Oliver Burkeman || Time Management for Mortals

the Psychology Podcast. In this episode, I talked to best selling author Oliver Brickman about his latest book, Four Thousand Weeks. On the surface, it's easy to mistake this book for another self help book on time management, but this book is very different. Instead of enthusing about productivity hacks and making sure that we're superhumans, Oliver challenges as readers to confront the finite nature of humanity. By doing so, he argues, we can live four lives without having to always carry

the fear of missing out. We also touch on the topics of procrastination, positive psychology, flow realism, deep time, and patience. This was a really, really stimulating episode and I hope it helps you in this new year, live a very good wife. So now, without further ado, I give you Oliver Brickman. I'm definitely a fan of yours. Now, that's very kind of you to say, what a great book. So, how's your own time management coming along this year? So far?

It's you know, it's been a challenge, right because I you write this book about things you've learned about time and how to use it, and then it does some it's kind of done better than I expected. And so now like I've got more emails to answer and more potential opportunities to pursue, and all these kind of all the issues I thought i'd got handled, you now a sort of you know, kick into a different, different degree. So I'm I mean, but you call that the efficiency trap, right?

Don't you have like a fancy name for that exact phenomenon that is that? Right? Yeah? I mean that's funny. I haven't really thought of that what's happened in my life in the last few months as efficiency trap, but I guess it is could be. I mean, I just use that as an umbrella term for all these different ways in which getting better at processing your stuff attracts more and more inputs into the system, so you don't

actually get through your your stuff. I think in a lot of context, it also attracts sort of lower quality inputs. So you if you think you can do it all, you end up with even more to do and with less and less of it is what you want to be doing. I think what what I'm experiencing in these last few months is not quite that, because you know, put this thing out into the world and it's resonated with some people. And so that's why my system has more inputs at the moment. It's not because I got

any better handling my email. I have had the experience of getting really good at handling email and being punished for it with more email. That's that's certainly happened in the past. Yeah, I mean we get punished. That's one way of looking at it. The more that we help someone than they say, wow, that person's available to help me.

So then they you know, they come back to faster you. Right, you can certainly put out the feelers of like I'm unavailable and I'm not here for anything, and certainly people will ignore you, and that is true, But is that

a life worth living? So I think that you know, it's it's instant to question, at what point are you like, Okay, that's enough for my life, you know, like this short particular threshold you know of of helping others, because I think people can get really obsessed with an obsessive in a sort of compulsive way of like I have to help everyone or else my life is worthless. Yeah, I mean, I think it's going to be so different for different people.

And obviously there's also going to be a whole lot of people everyone to some extent, I think who has any kind of a job, you know, there are all sorts of emails that you can't fail to answer, and people who's bidding you can't fail to do just because you've decided you're going to say no to things and

set boundaries. I think the really important part of this aspect of it all is like it's seeing what's going on, So it's seeing that and it's sort of seeing through that delusion that you could ever get on top of it all and handle it all is the important part.

You may then still have to answer more emails than you would like if you want to keep working in the job that you want to keep working in, you may still have to, you know, attend to various family obligations that feel like an important part of life, even though you might choose to have someone else handle them.

But you're no longer going to be thinking that if I can only get a handle on this with the right productivity systems and enough self discipline, then I'm never going to have to make any tough jobe between these things. But yeah, obviously it's a it's a privileged position to be able. I don't think I'm in it. Probably very few people are in it, you know, to be able to literally say, I'm just going to sort of answer precisely as many emails as I feel that I want

to answer, right, like set a cap where like I'm done. Yeah, well, let's take a step back here, singing. So you wrote this amazing, amazing book on time management, and I think it's amazing because it seems to have come out of left field. Right. So you see all these kind of books on productivity and time management that are so much about kind of make your life more efficient, how to in a way, how to be superhuman, And your book

really is a book for mortals. It's a really not just for mortals, but it's a book about you know, being human and coming to terms with that and and facing reality as head on as humanly as humanly possible. Literally, right, Is that a fair summary? Yeah? Absolutely, I mean I think it's a bad Yeah. My argument, my hunch that I'm following through this book is that, you know, three parts, we are very, very limited and finite in our amount

of time and our control over it. We put a lot of effort into avoiding the confrontation with that fact. And actually we'd be happier and more productive and have more peace of mind if if we confronted it a little bit more. Yeah. You know, when I said your book came out, I feel I meant as a compliment in the sense that it's very refreshing. It's very refreshing in a space where you constantly feel like you're something's

wrong with your life. If you're not keeping up with the Joneses, if you're not constantly doing all the biohacking, you know, sort of latest things, you feel like you're kind of wasting your life in some way. Yeah, no, and I took it as a compliment. I think there is a sort of I mean, I don't want to

big myself up too much. But I think there is a kind of a subversive aspect to thinking in this way because we you know, I think our human nature pushes us to want to kind of be superhuman so that we don't have to face what it is to be human. Our economic system takes advantage of this desire and sort of wants us to keep on keep on being dissatisfied, going for more, you know, never never considering

that what we do is enough. And then you know, all sorts of other cultural forces they're all pushing in this direction of you know, if you just keep going and you just push a bit more, then you can do more and you can get more done, and like that would be fine if it worked. I don't have any problem with and you know, sometimes people misunderstand what I'm saying here as some sort of case against being

