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Everyone feels like they've got too much to do.
So you try to find ways to do more of it, which is either clever systems or extra self-discipline.
Technologies kind of hold out this amazing promise.
With this device or with this system, you're going to be able to do more and more of it.
You're constantly chasing it, and you never get to the point of being able to do all the things.
Of course we're pursuing long-term goals.
Of course there are things we're creating in the hopes that at a later point we reap the rewards in this way or that, but there's got to be some role for finding meaning in the doing of it.
You start to feel that it's only if you kind of do enough stuff that you get to feel good about yourself.
And ultimately that can't be the definition of a meaningful life.
One of the great illnesses of today's world is busyness without satisfaction.
And by this I mean the proliferation of jobs and careers that fail to provide those who pursue and hold them with much social meaning beyond what they pay which, according to Rucker Bregman, who I happen to have just recorded a podcast with today, 25 of people in modern economies.
But this malady extends further than that, to a broader crisis of meaning that undermines our ability to live our lives more meaningfully in the day-to-day, which is this epidemic that is fueling chronic states of anxiety irritability impatience, exhaustion and just general discontentment.
Now, I don't know about you, but I can certainly relate to this.
And despite the fact that I derive tremendous meaning from what I do for a living, from my family and from many things that I involve myself in outside the strictures of what anyone would reasonably consider work, I still find it difficult to just simply relax and enjoy this incredible life that I've built for myself.
Because there's always way more to do than I can possibly get done, which leaves me more anxious, more distracted, more prone to lower emotions than is reasonable given my circumstances, which is confusing at times and tremendously confounding.
So I was pretty enthusiastic about sitting down with today's guest, because this is a conundrum that Oliver Berkman has spent a lot of time thinking deeply about, and also somebody who has devoted the better part of his attention to solving a solution that revolves around repairing our dysfunctional relationship with time.
You may know Oliver Berkman as the productivity guy, a journalist and the author behind the landmark book 4000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals, which challenges conventional notions of efficiency.
Oliver has written extensively for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as The Guardian, and currently publishes a twice-monthly in-demand newsletter called The Imperfectionist, in which he shares insights on productivity mortality, the power of limits and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment.
Oliver's latest book is Meditations for Mortals, which outlines his philosophy of imperfection in the context of a four-week plan designed to help us make better decisions within the demands and the time constraints of our lives, so that we can live more fully.
And the main idea here is that an accomplished, socially connected and fulfilling life is built by accepting, rather than struggling against, one's limitations, finitude and vulnerability.
And so That's what we get into today, along with an array of all kinds of actionable tools to help you reframe your relationship with productivity and redirect your attention, with devotion, on what matters most.
Well, I'm very excited to talk to you today.
Thank you for coming all the way out here Oliver, because I think your work as I said to you before the podcast started is just so vital.
It gets at the heart of this discussion dilemma conundrum disease, whatever you want to call it.
That goes to the very center of what it means to inhabit a human body in the modern world, really.
You know, it's like this experience, this failed attempt that we're all making to manage our lives, based upon this diluted understanding of how time works and what it means to live a meaningful life.
And all it does is create this constant, perpetual state of anxiety and exhaustion irritability, impatience and general discontentment.
And I would say just from a personal standpoint, you know, this is my biggest malfunction.
You know, I'm living a life well beyond anything I could have ever imagined for myself.
And yet I struggle in my ability to enjoy it.
I feel so burdened by responsibilities and my inability to keep up with the demands that are placed upon me.
And, of course, as you write about, like I'm projecting some idealized future self, who's going to be able to enjoy all of this right?
Well, my life is sort of passing by in the interim.
And I know that, you know, I'm not alone in this.
And this is the dilemma, the core dilemma that you've essentially devoted your life to resolving for all of us, which is a tremendous act of public service.
Thank you very much.
Or not resolving, but sort of really living into the irresolvability of it, maybe that's yeah well, maybe we can start with uh our, our broken relationship with time.
Uh, you know, as a theory of mind.
You know, i think so much of our human dysfunction really boils down to this misunderstanding of how time works and and our relationship with it that drives our decision making and our behaviors, and this general sense of of discontentment.
Yeah, a lot of it comes down to time, or you can just say We live in time, right.
It's the stuff of our lives.
So anything that we're doing wrong that's increasing our suffering is going to manifest in that way.
I guess one of the ways of seeing it is just this basic idea that time is something you have, right?
That you're in a relationship to time.
I think that's kind of the cause of all the problems in a way.
Because we start off with this idea that we've got this resource.
And we've got to make the most use of it.
And we want to control how it unfolds.
And there's something about all of that that is not true to the situation that we're actually in, which is that all you ever have is the actual moment that you're in.
You don't really get to control.
You can't put time aside for later.
You have very, very partial control over how time unfolds, even in your own little corner of the world.
Um, and yeah, like time is going to win the battle in the end, right?
So i think we're constantly trying to do things to make ourselves feel like little gods over our time and not sort of, and i think it leads to all sorts of i think that is the source of like, all sorts of action problems.
You know procrastination distraction, all the rest of it, a lot of it can be understood as ways of trying to feel less limited.
Fundamentally uh, we have uh, an insane notion when it comes to what we think we're able to control and not control.
We're much more prone to believe that we have a greater degree of control over our lives and external events than we do.
And that's sort of at the foundational level, right?
And so, with that sense of control that we're never able to quite master, we're constantly disappointed by our failed attempts to control external events and even our own emotions.
This just seems to lead us towards a deeper desire to control, rather than an honest appraisal of our lack of control and the natural uncertainty of the world.
That leads us to hold on even tighter rather than release the reins, which is a central tenet of your message.
Yeah, totally.
I mean, just like a really obvious simple example is like overwhelm, right?
Everyone feels like they've got too much to do pretty much everyone.
So you try to find ways to do more of it, which is either clever systems or like extra self-discipline or something um, and you never get to the point of being able to do all the things.
But by definition, because the space of things that feel like they need doing is but we still believe it's possible basically infinite.
Right, you're constantly chasing it.
Uh, technologies kind of hold out this amazing promise right, that's like with this device or with this um system, you know you're going to be able to do more and more of it.
But those technologies also bring us... Just foments more of it.
More and more of it to do.
Right.
Remember, like, the inbox zero movement for a while?
And you know all that did was, you know, precipitate a great deal of like shame and guilt and, you know, a lack of self-compassion.
Right.
No, I agree.
Because you know, like it's kind of obvious when you think about it, that if you start answering emails at a much quicker tempo than before in order to get through all your emails, you're going to get a more quickly, and then you're going to get a reputation in your organization for being really responsive on email, so more people are going to email you.
And like the whole, all else being equal, if you try to optimize yourself with respect to some effectively infinite stream of inputs, you're just going to get busier.
You're not going to get that control that we feel we need.
I sometimes think it's including in the book.
I kind of think it's really interesting to make this comparison with, like people from a long, long time ago, like what it would have been like to live in medieval england or something and to, just from the beginning, have no thought that you could control whether war or famine or plague was going to obliterate everything in your life, like within a month.
Um, there's something very modern about the fact that we have all these technologies that kind of lead us to believe that it ought to be uh, doable.
So we constantly feel like we're almost there, like just one more productivity system or just six more months of getting my habits in order and like then i'll get to that bit where it's all plain sailing.
It's premised upon this idea that uh, We should be productive.
Productivity is good.
And our value is calibrated based upon our ability to be as productive as possible.
And one of the things that you talk about is this idea that productivity is not a moral imperative.
So tease that out a little bit.
Well, right.
I mean, it's just, we are deeply conditioned, I think, by this ethos that doing lots of things is kind of an inherent thing, inherent good, like the doing of as many things as you can, and if you can get through more of the things, then that's somehow better and you should feel better about yourself.
Just stating it like that, it's obviously clear that right, obviously it depends on what the thing, what the things are.
Um uh, there are plenty of people in the world who we might wish to do fewer of the things that they're doing.
You know, it's like well, it'd be a better place with certain people not doing the things that they're doing.
And and for ourselves, we're in this constant kind of tangle where our self-worth is totally wrapped up in this, because you start to feel that it's only if you kind of do enough stuff that you get to feel good about yourself.
There's no limit to the amount of stuff that is coming in to the.
You know, the input side of this arrangement uh, your outputs are very limited.
So you're just in this kind of tangle the whole time and like yeah, ultimately that can't be the definition of a meaningful life that you like, the the number of things that you did.
It's it's got to be something about what you did and whether you did it in a spirit of like, showing up for it and presence while you were doing it.
I think you know there's lots of reasons for this.
It's capitalism and probably protestantism in our histories and um, and some other forces as well, but it it just leads to this, you know, it leads this way of measuring ourselves that is never going to lead us to conclude that we're, but we're okay and can take a breath.
Well, we so self-identify with it.
I mean, I just know in my own life, like I, you know from as long as back as I can remember as a young child, like the bedtime storybook was the early bird gets the worm.
You know, it's like, this is so deeply embedded.
And the way that I was raised is that, you know, productivity is a proxy for love and approval.
And when you get hardwired at a young age with that Protestant work ethic and you go out into a materialist, capitalist world that rewards you for that, where the incentive structure is such that it's impossible to escape this idea that your ability to be productive, to accomplish things and be validated for that is the meaning of life right.
And we miss life in the midst of all of that.
And it's only in the case of experiencing some kind of interrupting event or crisis that we are given the gift of recalibrating that equation.
Yeah, i think that's really well put.
I mean, i think the the thing about it is also that like, i'm not against accomplishing lots of stuff right, but we but we naturally, as part of this um attempt to feel more in control of our lives than we really get to be as humans.
I think we we turn it into this battle where it's always like a deficit we're trying to fill, it's like if we do enough.
I think a lot of people go around in this state that I call productivity debt, right.
There's this sense that you've got to do a huge amount by the end of the day or whatever, just to feel like you're at baseline, right.
