#840 - Oliver Burkeman - 8 Unexpected Lessons To Be Less Hard On Yourself
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Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Oliver Berkman. He's a journalist, a writer for The Guardian, and an author. Does trying harder to be extra productive actually work? Does it net more success or just more misery? For the type A people in the world, how can we learn to be less tough on ourselves and maybe have more fun in the process? Explain

Expect to learn what imperfectionism is, how to overcome decision paralysis and to deal with distractions, whether or not there is an easy solution to imposter syndrome, an unexpected answer to fixing procrastination, the most effective ways to curb self-criticism, why you should stop berating yourself for not being sufficiently present, and much more. Oliver,

has probably been my favorite writer over the last 12 months, certainly in the top three. And I just love this sort of very unashamed,

raw, open perspective on the fallibility of all of us trying to work harder and the inevitable face planting that we do on a daily basis. He's so great. And I really, I really feel like he gives me license to open up more about my shortcomings too. He's so phenomenal. The new book's great. You should check that out. And yeah, there is just so much to take away from today. So please enjoy it.

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What is imperfectionism? This is my proprietary term, because I think you've got to have a proprietary term, a sort of umbrella term for this whole approach that has been getting clearer and clearer in my mind in the last few years. I guess the simplest way to talk about it is

understanding your built-in limitations as a human, your finite time and finite talents, finite energy, finite attention, as not things you have to spend your whole life struggling to do away with, but actually like the portal to a sort of energized and accomplished and interesting life. So it's about embracing that.

limitations of all kinds, including the fact that we can't ever produce anything perfectly. I was going to say, what's an alternative perspective? What's the opposite of imperfectionism railing against that can't be beaten? Well, obviously, perfectionism is one way of putting it. But I think the problem with that is that people think about perfectionism as meaning something very narrow, which is like, I'm so obsessed with producing perfect work. High standards. Right, right.

I really want to say that that's one example of something broader, which I think is everywhere in productivity advice and personal development culture and all the rest of it. What looks like an attempt to improve and do better and reach new heights is very often just a kind of psychological avoidance, a way of helping you not have to think about the fact that time is short.

good relationships and an interesting life involve emotional vulnerability and uh you know that um that you can't control the future and and it's generally a stress-inducing challenge to try so you know all these different ways in which we we think we're sort of getting more control over our lives i think very often what we're doing is enabling this avoidance of of uh really confronting what it actually is to appear alive there is something sort of uh uh

mortally hilarious about being a finite human with infinite tasks to do. The 21st century memento mori is me thinking about the fact that one day I'll be dead, but my email address will still continue to receive emails. So true. Yeah, it's terrifying. I mean, it's terrifying at first. I guess the email example is so powerful because it is just the obvious example of

an incoming supply of things that is, to all intents and purposes, infinite. We're surrounded by these. There is an effectively infinite number of things that would be useful and interesting to read, of places that would be interesting to go, of hobbies or business ventures or anything that would be interesting to launch and get involved in, money you could earn. None of it has an end point, but we have end points. I think

Of course, it's not just that the supplies are infinite, but we have minds that are capable of conceiving of the infinite, or at least of much more than we could do. You can have 20 completely incompatible dreams for the next five years of your life. There's no problem with that at all. The problem is when you try to bring them into reality. I think that's just the thing that I'm always coming back and back around to from a million different angles. It's just like

What does it mean to actually drop into that reality that you're going to have to choose? And that most of the things you never get around to doing are not going to have been like tedious second tier things that you should have abandoned. They're going to have been good things as well, but you just didn't get to do them. And arguing that this is good news and really empowering and really in favor of productivity is my mission and my challenge here.

You say the world opens up when you realize you're never going to sort your life out. What do you mean? I'm glad you brought this up because I think that is in some ways, it's like the governing example for a lot of people, maybe just kind of neurotic people like me, I don't know, but of the way in which we try to attain a kind of control over our lives that is not actually open to us as humans. So that sense of like,

it takes different forms, right? But it could be, I'm going to get completely organized. I'm going to get so productive that I never need to drop a single ball or fail to meet a demand. Or it's going to be that I'm

so talented at what I'm doing that I really feel the confidence of knowing what's going on in work, in relationships, in parenting. There's one that you never feel like you've got a handle on. I'm sort of saying if you pursue life with this idea that you're going to get to the point where it's all sorted out,

you're sort of constantly postponing the meaning of life into the future. You actually end up doing less because there's all sorts of things you feel that you can't really fully get involved in until the point at which you've sorted life out. And so in some ways, this new book I wrote is kind of like a manifesto for like, okay, what happens if we just accept that

You're never going to get life sorted out. Other people, it's like the news, the world, there's too many crises. It's just a really anxious time in the headlines. I want to wait until that's all calmed down. And it's like, what would happen if you abandoned all that and said like, no, it has to be now. It has to be now that you do interesting and meaningful and important stuff because this future point of smooth sailing and control is never coming.

That's got me thinking about sort of two types of people. There's many types of people, but here's two, a little taxonomy. One being the people who have not an external locus of control, but the restrictions on why they can't do things are because of something that's happening out there. How can I sort myself while the climate is still such a mess or while there's these global conflicts going on or while we've got this person in power I don't like or this person trying to get in power that I don't like? And then...

There's another version of a person who does the exact same thing, but all of their restrictions are inside of themselves. How can I start doing my life while my to-do list is still all over the place? How can I begin to do that when I'm still at 17, 18% body fat and I don't know what diet I'm going to follow? How can I do this before I... You know, it's the same psychology that...

Many people that listen to this show and are fans of your work probably chastise others for the externalized locus of control. And it's like you have an internalized, externalized locus of control. Yeah, absolutely. And that's really well put. And it's like, if you're waiting, there's something sort of fundamentally absurd for any finite human to sort of wait for

to really show up in life, whatever that means to you, until a point at which you have greater control. You're in the driving seat of the situation. Just to put examples on it, absolutely. One of the things that I get from one portion of people who

engage in a very friendly way, but slightly critically with things I write sometimes or talk about is like, well, it's all very well giving this advice about how to handle too many emails. But the problem is that we live in an economy and a society that puts people in these impossible work situations. You can't just choose to ignore your emails because you have to pay the rent.