ambitious or something. But my argument is that things like being really ambitious work a lot better if they're done in contact with the reality of our situation as finite humans, because part of one of the big consequences of not acknowledging your finitude, I think, is that you end up spending your whole life trying to clear away all the little stuff and never getting around to the things that you were ambitious to begin with. Well, there's a lot

of very nuanced, interesting artic arguments in your book. It's not it's not just that we never get around to it some days that subconsciously you kind of insinuate that, subconsciously we're subverting ourselves. Where there's something there's there's a topic in psychology handicapping, you know, where sometimes we actively don't do the things that are most meaningful to us because we're afraid, well, we'll never do them. So it's

too much to bear that thought, you know. And so I wondering if you have you connected some of your

ideas to the idea of handicapping and social psychology. That particular phrasing of it is new to me, I'll admit, I mean what I think of it as relating to in psychology, and I don't know what your take on all of this is, but is is sort of psychodynamic psychotherapy and frankly Freud, I mean, you know, putting aside all the myriad ways in which the specific claims have been debunked, that basic idea that we invest a lot of energy in building lives and psychologies around the avoidance

of certain feelings that we think are going to kill

us if we have to feel them. I think that's deeply true, no matter what you're about to tell me, that the sort of the research that says and that's really what I'm I think I'm that's a big affinity with what I'm saying, right, which is like, I think we certainly me historically, we invest a lot of effort in trying not to face the consequences of being finite, the fact that we have to make tough choices about time, the fact that we don't ever really know what's going

to happen in the very next moment and can't really plan our lives in the way that we'd wish. We really want to not feel that. And I think a heck of a lot of productivity techniques and systems and self help advice is actually just kind of enabling that avoidance. It's sort of helping us not feel it. And but that the way you describe it in terms of handicapping feels very similar, right, It's like if I if I'm understanding you correctly, it is another phenomenon of being motivated

primarily by not wanting to think about or feel certain idea, yes. Yes. Another element of handicapping is, well, you don't. It's an excuse. You want to have an excuse if you fail, right, So if you fail, you want the excuse to be

some external excuse. Do You don't want to be that you're not talented and that you couldn't have done it to begin with, So you handicap yourself a little bit so that you have a little bit like you're like, well, I was drunk last night, so I well, the truth means you could have maybe done it if you weren't drunk last night. But we do these things in our lives because it's like too hard to face the reality of the matter. If we do fail, then it might

be us. It's a fault our talent. Yeah, totally. And it's like, yeah, the stakes are high, and we'd rather do things where the stakes are low. And I think you know, an even more familiar version of that is

just standard issue procrastination. In the short term, it feels better to think one day I'm going to write a novel and it's going to be brilliant than it fails to write a couple of pages of your novel and for it to not know whether it's brilliant, or for it not to be brilliant, Yeah, or to discover that

it's not brilliant at all. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes some people will go their whole lives just it's just good enough, just fantasizing about having all the accolades, you know, and having you know, it's you almost don't want to know if you really could or not. That's a big risk. That's a big risk. Yeah, I totally feel I mean

I can detect that even in myself today. I think in certain domains, you know, where you're sort of like, there are a whole kind of I don't know, certain kinds of fitness or versions of meditation, things like this that I sort of feel would probably be really good for me and that I'd get a lot out of, but I'm not gonna. Yeah, it's it's more comfortable to think about the idea that one day I'll be the kind of person who makes that a central part of

my life, rather than doing it for half an hour today. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, you talk about procrastination as you offer advice to people on how to be a better procrastinator, you say, quote, so the point isn't to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you're going to procrastinate on in order to focus on what matters most. The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things. I think this gets to

a certain core of your argument, right that. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean I think that again. I'm just that's sort of the idea of becoming a better procrastinator and slightly sort of frivolous way of putting it. But I'm trying to be cheeky, okay, cheeky, but I'm trying to target You're British. I'm trying to target this fantasy that I think is going on most of the time when people think about these issues, which is that you might be able to get to the position, the point in life

where you were not neglecting anything important. And as I sort of slightly relentlessly try to drive home, there's just no reason to believe you will ever get that. Because we are finite. The number of things that can feel important and feel as though they matter is effectively incident. There are reasons to believe that technology and changing culture

is that making the number feel even larger. And so this notion that the key is to figure out how to get everything done that matters is like that sort of that ship has sailed just the moment you're born, basically, And instead, if you can acknowledge that at any given moment and with any given year or month of your life or season, you know you're going to be neglecting countless things that would be a very legitimate use for that time, then you see, oh, okay, right, So my

job here is to make the wisest decisions about what to neglect, what to focus on, and to sort of learn to lean in a little bit to that discomfort of knowing that there are lots of things you could be doing that would count and don't and you're not going to have time for. And it stop me if this is all obvious at this point, but they I

think it's particularly interesting. You know, you see all this stuff in the culture about how you got to learn to say no, And I quote Elizabeth Gilbert in the book making the point that like, we just instinctively assume that what that means is saying not to all the stuff we don't want to do, so that there's enough time for everything. That matters, and she says, no, No,

it's much harder than that. You've got to say note to lots of things that do matter, that you do want to do, and that do count, just because that's our situation. You know, there are always going to be more worthwhile and meaningful things that you could do them that you will do. Oh, humans are so messy, our motivational structure. It fluctuates. Yeah, there's so many complications when

we talk about humans. And in theory, I love exactly what you're saying, right, but in practice, one's highest priority motivation can change based on one's mood, can change based on It's hard to understand sometimes which things are gonna bear the greatest fruit, you know, and how do you predict that ahead of time? But you know, with all that's I love this idea of in a essence, you're saying, to live life to the fullest, it requires settling on something that you're in a moment. Yeah, you make a

really good point. I do get occasionally get askedlight, so what's the algorithm? You know, what's the hack your way? What's the way to decide which party matters the most and then stick to it? And I always shy away a bit from that, because I think, again, this is really about spending more of your life in the state of being conscious of how of what this situation is. It's not that you're absolutely right, you know you're not.