And there would be another way.
You've earned your right to breathe air.
Right, exactly.
No, exactly.
It's completely tangled up with self-worth.
And this is why some of the most sort of accomplished and successful and productive people seem to be so unhappy, I think because actually they are more driven by those kind of demons than them, than some people who might be less outwardly accomplished.
Of course, you can think of a different way of being productive and accomplishing lots of things, which is that you start from the baseline of feeling okay about yourself, and then it's fun.
It's a fun way to engage in the world, to accomplish things rather than not accomplish them.
That's great.
Are there people who walk around the planet feeling good about themselves naturally?
I'm not sure it comes easily to most of us, but I'm definitely closer to it than I was.
I'll say that much.
I mean, what is the impetus to even approach this subject matter?
What was going on with you personally that led you in this direction?
I mean it happened gradually and I wrote this column for the Guardian newspaper for many years where I was kind of testing out these kind of systems and methods of productivity and happiness tactics and all the rest of it.
And I would have said back then I think that I was doing it out of, you know, journalistic interest.
But of course, you're never doing anything out of some purely professional motivation.
It was an attempt to reckon with my own, I think, you know, a lot of anxiety.
I was a huge ball of anxiety at university.
That's when that really started to kick in for me, for a bunch of different reasons some notion that i had to be working harder and harder and better and better yeah, just in order to keep my head above water and, as you say, to have your have my right, right to exist, and um.
So i think i was, at first unconsciously and then just fairly consciously, to be honest, you know, using my public writing as a way to grapple with all of this stuff, and one of the interesting effects of that with the column was that I went on for long enough that I got to try out many, many of these supposedly silver bullets for living a calm and happy and accomplished life.
And there's something very useful about getting to the point where you're like I've done 100 of these right.
And I haven't found the one.
So maybe the problem here is not going to be solved by the 101st.
Maybe the problem is the quest, right?
Maybe there's a problem with looking for a silver bullet.
How would you articulate your global thesis on all of this?
I guess I would say it's that we are very finite and limited as human beings in all sorts of ways.
This is fundamental and definitional to what it is to be a human in time.
We really hate this fact for a lot of reasons.
So we do a lot of things, often masquerading as productivity techniques or habit change projects and projects of personal transformation, mainly to make ourselves feel that that's not true, mainly to sort of help us ignore the vulnerable and limiting and constraining truth of being a human.
Sorry, this is a very long version of the thesis.
And that actually by embracing and confronting and acknowledging those limitations, that that's actually.
It's a little bit of a harder path, but it's the path to less anxiety and more calm And it is actually the path to more meaningful productivity.
It's not a path to passivity.
It's a path to doing the right things.
Fundamentally, the premise is if you want to be a fully actualized human who is, you know, quote unquote productive in the healthiest way and the healthiest definition of that word.
First, you have to accept reality.
And my kind of on-ramp into this is recovery from addiction, like sobriety, and being introduced to these ideas like acceptance and surrender as a means of growth.
And they're challenging ideas, right?
You're confronting people with ideas that they associate with giving up or being weak, etc.
But actually, this is where all the strength lies. happens.
Like you know, it's like it takes courage to accept life on life's terms, to accept that we're going to die, that you know we only have a finite amount of time.
And within that, in this Zen Cohen kind of way, like how do we exert our self-will while also, you know, relinquishing the parts of it that we don't have control over?
And there are so many ideas.
I'm not an expert so I might need correcting, but there are so many ideas from recovery, a 12-step, especially that that seemed to always be like overlapping and definitely comes in and out right now and in all of your writing.
So I mean the things that I think of in that regard are like firstly, on some level, the cliche, like the idea of hitting rock bottom right, the idea of sort of being forced to let go of your illusions in some way, and then secondly, that notion that, like what we're doing here, that the path to a something active and getting traction on life and recovering a sense of agency and autonomy actually lies through a kind of defeat about how much power we really have in the situation.
And I often feel like that notion that one is always an addict but a sober addict or whatever, has a lot of affinity with this idea of just sort of yeah, falling into the truth of finitude, letting go of the idea that you're ever going to somehow sort of lever your way out of the human condition and be in a new controlling position.
And, as a result, somehow then getting purchase on life and then being able to put one foot in front of the other and make something.
Agency is found on the other side of acknowledging that you're never going to sort your life out.
Yes.
Yeah.
Disabusing people of that illusion.
You know what I mean?
This is.
I think we hide behind productivity and busyness and all of these things as a distraction or an avoidance tool that helps us.
You know, keep these terrifying ideas like death and our insignificance, you know, in abeyance.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And the idea.
One of the ways I try to encapsulate this is like the idea that there's a lot of power in understanding the sense in which our situation is worse than we think it is.
There's like, as long as you think that getting through all your to-do lists is really difficult, that's a very sort of agonizing way to go through life.
But if you can appreciate that it's in a certain sense impossible, then in that shift from really hard to impossible there's a possibility of like relaxing yeah, into into life.
There's the zen teacher, ju kennett, who i quote talking about how her method of teaching zen students was uh, not to lighten the burden of the student but to make it so heavy that he or she will put it down.
I just love that.
That's just like, that's exactly the feeling that I'm going for here.
That notion like it's like.
When you really see what it's like, you're not going to waste all your time and effort trying to deny that it is what it's like.
And then you've got that time free.
You have liberation.
Yeah.
You've got your energy is, and your focus is freed up to do something more, more possible.
The thing that that I bump up against is is I have a fair degree of self-awareness around all of this.
Like you know, I've read your books and you know I I am in 12 step recovery and I have this job where I get to sit across people like yourself who are very expert in this terrain.
And yet every day I still wake up and I'm like, I don't have enough time.
I don't know how am I going to do this?
I'm burdened, I'm tired and I get grumpy.
And you know, I just like mastering this is such a difficult feat.
Like my self-awareness is, is, as they say in recovery, availing me nothing.
But don't you think that?
You see, I think about this too, because I am not going to sit here and pretend that I don't wake up and feel like I haven't got enough time.
I resonate with that completely.
I don't think this is just a sort of way to evade your point.
Isn't it the case that imagining we could ever master this completely is just a recapitulation of the same, of the same mistake?
I mean, I have taken a huge amount of solace myself from realizing that this journey through like ways to handle being alive better, is not going to end somewhere right.
I mean, it is going to end at some point, but it's not going to end because I found the solution.
It's going to end because life is going to come to an end.
But so the idea that it's just an onward, hopefully like a deepening spiral right, rather than just going around in circles.
But I think that's just, I think that's completely baked into what we're talking about.
I don't know.
I find, for example, I do still feel overwhelmed and feel like I wish I had some way of getting through more stuff, but I sort of see through my own bullshit a bit, in that sense right.
So I notice that I'm doing it.
But then you can beat yourself up for, you know, you of all people know better.
Well, no, but you see, now it's like on a good day anyway, I kind of laugh affectionately at myself.
I think this is a better response than, you idiot, how come you're doing this?
And then it's easier to let go of, right?
I'm much less likely to spend days, weeks stewing in that kind of thing.
But I don't think the desire to be less finite works.
I'm not expecting that to ever go away or to have more control than one has.
I don't expect that to completely vanish.
And actually sort of acknowledging that that's always going to be there.
I feel like is part of this.
I want to tease out some of the core tenets in your work, many of which stem from 4000 Weeks, which is sort of your seminal work.
And we're going to talk about um, meditations for mortals, which is really a, a means of like, practically applying these same ideas.
Is that fair?
Yeah, i think it is.
Um explain this idea of a, a limit embracing life.
This is really an attempt to encapsulate this whole idea of what would it mean to stop running so hard from these truths of our limitation and to embrace them?
Uh, A little bit more.
To start from the position you might say that there's just always going to be more to do than you would like.
There's always going to be more you feel you'd like to do than you're going to be able to do.
That you're never going to be able to be certain about what the future holds.
That you're always going to be vulnerable to emotions and experiences that you might prefer to avoid.
There's a spiritual teacher called Robert Saltzman who has this phrase that we suffer from total vulnerability to events, which I really like the sort of bleakness of that phrasing.
So the limit embracing life is like well okay, what if we started from this?
I think what we find is that actually, the more we accept those limitations, the more we can sort of into the truth of them and stop flinching psychologically from them.
Actually, the more um calm productive, enjoyable life becomes, because now we're sort of dealing with what's here and what we can do.
And um and, and there isn't so much energy going off into this act of emotional avoidance, which I think a lot of stuff, including a lot of conventional productivity advice.
It's basically enabling a kind of um pretense that just over the next hill lies total domination of reality.
Yeah, I think that that is what lies beneath the constant striving, the striver's dilemma.
I wear this bracelet.
Are you familiar with Phil Stutz, the psychiatrist?
Yeah, he has the tools.
He gave me this and it says uncertainty, pain and hard work, and and he's somebody who's treating all of these high achieving people who are hyper productive right um, but are all miserable uh, because they arrive at this, you know apex position in life only to realize that their that life is still uncertain, that they're still experiencing pain and they still have to do hard work, and their denial of that is what drives the suffering.
So your message is one of acceptance, like this is you're never going to outpace any of these things.
You're never going to transcend them or overcome them.
And in order to find some level, some degree of peace and find purchase with meaning in your life, let's first accept that all of these things, everything's finite.
You're never going to transcend these things.
You're never going to figure out how to solve all of these problems.
You're never going to complete your to-do list or answer all of the emails.
And that's the foundation upon which you can start to begin to construct something new and different.
So it's a deprogramming on some level.
Yeah, yeah.
I think of it as a kind of process of becoming disillusioned in the most positive sense of the term.
Right
It's like the illusions fall away, or at least the fog starts to lift.
And I think the thing that's always been really important to me about this probably because it's just my personality I am quite an ambitious person, I do want to do loads of stuff in the world is to emphasize that I really do think that where you get to, if you move a bit further along this path, is not towards passivity, right.