That's sort of true, but also you've still got to make decisions about what you're going to show up for as a finite human. That might involve neglecting some emails. Then, yeah, on the other side of the equation, it's like people who are very, very in love with that idea that through any manner of philosophies or personal disciplines or the perfect daily routine, they're going to master life on their own and for themselves

which feels like a more independent way of living. It feels like you're much less indentured to what political party is in power and at what stage late capitalism is at. But actually, it's still giving all the power to future you who's going to be so great once you've developed all these habits you're going to develop and put in place all the

systems and achieve the financial independence and all the rest of it. There's a Sartre quote where he says, I have led a toothless life, a toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on. And I have just noticed that my teeth have gone. Amazing. I've never come across that line. It's exactly the point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Gwendo Bogle has a similar idea about deferred happiness syndrome that you sort of

This sentence, it's so common. I remember I used to think this when I spent the summers in between school. So I played cricket growing up like a good British boy. And the season obviously really ramps up as soon as you get into summertime, especially as a youth cricket player. And I always remember that I would think, well, summer hasn't really started yet. And it would be half a week in.

And then it would be a week and a half in. I think, well, summer really hasn't, it still kind of hasn't started yet. And then before I knew it, I was getting ready to go back to school and I was thinking, but summer hadn't really started yet. And I think that that is a, it's a microcosm for kind of how we see our life. It's this sort of common feeling that your life hasn't yet begun and that the reality you're in at the moment is some sort of prelude to an idyllic future that

It's totally right. Obviously, I'm writing about stuff and talking about stuff that I am an archetypal sufferer of. Otherwise, it wouldn't be interesting to me. But I think one other point, just to get a bit self-referential and meta about it, obviously, is that it is also possible to hear all this. There are a few books and gurus who talk along these lines and actually become

a different kind of perfectionistic about seizing the moment and being present. I think what we're talking about here, this feeling that real life hasn't quite begun yet, is in some sense almost universal and very, very natural because it's a protective mechanism against

Doing all the feeling and all the realising that comes from seeing what it really is to be a human, born on the river of time, en route to death. It's terrifying and I don't think anyone necessarily is fully reconciled to it.

So it's not that you can sort of snap your fingers and decide, okay, now I'm just going to show up for my life right now. It's more a question, in my experience anyway, of getting better and better at seeing what you're up to, seeing what's happening when you get really, really invested in some new habit change project or some new goal setting technique or something. Not that any of these things are bad, but that if what you're doing is really investing in them because you're en route to the time when

life's really going to matter. I think that is a problem. There's a life cycle thing to this too, right? It's like it's a lot easier and more reasonable to think that most of life is coming later when you're 19. And kind of a little bit absurd, I can relate when you're in your 40s, right? It's like that's what midlife does to a lot of people. It's like, oh, hang on.

At a certain point, I can't carry on claiming that real life is going to be five to ten years. I'm in mid-August. I can't say that summer's not started yet. Right, right. Yeah, it's funny thinking about how the push that we have, the tools that we use to kind of try and bring...

life under our control and how many of those end up actually pushing life off. I do think I've had this argument for a long time. My background was in productivity when I first started the show, you know, David Allen was coming on and the Peter C Brown that wrote, make it stick. You know, like I was fully in the weeds, absolutely Ali Abdaal pilled. And

I think that there is an argument to be made for insecure overachievers like us. I think there is an argument to be made that you probably need to spend a good bit of time, ideally when you are a bit younger, because you can afford to waste it, just learning what a GTD method is and learning about time blocking and learning about kind of the physics of the system. I think that is important in many ways, because once you've learned some of the rules, you can then begin to play with them a little bit. But

just saying i have no idea how to manage my time now i'm just getting like all of a sudden i can just be kind of this free-flowing thing i'm just gonna like live life bro i get that but if you'd had a little bit of um the basic foundations to this i think you can get a bit further so this is my uh justification for why everyone should be a productivity bro for six months out of their life and then after that they can graduate to being an imperfectionist

Oh yeah, no, totally. I think in many ways you can make an even stronger case for the productivity side of things than that. I probably have in certain bits of journalism here and there just sort of mocked the whole world of productivity culture, but I'm a huge sucker for it myself. Definitely. It's a bit like Shakespeare or the Bible, right? There are so many bits of

GTD and David Allen that we're all using all the time now that nobody realizes that he deserves the credit for them because they've just sort of sunk into our way of thinking. Absolutely. I think the problem for me was always, in hindsight, that I would jump on a new philosophy or a new system and

It's almost religious, right? I don't think it's inappropriate to say that on some level, I would think that this was going to save my soul. I would think that this was going to be my salvation. It was going to all the things that were largely unconsciously in me about feeling like an insecure overachiever, feeling inadequate, feeling that I needed to do all sorts of things in order to just be basically okay and justify my existence. I would put all of that onto

the new system that was going to, um, organize my life. And I was going to get to a point where the system was in place and it was just like, um, set it and forget it. You know, it's just like, then it's just gonna, it's just gonna run and life's going to be easy. And all these achievements are going to follow without me having to go through the, the sort of, um, inner work and you, that doesn't work, but that's not the fault of David Allen coming up with a

useful and interesting way of organizing your projects and your tasks. That's something that we do very naturally. Other people do it with religions, or they do it with political movements, or they do it with substance abuse probably on some level. You could see all of these things as being different ways in which we're trying to save ourselves from being where we are and who we are as finite

humans. It's really great to see through that and then carry on using the productivity techniques. No problem at all. How do you describe insecure overachievers? I fear there's maybe quite a few thousand listening. Yeah. I think there is a very formal way in which this idea has been defined in psychology, but to me it's just the idea of people who achieve a lot, get a lot done, are very ambitious,

are probably, broadly speaking, praised or reaffirmed by society in general for doing that. Maybe described as driven. But ultimately doing all of that to try to fill some hole inside. It's the feeling that you're scrambling up towards a minimum baseline of being an adequate person as opposed to

"I'm an adequate person, everything's fine, I'm enough" in the famous phrase, and now I'm going to accomplish some things because it's really fun to accomplish them. It's got that much more desperate sense of like, "Ultimately I need to do this or I'm kind of not okay." Once you start thinking in these terms and you just sort of look at politics and look at the world of business and

all sorts of other areas, you know, entertainment, the arts, you start to see, I mean, maybe it's unfair of me and I'm just applying, I'm just seeing my, my issues and other people, but you start to see like, there are a lot of very successful high profile people who it seems pretty obvious are sort of in that locked in that dynamic.