I'm not suggesting that people are going to use this figure out their number one goal and then pursue it every single day for the rest of their lives. It's just it's more about living with that awareness of inevitable sacrifice and of inevitable the deal inevitably fall short of ideals that are not consistent with being a limited human being in terms of how much you do and how

many things you do. It's almost like living in a state of being disillusioned in a positive sense, right, It's like that you're sort of the more that you're in that mind space, the less likely you are to go down rabbit holes of trying to I don't know more, I don't know, empty your inbox completely before you turn to some important project, or wait until some milestone in your life has happened, before you get stuck in the to the ambition that you know is the central one

in your life. It's it's just about sort of living with that. Yeah, it's it's a tragic sensibility. I guess right. It's just living with an awareness of the of the mismatch that we're all born into between our ability to conceive of infinite things and only do a finite number of them. Yeah you talk, Yeah, Oh yeah, I'm going to be calling you a lot today. You say so, when you pay attention to something you don't especially value, it's not an exaggeration to say that you're paying with

your life. Holy come, no pressure, No pressure when I when I'm eating that pizza every now and then, can I be like, I'm gonna pay with my life this juicy pizza I'm meeting right now? Is that? Okay? Every now and then I give you permission and which you definitely needed from me right before you could eat a pizza. Yeah. No, the again, I think you know, firstly, just the caveat. I don't claim perfection any of these of these approaches

to life myself. But it's deeper than that. It's that it's that if you know that this is the way the situation is, and you know that you will fail to perfectly respond to that situation, I mean, it's just

a it's ultimately just a richer way of living. It's hard to it's hard to put into words in this context I'm finding, but like the pizza is an example, because I would have thought a really good pizza could absolutely be, by anybody's standards, a fully legitimate way to spend to focus your attention for a while, because like,

really good pizza is really good. A more challenging question to me, I would have thought would be like, are you saying I can never veg out in front of a TV show that I don't particularly love just because I want to relax and like use an hour of my time on something that wasn't kind of consistent with my highest intentions. And even there I would say, you know, no,

I'm not saying anything of the sort. I'm saying, like, let's let's coax ourselves to be more aware more of the time that in spending that hour on that you were inevitably choosing not to spend it on countless other things. And if that kind of fairly relaxed kind of zoning out is truly the right thing for that moment, then you know fine. And if you're not capable, and I don't think any of us are of perfectly organizing your life for maximum meaning and value, then give yourself a break.

But let's not fool ourselves that that's not what's happening, That when we spend an hour on something, we're not foregoing all the other things. I think, I think, I think that deeply building in to the human genome is the fear of missing out on those alternatives and what could be better or what could make us happier. We worry so much about that we don't focus on the beauty of what's in front of our eyes. Often. You

have an interesting spin on this. You say, no, we should talk about the joy of missing out, the recognition that the renunciation of alternatives is what makes their choice a meaningful one in the first place. Talk a little bit more about the joy of missing out. Maybe we shouldn't be harnessing that that more in our lives. You think, Yeah,

I mean, I think. The funny thing about the fear of missing out is that that's a kind of stance that says like, I'm really worried that I might miss out on some meaningful experiences or opportunities or whatever it is. And I'm at pains to say, well, if you look at the situation a bit more. Honestly, it's absolutely inevitable that you're going to miss out on huge numbers of

potentially meaningful opportunities and experiences. So it becomes a little strange to fear that that might happen when it's already happened and is definitely going to keep happening. And I find that a very liberating for myself, right, I mean, if there's a possibility of not missing out, then it's really stress inducing because I have to do everything I

can to make sure that I don't. Whereas if you know that you're going to be missing out on almost everything the world has to offer and you're going to not meet almost all the people you could in principal meet, this is incredibly liberating. Firstly because it's sort of it lets you off the hook. You don't have to be sort of constantly struggling to pack more in just for the just for the sake of it. And then secondly, yeah, I think it it imbues the choices that you do

make with more value. I think that if I take sort of a couple of hours on an afternoon to go on a hike, say if I'm kidding myself that I have all the time in the world, and that that is no sacrifice, and that nothing is that nothing is lost or no opportunities are foregone by doing it. It's kind of like the stakes the stakes aren't high

enough for it to be for it to matter. It feels like it the stakes aren't high enough if you see the truth of the situation, which is that you know, in those two hours you could have done lots of other meaningful things, but you chose to do this one. It's kind of like an affirmation of that choice. It's like, Okay, the stakes are really high. I could be doing other things that really count, and I'm doing this one because I've chosen to do it. I think it does sort

of plunge you to speak of it vaguely. I think it can sort of plunge you more engreasingly into the experience, to have some alearners of that. Yeah, this dovetails. This will segue nicely into this idea of deep time and topic that I've never actually heard the phrase deep time before, but in my field of posit psychology it's called flow. And Mihai chicks at me Hi, who passed away recently spearheaded a lot of that work as well as the