It's not like some people seem to worry that if you sort of think about these things too much you might just give up and lie on the couch, because what's the point in doing anything?
But for me it's always been the case that once you can let those kind of illusions of total control and absolute omnipotence, hyper productivity, at least relax away from that a little bit, that's exactly when it becomes much easier to like roll up your sleeves and get stuck into doing a few things, partly because you're no longer like tortured by second guessing yourself about whether there are other things you ought to be doing instead because, in a sense, there always will be, and so you the.
The solution to FOMO is is that you're always missing out, so there's no worry about fearing.
This is always happening.
And in order to protect your yeses, you have to learn how to say no.
Yeah, yeah.
And you're always saying no, at least implicitly all the time anyway.
So all you're doing?
I think an awful lot of what I'm writing about is it's not saying why don't you live differently?
It's saying like, why don't you notice a bit more consciously how you always inevitably are living?
And one of those is that, in every moment, you're declining a million possibilities for how to spend your time.
So might as well stop trying to pretend otherwise just to feel comfortable, and start being able to make more conscious decisions about it.
One of the metaphors that you use to illustrate this is the one with the kayak and the super yacht.
Yes, I love this.
I mean, I have to say, my personal knowledge of super yachts is sufficiently limited that I'm slightly a bit impressionistic.
But I think we want by default.
We want to feel like being human is being the captain of a super yacht, right.
You're right up on the top of the, in the air conditioned bridge or whatever.
I'm again, I'm speculating, but and you're sort of programming your destination into the navigational computer.
And these are the things I want.
This is my destination I want in life.
And then you sit back and the plan turns into reality and it's all very stately and controlled.
Whereas the reality uh, is that we're just sort of in a little one-person kayak.
We're just like thrown into the river of time.
Uh, martin heidegger, the philosopher, actually uses this word thrownness, to talk about the situation in which we just find ourselves here.
You didn't ask to be born, here you are.
You're on the river of time, being born forward.
You do have some agency right, because when you're in a kayak, you can steer and you can deal with what comes in each moment, but you can't um, You're not in charge of the whole journey.
You don't know whether there's whitewater rapids or tranquil waters around the next bend in the river.
You're in this very, very sort of vulnerable, but also very alive and exhilarating situation.
And I think we spend a lot of time and pursue a lot of strategies, under the guise of personal development and all sorts of other things, that are really aimed at helping us continue to wrongly believe that we're in the super yacht, when actually, the more you can sort of open to the truth that we're in the kayak firstly, the better you can make real decisions about the real situation.
And secondly, it's intense, but it's more authentic.
So it's ultimately a better way to show up for life.
It is a philosophy of imperfection, like acknowledging our innate imperfection as an antidote for our indecision, our attachment to somehow finding a way to be perfect in the way we show up in the world.
And the analysis paralysis and the decision fatigue that we face every single day.
So talk a little bit more about you mean, when you talk about embracing imperfection, i mean, so we, first of all, we are totally in the territory here of things that i end up writing about and thinking about because i desperately need them myself.
Right, i'm a i'm certainly a recovering perfectionist, which is the kind of you know people like to think.
It's a sort of thing you say about yourself and it's kind of really a brag.
Right, it's like it's the thing you're supposed to say in job interviews, like what's your worst fault?
I'm just too much of a perfectionist, but I don't think there's anything good about it at all.
I think it really is a stance on life that tries to insist that everything that's happening measure up to a fantasy in your mind that it never actually could measure up to.
And if you're pursuing perfection in your work or your relationships or anything really, I think you're pretty much automatically going to be trying to gain more and more control over your situation, even at the cost of really making progress, diving into life, committing to relationships, producing art work, whatever it is.
So you know, I think I spent a very long time where, if you look at what I, I might have thought what I was doing was trying to become more productive and get more done.
But what I was really doing was, you know, building systems for tracking your habits or something like that.
That feels great because you're kind of seizing control of the reins of your life.
You're getting into the driver's seat.
I don't know what a metaphor you want to use.
And it feels like you're gaining control.
Whereas to actually do the thing instead of make all these preparations requires you need to be loosening your grip on the reins of life.
You need to be just like all right, I'm going to write this page of my novel and have no guarantee that I'm going to get to the end of it, or that think could be really wonderful, but i certainly don't know.
And it's yeah, it's scary, right you're?
You're sort of setting sail on or putting your boat onto the water and and handing over control to some other power, while not handing it over because you never had it in the first place, but you know what i mean.
It does take a high degree of self-belief.
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It's a weird kind of like twist of the mind on some level.
You would think like someone who has a very high opinion of themself is a perfectionist, but actually in order to produce your best work with confidence, you have to have a healthy relationship with imperfection.
Like I'm just imagining you sitting down to write this latest book, you know, coming off previous successes and feeling the pressure, the expectations.
Is this going to live up to?
You know like, I know what I'm capable of, and now I have to do it again.
And it's easy to you know cramp up in that way and then just be paralyzed and unable to write at all.
And maybe you could talk a little bit about how you keep things loose in your own life so that you can, you know, open up the valve and let the best version of yourself flow.
Yeah, no, and I did cramp up.
I mean at a certain point in this process, because I think that's very lots of people will be familiar with that dynamic, right?
You too.
I'm sure that like, it's very difficult.
Uh, if you achieve something that you're proud of, it's very difficult for that not to just become the absolute minimum baseline that you've got to meet next time in order to you know.
Second album syndrome.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So I definitely did uh, a clamp up, uh a bit in the, just in the context of writing.
What really um shifted things for me was uh, learning to do free writing, which is this kind of you know, as you know practice where you just sort of set a timer and keep your fingers moving on the keys or keep your handwriting on the keep your hand, but you don't.
You, you write regardless of whether you have something good to say, and this of course doesn't then end up in the book, because that would be atrocious.
But you but, so you're making a mess on the page.
I'm really striking how difficult that was for me at first, even though I was talking about a text file on my computer that literally nobody was ever going to see right, i mean, somebody might break into your computer and read it, it's just i had to see it.
So my inner critic was just like furious.
But that was a very useful thing for sort of.
You know, i think you can scaffold or whatever the word is i'm looking for.
These kinds of.
It doesn't have to be a huge leap of faith, it has to be like what's the one thing i can do?
That feels uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable that i'm gonna die.
And, like you know, I could look at that project of writing for 20 minutes and making a mess on the page and say like I really don't like this, but it isn't going to kill me.
But that can still go on your done list.
Right, yes, if you keep a list.
This is another thing that I'm really big into, right?
The idea of either as well as a to-do list or instead, you know, keeping a list of things as you accomplish them, sort of satisfying accumulation of things that prove to yourself right yeah, i do have agency, i can decide to do these things and that.
Yeah, that too got things.
Got things flowing again in the in the writing context, the idea of the done list being as a as as distinct from the to-do list, as a generative kind of process.
Your it's additive, like you want to include things and you kind of engender self-confidence by growing that done list, as opposed to the growing to-do list that never gets done and starts to make you feel bad.
Right, right.
And the to-do list is always like.
Your judgment of your productivity with a to-do list is always in comparison to all the things left to do, which is like and, in general, comparing yourself to an infinite yardstick is a bad way to feel.
Well, there's also the thing where you make the to-do list and there's something in the brain that sort of feels like you accomplished the task just because you wrote it on a list of something that you need to do, even though you never do it.
Yeah, right.
No, absolutely.
I mean, we play all sorts of tricks on ourselves to feel like that moment of control is coming soon.
And one of the great things that some people find with done lists is that if you find yourself in a sort of really low motivational moment right, a sort of really sort of in a rut with things, you can start off making a done list with things like tasks so low level that you wouldn't ever want to admit to anyone else that you'd put them on a done list right.
You can say, took shower, made coffee, right?
And even that little bit of consciousness of your own efficacy in the world can very quickly snowball so that you're back to being a functional person.
Yeah, one of the things you talk about is the mystical energy that's produced by completion.
Like just completing something uh, to use the word again is generative, like it contributes energy to you where whereas uh perfectionism, you know, leads to incompleted things or delaying completion, that becomes an emotional drain.
Yeah right, and then yes, perfectionism is always holding out for more or trying to do more things.
Multitasking, i think ultimately, is an attempt to like you're more in control of, like all the projects then.
Then you really are.
So completing things does take this kind of the same kind of anxiety, tolerance or something that is in the background, a lot what we're talking about here.
I think you have to be like I know there's lots of other things I, on some level, should be doing, but what I'm going to be doing is finishing this one, moving it off, going to the next one and, of course, with a huge project, you're going to be talking about a sub of it.
I don't mean writing a book or redesigning a house as a single step, but the idea that you're deciding to take it on, to make all the other things wait, to bring this to completion and then to move it on to the next thing.
As you say, you'd have thought that would take a lot more energy and stamina, but it kindles it, it releases it, and my sort of non-scientific theory for why that should be is just that it's because we're sort of falling in line with reality at that point.
We're fitting ourselves into the grooves of how time really works for us, which is that we do act sequentially.
We're acting sequentially even when we think we're multitasking, right?
So we don't act in parallel like we wish.
One of the things that I constantly confront is trying to arrange my schedule and my life to you know, create these moments and opportunities where like, for example, I'm writing a book right now and you know my life's already busy and I have this day gig.
And so when I can block out some time to finally sit down and focus on this one thing, and the stakes are suddenly very high because it's like oh, I only have the, I have to make this much progress.
You know it goes.
It brings up the perfectionism and the and this you know constant sense that there isn't enough time.
And of course that just creates constraint.
That's a cross purposes with you being able to do your best work.
And then, of course, there's all the uninvited interruptions, because life has a way of intervening on you.
Know those, those moments despite you, know your sense that you're controlling the universe and setting everything up to be perfect.
Yeah yeah yeah no completely, it's um, and the high stakes thing really speaks to me.
