Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - How is Your Time Management? Breaking Down the Facade of Productivity | Oliver Burkeman

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

This week’s conversation is with Oliver Burkeman, a British author and journalist who I’ve really enjoyed his writings on productivity, mortality, the power of limits, and thoughts on building a meaningful life in an age of distraction. Oliver is the winner of the Foreign Press Association's Young Journalist of the Year award, and for many years wrote a hit weekly column for The Guardian called This Column Will Change Your Life.In this conversation, we dive into Oliver’s newest book, Four Thousand Weeks - where he uses the average number of weeks that humans live, 4k – as a reference point to help us examine how we are living…especially in a world of impossible demands, infinite choice, and countless “productivity techniques” that mainly just leave us feeling busier - and less fulfilled. Oliver’s perspective and insights were a breath of fresh air, and I hope you’ll leave this conversation inspired to do the work to get clear on your values and prioritize your time based on the things that really matter to you – so that, ultimately, you too can make the most of your remaining weeks._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Now this week's conversation is with Oliver Berkman, a British author and journalist who I've really enjoyed his writings on productivity, mortality, the power of limits and thoughts on building a meaningful life in an age of distraction. So Oliver is the winner of the Foreign Press Association's Young Journalist of the Year Award, and for many years wrote a hit weekly column for The Guardian called

This Column Will Change Your Life. And in this conversation, we dive into his newest book, 4,000 Weeks, where he uses the average number of weeks that humans live, 4,000, as a reference point to help us examine how we are living, especially in a world of impossible demands and infinite choice and countless productivity techniques that mainly just leave us feeling busier and likely less fulfilled. Oliver's perspective and insights were a breath of fresh air for me. And I hope you'll leave this conversation inspired to do the internal work, to get clear on your values and your first principles, and to prioritize your time based on things that really matter to you so that ultimately you too

can make the most of the remaining weeks that you have in your life. And with that, this jump right into this week's conversation with Oliver Berkman. Oliver, how are you? I'm doing well. Thanks very much for inviting me. Oh, stoked to have you here. Your practicality in the way that you wrestle with ideas, I love it. You're really clear on fluff isn't going to make it, overhyped positivity isn't going to make it. And I want to kind of drill into the weight of where that came from. I think that there's going to be a crossover between respect for the newspaper, but then also your dad's influence on timelines and deadlines and management. Can you help me understand that crossover a bit? Yeah, I write about this in the book. I think he's largely flattered to be in the book as opposed to insulted to be lightly teased in the book. But I mean, I certainly owe my father

and my mother for that sense that newspapers matter and writing matters and being able to communicate what's going on in the world or inside your mind accurately is a thing you can give to the world. I also, in the book, talk about coming from a family of compulsive planners, people who are pretty keen on getting all their plans lined up far in advance. To some extent, that's what I'm pushing back against in my explorations of time and time management these days. It's very easy to overinvest in that feeling that you want to be in control of your unfolding time in ways that make you miserable and that in fact are antithetical to like high performance and doing things and

accomplishing things right you can go too far in that direction so you know this is the tale as old as time i owe an enormous amount to my parents and spend my professional career in reaction against them you know it's it's it's it's both those things i i hope that the result is kind of um you know it's something that um that resonates with with people but yeah i mean is that what you're after with that question i'm not too sure right yeah no there it is like how that influence um happened and then your response to that influence and it doesn't sound like i don't want to do too uh too much on the psychodramatic stuff here but it doesn't sound like, I don't want to do too much on the psychodramatic stuff here, but it doesn't sound like you had this radical rebellion, but you're like, no, I know that I'm pushing up against the ethos of the family or this particular lane of the ethos. And it's like, I'm not going to do it the way they did it. So I'm going to carve a new path and I'm going to have high regard and respect for the family. Well, and what your question makes me remember as well is that in a sense, I think all books, at least in this genre, all kinds of writing that exist in this kind of broadly

advice, prescriptive nonfiction as they call it in publishing, all of that is always some kind of act of self-therapy. I'm writing, for example, about my perspective on time, not because I figured it all out and now I get to share it with you lucky mortals. It's that the writing of the book is the exercise in figuring it out. You're writing the book that you need to have existing in the world. And I think that's always for pretty much everybody going to involve to some extent coming to terms with the bits of their sort of family inheritance that they want to sort of reframe or move away from or something like that.