humanistic psychology. Abraham Masow talked about peak experiences, and the kind of common thing about all these, whether you called peak experiences or flow, is that you become so locked into the moment, so absorbed that you're almost your sense of time changes, and things feel a little bit slowed down, and your full consciousness is on the task at hand or the activity, so that you're not thinking about what could be better, you know, and so those thoughts are

not even your head in these kinds of experiences. So you know, how can we harness more of this deep time in our lives? And do you have any ideas and practically how people can do that? I mean, this question of making these insights practical in this area and others is the It's the really big, fascinating one, And I'm still thinking a lot about it because I do think that I do think that the sort of greatest contribution that I hope my book can make is in

inducing a kind of a perspective shift. So I think if I communicate the thing that I'm trying to communicate, it enables you to see that the sort of clock time mindset that we spend most of our life in. I think it enables you to see that it's not the only option, and something can sort of fall away, something that you're sort of a struggle, that you're in a fight against time can sort of be relaxed, and then what I'm calling deep time follows kind of arises naturally.

It's almost if it's in a natural state behind the clock time that we impose upon it. And the parallel to flow is fascinating because I do know a little bit about to accept me high as work and others on that kind of stuff, and I've never quite I quite see if I'm talking about exactly the same thing or not. And when I read sort of self helpy people talking about how to get into flow, I know he wasn't a big sort of self healthy person, as

I understand it. But when I see people taking that idea and running with it, they have all these very proactive methodologies. Right. So sure, absolutely spend three minutes at the beginning of a work period meditating on your breath. Sure adopt certain rituals that you'll come to associate with being focused all great stuff, shut out in interruptions. I think that's all absolutely beneficial, and I do some of

them myself. But I do think that the most profound level the thing I'm trying to point to with this idea of deep time, it is just sort of something that arises once you've once you've seen through certain things

about illusions clock time. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm constantly I would really like to be able to say, you know, he's the technique, and there are some you know, the book has a bunch of stuff in the especially in the back, that is meant to be much more sort of tactical, But I sort of stumble a little bit because I do think that the most important thing is is like getting what we're talking about here, and so really the book is just an attempt to sort of

offer people glimpses of this in like one hundred different ways, and maybe one or two of them will be the ones that do it for a given reader. Slightly avoiding question, no, no, I look, I totally understand what you're saying. And your book is, on the one hand about are on the surface about time management. But to me, someone who's deeply interested in the science of human potential and living good life,

it's really about a book. It's really a book about what it means to live a good life, what it means to live a meaningful life. Your book could easily have been that could have been the framing of it. Not time management, you know, but time management is so bound up with that, and you can see it so clearly. Time managements so bound up with the meaning and the happiness and joy that you have in your life. How would you link this book with your prior book, The

Antidote Happiness for People who can't stand Positive thinking? By the way, what a great subtitle that is. How do you link the two things? Because in a way both books are about right the life, about the well being and yeah, no, absolutely, yeah no, totally, and I think there's probably something more thematically consistent between them than that, although it's one of those things you only ever see

in the rearview mirror, right. I Mean, all I thought I was doing when I wrote The Antidote was trying to sort of sum up my life, philosophy and the most engaging and useful way possible. And it's kind of I was doing in this book as well, And that's a changed to some extent, But in the lots of ways,

I think there's a sort of a through line. That book is about happiness and the problems with positive thinking, and the problems with trying to sort of will your way into happiness and success, and this book is about thinking about how to use time. But I think the common thread is, yeah, the common thread is this kind of openness to negative experience and the sort of necessity of being willing to sort of befriend the feelings of insecurity or discomfort that sort of come with being human.

And I think that positive thinking is one way of in its worst forms, you know, is one of one way of trying, in a very strenuous way, to sort of get outside of life somehow, to get to get outside of or on top of reality so that you're in this kind of emotionally safe place where everything is good all the time, and that this doesn't work, that actually it's far more meaningful and even happy in life eventually to be able to in the end, to be able to encompass all the downs as well as the up.

So there's something sort of there's something inauthentic and about striving for the time when everything is cheerful all the time.

So in both cases, I think I guess I'm talking about a certain kind of pessimism or like almost like a tragic outlook, to put it a bit pretentiously, that is about it's about accepting a certain kind of defeat as being the precondition of a life well lived, I think, And that defeat is the sort of to let go of this fantasy of perfect happiness, perfect efficiency, perfect whatever

else it might be. Yeah, I mean. And the other thing, of course, which we could totally go into, is they're all just different ways of me doing doing my therapy in public. These are one of my books about productivity and time management. As you pointed out, it didn't need to be necessarily is because that's been my that's been my struggle. And you know, I think writing from writing from a particular point of view is usually the best

way to say something more universally worthwhile. Well, everyone does it, or you know, you're not the only one who writes a book just to heal themselves. We all do it in disguise. You're just not disguising it, You're honest about it. Well, this is this is my question for you, because I'm thinking about the thread that runs through both those books.

To me, I would have said it's realism. It's about confronting the truth head on, the truth about your life, the truth about your limited time and earth, and the truth about about how not everything is positive all the time, right that that's not necessarily embracing the negative like you frame you framed it as like, you know, being more open to the negative. To me, that's just being more realistic.

But what if someone takes the point of view most of you know, how does your philosophy apply to like an Elon Musk kind of mentality or someone who wants to be got alike? I mean, they want to be you know why? Like, who are you to say certain people can't be some people? Some people have such broad ambitions that it that they probably would not fundamentally change the planet if they were too realistic? Do you know

what I mean? I do? And I think about this a lot, and I think it is it is the sort of Elon Musk cases that obviously push the press to the point the most at a slightly toned down level of ambition from Elon Musk, I think I think it's pretty clear to me how these ideas are not only not inconsistent with being ambitious, but they're kind of they're an important part of being ambitious, and in some sense, I mean, you cannot do what Elon Musk has done unless you are in some deep sense in touch with

the reality of how things are right. You can't you can't build on at a certain point. However much you're sort of motivated at a certain stage by the refusal to believe that anything is impossible, at a certain point you have to like figure out how this is going to be manifested in engineering and silicon chips and pieces of metal. And on the one hand, it's probably not quite right to say that Elon Musk's achievements are sort

of the consequences of not being realistic. I guess what it points to is a sort of double meaning in the idea of realism that we maybe are getting, there's potential to get tripped up on, which is like there's realism as in like, okay, don't aim for anything too impressive, like let's be realistic in the sense that you might well hear a British person say it. And I think in some ways this is a cultural culture bound thing.

And then there's just then there's just like that much more precise meaning of realism which is to be in touch with the way things really are as much as you possibly can, and not to have your vision clouded by comforting fantasies of how you wish they were. And that I think is surely completely compatible with the most vaulting ambition. And so often when I'm talking about how you get my book is about helping you give up the quest to do impossible things and get stuck into

doing what's sort of gloriously possible instead. There's one slightly silicon valley come back to this, which is like, if people didn't dream of doing impossible things, how had anything

exciting done that changes the world. And then I have to make the most boring kind of objection, which is a semantic one, and say, you know, I'm all for people trying to do the very, very nearly impossible to think the things, and for sort of pushing through their artificially limiting beliefs in order to do more than they

could ever have believed they were capable. That's very different from the idea of doing things that are literally impossible, like you know, answering an infinite amount of emails, or you know, dedicating your whole working life to two different things, because if you're dedicating it all to one of them, you can't be dedicating it to the other. I imagine that Elon Musk is pretty realistic about how many of the emails sent to him personally he has time to

reply to. So I think it's all you know, there's a there's a fine line to walk there, because I don't think any of this is inconsistent with those occasional figures who sort of really change history. On the other hand, I think it's also great to not feel that your meaning in life is dependent on being one of those people and that you've somehow failed. If you're not Elon Musk, that's clearly also an idea worth getting passed. Yeah, yeah,

you've what is the failure there? That you feel like you've failed as a human, You failed as I mean, you did fail in being Elon Musk. If you're not alannam Ask, that is technically true. You fail that creating a company that can potentially send us to Mars. You

did actually fail on that. You know there's you're talking about you talking about realism and uh in positive psychology sometimes or you know, the over positivity, sometimes they'll say things like you are enough, you know, like you know, you listen to these meditations, right, I mean you've all people, I feel like, you know what encerted instances want to be like face the reality here, you're you know, you know, like you're not enough yet in some in some instances,

in some instances, I mean, it depends on, It depends on, It depends on enough for what. Right? I mean if somebody is listening to one of the question right, I mean, if somebody is listening to one of those meditations to help them feel that they're perfectly well qualified to you know, perform open heart surgery when they haven't actually studied the right skills, then then that would be disastrous. But I'm but in the existential sense, yeah, I mean, cheesy as

they are. I think that message, as though some of those meditations are, I think that message that like your existence on the planet is already justified, which has a lot of religious resonances, and it's and it's sort of closely connected to like the Christian idea of grace and all sorts of other things in different traditions. It's kind

of it's really important. And this is where we get to like openly me just talking about the therapy aspect of this book, because I think that for a long time in my life, productivity and making good use of time was very tightly bound up with self worth, you know, And I think it's true for a lot of people. They feel if they don't if you don't get through a certain amount of stuff by the end of the day, you haven't quite justified your right to be on the planet. Somehow.

It's this kind of existential sense of not being enough, And I think it's tremendously empowering to consider instead that maybe you are enough. Maybe you wake up in the morning and you've done all you have to do to justify our existence on the planet, and anything you do beyond that to earn a living or to make the world a better place, that's fantastic. But it's not like

trying to pay off some existential debt. So the person who is not qualified to perform open heart surgery is very much enough as a human being, they're just not

enough as a surgeon. Yeah, I'm imagining as a comedy skit where, well, I guess maybe tragedy comedy skit where someone is a terrible surgeon and they have sort of killed everyone in the world and they feel terrible about themselves, so they put on a calm at meditation that says, just take a deep breath, you are enough, and then they're like, okay, I'm an that's okay, right, And that puts me in mind of the fact that I think, you know, probably an awful lot of damage is done

to the world in politics, in toxic parts of business, in all sorts of areas by people who don't feel adequate in that sort of deep way and are using external power and you know, being a jerk to try to fill that hole. So, yeah, a lot of overweening ambition is, yeah, is trying to get to there. I think, yeah, for sure. Another major theme of your book is the

importance of patience. The important I mean a lot of it's Zen philosophy is so also not just patients, but being comfortable with boredom, you know, is a big one. And you know, there's this fascinating study at Harvard where most people, when they're in a room alone and they couldn't do anything, they'd actually prefer an electric shock over just daydreaming or mind wandering. It's a mind blowing finding.