I think that's uh, there is this phenomenon, isn't there, whereby the more, the more success that we have in in scheduling our time right so, even as you get better at this and as you also have the autonomy to make your life look like how you want and so you, you implement that somehow the the worse it gets, that feeling that like I've got this 90 minutes for for this thing.
Um, and this is part of a maybe part of a broader situation where like, success is not an antidote to any of this stuff because, if anything, success just means that the um things you're choosing between uh, it's more painful to say no to things because you're getting more interesting opportunities, or um uh, right.
There are, there are 10 wonderful things you could be doing with that 90 minutes.
And if you don't use it properly for the thing you've, uh, deemed it for, then it's more of a failure because of all the things you're, you're missing out on.
So yeah, it's important to see that, like none of this is about finally reaching a place on the ladder of success where it goes away.
It's, um, if it's, if anything, the opposite, all of it is premised upon, uh, this investment that we're making in our future selves and this idealized version of what our life is going to be like, if we can just sit down and focus and be productive in what it is that we have to accomplish today.
Right.
And one of the things that you talk about and one of the practices that you advocate for is this idea of of, of like stop being so kind to your future self.
Like your life is happening right now.
Like that's all we have, like this, you know, on the subject of reality, accepting reality, like this present moment, this exchange that we're having right, this is all that there is, and everything else is a narrative.
It's a story that we've constructed, and and true productivity and everything that eludes us, meaning fulfillment satisfaction, purpose.
It's all available to us in stillness, and yet this is the one thing that uh, you know, we resist the most.
Yeah no, really well put, i think um, There's something really intense about being – about sort of being present, about accepting that, like this is real life.
This is as real as any of your life is going to get.
There's something that feels kind of – yeah, it feels unpleasantly vulnerable.
And there's something self-protective about the idea that, like this is all just preparation for the time later on when I really step into my own, which you know –
In my experience, it's one thing to believe that when you're 20.
And as you move through the decades you kind of got to – it becomes less and less plausible that the moment of truth is still in the future.
Well, life is rigged this way.
It's like we go to school and it's like get good grades so you can get into this school.
It's like everything is based upon setting you up for the future.
And so how do you then deprogram yourself from that hard wiring?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And I think it really is.
For me anyway, it's just been a question of just very gently – leading oneself back again and again to this truth.
So the future, you stuff is very interesting because of course there are people right who you might look at their lives and say you need to spend a bit more – think a bit more about what this is going to mean for the future, and people who sort of live in a very sort of hedonistic way.
But almost anybody who's interested in this stuff in the first place right who has – an interest in personal development or anything is, I think, is almost certainly going to be already perhaps too good at the deferring of gratification.
That, as you say, we're culturally, is culturally reinforced at every stage, and you can defer gratification too much.
Like you definitely can put off the moment where you kind of claim happiness and enjoyment uh in life to a point where, like you're making a bad decision.
Those marshmallow experiments you know, really famous.
I mean, they're slightly contested now as well.
But even if we take them at their word, that you know, it's a good skill to be able to resist one marshmallow until you get a second marshmallow.
That logic doesn't continue indefinitely.
There's no prizes for getting a thousand marshmallows.
When do you get to actually enjoy your life?
Exactly, right?
One of the practices that I commit to is when I am in a in a deep work session, whatever that is.
Um, you know if, if my wife or one of my kids calls me like I'm picking up the phone, even though I just you know, it's just like, how dare you know?
Like, don't they know?
This is like this.
I only have like out of the entire week, I have this like three hour chunk of time and like really, you know, it's like that's my disposition.
Right.
But it's like, okay, no, like, My daughter, who's in Chicago in college, calls me.
I'm picking up the phone, and I'm not vibing her for calling me.
I'm like, tell me what's going on, and I'll be on the phone for as long as she wants.
Just that is a rule.
And it's been a great lesson in another thing that you talk about, which is this notion that time is linear.
Time really isn't.
Our experience of it is linear, but that's not the reality of time.
In my experience, time is elastic.
And when I prioritize or make space for these things that are important, like these values that are important to me, by practicing them and allowing other things to get interfered on my life, is better.
I'm happier.
And all those things that I thought I wasn't going to have time to complete, they get completed.
I mean, that's my experience.
No, it's weird.
Or like I don't have time to drive across town and go to an AA meeting, but my primary purpose is to stay sober and help another alcoholic.
And when I'm like, I don't have time, I have all these things, blah, blah, blah.
And then I go, and then I leave, and then I'm just in a better state and I can manage all of these problems better, and everything gets resolved.
And so it's changed my relationship with time or my default relationship with like, how time operates in my life.
Yeah, I think yeah, it's such a great point because I think that I guess one of the ways of talking about the difference is like it's that very sort of left brain control-y I've set out what my time is going to be like and then any divergence from that is a problem.
But versus the idea that you know there's a right time for certain things and it matters what you feel.
What you feel like doing kind of does matter.
Not necessarily that you should always indulge it, but it's like that's a real energy and you don't want to have this kind of very intellectualized cerebral schedule for your day that basically says if this feels like the wrong thing to do at this point, just ignore that feeling and try to stamp it out.
Because obviously yeah, there's wisdom coming from many more places than you know your caffeinated brain at eight o'clock in the morning when you draw up the schedule for the day.
It's also, you know, a practice in embracing the fact that you can't control.
You know the universe in your life right.
Like these things, this is life, right?
And so you talk about intimate interruptions, like you know, like you're not going to be able to like control your environment, so everything works out the way that you want it to.
And when these interruptions happen, how can you just you know allow them to happen and appreciate them and accept them, rather than be resentful or try to resist them?
Yeah.
And the whole concept of an interruption, right.
On some level assumes the premise that like, you know, in advance, yeah, it's bad.
What, what, what, what would be right for that to happen in your time?
There's a.
There's a writer I quote in the book and I've been very um inspired by a Dutch Zen monk called Paul Lumens, who um writes about sort of intersection of Zen and time and time management.
And he makes this point, which is absolutely shown to be true in my personal experience, that any interruption, or quote interruption, if you give it your full attention, either the kind that you write, you talk about when it, when your daughter calls, or even an interruption that is just annoying and you want to get rid of it.
If you give your full attention to that interruption and either have a long conversation or you say to the person I can't do this right now, but would it be possible for us to talk at a certain later time, or whatever it is, instead of trying to kind of keep all your attention on what you were doing and just apportioning out a stingy little bit to this, it works better for you as well as for that person, right?
So, you know, if my nine-year-old son barges in in the middle of something I was thinking I was going to be doing some deep focus for um, in most times i will try very hard, like you, to sort of give full focus.
But even if there are times when i do need to say this isn't, i can't actually do this right now, because i'm the more that i can like fully enter that moment, even if it's just for 30 seconds, the more satisfied he seems to be as well.
Right, it's like everyone.
Everyone just feels a.
It's that attempt to say like no, I'm going to stay in control of the schedule, which means that you're not even going to get 5 of my attention.
It just leaves a bad taste in everybody's mouth.
I often also look at these interruptions as little knocks from the universe.
Like, why is this interruption happening?
Like, this is a little more like woo-woo or mystical.
But, like, why – you know, okay, so this interruption is – what am I supposed to learn about this?
Maybe it's just you're not in control of the world.
Like, okay, you know, that's a –
That's a practice of humility, which is good.
But sometimes it's about getting me out of my own, you know, self-obsession.
You know, that is definitely a problem for me.
And I just had this experience that you couch what I'm about to share as, instead of trying to, you know, figure out what you want out of life, like life is kind of telling you what it wants out of you.
And By pursuing that, you can find whatever meaning eludes you.
I was in New York City and this was gonna be my big week to like make progress on the book.
And you know, family crisis popped off and I had to go down to Washington DC and spend four or five days with my parents attempting to get my mother into a memory care facility, which was tremendously inconvenient.
You know, like this was supposed to be my time, and don't you know who I think I am, and all of that right.
And not what I wanted to do, but ultimately, of course, the right thing to do is to stop what you're doing and go down and be with your family and be of service to them in this moment of need.
And to be able to show up and be present for that experience and walk through it without regard for how it was disrupting my life, was such an incredible gift and I'll never forget it.
So that's what life wanted from me.
There's what I wanted and there's what life wanted, and by heeding that or following that, rather than um resorting to resentment and this narrative about how your life is being upended or disrupted like that's that's, you know that taught me.
Like life is happening right now, like these are, this is, this is.
You have done all these things in the world so that you can be available for these experiences, because life is in session.
Life is lifing all the time.
And so much of productivity is about resisting that or denying it, and trying to create this safe cocoon.
And it's all just bullshit.
It's like this crazy delusion that's driving our suffering.
I completely agree.
And the great thing as well about asking what life wants from you is, in my experience anyway, it does still allow you to distinguish between something like the example you mentioned, which wasn't your plan for your time, but was truly important.
There's a third category of things right, which is like just becoming a doormat and doing whatever other people's agendas.
You know, just fulfilling other people's agendas.
But actually, this question allows you to filter those.
It's very clear if you ask, you know, what's reality asking of me right now?
What does life want from me right now?
Actually, I find myself able to sometimes precisely reconnect.
What it actually wants me to do is throw my weight around a little bit right now.
It actually does require me to say no to this person and maybe, you know, cause some disappointment or mild irritation, because the thing that I'm doing is sufficiently dear to me.
So it's a really great question for not getting too full of yourself, but also like staying full enough of yourself, I suppose.
I mean you conclude the book with that, like it's like.
You know, it's this tension between, like I am infinitely capable and I'm also completely insignificant.
That juxtaposition of those two conflicting ideas is the grist between those two is where we find the answers.
Yeah, right, absolutely.
Yeah, I just agree.
I won't repeat it.
Within this philosophy of imperfection, one of the really practical ways tools that you have is this idea of of committing committing to something quote-unquote like daily ish as opposed to you know we're in this hustle porn culture you know it's all about like how hard can you work and sleepless nights and all of that uh and streaks like building streaks and i believe in momentum i think momentum is like a spiritual energy um but it also uh there's a hardness to it um that doesn't uh allow for human frailty, you know, the human imperfection to, you know, rise it, raise its head.