And I think a part of what I'm trying to do in my work and in this new book is like rescue ambition and accomplishment and all the rest of it. So I don't want to say in order to get past my insecure overachievement, I just have to kind of like settle for mediocrity and give up and do nothing. I want to say like, no, there is a way of achieving.

not treating your whole life as a kind of scrambling towards a basic sense of adequacy, where you are then actually freed up to do a whole ton of cool, meaningful, interesting, impressive things precisely because you're no longer actually doing it for this other reason. It kind of doesn't work when you're doing it for that other reason. People do get a lot of success, but there's always this undertone of

dissatisfaction and problems with like deep procrastination that come up and desperation guilt shame yeah yeah yeah i'm intimately intimately familiar the insecure overachiever thing i actually i didn't know it was a thing outside of your work but i first read about it through you uh and your fantastic uh blog mailing list thing the imperfectionist and uh i

Fuck me, I was seen. I was seen. It was for the first time in my life somebody saw me. I was absolutely pierced through the soul. There's a point, I think, just to hammer this home for the insecure overachievers that already feel too seen, that they don't have fun while they're doing it. I think that's an important element of it, that you go through all of this

rigmarole and effort and and achievement worldly internally personally professionally all of it and you look back and you go and how much fun did you have doing that and it was all swimming in this milieu of desperation and necessity and obligation and and fear and lack and and

uncertainty. And at no point did you feel this sort of liberated free thing and you go, well, hang on, what was the point in going through all of this if you didn't even have fun? Like what literally, what was the point? I'm aware that there's a difference strictly speaking in psychology between happiness and meaning and blah, blah. But really the moment to moment experience of you doing most of your life's work, whether that is personally or professionally is

should in some form be fun and i think that the insecure overachiever is able to imbue even the most fun activity with the least fun frame totally and i just want to i really want to point out like not only have i suffered deeply from this and been in this situation but like on some level i still am i think i've got a lot of distance on it and a lot of sort of higher altitude on it and and

I think I do enjoy my life and my work much more than I once did. But on some level, I don't think these things ever entirely go away. In fact, I think it is perfectionistic to expect them to entirely go away. So there. But it's so resonant for me, that sense of deficit. That sense that magic superpower ability to turn

great things, even just like purely enjoyable or purportedly enjoyable kind of leisure experiences, holiday experience, whatever, travel into that sense of like, either am I getting enough out of it? Am I using this well? And I still have this happening to me today with, you know, the last book, 4,000 Weeks, did a lot better than I was expecting. And so a thing would happen now and again that like somebody

quite high profile would say something positive about it or I'd get mentioned somewhere in a way that was amazing. I'm getting better at catching myself, but my immediate response to that is like, "Oh, it's amazing." Then two seconds later is the thought like,

I've got to be capitalizing on this somehow. It's really bad that I don't have these on a nice page of my website that I'm still trying to redesign my website. I've got to use this somehow. Otherwise, who even am I? Ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. I think I see this so much in my life as well. If I'm sat by

The garden reading on my Kindle, reading some article, maybe one of yours or something from Astle Codex 10 or whatever. I read this great thing about GLP-1s and the economics of them the other day. And I remember stopping reading

and starting to do spaced repetition memorization so that I could recall it on a podcast later. And I was like, I'm not gonna talk about the fucking economics of GLP-1s. Like just allow yourself to enjoy this nice article as you sit in the sunshine, just allow yourself to do it. There's this permanent feeling that we're falling behind, that we should be doing more, that we could be doing more, that we need to scramble back up, that even leisure activities is this sort of weird puritanical fucking guilt

that we have where it's like, oh, you're just enjoying that article? Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are to just enjoy that article? How terrible of you. But yeah, it's something that, like I say, I'm intimately, intimately familiar with. And then there's the other side. There's a bunch of different areas. I've got this idea for the book that I'm currently working on at the moment, The Four Horsemen of the Productivity Apocalypse. And

One of them being productivity purgatory, which is that even the leisure activities you do have to serve some sort of purpose. Like you're not playing pickleball because you like to play pickleball. It's because you've read from an Andrew Huberman blog that if you do social activities for 45 minutes two times a week that you've got a reduced chance of mortality. The dark playground is

from a tim urban which is when you're supposed to be working but doing something leisurely which means that the leisurely thing isn't enjoyable and you feel guilty about it and also the work isn't getting done and you feel guilty about that too um so you know there's just this there's so many places that this shit can come into your life but yeah i am the the insecure overachiever that's a that's a

rehabilitation arc from insecure overachiever to rehabilitating insecure overachiever. What were the things that you did? Was it practices? Was it a reframing thing? I'm a big fan of mantras and philosophies and stuff, but it seems like it's such a fundamental part of people's lives that simply some mental tool that tweaks the way that you look at a particular perspective, that doesn't seem like it would be powerful enough.

No, I know what you mean. And I think actually not only not powerful enough, but can be really easily co-opted back into the same insecurity project, right? I mean, and one of the things I talk about in the new book, not really picking a fight with James Clear because he's A, really wise and brilliant and B, like,

How stupid would it be to pick a fight with a towing habit? Hinting that there is another view here which says that actually focusing on developing good habits can be really a distraction from what we need to do. This is an answer to your question, sorry, the long term. Because actually turning anything into a project of habit change for various reasons that we can talk about can really

cause you not to just do the thing right it can really make it it can really create these kind of psychological structures in your life where it becomes terrible if you miss a day or where you're again just thinking like it's it's only when i've fully embedded this habit that um that uh i'll really you know be a properly functioning human or it's like you know

I'm going to meditate for 10 minutes today because I have a plan that within about three months I'll be meditating for two hours every day. Suddenly, that is just a huge, intimidating, long-term thing that will prevent you from just sitting down and just the leap of faith that is involved in just meditating for 10 minutes today with no guarantee that you're going to do it another day or come back to it or make anything regular out of it. This is all by way of saying, I think there are things you can do to embrace the

the outlook that we're discussing here but at the very end of the day i think it's important to be clear about the fact that it is it is just a sort of long and two steps forward one step back process of like unclenching right it is a sort of it's a it's a um almost like a bodily uh

It's not a doing of something to get into this mindset. It's a being willing to not do something. It's like an untightening of your musculature and of your whole attitude to the world. I've written about some ways that you can encourage that, and we can talk about those. But I really want to say that, yeah, I think in the end, it isn't about tools. And that in my experience, it has been...

journaling about it early in the morning for years and catching myself back in the mindset of not enjoying myself and scrabbling to try to get everything done so that I can feel okay. Catching myself again and again and again. And so yeah, really happy to talk about tools and techniques. But I think on some level, it's important to see that, that it's just like a

It's a slow, and it feels very uncomfortable at times, slow kind of unclenching of some kind of muscle. Have you read any Jed McKenna? Are you familiar with that guy? Oh, years ago. Yeah. Spiritual Enlightenment Now and stuff. I'm really not.

very well versed in spirituality stuff at all. And I'm not convinced that he classes as that. He's like the most straightforward writing spiritual teacher, I guess, that you can find. But he has in his book, Release the Tiller is one of his cues. And he's talking about how people hold on to the tiller, which is the thing attached to the rudder that steers a ship. He's talking about how people grip it so hard. They grip it very firmly, trying to get you to move in the direction that you want. And his

uh contention is to release the tiller of the boat and sort of to allow it to go where it goes as he says and in your most recent newsletter again i keep talking about it because i read it all the time uh in your most recent newsletter you said reality doesn't need you to operate it oh my god

So I'm quoting Michael Singer. I want to pop in there and say, this is not my, my sort of, um, phrase, but yeah. Yeah. And somebody else sent me in response to that, uh, another way of expressing the same idea, which was something like let go or be dragged basically. Right. That's great. I love that. Like those are your options. Um,

I tell you what there are, because I don't want to be a person who just says, oh no, it's just years of slow progress. There's nothing you can do about it. I think there are ways that you can navigate day-to-day.

like frameworks or kind of questions and i've written in the past i think we may have even spoken in the past about the one from james hollis about whether a life choice enlarges or diminishes you you know if you're facing some choice it's like well if i went down that avenue i don't know if i'd enjoy it i don't know if it'd be painful but i can intuitively connect to the sense of whether it will be an enlarging direction or not that can be very useful um and then

Also, maybe this is a little bit broad brush, but it's almost the case that if some practice or some way of thinking makes you feel incredibly uncomfortable, and especially if it makes you cringe, that this is probably something that you need. For me, and I think for many people, and maybe for people in the audience for this, I think

The whole field of self-compassion and being kinder to yourself is that. It makes you want to just sort of like, I do not want to read more about how I'm supposed to be kind to someone. But actually, that's sort of a sign that maybe it is that. So, you know, anyone who has remained following this conversation after I said the phrase,

self-compassion weeded out the people who are so who cringed at it so much that they won't even move forward then then you get to the point of like oh yeah probably the reaction i have to that idea about being kinder to myself is is a quite a useful sign that there's something valid yes yes uh so getting into the new book there's a i've picked out some of my favorite lessons one of which i think relates to what you were just talking about the reverse golden rule of

on not being your worst enemy. Yeah, and I begin each of these little chapters just quickly. The structure of the book is that it's 28 short chapters divided into four weeks with the kind of invitation that you read one a day. Obviously, I can't control how people read the book, and I don't think you have to read them one per day, but that's the idea. Each one begins with a quotation from someone else that

really made a powerful impact on me. That one, on not being your own worst enemy, begins with this quotation from Adam Phillips, the psychoanalyst, who makes this very vivid point that, for many of us anyway, if you met at a party the person who is in your head berating you half the time, shouting at you to do more and work harder, or criticising the results of what you do, that inner

inner critic voice. If you met that person socially, you would just think they were damaged. You wouldn't take seriously somebody who comes up to somebody else at a party and just starts ranting at them in that way. They're the problem. He says more very interesting things. But we accept that level of criticism of ourselves in a way that we wouldn't even

It's impossible to think of addressing your friends in the way that I think a lot of us either verbally or it's almost implicit and unconsciously address ourselves. What I love about this idea of the reverse golden rule, which comes from the philosopher Ido Landau, is just the idea that you should not treat yourself in ways that you wouldn't treat other people. What I really like about this is that it's a very

palatable form of self-compassion for those of us who want to sort of vomit when we hear the phrase. It's not this idea which you come across in certain social media contexts and elsewhere of kind of treating yourself as this kind of uniquely wonderful and special person who requires both your own and the world's care and stroking. It's none of that. It's just saying,

You value friendship, right? You're a good friend to people. You like to think of yourself as a good friend to people. It's good that people are good friends to each other. Don't just randomly exclude yourself from that basic ethic with which you go through life. If you're the kind of person who likes to think that you're decent to your friends, just kind of be decent to yourself as well when it comes to

taking a clear-eyed look at how much you've achieved in a given day or the standards of something that you've done or whether you did your best to navigate some interpersonal thing, even if it didn't work out as well as it could have done. You know what I mean? It's just that basic sense of like,

bring the way you treat yourself up to the level that you already treat other people. Yes, the minimum bar that you have for everyone else. There's something inescapable and stark about

realizing that you treat yourself worse than you treat people that aren't yourself. And even if you were born with an identical twin or you and your mother live to the same year together and you spend all of your time together as son and so forth, there is nobody that you're going to have as intimate of a relationship with as yourself. And you're just, yeah, this incapability that the insecure overachievers among us have

to just be fucking kind to ourselves, to give ourselves a break, to be able to see us, see the actions that we took with a bit of equanimity, a bit of rationality. God, forget even the emotions getting into it. Just simply not being irrational, always in the direction of negativity and chastising. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I see it. I, I, I feel it. I feel it viscerally. Uh, so,

Moving on to the next one. It's worse than you think on the liberation of defeat. And you've got this Eugene Gendlin quote. What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true for they are already enduring it.

That quote still gives me goosebumps. You can't say that by your own writing, can you? But I think you can say it about writing that- You quoting somebody else in your writing. Yeah, yeah. I think this comes near the beginning and that idea that there's something incredibly liberating about seeing the sense in which your situation is worse than you thought it was, I think that's really a kind of organizing principle of the book.

and understanding the sense in which that's actually empowering. Not just that it's relaxing, but that it's empowering as well. I'm talking there about, to give the productivity example, if you think of the challenge of getting on top of all your to-dos and achieving all your goals on a very tight schedule, if you think of that as incredibly difficult, then that makes life very agonizing and unpleasant and a constant slog towards an imagined future.

moment of fulfilment. But if you see that it's actually completely impossible because there's an infinite amount of stuff effectively that you could do and you're not going to be able to do an infinite amount, that shift from very, very difficult to completely impossible is actually very powerful and positive, I think, because you suddenly see like, oh, okay, there's no point trying to get my arms around all of this. It's going to be a huge distraction from what I could be doing, which is pouring my finite time and attention into

the things that are going to make the biggest difference. Then I take that same idea, like it's worse than you think and that's good news, to lots of other areas. If you suffer from imposter syndrome, you might think the big problem is that you've got to spend years getting much, much better at what you do before you'll finally feel like you know what you're doing in most situations. Actually, it's worse than that, which is like most people don't really know what they're doing in most situations, especially if they're doing new, interesting things.

innovative things, almost by definition. Actually, you can give up the quest to feel like you know exactly what you're doing. As a result, you can get on with doing the things you were postponing until you knew what you were doing. Then just one more example in there is relationship troubles. I think people are very prone to thinking during rocky patches in relationships and things like that that they're

they're in the wrong relationship or they've got to do tons of work on themselves to get over their issues. Obviously, that might be true. I'm not saying nobody should ever leave a relationship, but it's also true that if you're going to be in a long-term commitment with another person, then you are just going to push each other's buttons and not ever fully understand how the other person sees the world. These are just sort of built-in limitations of being human. So it's worse than the idea that it's just your problem.

That, again, is liberating because it's like, "Oh, okay. I was tormenting myself with this expectation that people get to this point of total control or confidence in understanding of everything that's happening. I don't need to torment myself with that anymore. I can actually dive into this experience here and now."

Too much information on the art of reading and he's not reading. I think this is probably a challenge that a lot of people deal with. It's really funny to me that at an earlier point in the history of the internet, people thought that the whole sort of problem of there being too much stuff that you wanted to consume or read or know or learn would go away because we get really, really good at filtering just the stuff that we were most interested in.

And we have got really, really good at filtering the stuff we're most interested in. When social media is working well, that's what it does. And, you know, there are all sorts of discovery mechanisms on, you know, Amazon and everywhere else that sort of bring you the stuff that you want.

doesn't make information overload go away because the supply is infinite. Now you've just got a pure firehose of things that you really want to read instead of a whole lot of dross around the edges. The problem, if anything, is worse. I'm making the point there that the only way to relate sanely to this is to understand those information flows as rivers, not buckets, by which I mean

Rivers of stuff that flow by you and from which you pick a few things that look interesting. You let the rest go by without feeling guilty as opposed to buckets like you've got to empty it, right? That if you've sent 50 articles to your read later app,

then your job is to process every single one of them until the inbox is clear. Which I feel, and it's funny because I sort of, for years I've kind of teased my dad and sometimes other people in that generation for seeming to think that like if there's a magazine or a newspaper in the house, like they've got some sort of moral obligation to read every page to check if there's anything there. And I was always just like, why are you doing that? It's just, that's some sort of weird sunk cost bias that says, well, I paid for the newspaper. So now I've got to

look at every page um but that's exactly what we end up doing with meanwhile you've got you've got an obligation to a completely free pocket or insta paper read later list exactly exactly into which far more material can frictionlessly be shunted than uh can fit in the pages of a newspaper um and i think related to that mentioned also in that in that section

Your mention of spaced repetition brought this up for me a bit earlier. There's a huge, there's a very, very widespread idea now, it seems to me, on social media basically, that you should want to try to retain everything that you read. The ideal would be that you could remember all the things that you consume.

It interacts interestingly with the whole sort of personal knowledge management and note-taking and stuff, which I think there's lots of really useful and interesting stuff being explored in that area. But there is also this kind of weird, obsessive control idea. People who get a little bit too into like, you know,

Zettelkastens. What's a Zettelkasten? I don't know what that is. Yeah, oh, right. Oh, you know, there's this whole world, I'm sure you're aware of the world in general, right? Of people sort of using different note-taking apps, Obsidian. External brain type thing. Right, right, right. And yeah, exactly. And that's a great thing, and I try to do it myself. But there's a way of doing that that becomes this kind of attempt to

own, almost kind of like eat all the knowledge that you're exposed to. Another point that I'm making in keeping with the sort of Rivers and Buckets ideas there is that that's not the primary point of reading. I'm all for people taking notes about really interesting things that leap out at them.

The benefit of reading, say, a really good book is not to sort of squirrel it all away for some later moment of use, which is the same old problem of postponing everything to the future. It's because if it's a good book, it will change you a little bit in the activity of reading it. Actually, that's something I've tried to guard against in this book.

the tendency that I know in myself and therefore I suspect in my readers to want to be like, okay, I'm into this. It's a really good system. I'm going to take very detailed notes on every page and then at a certain point in the future, I'm going to execute on it all. I've really wanted to try to pull the rug out from under that at every opportunity and be like, no, just do some tiny little thing differently in the next

hour and a half you know i think that's much more powerful in the long run than any number of hypothetical plans for radical change so true i think about you know you'll be episode 840 maybe on the show and i would guess that at the very least there is one to two pieces of advice per episode perhaps maybe many more on some of the more tactical ones

And who the fuck is able to do that? Who is able to apply 2,000 pieces of advice to their life? And recently, especially, I found myself getting caught up as I've become busier. This year has been the busiest I've ever had. And I've forgotten some of the lessons that I previously taught myself, which is a particular circle of hell that you can descend into.

where you've forgotten a lesson that you needed and you don't need to discover something new to fix it. You need to rediscover the thing that you already tried and then stopped doing. And Tim Ferriss has this idea called the good shit sticks. And I think it's the best way to remember what you learn. If it's the sort of thing when reading that forces you to get your phone out and take a photo of it and send it to a friend and go, oh my God, dude, I can't believe this is a bit of...

There you go. Like that's it. So you just raise the bar for activation energy or whatever so that only the things that really hit home are the ones. And it means that it's, I think that the way that I read sometimes when I'm not reading mindfully is I read as if it's my obligation to

keep a hold of the information that's in whatever I'm reading. Whereas it's not. It is the obligation of the thing that you're reading to make it worthwhile for you to keep a hold of it. It's the other way. It should be the job of the book or the article or the podcast to make you go,

I need to pause that. I need to stop and sort of look at the sky for a little bit and reflect on what that means to me. And working from that frame, that it's on the content to do that to me, liberates you because there's no way that you can do that wrongly. There is no way that you can't do that correctly. I think that's really well put. And I think, yeah, absolutely. It's almost as if when you take a note,

the note-taking is not to try to preserve the thing, mainly. It's almost more just some sort of physiological thing that you've got to do because the point was so powerful. Something's got to come out of you in that way. Also, there's a writer called Sascha Chapin who I think is brilliant and who I quote in the book as well. Although I don't think I quote

him saying this. He's got a great newsletter on Substack who makes the point that if you're trying to take notes on something in such a way as to record everything that the author meant to say, or you're trying to take notes on it because you think it has some sense of duty towards consuming all the facts that are there or something like that,

you're imposing some frame onto it other than your natural spontaneous response. And so what I'd say about that is you have no obligation to the author of a book you read, right? It's like they may have wanted to convey a certain set of things, but they will be conveying a certain set of things that land with you, and it's those that are worse. Yeah, that's a really good point that...

Different people will take different things away from the same piece of content or the same book or the same article. And again...

assuming that this thing is meant for you, it should be actually a enjoyable process for you to go through a bunch of podcasts or documentaries or whatever and not have to get your note-taking thing out. You go, okay, look at that. I was just able to enjoy it for what it was. Now, obviously, there can be a world in which you watch it, take nothing from a practical standpoint away from it, and also it was crap. So that's a bad situation to be in. But

But yeah, I just, I really, really think the good shit sticks. Don't expect, you know, if you can just do one thing

It's not the takey-away, it's not the notes that you've got written down. It's what's the thing that's so apt for you that you can't not do it? And you think, okay, I'm just going to try and do that thing. Because one tactic that you try and implement is better than 50 that sat in the arse end of Anki that you're never going to learn. It's totally true. And on the podcast front, it's like I've even caught myself, and I do this with books as well, and I'm getting better at it,

like literally not listening to something that I really want to listen to or read something that I really want to read because I feel like, you know, that's something I'm going to want to really like take notes on and focus on. And then you just end up listening to some people arguing about politics or something because it's sort of whatever. Well, I mean, that might be your thing, but if it isn't your thing, you know, it's like a second tier experience from the one that you actually wanted because the one that you wanted involved too much of that kind of

work at consuming it properly, which makes no sense. Similarly, you can't care about everything on staying sane when the world's a mess. And William James quote says, the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. I wanted to speak in this section to people who do feel that

you know, they have some responsibility to the world that is wrapped in so many different crises and seeing so many images of so much suffering all the time. You know, and I sort of rescue, I want to sort of salvage that instinct from, you know, there's definitely a kind of a

all sorts of wild overreach of what gets called activism these days that I'm as critical of as anybody. But that basic idea that actually maybe we do have a bit of a duty to be good citizens in a certain way. If you buy that, I think you have to face the fact that in the attention economy as we live in it now and the environment that we live in, the point I'm trying to make is that

If you're the kind of person who feels like you ought to care about anything outside of your own immediate life, you're going to be asked to care about everything, maximally, all the time. Every campaign group, every media organisation is incentivised, even if they're very honourable in how they operate, they're still incentivised to present what they are campaigning for as the most important thing in the world, the only thing that you should give any attention to. I think that even

I think we've got ourselves into quite a tangle with all sorts of things - climate, Covid, lots of things - where I want to say that these are incredibly serious real crises that then get into this kind of hyperbole machine that the attention economy is. Everyone gets sorted into maximal panic or denying that it's an issue at all. Because again, you're going to be asked to care about absolutely everything and some people just get tired of that and

disconnect or get hostile and other people just drive themselves into a sort of frenzy. And so I'm really just making the argument in that section for the idea that it is okay and in fact necessary to sort of pick your battles and to disconnect from an awful lot of what's going on in the world at large. Not because it doesn't matter, but precisely because if you're going to make any kind of difference

you have to be willing to choose one or two things that you're going to focus on. I quote there a great blog post from David Cain, who runs the blog Raptitude, who sort of has this image of like...

public concern being something that is distributed like raindrops over thousands and thousands and thousands of little buckets? What would happen, the buckets being the different causes we could care about? What would happen if we just said, this issue is going to be the concern of these several thousand people? It's a hypothetical, but what if we concentrated our

available compassion for things like that and tried to actually make a difference instead of this very performative, very despair-inducing kind of vague attempt to appear like we're caring about everything. Let the future be the future on crossing bridges when you come to them. I think one of the most fundamental ways in which we're limited, even though it's harder to see,

is the way we're temporarily limited to right now. I think any kind of worry and anxiety is basically an attempt to exert some control over what happens in the future, which in that sense you can't really do. Obviously, you can do things that make it more or less likely that the future will go well for you. That challenge of like, "Oh, I can't control now what's going to happen in the future,

But I can trust that I will be up to dealing with the things that happen in the future. I think that's an incredibly powerful shift. There's a quote I have there from Marcus Aurelius, which is something along the lines of, you shouldn't be disturbed by the future because you'll meet it with the same resources and

skills and talents that you meet the present with. If you were incapable of dealing with the things that life throws at you without dying, you would presently be dead, right? So clearly, you do have it in you to give up that kind of anxious reaching after total certainty about what's going to happen later. Yeah, I...

I definitely think about that as well. That was what hit me with the reality just doesn't need your help to operate it insight, which is we, there's this sense that by worrying the,

We somehow get to extend out temporally into the future and kind of... It gives us a sense of a degree of control over what's going to happen. If I just worry enough, then...

that thing can't come to pass or it'll come to pass in a different way. There's this, you know, we even get in your totally fucking hysterical moments when you're laid awake in bed at one in the morning or whatever, and you can't sleep. You almost even start to think about stuff like, well,

because I know or because I'm thinking about the fact that it might happen there's no way that it could happen because all of the things that I think about that happen don't actually end up coming to pass it's always the things that you don't see that get you so by thinking about the thing you're like what do you this is divination class am I like gonna start drawing tarot cards in a desperate attempt to control the future what's going on here yeah

Yeah, no, it's amazing. There's a lovely phrase from Robert Saltzman, who's another spiritual writer, who says that all sorts of what we do, and a lot of spirituality I think he would say as well, is ultimately an attempt to distract ourselves from the fact that we suffer from what he calls total vulnerability to events. This idea that essentially

Literally anything consistent with the laws of physics could happen in the very next moment to you or to anybody, always. We're always engaging in certain kinds of irritable psychological activity to make that not be the case, but it always is the case. My wife has this incredibly vivid memory that has always, I think it might mean more to me than to her at this point, of being a

teenager growing up in Baltimore, having had a childhood where she was really sort of steeped in going to the movies and just really sort of into cinema and film. Walking across a bridge, I don't know, just in the middle of the day sometime in Baltimore, and suddenly realizing that if something absolutely terrible were to happen to her or to somebody close to her, it wouldn't come with foreshadowing music.

like in the movies so that you can sort of gird yourself and get ready for it. Just that, you know, that kind of realization. It's like, obviously you know it intellectually, but then you, oh yeah, I'd kind of been assuming I'd get some warning and actually like, that's not how it works. And we're always trying to find ways to buffer that. I think about similar, even more macabre way. Um, how many people have died being surprised by

You know, that's every... You know, someone ends up in a random unfortunate passerby catches a stray bullet in a shootout between two gangs or something like that. They've never been shot before. Maybe they've never heard a gun go off before. And they look down to go, I... I...

I've been, and then, you know, they die in surprise. I wonder how many millions and millions of people their last sense was, oh, surely not. Like, you know what I mean? Like exasperation. It's not like this, surely. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, um, yeah, I mean, it's, it's just,

on some level it's just completely unacceptable to us right but that's how it is and on no on no level am i saying i'm completely at peace with it but it's really useful to to see uh to see what's going on there i have to say just in the macabre um topic you're reminding me of um a slightly different point but it's clearly related when i was working as a journalist years and years ago i was i was one of many people in london reporting on the

the tube and bus bombings. I remember in a follow-up piece I did about that, coming across this idea that some of the people involved in the rescue operation, some of the senior medical people said that it's pretty likely that at least most of the people who died on that day never knew anything was wrong.