And then you think about it and you're like, yeah, probably if the electric shot was mild, because at least it's something, right. Yeah, Yeah, I mean I think that patience. I think that the question of patience and impatience is just another way into this question of, you know, the degree to which we want to be superhuman. We want to make the world go at the pace we need it to go, which is, you know, instantaneous, and all sorts of technological developments, you know, convince us that we're

almost there. You know that we're very close to being able to do everything in an instantaneous way, which is why, as I argue in the book, that you know, it's far more frustrating to wait for a microwave than it is to wait for a conventional oven, because the microwave sort of encourages you to believe that it ought to be possible to have your food instantaneously, and so it's much more frustrating to have to wait two minutes for it. If people never expected that in the first place, they

wouldn't be they wouldn't be so impatient. So yeah, I think it becomes very a very important skill in the modern accelerated world, you know, to be able to let things take the time they take to be able to sort of not read a book without without trying to read it as fast as you possibly can, or to consume a work of art in that way, or to be in a relationship without needing things to sort of without needing the day to flow at your own person

you know, preferred speed and so and it's hard. It's really hard and unpleasant and a constant challenge and I haven't you know, figured it out for myself. But it's again, I'm just really attracted to that idea that there's something sort of subversive in being able to withstand that a bit instead of just jumping on board the acceleration train, as it were. Absolutely, you know, there's things, some things happen in their own time. That's an obvious statement I

just said there. But there's a lot of deep profundity around that idea when you really think about that role. May the humanists the culture had a great book called Love and Will about how errors takes time to develop. Sex you can have instantly, you know, whilst you can have instantly, and we're kind of being pulled by either last.

But when we instead want to grow arrows or grow love, that can only happen as an interaction between you and someone else that unfolds over time, when tensions get resolved, when you know, you go through a relationship and you you know that you can fight and then you can make up and then you can grow from that. It's a process. It's that thing you can biohack right right right.

And you're reminding me also of not everyone appreciates the book, but I basically do the Roadless Travel Scott Peck where

he talks about attention being the work of love. I think that's I think that's a phrase from his writing, And there's like this wonderful passage about how like listening to the other person in a relationship takes effort, and you do it more and more, and like it just always keeps on taking effort and it never actually gets easy because there's that there's something about but putting in an effort that is that is the value of the Yeah, interaction,

and yeah, yeah, that's where the meaning comes into play. Yeah, the effort, the commitment, commitment and meaning are so deeply, deeply intertwined. You know, like the second we we commit ourselves to anything, we are in a sense committing ourselves to meaning. For that thing that we're going to find

some meaning in it. Yeah, yeah, and sacrificing some kind of comfort in so doing, because you're sort of voluntarily binding yourself to certain experiences and speeds of things unfolding that you might not then choose if you were, if you haven't made the commitment in any given moment, but that you sort of yeah, yeah, fascinating. Sorry, that didn't go anywhere, but it is fascinating. We're riffing. We're riffing.

For the remainder of this interview, Let's talk about some of the practical things you do talk about in your book. You have three principles of patients. You say, the first is develop a taste for having problems? Can I go through all three and maybe you could collaborate a little bit on each one. So the first one, develop a

taste for having problems? Does that mean I'm trying to target there this sense that I think a lot of people have, certainly I had for a long time, that the problems in your life, and there are always a whole bunch of them that you're trying to work out, are sort of doubly problematic. Firstly, because you have the problem itself, but also there's some idea that you ought to you take yourself to be en route to some time when you're not going to have any more problems.

And in a different not in the book, but elsewhere, I've quoted a talk that I heard Sam Harris give about this where he was sort of remembering some moment when he was moaning to a friend about all the problems that he was experiencing in his I think work at that time or something, and she said like, hold hold on, do you think you're going to get to a time in your life when you don't have problems? It's like, and that's a really big realization. I think

that that's really that's really true. This idea that one day there's going to be the problem free time is very seductive, and I don't think that's ever going to happen. I don't think you'd ever want it to happen. Certainly, you know there are very grave problems that it would be. You know, it's nice not to have, and that it'll be nice to not have any more of, but the sheer fact of having sort of things that you need

to address yourself to that are difficult or challenging. And that feel like roadblocks to where you want to get. I mean to approach those in the spirit that you're one day going to get rid of them. All is to sort of treat life as a problem in itself, right, I think, And and so there's something really powerful about letting go of that. There's a I think can't remem if I put it in that that point in the book.

But there's a quote that I really cherished from the French perk called Chris Chiamboban, who says, she is translated obviously by somebody else, I was peeling a red apple from the garden when it's suddenly, when I suddenly realized that life would only ever give me a series of wonderfully and soluble problems to solve. At this moment a notion of profound peace. And in my heart, I think that's the approximate quote. And it's just like, oh, yeah,

this is this is life. The problems are life. My wife. Occasionally when I'm when I'm really when I'm whining about some aspect of my work, it's like, no, this is the job solving these problems, Like that's the thing that you do. The idea that you've got to get rid of all those so that you can get down to the real, the real stuff of life. That's the illusion. It's so beautiful, it's so it's so true, it's just

so darn true. I think there's a lot of people going to listen to this episode and and and just they'll need to hear that, you know, Like I needed to hear that. When I was reading your book, I was like, Wow, this is life. Maybe that could have been the title of the book as well. No, no, no, that is your life. That is life. And I'm always, you know, occasionally encountering people who think that I must have internalized this epiphany once and for all and live

in a perfect state of equanimity. Certainly not I think that. I think that, you know, obviously, this is stuff I need to remind myself of again and again all the time. But it is always liberating, and it's always a burden lifted from my shoulders when I when I do right. Yeah, there are problems to be solved, but this, the fact of having problems, is not a problem to be solved. If that, if that makes more money, more problems. The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism. So what is

radical incrementalism. I'm talking here about developing the willingness to make progress on your work, whatever it is, is is, in very small, consistent amounts. There's obviously plenty of research about the importance of a sense of, you know, small victories and small wins in keeping people motivated. But I think there's this, there's this impatient urge in a lot of people.