So certainly, I do not come from a background of super laid out, laid back, chilled out people who can go with the flow and adapt easily to events. They have so many wonderful strengths and I love them to bits, but that I would say isn't necessarily one of them. And you know, that's an incredibly useful skill for someone to develop. I think in these times, it's more useful than it's ever been to be able to sort of respond in that, um, more flexible way. And it's one of the letting go of control a bit and, and sort of, um, being more at ease with not knowing about what's coming is one of my, one of my particular challenges in life we all have some and you know

the act of writing is is to explore that and to and to come to terms with it and and then you realize once you put the writing out there that there's like lots of people who seem to think you were inside their heads with a monitoring chip or something because they're like that's exactly how i always think about it so yeah yeah that okay so i wanted i want to pull on the psychology of that for just a moment but i think it'd be cool if we could level set there's so much that we could talk about really like your first book the title alone speaks volumes which is happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking and before so before we dive deep into the content, if you just gave a headline of what you hope, maybe one or two or three things that people would be able to pull from this conversation,

what would you hope happens? Well, firstly, I'd like to convey my sense, which I sometimes think of almost like a sort of overarching philosophy here, that there are all sorts of ways in which we try too hard to be happy, to be in control, to know what the future is bringing, and that it's actually an incredible relief to realize that that is basically an impossible quest and to give up trying to do things which are completely impossible for finite humans to do. Not just a relief, but actually the precondition for then accomplishing the greatest things of which you're capable. Putting it that way makes it sound like I want to sort of deliver a message in this conversation. I really find in my interactions with people, readers, all the rest, um, that actually one of the most powerful things here is just the sort of.

There's something incredibly empowering about understanding the ways in which we're all in the same boat. And there's some, there's that sort of moment when someone says in response to something, maybe I've written, oh yes, yeah, it's like that. Like you get that moment where you're like, oh yeah, this is what it feels like to be a human being. Not because I delivered this stunning new information into their brains, but because there's something powerful in just sort of seeing what you've kind of always known. So I don't know if that's too vague for what you're asking here, but I would,

I would love to feel that people listening to this conversation have some sense of, of that as well as sort of, you know, hearing my message and finding it useful in their life. So there's a deeper, the way that I push it through a couple of filters is that what I hope is that people see themselves and know that they're not alone.

That we're more similar than dissimilar. And what I'm on about, I think a lot of people are on about. And so we're in it together. Yeah. Is that? Yeah. And I think absolutely that that is one of the themes that I find cropping up in all sorts of things that I write or that I'm interested in people who sort of energize me to, to talk with. And it is empowering in itself, right? I mean, to,

to understand that, to put less effort into maintaining the facade of, um, being different from other people or being, you know, it's actually, it's so liberating to sort of be able to talk honestly about the way it actually is. And again, not so that you can spend the rest of your life, like in despair or lying in a hammock doing nothing, but precisely so that we can sort of get down to business on the things that really matter with as much energy and focus as possible. Can you talk about this political correctness? Because you've got a, which I love, the counterculture to the zeitgeist is kind of how you position, I think much of your insight is counterculture, which I love it. i i would love to hear your take on that

one of the ways in which what gets called political correctness sort of uh dominates our sort of public conversations at the moment is that there's uh a lot of focus and i think it's a perfectly legitimate focus on the ways in which different groups of people have different amounts of power in society. And that is sort of the one topic that is the sort of topic of conversation in politics and culture. And I don't, and I'm absolutely will stand up for people having that conversation. But what that tends to do, I think, is to neglect these kind of universal, timeless sufferings that just come from being human, not come from your position in society or how you've been treated, but just from the fact that we find ourselves in this ridiculous situation as human beings, finite whatever, and having to manage that kind of mismatch. So a lot of the time, you know, one little example of this would be that, you know,

imposter syndrome, it's a big deal. Everyone always talks about it. One standard way to respond to that someone saying that they feel like they're not good enough or that they don't know what they're doing is to really try to boost their ego and say like, no, you have as much right to be here as anybody else. You know what you're doing. You're really good at it. I always feel like actually a more powerful way to address that is to sort of point at the ways in which quite correct that none of us know what we're doing at any moment, that everyone is winging it in some sense, that we are all in this together. So I think in everything from hyper-polarized political institutions, some of the manifestations

of identity politics, all these things, they do have this effect of separating people off into camps. And I'm really trying to say, firstly, there is a sense in which we're all in the same camp. And then secondly, it's kind of a downbeat truth, I guess. I hope it's funny, and I do find it very amusing sometimes to sort of explore these ideas. But it's not about how everyone's great. It's how we're all in some way a bit kind of flawed and rubbish. And we're all just sort of stumbling through not knowing what the future holds. And I know that Americans quite rightly hear something British in that outlook, but I think it's also true. I think there's something very liberating about sort of acknowledging that we're all just in a huge mess and then we can just start making the best of it and picking up a few

of the pieces instead of trying desperately to convince ourselves that we're not in a huge mess. I'd love it. You know, when people talk to me about that bit, you know, the imposter syndrome, my response is like, it's very, it's pretty consistent, which is, oh, good. Welcome. Yes, right, right. Yes, yes. is like it's very it's pretty consistent which is oh good welcome okay good you know like yeah all right and then this idea this this kind of undergrowth philosophy for me is is quite evident and you can probably pick apart the tradition that i borrowed it from but we're all going through something right right and so there's, you know, that idea that suffering is part of the human experience.

And I just put a little bit of a modern twist like on it, like we're all going through something. So like, why are you pretending? Why are you pretending that you're not? But that's the bigger question. And I think that that's why the title of your first book was like, I loved it. You know, happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking and help.

Yeah. So before we get into the 4,000 week philosophy, when I say you write self-help books, what do you do with that? Explode in rage and storm off the podcast. No, no, not at all. I'm completely reconciled. Should we use that word? I haven't yet. I haven't yet. It makes me gag because I'm writing right now. So that's why I'm asking you this question. Here's how to reconcile yourself. Okay, good. You may know this, but you might not have made the connection to self-help. It never used to be the case. Go back to the ancient Greeks, the ancient Romans. It was not the case that philosophy

and thinking was something that you did separate from the world of therapy in the broadest sense of helping yourself, of helping other people. But the point of what ancient Greek and Roman philosophers were doing, the Stoics make it very obvious, especially now that everyone's rediscovered them, but it's true in lots of other traditions as well. The point was to find better ways to live or to reduce suffering. As I'm sure you know, Buddhism, the founding texts of one of the major world religions is it's, it's like lists of like tips and processes to go through to, to feel better. Like it's totally self-help.

And so, you know, I think something very strange happened when, when, uh, philosophy became sort of professionalized and moved fully inside the academy and then what's left is self-help is this kind of rather dubious sector of people making wild claims but there is nothing wrong with wanting to help yourself and there's nothing wrong with wanting to share with other people your thoughts on how they might help themselves there's something wrong with bad self help but there's something wrong with bad everything, right? So, you know, that's how to reconcile yourself to it. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be

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without digital fatigue creeping in. Plus, they look great. Clean, clear, no funky color distortion, just good design, great science. And if you're ready to feel the difference for yourself, Felix Grey is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. So let's dive in to the philosophy about 4,000 weeks. Can you just kind of kick us

down the path of like, I understand why that's important to you, but the tension that you felt to get you to writing this book? Yeah. Well, my experience was for many years, I wrote a column for the weekend magazine of the guardian newspaper about these kinds of issues self-help productivity personal development all the rest of it and one of the things you get to do in that role i suppose is to is to try out um huge numbers of like ways of organizing your tasks and your calendar and your life and and the rest of it and so that i basically what happened is sometimes where i put it it's like i i did enough i tried enough of those things to realize that the magic method that was going to make everything all right forever was not to be found right because you

sort of you get to exhaust that that path in a useful way so i I was kind of, this is, and this book is sort of what happened on the other side of that. I took the time to sort of think about why I was so fixated on trying to feel in control of my time or get on top of things and how universal this feeling seemed to be. And how the way in which we approach doing that, especially in a lot of sort of mainstream productivity and time management advice, is just systematically impossible, right? It's an attempt by finite creatures to become so efficient and so optimized that they can do an infinite amount. And I sort of went pretty deep into that, both in my own life and introspection but then also in in reading and writing about it I guess the the idea that I'm trying to get at in the book is that

we we put a huge amount of effort into a kind of emotional avoidance right we think what we want to do we may tell ourselves that what we want to do is live accomplished lives and do meaningful things and help people but a lot of the time, what we want to do is kind of not feel the anxiety and stress that comes from acknowledging our limits and our finite nature. So I think one way to understand a lot of the appeal of productivity advice is people don't want to confront that fact that they're going to have to choose which things they're going to do and which things they're going to let slide. They want to find a way that makes them so efficient that they never have to make tough

choices about them. Or you find in some corners of self-help these approaches to prioritization that are not really about prioritization at all. They're about sneakily finding a way to do everything and not have to make any tough choices. It's not about actually facing up to that fact that being finite involves choosing among things. Same with trying to control and plan for the future we were talking about before. That again is an attempt to get into the driver's seat in a way that I don't think it's possible for a human just finding themselves in human life to do. And so we put all sorts of effort into drawing up new schemes for planning our lives and setting goals because it helps us not feel the truth, which is like, you're here, this is it. Life is

an address rehearsal. You don't have that much time and you don't have much control over the time that you do have so i guess i'm trying to sort of lead people through that understanding say that again say that again those three or four steps yeah those are really i and the reason i'm asking to say it again is because i found that i find the concept to be deep and your writing to be practical, pragmatic. And so there's a really cool tension between the two that you've struck. And so what you just said is really rich. There is something very liberating and empowering

in seeing that there will always be too much to do, that you will always miss out on most things that the world has to offer if you're gonna spend time doing any of them. We want to sort of feel like we're controlling the future, but we actually can't. And if you can, I guess I'm not, it never comes out the same way twice.

No, no, no, you're on it, yeah, same theme. The basic idea here is that there is something, it's good to face up to these truths. There's something in the culture and maybe just in human life in general that wants to deny that that wants to that wants to say i'm going to find a way to do everything i'm going to find a way to feel certain about what's coming down the pike and all the effort that we invest in that number one makes things worse for various reasons that we can discuss if you like. And number two, just takes away energy and focus from actually doing and accomplishing

a few important things with your short time on earth. So my trick as I see it, maybe other people won't agree, is always to try to help people to see this insight by kind of saying the situation is even worse than you think, right? So it's like, it's this kind of negative route to a positive endpoint. It's a matter of saying, like, you think that getting through everything on your to-do list is really hard and it's going to take tons of time and tons of effort. Well, hard and it's going to take tons of time and tons of effort well no it's worse than that it's actually impossible to get through everything

on your to-do list you think that you have to spend hours every week strategizing and reading books about the future and dealing with you know consult concocting systems of plans and goals in order to be confident about the future but no it's worse than that even if you do all of that you still won't know what's happening in the future. So there's a very useful move. It doesn't mean that you should never make plans or think about the future by the way, but there's a very useful move, which is like, oh, I've been trying to do something in my life that I thought was really difficult, but it's actually as impossible as making two plus two add up to five. And when you go through that understanding, what you come out

on the other side as is like oh great well now a burden is lifted from me and I can dive in to these things I really want to do without without the distraction of trying to do everything so in some respects what I hear you're saying is you need to make a choice and and the idea of trying to collect as many birds in the hand as you can is a bit futile like yeah or as you hold one or two well right right or as your former guest Mark Manson would say not only that you have to choose but that you're always choosing anyway you You're just doing it unconsciously. Because you're finite and the opportunities and tasks and emails are infinite, you're always choosing effectively not to do huge numbers of things. It's just that you're doing it unconsciously in a way that then tends to leave you at the whim of other people's agendas or doing whatever seems easiest in the

moment or something like that um so the move here is really from unconsciously choosing to consciously choosing and that requires you to yeah to face up to the fact that these are choices that there isn't a magic way to sort of evade the terms and conditions of of being human yeah and the forcing function that you're using is saying listen you've only got on average 4 000 weeks and you know it's borrowed from the math of 1440 right there's 1440 minutes a day what are you going to do with them 980 you're sleeping so like what are you doing with your time it it is i i can i jump in there i mean one of the things that that makes me want to say is like you're absolutely right there is then an interpretation that people

sometimes put on this which is okay time is short i gotta seize the day i've gotta make sure that i spend every day doing only astonishingly remarkable things i've got to seize the day. I've got to make sure that I spend every day doing only astonishingly remarkable things. I've got to like, you know, go base jumping every weekend. I don't know. I've got to live this kind of very effortful seizing the day kind of life. And that may be what some people truly want to do. But I think that's a bit of a misunderstanding of what I'm saying if people go down that road, because there's something much calmer, I think, about the message that I'm trying to get across here. It isn't that because time is short, you've got to absolutely cram it with amazing experiences so that you can still end your life

feeling like you're kind of like you reached sort of God level at being a human. In fact, it's just that it's okay to come back down to the level and the scale of a human life and to live wholeheartedly in a human way and in a really full human way, instead of constantly trying to sort of break the limitations of your situation. And by the way, I think that is completely consistent with doing incredible accomplishments in your life in your career i don't think um those are at odds at all but it's about sort of not fighting the reality that you're in and i think the person who tells themselves they've got to do you know dangerous sports every weekend and they've got to live at this kind of high octane level all the time they are still trying to refuse to feel the the situation they're in a little bit and are you let's put the lens of mastery on top of your thinking or inf in your thinking, I think what I hear you saying is pick a couple things,

choose well, and then really spend your time watering or hydrating, nursing, whatever the metaphor is, those elements of your life. And as opposed to spreading thin across the crust, saying yes and no to you know or trying to say yes to everything and saying no to depth so am i am i hearing that right which is a few deep as opposed to many wide i really i think you you you do hear it right um i think one thing i'd add to it is if you're like me that kind of advice can sometimes spark an anxiety. It's like, but I can't give up D, E, F, G, H and I just to focus on A, B and C. And there again, I would just say that telling yourself that you're choosing now your two or three deep things and you're never going

to make another change in the whole of your life that's just the same thing i've been talking about right that's just still trying to sort of project on out over your whole life so i think it's useful to say like yes go deep but like you can change you can course correct uh there's a there's an anxiety isn't there in in letting things go undone that it's actually very useful to be able to tolerate. If you've got 10 amazing things you want to do with your business, say, there's a real skill in being able to pursue two of them and accept that the other eight are on the back burner for now. