of our overall career.
This lines up with the "T-model" of learning that describes the ideal knowledge profile a person can have for today's world:
The crossbar at the top of the T, we learned, shows the kind of learning that already put early polymaths in history ahead of everyone else.
People like Leonardo Da Vinci, Aristotle, and Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century computer (!) theorist, learned everything they could get their hands on. They studied widely across plenty of different disciplines, and that allowed them to...
Understand how everything connects to everything else
Make new and creative connections no one else could even see
Apply repeating concepts and ideas without having to learn everything in new areas from scratch each time
...and thus make contributions to science, arts, and history that rival those of entire generations.
The I-section of the T, meanwhile, represents the deliberate practice required for the deeper mastery sometimes needed to make significant contributions and attract the exponential rewards associated with winner-take-all markets.
That deliberate practice of learning — learning not just to learn but to improve — must have 4 elements to work:
Clear, specific goals, like being able to execute a perfect dive off the side of a ship.
Focus, which means giving undivided attention to your practice and goal for 30-90 minutes at a time.
Stretching, aka going beyond what you can normally do, for example memorizing 10 items in a shopping list when you can usually only remember 5.
Immediate feedback. A way to instantly recognize and correct your mistakes, like position pointers from a coach or answers to a quiz.
When you follow this model, when you learn both broadly and deeply, not only will you future-proof your career, you'll also become the kind of person that can accomplish all of their goals and then some — and the Four Minute Books Lifetime Membership will help you pull it off.
Access to all 1,300+ 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
Access to 10+ high-quality, beautifully illustrated PDF guides to help you become more productive, read better, use your phone and laptop 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
You can use this massive library of incredibly well-curated resources right now to...
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.
That's the crossbar of the T. Your daily, broad learning habit. Your path to becoming a polymath, 4 minutes at a time.
You can also...
1. Curate individual lessons from books on one topic via our Evernote notebook.
2. Add your own notes, highlights, and learnings.
3. Deepen your understanding of many subjects this way.
That's the vertical part of the T. The depth to balance out breadth, and to help you break into various topics and industries as you keep reinventing yourself.
Of course, we're not stopping there. We've already started working on an entirely new learning format that has the power to deliver both to you in 4 minutes a day: a wide variety of great lessons from books and depth in the form of specific, focused courses.
When you become a Lifetime Member, you're securing access to all of these benefits and more — including future access to the top tier of the new, monthly membership model going forward. Plus, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee, of course.
It's an amazing, pay-once, use-forever opportunity that won't come back again any time soon. The only question is:
Will you join me in the ultimate quest to become a master learner and take control of our future?
After having been through absolute hell for several days with little to no sleep, food, and time to recover, in the one moment he could use to catch his breath, Toranaga wants to learn how to dive — and John, having been through the very same hell, willingly decides to use that same moment to teach him. What's up with that? Are these 2 just nuts?
No, not quite. There's a big lesson here, and I think it's this:
Life won't always hand you the best of opportunities in the most convenient of moments — but every moment offers some opportunity, and if you feel even an inkling of inspiration, you must take it before the sun sets.
Whether it's the opportunity to hold the door open for a stranger, the opportunity to complete one more task at work, or the opportunity to strike when a lifetime deal like this one comes along:
Nobody knows what the next 24 hours might bring, but there is an hour unfolding just in front of you right now.
The only way to learn, to love, to feel, act, and live, is to use that hour. And no matter what you wish to accomplish or understand, as long as you make the most of that hour, at the very least, you'll always receive a new life lesson in return.
Whether or not you'll use that hour is a choice. It's a choice only you can make, but nevertheless a choice that can begin with a few simple words:
"Tomorrow is tomorrow. Today, I will learn how to learn."
Thank you for reading, listening, and considering.
I hope to see you inside our Lifetime Membership, and as always, I wish you...
Happy reading, -Nik
PS: If you have last-minute questions about the membership, you'll likely find the answers here. You can also just hit reply and I'll try to respond as quickly as I can! Whenever you're ready, join here »
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