Obviously depends on your sort of specific profession and things like that, but there's this sort of urge to race ahead, this idea that that accomplishment and progress is a matter of sort of binging your work, of sprinting forwards and

making like vast, very very quick progress. And I'm sort of drawing here on lots of evidence from different places, but I am focusing specifically on writing just because it's something I so personally familiar with that the exact opposite is true, that actually that sort of willingness to do a small amount, do a small amount the next day, be quite dogged in that in that way, this makes accomplishments sustainable over the long haul. There's fascinating work by

this psychologist Robert Boyce. I don't know if you've run into his stuff who spent a lot of time studying the writing habits of academics and made this really interesting finding that actually the most productive academic writers were those who made writing a moderately important part of their daily lives instead of the ones who tried to make it a hugely important part of their daily lives. It's less intimidating.

You can come back to it day after day. You can actually create that situation where you want to return to it day after day because you haven't sort of permitted yourself to do so much of it that you've grown sort of exhausted by it, or or it feels like it sort of unpleasantly dominates your life and takes

away from other things. The part of that that I'm always sort of really intrigued by and that has been so powerful for me is not just that you and this is in my own writing practice, I guess you know, not just that you only ask of yourself an hour or two's deep writing focus in the course of a day, but that you make sure you stop at the end, and even if you're on a roll, you actually sort of flex that muscle of getting up and walking away.

And it's really hard to do. But Boyce argued, and I think he was right, that if you give in to that urge to just keep going and keep going and keep going, you're basically giving into impatience, like this idea that you that you must get it done now that you're never going to get another opportunity, that it's absolutely essential that you add another two thousand words to the chapter or whatever it might be. And when you see that it's not essential. When you see that, you

can walk away. You can live with the discomfort of knowing that you could have carried on but you didn't. That's actually what keeps you sort of in this like more tightly coiled place where you're willing to, you know, come back to it day after day after day. Does that resonate and doesn't resonate with your own experiences? I'm interested, or you're a binge writer. I know some really accomplished people.

Ask Stephen Pinker. I think I've heard him talk about how he totally disagrees with all things and just like rites for fifteen hours a day for a few months and then stops for ages. So that's me, oh, interesting, Well, if it I work on inspiration and when i'm feeling inspired. I need to capture that juice that sauce that energy for as long as I can ride it, or because it may be days before I get it again, or even months. So that philosophy of radical incrementalism does not

jive with my sort of menia. But that's my own psycho pathology. I mean, it's really interesting to me because I do think that the sort of the deepest level of this, which is that things take the time they take and you need to give them that time, I think is universally and I'm sure that if we sort of dissected your writing habits, we'd see that emerging in

some other form. But yeah, I think that the idea that the idea that of doing these sort of short, consistent amounts, that's probably a corrective that is needed by people like yeah, people whose tendency, like me, is to be sort of I don't know, perfectionistic, not necessarily in terms of the quality output, but perfectionistic in an absolutist in this idea that I ought to be able to write for eight hours a day, and then when I can't,

it becomes incredibly depressing. You're talking as if it's a sheer pleasure maybe to write for eight hours a day when the juices are flowing, And I don't necessarily want to be a person who tries to get in the way of that. Although I suppose if you really followed Robert Boyce's ideas to them end and to be deliberately competive about it, I would say, is there any possibility that you're talking as if inspiration is only there sometimes and you have to ride it when it is there? Right?

But it would be tempting, in a Devil's advocate way to ask, do you think that you're riding of the inspiration as long as it'll go? Has some causal influence on the fact that it only shows up sporadically, And if you could force yourself to work in much shorter bursts, would you find that there was a sort of low harm of inspiration that was there all the time. Yeah, So I think that's a really I'm just interested in. So it's a really good question, and I maybe perhaps

experiment more with that idea. You seem to produce the books, so like, if it's working, I'm not sure I want to tell you to do something that might not work. So yeah, So, well, maybe individual differences do play a role here, but I see the corrective that you're trying to make, and I think that's an excellent point, so we can focus on that. Okay. So the final principle is that more often than not, original lies on the far side of un originality, that mind blown, mind blown.

Can you explain what that means? Yeah, I mean the simplest way of putting of unpacking that is just that in creative work especially, but I think it probably applies in relationships and in a bunch of other domains. You often have to go through a period of things that feel derivative or not, you know, you being truly your unique self in order to get to the parts that

are truly original and truly your unique self. I use this whole I lean on this whole story from the about the Helsinki bus station theory that I can talk about here, though it takes more than ten seconds, so you can you can ask me to or not and edit it out or whatever, but also be familiar to people.