Yeah.
And I mean, I think this is totally consistent with a belief in momentum, by the way, right?
This idea of daily-ish, which was a phrase I got from Dan Harris, the meditation podcast, although he, as he points out to me, he got it from someone else too.
So we're all just passing.
There are no new ideas.
This idea that like committing to doing something daily-ish.
To the person who's really fixated on streaks and absolute consistency it sounds terribly self-indulgent, but it really isn't if you take it seriously.
Like to do something daily-ish.
You know that if you do a habit like twice a week, you haven't done it daily-ish.
But there are very busy seasons in life where maybe four times would get to count.
Five is great and six is certainly right.
So you have this kind of blurry boundary between like doing it and not doing it, which is really helpful and actually makes it more resilient in the face of the way that reality works.
Because like, momentum is one thing, but this idea of an absolutely sort of brittle, unbroken chain of things as a way to do it has all sorts of you know, famously people get, they fall off once and then don't go back to the thing for three months because they feel so right, it's good in the short term, bad in the longterm because yeah, once you lapse, then there's a whole cascade of like well, I can't do it, or I feel bad, you know, but then you just you break up with the whole enterprise altogether.
Right?
No, absolutely.
And and I think in many walks of life anyway, that skill of getting back on the horse, whether or not you did it yesterday, is actually a far more um important skill.
I think meditation is, This book, the new book, has meditations in the title.
It's not about formal sitting on a cushion meditation.
But formal sitting on a cushion meditation is a really good kind of metaphor for a lot of this, because the actual skill that most meditation teachers will teach you is precisely to notice when you've been distracted and come back to the breath or come back to the object of meditation.
So you're not really succeeding if you never get distracted.
The whole thing... is the noticing and the coming back, the noticing and the coming back.
And it's impossible to not be distracted like a nanosecond.
After you had a fleeting experience with non-distraction,
Totally, yeah, absolutely.
And I think that's the same idea, right?
It's like, if you're working on some creative pursuit, it's noticing that you failed to do it yesterday and nonetheless doing it today and coming back and back and back.
I think it's just like.
Yeah, I mean the other analogy somebody used in conversation once was like it's like it's like weight training, where you just like take the, take the weight and put it up on a high shelf and just leave it there and then stand there for the rest of your workout.
Like that's not the point, right?
The point is the repetition and getting back into it, even though uh, you know you, you may have faltered uh previously on the uh doing aspect of all of this.
Um, you know, there is the going into the shed.
Like you do, you have to, you know, basically meet yourself and get some shit done in the midst of all of this.
It's not all, you know, uh, theory like there is, you know, hard scrabble practice and all of it.
So talk a little bit about the daily um, nuts and bolts of trying to move your life forward within this construct.
I guess the way I think about this and it's part of how I've tried to structure the book as a kind of a course in these ideas is that tools and techniques for me are very much downstream of principles and perspective shifts, right.
So I'm trying to convey a certain orientation towards the world and then, off the back of that, there are like a thousand ways of doing it that one can keep in the cupboard and take out when they when they're useful.
So you know, one of the ones that I write about that means a lot to me in day-to-day life is that when i'm feeling sort of stuck or don't know how to engage on some project that i'm working on, uh like, going looking for a decision that i could take is a really helpful practice because, um it, that really sort of brings you into the finite space of the actual situation, right.
So it might be something very simple and low level, not some big decision.
It might be just like you know um, you know which platform am I going to publish this thing on?
Or which of these three beginnings for this chapter am I going to go for?
But the sort of push to make a choice among alternatives, cutting off certain paths, moving one step down any given path, is really helpful.
Like that kind of idea of going looking for some small but real decision in the morass of the material or the project is uh, the idea being to, you know, stack some small wins, stack some small wins.
Absolutely.
And also, at the same time, like commit to the truth that you're always making decisions or you're always choosing anyway.
So I think where I go wrong, and definitely have gone wrong for months at a time in my creative work is, like you you, you think that you're trying to figure out the right um, the right way to go something.
But what you're really just sort of doing is hanging out in the space of indecision because it feels it's got an illusory feeling of being in control, right.
Because the best way to feel in control of any project is like not to make progress.
Just hold everything in a place.
And then you can just be like, when I do this and it gets finished, it's going to be amazing.
And I get to carry on feeling great about how great it's going to be, because I'm not actually stepping into the imperfect reality of it.
So sort of Gently leading myself by the hand and saying like okay fine, but what's one thing you're going to do right now that closes off alternatives?
As I say, literally alternatives, like I've got three ways to open this chapter, so I'm going to pick one.
Because then where that goes next is going to be different as a result.
And then, you know, so on and so on and so on.
What is the right way to think about procrastination?
Well…
I mean, in my book 4000 Weeks I made this point that there's kind of a good form of procrastination.
There's a sense in which we're always procrastinating anyway on almost all the things except the one we're doing, because there are more things we could be doing than we are doing.
So there's an argument for saying that actually, that kind of – that sense in which we're procrastinating all the time is one in which we should get better at procrastinating, not try and get rid of it.
We should try and become wiser procrastinators, choosing the thing – making some conscious decision to choose which thing we're going to move forward on while tolerating that kind of anxiety or self-criticism or whatever it is about all the things that you're not making progress on.
So I think I want to reframe procrastination in that sense by saying like yeah, we're almost always not making progress on almost everything.
So let's get honest about what we want to choose for now, and better at letting the other things stand by.
The other kind of procrastination right, the kind where you do know what you want to make progress on but you're just not doing it I think is almost always the same theme we've been discussing is almost always an attempt to sort of cling on to a feeling of control at the expense of making progress.
So if I'm working on a book and I know that I care about it, and I know that it's central to my intentions for my life, and then I still find myself procrastinating, that's almost always because There's some feeling of too much vulnerability that goes along with actually It's fear.
It's fear, right.
Moving forward with it.
Yeah, right.
So you clean the kitchen instead and do all those other things.
Yeah, I think of it in two different ways.
I think the productive side of procrastination is sometimes know whether it's a big decision or some kind of problem you're trying to solve, or or uh, you know confusion around uh, something you're working on creatively.
You need that background rumination and time and space to sort it out, because sometimes going at it directly is not the best way.
Like it gets solved passively, like uh, and you know, in the, in the, in the semi-unconscious part of your brain while you're doing other things.
So i think it's important to to indulge that, if that's the right word, from time to time, as long as you have enough self-awareness to know when that's what is required, versus you know avoidance, fear or analysis paralysis, or just you know, wanting to kind of know what the conclusion is going to be of any decision that you make, which is what we always want to feel safe and secure.
Right.
But we're not allowed to know how it's going to work out.
We have to make the decision.
This is famously, uh, Dr. Ellen Langer, who, who has been here.
So uh, professor of psychology at Harvard, she's like stop worrying about making the right decision, like make the decision right.
Like this.
This impulse tours towards decisiveness.
You know that, that we seem to kind of lack in our hardwiring.
Yeah no totally and I think yeah it's a question for me anyway it's often a question of kind of just playing a mental movie a little bit of like what it would feel like to be taking the action that I'm apparently not taking and then you can get quite a lot of instant feedback about like whether it really is that something is germinating and it's not the right time or whether you are whether I am just trying to resist that slightly vulnerable feeling of sort of diving into it I think it's really useful I find it really useful to ask myself why things that I have been telling myself I'm about to do have never seemed to get around to for weeks or months on end like there's always a reason that is not it's never usually that I'm just too busy there's something that is being resisted Paul Loomis writes about this again you know sometimes it's just that you haven't thought through you haven't figured out what the actual next literal action is uh but other times it's because you expect it to bring up some emotion that you would rather not feel i mean this is the thing that amazes me time and again we will again i will um resist doing things for fear of feeling very very low levels of like difficulty or distress or embarrassment or awkwardness it's not it's not because i've got a terrible problem with my emotions and when i take that action i feel completely destroyed it's just tiny little bits of discomfort are enough to be like i'll do something else you know always even though we know in that delay we're just creating more pain for ourselves yes the hump is getting bigger as you neglect it yeah no absolutely yeah yeah yeah i mean you talk you you have very basic examples like uh you know you were assigned an article at the guardian and like you know it was too many words too little time and you should have just said you know no i can't do this right now or whatever but the people pleasing you know it's rumination around it or whatever and your editor finally just saying like well just if you can't do it just tell me no it's like you're just creating more problems for everybody else by you know trying to like manage the editor's emotions or trying to come off uh you know in a in in a good way to your editor totally yes right absolutely and to your earlier point this is so sort of it's so extraordinarily it's so extraordinarily self-absorbed in a way right i mean people pleasing very often is this notion that this editor of the newspaper couldn't cope Um, and to this day, you know, I, I see what I'm doing, so it doesn't derail me as much.
But to this day, like when I was um uh, pushing it with the deadline for this most recent book um, and I knew that my editor at the publisher wanted to to receive it as soon as possible, please.
I would catch myself entertaining fantasies where, you know, this important person at a in my mental fantasy was just doing nothing but pacing up and down his office all day.
It's like, where is Oliver?
Where is Oliver, that loser?
Where is he?
And you know it's so.
It's so self-absorbed to think that we've got to structure our lives around causing people not causing people distress, but then they've got their own problems.
We're all walking around, you know, under this idea that on some level, we are the center of the universe and everything else, you know is a mirage and everyone around us is here to serve our agenda.
Right right, even when yeah, and sometimes that manifests as being a huge egomaniac right, but it can manifest as being incredibly like retiring and people pleasing and shy and worried about what other people are feeling, but it has the same fundamental egocentric right.
It took me a long time to realize that people pleasing is is is really just a form of narcissism.
Yeah, you know, masquerading as like i'm a good person.