I mean, maybe not everyone. I don't know about the details of the different deaths. But it would be possible to just be going along and then it's lights out. Actually, that being some slight form of solace on the part of their relatives and friends. But that's sort of narrowing down even taking away that moment of surprise. It's just like, we're here and then we're not here. Yeah. Extraordinary.

finish things on the magic of completion and sarah manguso when my husband does the dishes he always leaves some platter in the sink some surface unwiped i tried to correct the behavior until i remembered that if i finish everything in my work in progress folder i'm afraid i'll die i love that line um uh yeah this is just this is a slightly more sort of i guess tactical um

productivity-ish day in the book. It's just this idea that there's an extraordinary kind of power in finishing things. There's a kind of energy that comes from completing things, even though you wouldn't think that's how it would go. You'd think that slogging to the end of something would deplete your energy.

I'm really making the case for finishing things, but also specifically for conceiving of your working life, your working day as a sequence of finishings.

changing finishing from being something that you maybe do every few months on some big project to something that you're doing sort of throughout the day defining end points intermediate end points obviously for big projects and and taking things to completion and i use this word uh deliverable working in daily deliverables and deliverables through the day precisely because it's so kind of you know linkedin right i mean it's just like it's such a sort of sort of um

soulless kind of corporate idea that takes all the drama out of something to say, like, "What's the deliverable here? What's the deliverable here? What's the deliverable here?" It's actually a really - especially for creative work - it's a very powerful way to think about things.

It's almost like you're falling in line with what it really means to be finite, which is that we are always doing one thing at a time in sequence anyway, whether we like it or not. And by sort of pushing yourself to get to a completion point, even if it's completing

50 words not completing the chapter or whatever it is i think that's a really powerful way to think about productivity treating yourself like a cnc machine that's doing a 3d etching into a piece of steel or something like that what will be done at the end of this well this is what will be completed at the end of this uh it's it reminds me of your um your idea of a done list which we spoke about last time and uh

Me and my friend George, we went on the road for about a full month across America. And we came up with the idea of a well-done list, which was a build off the back of yours. Originally, his name for it... Fuck, I can't remember it fully. But his name for it was...

The case of the defense in the prosecution against the 10,000 year old amygdala or something. And I was like, why don't we just call it a well done list? All of us got this cool idea. But it was basically that at the end of the day, you would be able to look back and think about the things that you've done well.

What went well today? Not just like the gratitude thing, because with the gratitude thing, it always ends up being really fruity and fluffy and kind of an un-nest. I had a great walk and I looked at the sky and I'm grateful for the fact I've got my health and I'm grateful for the whatever. The well-done list was something a little bit different to me. And it was, I...

managed to remain cordial today during a difficult meeting despite the fact that I was tired. Like that's a well done. That's something that's really well done. And it takes into account where you were at the time. And I'm not convinced that that would

The way that you'd write that in a gratitude journal would be, I kept my cool, and it's always sort of pro-social and something else. The well-done list feels a lot more kind of personal to me. But anyway, I am... No, and I really like, I mean, the way you described it then anyway was just like, yeah, it really connects to where you were at, right? So you can be...

like in bed sick or wake up on the wrong side of bed and you can still within that context do that life, the life you got given today well. Yeah. Well done. Yeah, exactly. Rules that serve life on doing things daily-ish. I'm talking here about the idea that it's very easy as we've spoken about to let the sort of productivity rules and rules for how you want to run your life

become the things that you're kind of looking for for your salvation, not things that you're using as tools to help you enjoy life and accomplish things that matter to you, but as things that you then sort of are enslaved to. It's that very familiar feeling for many of us, I think, of like, you know, setting up the exciting new schedule system or time boxing system or whatever. And then like two days later being like, well, I have to do this. This is so kind of

heavy and oppressive. I don't want to have to do this. I want to be free." So I give some examples of rules that lend themselves to that more serving life kind of frame. One of them is this idea from Dan Harris, the meditation teacher - I think he maybe would resist being called a meditation teacher, anyway - podcaster.

who suggests that the right frequency for a meditation practice is daily-ish. I think you can apply it to lots of other things as well. It doesn't mean just do it when you feel like it. It's not completely self-indulgent. It's this idea of like, I'm going to be consistent, but I'm not going to be obsessively consistent in a sort of brittle way that causes more guilt. It spirals up and spirals down. Right. And you know,

Everyone knows that if you did something five days out of seven, you did it daily-ish. And if you did it two days out of seven, you didn't do it daily-ish. But there are certain times in life that maybe three would count, four. You know when you're fooling yourself and you know when it's a kind of reasonable thing. And that enables you to actually... I think some of the ways consistency gets talked about these days is...

is unhelpful because it implies a sort of rigid consistency that breaks very easily. My favourite is actually from James in Atomic Habits. I think it's the best takeaway. It's an absolute sleeper of an insight that no one really ever talks about, although I keep on trying to fly the flag for it. His rule is never miss two days in a row.

And I think that just as a general rule, never missing two days in a row

that stops one missed habit becoming a new habit, right? One day is a missed habit. Two days is the start of a new habit. And just, I've used this for some, I even used it in reverse to reintroduce caffeine. I did a huge amount of time without caffeine and wanted to keep the sensitivity because it meant that I could have a, you know, just a teeny tiny amount of caffeine and get a big boost out of it. And I didn't want to lose that. So I set myself a rule of I only have caffeine

one day i can't ever have it two days in a row which meant that if i didn't have it yesterday then i could have it today but if i had it today i knew i couldn't have it tomorrow and it created this sort of artificial scarcity that made me think about my caffeine use so much more mindfully i'm aware this is like the most autistic thing that i could come up with

If it works for you... Yeah, look, I'm now back to being a large sort of caffeine degenerate. But even when I want to dial it back down, if someone is fully caffeine-pilled, just don't do it two days in a row. I think it really is a nice... And don't take caffeine pills, actually, because that's what we did at university, isn't it? It's the least enjoyable way. I know what you meant. The least enjoyable way. Three hours...

on finding focus in the chaos. This is this idea that I've, I think, in some circles become known for, I think, that if you're doing the kind of work that gets called knowledge work, if you're doing anything creative, anything that involves deep thinking,

It's actually a really good strategy not to aim to do more than about four hours of that in the course of a day. If you look back, and Alex Pang has written brilliantly about this in his book Rest, look back at all the routines and daily rituals of so many authors and artists and scholars and scientists through history. It's extraordinary how often three or four hours was how much they demanded of themselves of kind of deep, deep focus.

I've found this to be true from experience as well. There's certain research to suggest - it's not just purely cherry-picking anecdotes - to suggest that there's something about that kind of amount of time. Not necessarily all in one go, but in a 24-hour period. What I really like about this is, on the one hand, it emphasizes the importance of protecting time for that kind of thing. But on the other hand, it doesn't get into this idea of trying to protect

12 hours a day for it. These kinds of things that I think rarely work for people. What I'm advising there is that if you have the autonomy over your time, it's a really good idea to, on the one hand, really be serious about ring fencing that amount of time, to be undisturbed, undistracted, not to have meetings, to be at a time of the day when your energy levels are high,

but then also to kind of not try too hard to protect or structure the rest of the time in a way that will only cause frustration and will sort of deny you the serendipitous encounters that come from being interrupted and disturbable. It's that sort of binary approach. There is

There's this time, but I'm not going to worry about making the other time like that. And I think that's a really powerful way to make progress in creative work. I think I spoke about this with you last time that there was no problem that I've ever encountered in my life until I really, really started to think mindfully about it where I didn't just assume that the solution was work harder.

Like I just always thought, well, it's more, right? Or more focused or more intensely or better as opposed to,

you know, I've really, like I say, this year has been just so obscenely busy. And this week is the first week that I've thought of where I've had a little bit more downtime. And I was laid in the sauna earlier on. I went to the sauna place obscenely early this morning. And I thought, this is so nice. I'm coming up with all of these ideas. And I'm like, just allowing, I don't know, this weird sort of...

like exhaust fumes from my brain to just like, you know, like how you, you, when you go to sleep, there's these toxins in your brain and sleep clears them away. I think that's the reason we need to sleep. And lying in the sauna was like a waking version of that, where I just evidently had loads of bullshit thoughts that just needed to get up and they could percolate and then they, they're away. And then here's another one and that's a way. Oh, actually, no, that's, that's something that's interesting and so on and so forth.

But yeah, I think the most bizarre thing about this is to anybody that scoffs at only three hours of deep work a day. How much deep work do you get done most days? Because if I get three hours of deep work on a single task done in a day, it is an absolute triple A gold medal outlier. No, absolutely. And if you want to start with 90 minutes or an hour, I think you'll even then most people will be.

amazing themselves. If you can do that daily-ish for a very short while, the cumulative benefits are clear. On some level, that's not an original point. Do stuff, keep coming back to it, don't do too much. I think the point I'm trying to drive home is there's no reason to see it as a shame that you didn't do seven, eight, nine hours. Actually, that's part of this

process. They both belong in the day, the time when you're really focusing and shutting the world out and the time when you're not doing that. Yeah, it's the reason why so much of the progress that I made from whatever

sort of total toddler I was in my 20s to full-on adult infant I've become in my 30s was through a really aggressive morning routine. I had this very obscenely luxurious morning routine that was my best part of two hours long. And arguably included in the morning routine was lots of things that people would do later in the day. So you can call it what you want. But my compliance with it was really, really high. For years and years, I'd get up,

I'd go for a walk for about 15 minutes and I'd come back and I'd sit down and I'd journal and then I'd do breath work and then I'd do meditation with Headspace or Sam Harris or Insight Timer or something and

and then I'd read, and then I'd do yin yoga mobility, and then I'd cook and prepare my food for the day, and then I'd go about my day. And absolutely, you know, tell me that this guy doesn't have children without telling me that this guy doesn't have children. I'm aware. That's, you know, an absolute... That's the most bourgeois thing that I could have spoken about doing. It's not flying in a helicopter or getting a jet or going on a cruise. It's having this...

Two and a half, yeah, yeah.

I've got a stack of journals like this just from how much I did. And I never thought about myself as a journaler, but you just realize when you accumulate this stuff over a long enough amount of time, you look back and you go, oh my God, look at all of this stuff that I did. And now as somebody that has...

is giving himself the excuse that he doesn't have time to have that big of a morning routine on a morning. All of the things or many of the things that I loved about that and the byproducts of it are things I'm missing in my life. And the answer's back there. There's that embarrassing thing about the answer that you already need is something not only that you know, but something you've done in the past and then like, go on. So yeah. Yeah, yeah.

One of the things that I really appreciate about the way that you wrote this book as a, like I say, an avid stan of your imperfectionist blog was that you included some of my favorite posts that I'd read previously. And you can't hoard life, I think, is probably my favorite post. I was so glad that it got a feature in the new book. You can't hoard life on letting the moments pass. What's that mean to you? It's kind of embarrassing to admit that

And how easy it is, I think, to not enjoy life even when what's happening is, on the surface, completely enjoyable. The kind of thing that you always wanted to have in your life.

Because of this idea that you've got to really hold the experience or take ownership of it or something. There's great insight in Buddhism, I think, right? Especially lots of traditions, but especially Buddhism. That we make ourselves miserable not only by not having what we want or wanting things that we don't have, but by trying to cling really hard to things that we do want and do have. I give the example.

of being here in the North York Moors where we live now and just sort of having this experience early in the time we were here of being out early on a winter morning with snow on the ground and like barn owl flying by, drinking my coffee, pink sunrise in the distance, just absolutely my favourite kind of landscape and time of the morning and everything. You know, insert here whatever your personal one would be.

and catching myself thinking like, okay, this is the kind of experience I want to have. So firstly, I want to make sure I'm really enjoying it. And secondly, I want to make sure that whatever I'm doing in my life and my career is going to guarantee that I keep having this experience forever and ever and ever. And just all these different ways in which, yeah, we're trying to hoard life is the phrase that I've used there in a way that is completely opposed to

enjoying it. It comes back to this idea that I've sort of bumped into in different ways again and again in my work and in my life, that you sort of have to be willing to, in some sense of the word, waste time in order to live fully. You have to be able to stand on the side of a hill in a beautiful sunrise in winter in the North York moors and just be like, "Yeah, let it go. It's nice." It's not that valuable in some sense.

in order to really be in it. Otherwise, you get into this whole kind of attempt to acquire the experience for, to sort of squirrel it away for what? For some future purpose, right? When you can sort of, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know why we want to, what we think we're holding onto those things for, except of course that, yeah, on some level, it's a sort of a bulwark against, feels like a bulwark against having to, about against being finite and against the fact that

Every moment is just passing by and going forever. Yeah, I know that exactly. This sort of sense that this is a peak experience. And in the moment of the thing that you're supposed to enjoy, you begin to lambast yourself for not having a life where there are so many of these things in it.

And you're in a life that's in it, right? I mean, I don't know if I mentioned this in the book, but I was with an old, old school friend of mine who came up here. We went on a hike in the middle of the week of the day on a weekday. And I caught myself having the thought, I wish I had the kind of life where I could do this sort of thing. It's like, what's that about? It's wild. Yeah.

Yeah, it's important. Oliver, I love your work. I really do. Everyone should go and check out the new book. Everyone should go and subscribe to your mailing list. Where should they go? They want to keep up to date with what you're doing. It's all at oliverberkman.com. I love it. Oliver, until next time. Thank you. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks, Chris.