The Four Things That Outlive You. The Rest Is Discarded

Four things outlive a person. Everything else is discarded, including most of what you are working on now.

What actually survives from any period, and the arithmetic of a body of work. Then the tenth of your effort that builds the durable list, and the reason almost nobody spends it.

Inside

• What survives — the four things that carry forward, and the four that do not, which is where most effort goes
• The body of work — why volume beats selection, and why one subject accumulates where six do not
• The method — extracting the transmissible part of what you know, in four steps, and why giving it away costs less than it appears
• The people — the most certain of the four, and how to do it deliberately
• Working on the long timescale — three questions and three practices
• What this is not — four failures that thinking about legacy produces
• The hours of the long work — and why Saturn's hour is the right one despite being the one people avoid
• The numbers of what remains — what each is likely to leave, and how each most often loses it
• The four bodies over a life, and the character that appears on both lists
• The Working of the Long Name — an annual working, sealed and reread for years

Format

• 15-page illustrated PDF, 7 × 10in
• Two plates from a 1603 star atlas
• Instant download, delivered the moment payment clears

Digital product. No physical item is shipped.