Right, because you're making your business to try to avoid anyone ever being mad at you.
So it's all about you.
There's a lot of practical advice in this meditative book.
You know, it's this 28-day program.
You're going to go on this journey with imperfection.
And every single day, you're given an idea and an assignment.
You're told a story, etc.
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A real practicality to it.
And I can only assume that this is a way of taking everything that you wrote about in 4000 weeks and putting it into a framework where people could actually practice it rather than just understand it philosophically.
Yeah, i think there's a lot of that in it.
I mean, i think i suppose, in terms of my own development evolution, i think of 4 000 weeks as being a book about much more about the limited amount of time that we have and how you handle that, how one handles that, and then this book a bit more about control and specifically about kind of getting over the hump from knowing what want to do to actually doing it, which requires the surrender of control.
But yeah no, absolutely.
I really wanted to try to maybe not solve but address this problem that frustrates me with a lot of personal development books right, which is that they either offer a big perspective shift and then what do you do with that, or they offer a whole bunch of steps that emerge from the writer having been on a long, interesting emotional journey.
But but these steps are just offered, as if following the steps is gonna have the same effect.
And so in the end I sort of landed on this idea of very short chapters that hopefully trigger a bit of a perspective shift, but in a cumulative way, structured in a particular order, because that's what has always worked for me that kind of consistent, regular but still quite gradual feeling my way into a new way of being not necessarily one big lightning bolt and certainly not just carry out these seven actions and everything's going to be okay.
We've all had that experience of trying to carry out those seven actions or break a bad habit, form a new habit, take advantage of some new productivity hack, you know, with maybe some degree of success and then a lapse, and then you know, maybe banning it altogether or whatever.
Like this is a, you know, this is the human condition.
And just noticing that like, what does that tell us about human condition?
Because when I look at that or think about that, I think about the extent to which we're all on some level living out this story or series of stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, what we're capable of, that were baked into us from early childhood.
You know sort of that we've inherited from the way we were brought up, etc.
And and to really overcome those limitations or setbacks or our inability to kind of master a new habit or break a bad one um, we have to deconstruct those stories and try to figure out how to tell new ones.
And that begins, you know, on this sort of acceptance level of understanding like these are just stories that we're we're walking around just convinced they're real, but you know they're they never are.
So how do you think about that aspect of this?
I think that's really true.
I think a lot of the um power is People talk about like telling different stories or rewriting stories, but I think an awful lot of the benefit just comes from seeing that stories is what they are right.
And that sort of process of disidentifying from the agendas that we're raised with and understanding a little bit about what might be the ulterior motives behind them.
I've often found that like that's where the personal inner work comes, right?
It's like it's not so much that I then have to rigorously construct a different story.
It's just understanding that like, oh, right, yes, you get free of it in that moment.
I have like many, many people.
I have a sort of morning pages practice, right?
It's the one thing I've found myself actually doing consistently for decades now.
And I really think the main benefit of that is like I write about the stuff that's bugging me or that I'm struggling with and then, by definition, in the process of writing about it, it's no longer you've purged your well.
Yeah, that's the catharsis.
Definitely.
That is a part of it, but I'm more getting it like, like it's no longer the water I swim in.
Like it's, it's there on the page.
I've got like a third party relationship to it.
And, you know, I might still believe it or be bothered by it, but I'm no longer just seeing through.
It's not like you know glasses that i'm looking through, it's like i'm looking at the glasses instead and um, there's a degree of freedom from it in that and i didn't detach or disidentify right right, and then maybe choose to follow some of its logic and maybe not.
But have some choice in the matter.
What do you say?
The to the person who's listening to this or watching, who's thinking it must be nice oliver, like you get to wake up and do your morning pages and write your books, and you know that's all grand, but you don't understand the my life, the complexity of my life.
I've got two jobs and I'm a single parent and I you know this all sounds fantastic, but also quite privileged.
Like I have burdens and obligations.
You can't imagine just to put food on the table on some level.
Like, you know, I can, I appreciate that.
Like you know, life is.
Life is much harder for for most people than it is for you or I, But on some level also like this is uh, at the heart of productivity like how do you manage like a very difficult to manage life?
Now i think it's a really good point, i think it is fundamentally just like a different point as opposed to a contradictory point, right that that, on the one hand, there are all these forms of suffering that are relative, that are that that some people suffer far more than others because of their socioeconomic good fortune or bad fortune and demographic and all sorts of things, And then there are these kind of timeless issues that affect us all in one way or another.
So not being able to do everything, being finite, having to make tough choices with time.
That's everybody.
When you lay them over each other, then obviously yes, you're going to get people whose terrible, difficult dilemma is which of three amazing business opportunities to pursue.
And somebody else's terrible dilemma is like whether they're going to keep their job or get to be a halfway present parent for their kid right.
It's a much more agonizing situation and it's definitely a a harder thing, but it has the same structure and it's quite surprising how agonizing it can feel even to even to sort of address the more privileged versions of it.
So I'm constantly running into these um this, this strange territory in what I write about, where there are things I'm writing about where I think uh, I'm making claims that are really easy for me to say in a certain way, and also true, which is a which is an awkward space to be in.
Right.
So definitely, when I'm picking examples to give and illustrate things, I might pick one with more or coming from an example of more or lesser privilege.
And I'm definitely very, very grateful for all the things I don't the dilemmas I don't have to face in in my life.
But.
But these are like deep existential human things that we all have to to cope with.
I guess one other thing you could say about that is that even when it feels like you've got no room for maneuver in your actual external life, like you don't have the autonomy to only do a certain number of hours work in the day, or to spend more time doing something more creative or something, there's a real psychological benefit in seeing the truth of your situation right, in not being in that mode, like in seeing that you're not, in not collaborating with this societal ethos that if you just put a bit more self-discipline in or organized your time better, you'd be able to do everything.
Like if impossible tasks, if if life is asking impossible things of you, it's really helpful to see that that's impossible and that all you can actually do is choose some of them.
Uh, even if it doesn't lead to any great transformations in like what your life looks like from the outside, you have stepped back into your power in an important way there, I think.
I think of your work as a bit of a Trojan horse.
It's draped with everything the reader wants to see in the context of a how-to self-help book about productivity right.
Like that's how you're bringing people in.
But inside this Trojan horse is really a path towards self-actualization.
Like this is like how to live a better, more meaningful life.
And as much as there are practical things to do and guidance and advice about decision-making and how to be ultimately your most productive over the long haul of your life, it's really like I look at it as this devotional practice of honoring yourself in every moment.
Like how can you make better decisions, not to achieve some external goal, but so that you can be in greater alignment with your values?
And you know how can you make sure that you're resting as just you know reverence for your physical body.
And how can you be present enough so that you can serve the moment?
Like these are all concepts that you know are kind of higher up the Maslow's hierarchy of needs than like how to be more productive so you can be better at your job and get a promotion.
Yes, i think you're right.
I think um calling it a trojan horse makes it look like it's been more um, strategic and deliberate than it has been.
I think you're right that that's how it's ended up.
But really that has resulted from my own journey as someone who's kind of really wanted those productivity techniques and really wanted that system.
Uh, and i don't know, had the i don't know what the skill is, the perseverance or stubbornness or something to kind of kind of not to keep being dissatisfied with not having found it.
And then you get to the point where you see what it's really about and i think the devotional idea is is beautiful there, because it really is this kind of.
I keep coming back to the idea that ultimately it's not a set of techniques, it's definitely not something you can sort of install in your brain and then you're good to go at the end of the book.
I even point out that the yeah, the subtitle of the book, the idea that you're going to deal with this all in four weeks, is kind of a bait and switch, but Actually instead it's something that is really helpful to sort of marinate in this kind of perspective.
It's a way of being.
Right, right.
So the idea in the book is that you're going to give it a few minutes maybe every day for a month.
But even in just how I experience it in my own life.
It's like coming back to it, journaling about it, reading other books that are in a similar vein, not with any sense that I'm finally going to find the technique that means I don't have to think about it anymore.
Right.
Because even that desire to get to the point where you don't really have to think about it is like antithetical to what I'm talking about here, which is like no, we're in it.
This is it.
It's always going to be it.
Yeah.
I mean the whole notion of productivity on some level presumes the idea that you can control your life.
Right.
And your work is like, well, guess what?
You can't. sorry, life is messy.
It's always going to be uncertain.
So everything you ever thought about, like how you were going to be able to achieve that, like toss that out the window.
And here's a better way of being in relationship with yourself in the world that acknowledges the messiness and the uncertainty of everything.
And only by doing that can we now you know, this is what we started out talking about like find, purchase and agency to you know, exert yourself in the way that's going to best move your life in the direction of your aspirations.
Totally, and this is why i was going to say i think it's, it is the path to agency, to use the, the word that seems to be on everybody's lips in personal development at the moment but like it's, it's really good to have a word that means you know, getting purchase on the world, making a difference, connecting to the, the world, and doesn't come with this baggage of this idea that like, eventually you're going to get to the point where you have total purchase on the world, or where you under even understand perfectly what the hell's going on, or the other people that you're, that you're going on the journey through life with, but still have this idea that means like yeah, getting stuck in, because otherwise the other place that can go sometimes is to the idea that this is a fault.
In some spiritual literature, i would argue the idea is that if you really really got a handle on what reality was like and and accepted it and lived into it fully, you just sort of you would never do anything.
You become a blank right, you sort of float around, meditate in a cave right, right.
So to the person sitting in the corner office who is, you know, cracking the spine on your book thinking well, this is just a guaranteed path towards resignation and mediocrity like, i have no interest in this like, what is your response to that?
My yeah.
My response is absolutely not right.
Exactly, it's like it's a.
I think that the quest for control, the quest for a certain kind of total dominance over life, keeps us from acting, at least acting on the things that move the needle the most.
And that this form of acceptance is about it's not accepting the way things are, that they have to stay like that.
