Powerful ideas from top nonfiction
Try Blinkist to get the key ideas from 7,000+ bestselling nonfiction titles and podcasts. Listen or read in just 15 minutes.
Start your free trial
Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
Four Seconds summary
Peter Bregman
All the Time You Need to Stop Counter-Productive Habits and Get the Results You Want
15 mins
Brief summary
Four Seconds by Peter Bregman is a self-help book that emphasizes the importance of being intentional in everything we do. It encourages us to take a step back and consider our actions before acting impulsively, leading to greater productivity and personal satisfaction.
Topics
Table of Contents
Four Seconds
Summary of 6 key ideas
Audio & text in the Blinkist app
Key idea 1 of 6
To create better habits you have to pause, breathe, and identify an area of focus.
When you’re in a stressful situation, do you sometimes react in a way that ends up making you feel even worse? Many people respond to stress in self-defeating, counter-productive ways, such as yelling or starting an argument with someone. So how do we transform this unhelpful behavior into habits that save our time, energy and sanity?
The first step is pausing and breathing for four seconds.
Four seconds is the amount of time you need to take one deep breath in and out.
When you pause and breathe, this puts you in a state that allows you to make better decisions and consider the outcomes of your actions before you take them.
Say your kids are refusing to brush their teeth before school. It’s the third time this week and you can feel the anger bubbling up inside of you. You’re about to lose your cool and start yelling. But instead, you resist, pause and breathe. After doing so, you feel a little calmer and clearer. Maybe you even come up with a tooth-brushing game instead of succumbing to the counter-productive reaction of shouting.
In addition to the four-second breath, in a stressful situation it’s a good idea to identify an area of focus, rather than a goal.
Goal setting is often accompanied by temptations to cheat or to take unnecessary risks, whereas an area of focus motivates you without offering up such negative temptations.
For example, you own a store that sells a certain product. In recent years, your goal has been to increase your revenue. This, however, has led to some of your staff using questionable methods to hit targets, such as lying about particular features of the product, because all they care about are the sales.
But this year, you’ve set an area of focus, which is to talk more with the customers. The results? At the year’s end, you realize that the revenue has increased, thanks to focusing more on the customers than on increasing revenue.
Want to see all full key ideas from Four Seconds?
Key ideas in Four Seconds
More knowledge in less time
Read or listen
Get the key ideas from nonfiction bestsellers in minutes, not hours.
Find your next read
Get book lists curated by experts and personalized recommendations.
Shortcasts New
We’ve teamed up with podcast creators to bring you key insights from podcasts.
What is Four Seconds about?
Four Seconds (2015) gives precise examples of how to rid yourself of self-defeating habits at work, at home and in your relationships. A four-second pause helps slow down hasty, unhappy reactions and is the first step to reworking the way you communicate with others and receive feedback from them. You really can be prepared for anything if you just take a breath first.
Who should read Four Seconds?
- People with a sneaky feeling that their communication skills need improvement
- Anyone with bad habits that need to be broken
- Stress bunnies looking for a straightforward solution
Categories with Four Seconds
Book summaries like Four Seconds
People ❤️ Blinkist
Sven O.
It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. Added to that the apps ability to suggest kindred interests opens up a foundation of knowledge.
Thi Viet Quynh N.
Great app. Good selection of book summaries you can read or listen to while commuting. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion.
Jonathan A.
Life changing. The concept of being able to grasp a book's main point in such a short time truly opens multiple opportunities to grow every area of your life at a faster rate.
Renee D.
Great app. Addicting. Perfect for wait times, morning coffee, evening before bed. Extremely well written, thorough, easy to use.
People also liked these summaries
Design Your Future
Dominick Quartuccio
Three Simple Steps to Stop Drifting and Start Living
22 min
4.3
The Asshole Survival Guide
Robert I. Sutton
How to Deal With People Who Treat You Like Dirt
15 min
4.1
4.7 Stars
Average ratings on iOS and Google Play
29 Million
Downloads on all platforms
10+ years
Experience igniting personal growth