I think also in that as a fairly famous little piece of writing or speaking from Ira Glass, the radio host and producer, about how in the early stages of being a creative person in I think he's talking about radio specifically, your taste sort of runs ahead of your capacities, so it feels like what you're producing is substandard because you have a vision of something that is very good

and you're not yet able to create it. And so, in a very sort of mundane way, I can look back on my training as a journalist and see that it was important to do a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't necessarily the most fulfilling writing imaginable in order

to get to a place where I could. I think that it crops up in a different interesting way, in the sort of way in which there are so many sort of cultural messages pushing us at quite a young age to do very extraordinary things, right, to go to some different part of the world to live and work, to pursue sort of I mean, things that are the opposite of like settle down, get married, have children, all these things that feel like they're they're sort of insufficiently

unusual in some ways, I think to a lot of people, and that maybe actually you have to fall into these conventional grooves sometimes in order to get to certain things, like you know, the fruits of a long term it's a relationship or parenthood and deep roots in a location, things like that. So I guess that's that's that's the

that's the general point that I'm getting out there. Yeah, there's a great paper, one of my great one of my favorite journal articles by a sociologist called the Moondanity of Excellence where he did a really deep analysis of Olympic swimmers in their process leading up to their to their their greatness and he found that it's actually PREMI I love that. I love that. Yeah, me too, me too. Somehow seems relevant to your point. Yeah, you know, I want to kind of leave our interview today on making

something very clear. You know, you are about realism, but to me, it seems like there's a correlation, of positive correlation between the extent to which you have embraced this realism and the awe that you experience in the world. There seems to be a connection to awe and to wonder and to being able to pay attention to the wonder that exists in the world. Is that right? I'd like to leave on this note. Yeah, I think there is.

There must be. I'm just trying to think my way around that that idea because you do talk right, because in your book you do talk about wonder and you talk about how a lot of time management techniques are

are taking us away from being able to appreciate it. Yeah, the more on why ways of trying to manage our time, or ring more and more activities out of the same amount of time, and all the sort of unwise ways in which we relate to our time, they have this effect of sort of holding us back from full engagement with the reality that we're in. And so they are sort of awe killing in a way because they put

you one remove from experience. This attempt to be superhuman with respect your time is kind of as I've said already, you know, it's attempt to sort of get outside of life and attempt to sort of bring the world reality in all its kind of infinite wonder and uncontrollable variety and everything into a sort of something that you can get your hands around and organize the way you want

it to be. And if what I'm talking about here is letting go of that is letting go of that fantasy in order to actually do some good, meaningful things in the world, but to be part of the world

instead of trying to sort of wrangle the world. Then I think that would be totally consistent with with AWE, which is that sort of sense of your that sense of being part of something almost sort of terrifyingly bigger and more unfathomable than oneself, and and not thinking that you have not thinking that you have reality's number right, that it's all that it's all totally sort of manageable and can all be turned into your to your lists and your task management system and your goals for the

quarter or whatever. So yeah, I intentionally wanted to get this interview done so we could have it in the new year, and so I'm excited to release this a SAP.

How does this advice relate at all to people and their their futile, seemingly futile New Year's Eve resolutions, New Year's resolutions that they make on New Year's Eve that don't seem to last more than any I mean, I do think this kind of there is something about this point in the turning of the calendar that does feel very conducive to having some of these deep thoughts and reflections. So I don't I'm pretty hostile to New Year's resolutions.

In their most cliched form. But I do think this kind of period can be there's something about it, especially about that sort of week between Christmas and New ear. I think that has passed now. Of course, that is a great opportunity for reflecting on how these big issues how your life fits into how they fit into your life.

But I think, yeah, the big sort of negative problem with news resolutions is this is this feeling of a fresh start, this idea that you can sort of wave goodbye to your old self and everything can be completely different and implicitly perfect in some domain from now on.

And that is really, you know, a canonical example of the attempt to control more than you can control, the attempt to sort of say that, you know, from now on, one of the ways in which my time is going to be under my command is that three times a week I'm going to go to the gym with with no breaks. It's going to be an unbroken streak and

whatever it might be. And there is in that sort of inherently, isn't there a kind of a refusal to accept the degree to which you don't control reality, the degree to which you're just totally shaped by everything that's brought you to where you are now. That's the other thing.

It's like I saw somebody tweet this the other day, right, that all one's plans for self improvement are sort of premised on the idea that tomorrow you're going to wake up with twenty times more self discipline than you've ever demonstrated without any day of your entire life so far, and that kind of thing. It's again, it's an attempt to sort of leap outside of the situation in which

we're we're all in. I think that probably perfectly healthy ways to make New Year's resolutions, But there's a general sort of cultural feel at New Year, summed up in that terrible publishing industry phrase new Year. And you you that that is unhelpful because it's sort of it fuels this this idea of bending the whole of the world to our will and bending our own selves to our will,

which is impossible enough. Well, I'm sure that'll be a lot of comfort to a lot of people, right because it's like serious, serious, It seems like no, no, no, it's because it'll it's like you're giving people permission that, like, you know that you're human and in a lot of ways you're giving people self compassion, you know, do you're telling people have a little more self compassion as well?

Like Chris and Neff talks about some ideas that I see are resonant with some of your ideas actually about embracing our common humanity, embrace are in perfections, et cetera. And you know, yeah, totally totally, And I just think that the spirit to go into New Year with is something more like, you know, Okay, what if you didn't need to do make any changes to your life in order to be an okay person and to have justified your existence here? What if no changes at all needed

to be made? Okay, Well, then what changes would you make? Because it would be fun to do? So? Yeah, Well, thank you, Oliver. I really appreciate you coming on my podcast today. I find your book such a breath of fresh air, and I'm glad we're finally able to make this work. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation. Likewise, thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion

at thus ecologypodcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page thus Ecology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.