It's about accepting that the reality you're in is where you are.
It's the reality that you're in.
And, of course, then that's when you can see the situation that you're in and make the best decisions and change it in the ways that you want to change it the most.
You know, like I said, I think a lot of this that focus on ambition and on still being productive comes from like I want there to be a way that I can be way less anxious in the world and also get stuff done.
And get stuff done, not because it's kind of plugging a gap until I can finally feel good about myself, but because it's an expression of it's a fun way to be alive to create stuff and build stuff.
So I really want there to be a way of squaring the circle, and that's what I'm trying to do.
One of the tools towards that end is this idea you have of asking yourself, what if it were easy?
I think I first heard Tim Ferriss talking about that.
Maybe it was with you, I don't remember.
And I just remember thinking, that's just an outlandish proposition.
You know it's just like I can't imagine, you know like, just take any, create any, any project or whatever, like in my example, like writing a book or whatever.
If I'm not like, if I'm not just, you know, bleeding out at the end of it, then you know I just didn't work hard enough on it and it's not going to be as good.
Like creative projects don't work that way.
But the notion that I could, it could be a different experience, is deeply confronting to me because it brings up all of those presets around um, you know, effort and achievement and uh striving, et cetera.
And there is this indelible equation in my mind that my best work is, is is is inextricably tied to, you know, my capacity for suffering.
And in liking the people pleasing, I mean, me too, right.
But, like in the people pleasing, it's so weirdly self-centered in a way.
Right, it centers you instead of the work.
It says, like what really matters at the end of this process is that i've totally like dragged myself over the coals and feel awful and exhausted, as opposed to i won't feel satisfied or like i really gave it my all unless i do that right.
As opposed to even if it doesn't matter that, if it's making it better right, right.
Whereas i think ultimately, when most of us are doing these kind of things, if we stopped and thought about it, we would want to produce the best work that we could produce.
And if it happened to be not grueling to produce it, then that ought to be great.
Were you able to accomplish that in the writing of this book?
Well, I'll tell you what it certainly got.
More more of it got produced, the more that I remembered and understood the value of this, allowing it to be easy.
So the Tim Ferriss version of this question is something like yeah, what would this look like if it were easy?
Elizabeth Gilbert has a really lovely idea of having the courage to allow something to be easy.
And to what you're saying, it sounds like it's on some level scary to think, what if it doesn't involve drawing blood?
And that doesn't mean that there aren't difficulties.
It's not like some form of positive thinking where you're going into it saying like I insist that this is going to be incredibly simple or incredibly straightforward.
It's more like you're like, I'm not going to start from the mental posture that this has got to be a fight.
This is where I get a bit sort of impatient sometimes, with approaches to creativity that are all about, like you know, battling your way through resistance and just showing up and getting your ass in the chair and all this stuff.
Like I think it can have a role.
But yeah, you know, the metaphor that I've used somewhere, I think is like if you, if you like, barrel up to somebody in a bar looking for a fight, who who wasn't planning to have a fight like you'll, you'll turn it into a fight, right?
You'll, you'll get a fight by sort of approaching reality and that kind of okay, like let's, let's do combat.
And and in fact, things just go more easily if you allow the possibility that they might go more easily.
And it I'm not sure that the semantics are quite clear here.
But you can almost even difficult things you can approach with a spirit of ease.
Nobody's suggesting that a really difficult conversation in a business setting or a relationship setting, or nobody's suggesting that bad things happening to people you love is going to be easy in the sense of fun or anything.
But you can sort of not go into it like muscularly braced for it to be horrible and find that actually that's the way to to make it go uh, more smoothly.
Even if it's sad or stressful or awkward or, you know, unpleasant in some way, it doesn't need to be like combat.
Meditation has been very helpful uh, to me with respect to that issue, because it helps you notice how insane you are.
Yeah right.
Totally.
And when you begin to realize you're just running all kinds of crazy bullshit in your head all the time, then you're able to see with a little bit more clarity that quite often – I'll just speak for myself.
I'm my own worst enemy because I'm running some tape without conscious awareness that I'm running it.
And if I could just either stop the tape or get out of my own way – and be in that state of allowing, like then stuff comes forth like, especially with anything creative, like you know i'm usually like, you know the i'm, i'm like stopping the flow through, like my conscious urges, and if i can just relax into it and be in that space of allowing, like it percolates to the surface naturally.
Yeah, i think that's very uncomfortable, Right?
No, totally.
And definitely the hardest part of this for me and I write about this in the third week primarily of the four-week structure but the degree to which meaningful action is a question of getting out of the way, of letting the action happen, as opposed to needing to stand behind it and push it forward is yeah, for a certain kind of person anyway, it's much harder, that part, because it involves, you know, it's really where not trying to control everything becomes so salient.
There's a zen teacher called kosho uchiyama who has this line um, that is, i think i'm getting this right says um, life completely unimpeded by anything manifests as pure activity.
Which is this kind of amazing thought that actually the natural state of the world and us and reality is just to be creating and generating and doing things.
So that goes back to storytelling.
We tell ourselves a story and then that ends up arresting what we're naturally we would do naturally without it.
Right yeah no totally, we're impeding ourselves unnecessarily.
Right, and a very down-to-earth level right, you don't want to have an approach to organizing your day such that if you do happen at some point speak for my own kind of example, at 3 30 pm in the afternoon to suddenly decide it feel you, you know what you want to do for some piece of writing.
Like, You don't want to have some rule that says I always do my writing between half past seven and half past ten in the morning because that's the best time for me.
If that then stops you just taking advantage of the forces that come together at some random drowsy afternoon spot.
Yeah, you've constructed this rule in your head about how it's supposed to go.
What you talk about when you talk about comfort zones and how actually what we – sometimes think of as our comfort zone is actually creating all of this discomfort that we're not acknowledging.
Yeah right, so i mean this it's obviously like this kind of classic self-help concept that we would just rather stay uh comfortable all the time instead of taking the risks of, of action and growth.
And yet it's just a funny, it's a.
It's a funny phrase because it's not comfortable.
Keep yourself back from action in this way, it's a way of avoiding the kind of potential spike of anxiety that comes with, you know, making some bold move in the world.
But it's not comfortable.
It's like this sort of low level um suffering.
Uh, there's a, there's a translation of dukkha, the buddhist word for suffering, that as, not as suffering, but as um sort of unsatisfactoriness or bothersomeness was.
I saw, I saw once in a different, in some context, and it's like yeah, that's what you can, that's what you resign yourself to if you if, If you're unwilling to take that, that risk of sort of looking at things how they are and taking a step.
I think the book does a really good job of getting people acclimated To all of these tenants and ideas that you're talking about, and in a very low stakes environment.
You're like, just, you know, what's the little thing that you can do today?
Or what's the idea that you can challenge within yourself?
Or you know what happens if you, you know, sit there for three hours or, you know, just make sure you go into the shed.
If all you're doing is looking around.
You don't have to do anything, like all of these very low lifts that introduce this way of being to somebody you know who is uncomfortable with them or for whom it's new.
Um, a way that's not intimidating, you're not like you're going to do this for 90 days and you know all of that kind of stuff.
Yeah, that was important to me because i mean, firstly for the reason that i think you're getting at right, which is that this is something that enables you to do it, even if you're new to it and it feels threatening, but also because like, on a more philosophical level or something, actually the really important moment is when you cross from not doing it at all doing it at all.
It's a much more important.
Um, i saw somebody somewhere on social media making this point the other day that like one, writing one paragraph has more in common with writing a book than with having written nothing at all.
Right, or going to a bunch of parties and talking about the book you're going to write right, that too, right.
So yeah, the moment like understanding that once you bring this way of being into reality, once you cross from like, from nothing to anything, that is the really important crossing point.
After that it's just um, you know doing it some more, but that's always been my experience.
Like all of the, the sort of quote-unquote, like bigger or larger things that i, that i've done, all started with, you know an idea that, like i was just a scribble or or just some half-baked whatever and a stab at something that you know.
If, if you were to deconstruct it or look at it now, you'd be like well, this is nothing right now.
Right, but you see that idea with tiny little actions and you do create momentum and you don't know where it's going.
Or maybe you don't even have an intention that it's going to go anywhere.
But it takes root.
And then you know, one thing leads to another and suddenly you're on a whole other trajectory with your life that you didn't anticipate.
Yeah, right.
Because it looks like nothing, but it's exactly not nothing.
It's like the biggest thing, anything as opposed to nothing.
It's funny.
I'm sometimes get asked.
I hope you're I hope you weren't going to ask me this.
I'm sure you would.
But like what's the one thing that people could do to put this into practice?
Or something like that.
That's a favorite go-to for the podcaster.
Right.
And my response has always been like well, what that person asking that question wants is precisely like the safety rail, the handrail right.
The practice that you do it every day and then you don't need to worry about life.
It's going to be automatic.
Yeah.
But actually it is precisely like the answer to that question is 10 minutes of the thing that you know you want to do and are not doing right.
It's like the specifics I can't answer.
But if there is something in your world that you know would lend more meaning and importance to what you're doing with your time and you haven't been doing it like actually doing five minutes of that thing today, not preparing for it, not building a whole system for how you're going to do it every day, but but just actually engaging in the thing.
Yeah, as you say, however, in however small a way, it's everything.
And if you can't find five minutes to do that, then maybe it's not as important to you as you think it is.
Right.
If it really is the case that you can't get the time, then obviously you're choosing not to get the time for some reason.
Yeah,
On that subject of what is the one thing...
This conjures in my mind the world of self-optimization that's out there, whether it's books or podcasts or just the culture, this idea that the way to move your life forward is to reduce very complicated ideas down to a certain set of steps that you practice religiously, that are going to move your life forward or change your life.
So what is your perspective on this optimization movement that you see, you know, if you, if you just canvas the internet?
Yeah, I think that I mean it.
I understand the appeal right, because it is the purest form, in a way of, of the promise of control.
It's like do these things and everything else follows, because you're, you know you're, you're picking what matters and reorganizing your life according, according to those things.
I mean it's.
I've written about this quite a bit in the past, but I think the basic problem with optimization of any kind is that the question is always like optimization for what?
And if all you're doing is making yourself a better system for processing throughput, right then, all else being equal, you're just going to be busier and probably make worse decisions about what to bring in to your realm, because you think you can do all of it, so you end up focusing on all sorts of stuff that you didn't care about.
I mean...
It's hard for me not to look at a lot of this, including some of the extremes of the longevity stuff as well.
That was my follow-up.
Healthspan extension.
That is the extreme version of this.
None of these things are inherently bad.
It's not inherently bad to make your.
If it takes you an hour to find your clothes in the morning, you probably need some more efficiency in how your home is organized.
Sure.
What it's not going to do is get you to the point of total fulfillment in life by just continuing that logic through the rest of your life, and the same with um health span.
Like i mean yeah, i'm not going to sit here and say it's bad to do things that make you mean you have a longer healthier, enjoyable life to be to, to live.
But i've got to believe that in at least some people's cases and i think sometimes some of the luminaries of the space have been quite honest about this as well right that that um, that there is going on there an attempt to sort of not literally, intellectually live for it.
Everyone knows life is finite, but to sort of feel oneself not in the position of being on a glide path towards death.
And that should not stop anybody from eating more nutritiously instead of less nutritiously.
But it's like, what's it for?
What it's for is hopefully, that both the activity of doing it itself ideally and the energy and focus and extra time to which it might lead are opportunities to be more present in this finite life, rather than part of some plan to achieve escape velocity.
Yeah, it's about what's driving it, what the motivation is.
If your motivation behind healthspan extension, whether you're aware of it or not, is because you have this deep distaste for the idea that one day you might die, you know, Or just a discomfort with uncertainty or reckoning with your inability to be able to control externalities.
That's a dysfunctional relationship, right?
Obviously, we all want to live as long and be as vital in our lives as we possibly can.
But why do we want that?
So that we can experience the richness of what life has to offer.
So if your focus on healthspan extension or any other kind of optimization protocol in your life is purely for the purpose of mastering the protocol or because it states some innate desire within you to feel like you're in control, then you're off the mark.
These things are all great, but if your rules around sleep and nutrition are so strict that you no longer have friends and you're like you know you can't be in a relationship or you're unbendable in every regard, like you're missing the entire point of the whole thing.
Yeah, no, totally.
It's a question of knowing why you're doing it.
And even then, right, you can, maybe your enjoyment is mastering certain protocols, right?
That's not a problem.
But know that that's what you're doing and that it's taking away time from other things that you're choosing to neglect instead.
Again, it's always about becoming more conscious of what's going on rather than necessarily changing what one is doing.
If you had to choose one major misconception that people have around productivity in the context of living a meaningful life, is there one that comes top of mind?
I mean, I guess it's just this notion of living for the future, right?
I don't know that it's a misconception or if it's just a sort of way of an orientation towards life that we slip into all too easily, but it's that basic idea that in some way this moment right here is a bit provisional relative to the one that's coming later.
And I still get flashes of this in myself, right?
This is not anything that I'm absolutely perfect at, but it's this idea that the real reason that you're doing anything is for when it cashes out in a portion of life that's coming later.
Of course, we're pursuing long-term goals.
Of course, there are things we're creating in the hopes that at a later point we reap the rewards in this way or that.
But there's got to be some role for enjoying or finding meaning in the doing of it.
And otherwise, you end up in this place.
There's this great quote that I used in 4000 Weeks from John Maynard Keynes, the economist, where he talks about people being stuck in this mindset, where the guy who's stuck in this mindset doesn't love his cat, but only the cat's kittens, and not really even the cat's kittens, but the kitten's kittens, and like so on, forward forever.
Um, that's no way to live.
Is that one of the reasons why, uh, you have this practice of, of, uh, scruffy generosity?
Is that a way of like rooting your, your life in the present moment?
I really think it is.
Yeah.
Scruffy hospitality is this phrase that um pastor from anglican pastor from tennessee called jack king um coined, and it's really just the whole idea of like um, bringing people into your home.
It's not just about dinner parties right, but that's where it started uh, doing things in the world in a way where you're sort of like being open and honest about the kind of um mess.
So he and his he he talks about how he and his wife had this.
They loved having people for dinner, but they had developed this like checklist of things that had to be put in place until everything was perfect and so that the guests would be really impressed.
And it ended up putting them off actually doing it because it's so much work.
Because it was never clean enough, so then obviously no dinner parties.
Right, right.
And deliberately making this conscious decision to be like.
Do you want to say to friends do you want to come around?
The house is going to be how it is.
We're going to cook things based on what's in the cupboard.
And discovering, and I have the same experience, I think, not just that it's okay and that people will forgive you for making a less impressive um meal than you might have done but that there's actually something actively positive and sound kind of better in a way about the connection that comes from letting these facades fall and just being like you know this is uh this is who i am and this is what my life is i'm really interested in this i don't know if this um resonates with you in your professional role but like i have the sense that people are just completely um voracious online for like behind the scenes stuff they they kind of they they want to know like how you put this uh podcast together as much as they want to know what happens once the podcast is happening and all that kind of that same idea there's this kind of great hunger for like no what's what's the reality and i think there's just a desire to there's a closeness and a sense of connection that might be parasocial in the case of lots of internet stuff but but when it comes to like inviting people around your house there's a real closeness that comes from like you know this is this is how i am right and you know that it's how you are too you know your house is in a mess too sometimes right so like we're giving unvarnished reality like let's get over it yeah yeah relaxing into that like it's an it's it's like being okay with yourself in all of your imperfections and i think also just being okay with the uncertainty of everything, like relaxing into that rather than looking at it as some kind of puzzle that you need to solve or code that you need to crack.
Um, it's such a pressure reliever.
Yeah.
That, I think, then allows you to be like you can exhale, and then you can sit down and you can like do your shit without being burdened by that.
I love the?
Um anecdote that you shared about the, the dying rabbi.
You know what i'm talking about.
This is like a famous old, uh jewish joke.
You want me to tell it?
Yeah, all right, so this is a.
This is a joke where, like the, the celebrated rabbi is on his deathbed and all his students are lined up in descending order of seniority.
Next to him a senior student closest and, and he sort of opens his eyes one last time and and shares his kind of final wisdom on the nature of reality and he says life is a river.
And the senior student like, listens to this with great um sort of um devotion and turns to the next student, said the rabbi says life is a river.
And it goes down the chain of students the rabbi says life is a river.
The rabbi says life is a river.
And then um uh, it gets to the youngest student, who's sort of too naive and doesn't realize how respectful you've got to be, and turns back to the student next to him.
Says what does he mean?
Life is a river.
So the question comes back and back and back up the chain until the senior student, absolutely terrified at the sort of?
Um disrespect that he's risking showing, says I'm sorry Rabbi, but what do you mean?
Life is a river.
And the rabbi opens his eyes one last time and says, all right, so it's not a river.
And we are to make of this what?
What I think this plays with this joke is that This idea that we're so convinced that we can sort of get a conceptual grip on what's going on, on what life is.
And there's something actually deeply wise about being like, no, all right, whatever, right?
We're just we're constantly.
One of the ways in which we're constantly trying to feel in control is feel in conceptual control.
Like we know what's going on and we understand.
And there's something very, very relaxing, again, about just sort of letting go into the doubt.
Not that you shouldn't try to understand little bits of the stuff that you're working on or that is in your domain, but that being in a state of bewilderment about how things work, about what makes other people tick,
Myself, I find it really helpful in a relationship context not to think that there's going to come a point where I fully understand what is going on in somebody else's head and actually i think if you did get to that point it would not be a it would it would lose something you wouldn't want it you wouldn't want it yeah so just embracing um the mystery of it all yeah and about the future as well i always think i find it so interesting to think sometimes about how like the most powerful people in the world presidents prime ministers you know the pope like they're just in the same situation as me about the total uncertainty about what's happening tomorrow I mean, they have certain greater powers to make certain things happen, but they're just firefighting all day long.
And that's their job, right?
And so if they're marinating in the mystery, you're probably not going to crack it.
So relax and get on with it on some level, right?
Exactly.
The aspiration for this book, what is it that you really want people to get out of it?
I would hope that it helps people just like ease their way over this, this gap from from having some thoughts about how they would like to show up in the world to actually doing those things.
I wanted to try to create a book that was like an active ingredient in this process, as opposed to just being about this subject.
There may be limits to how far a book can ever do that, but i i wanted it to be like a, like a companion to putting one foot in front of the other in that way that, as we were discussing, is everything, even if it's just one step.
Well, I think you did a wonderful job.
It really is an antidote to the universal suffering that we're all experiencing in the modern world, this prison that we've crafted around our lives.
And you have figured out a way out.
And like I said at the outset, it's a real act of public service.
Just the fact alone that you decided to tackle this very difficult concept of productivity and meaning and how to make sense of our lives amidst our busy lives, and didn't go the route of reduction and instead really embraced, like tackling all the complexity and the nuance of of it, which is like no small feat and it's you know.
The work you do is really beautiful and i appreciate what you've done and i hope you continue down this path.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for that.
That's very generous thing to say.
Thank you yeah cool, um.
Is there any place other than to pick the books up that you want to point people?
No, pick the books up um, or in audio read by me, and then um, my website, oliverberkmancom has uh, you can sign up for my newsletter there, Excellent.
Thank you.
And please come back.
I'd love to.
Yeah.
I so badly want to make you my accountability buddy.
That would be awesome.
Yes.
Anyway, to be continued.
Thank you, Oliver.
Cheers.
Thanks so much.
Peace.
All right, everybody.
That's it for today.
Thank you so much for listening.
I really do hope that you enjoyed the conversation.
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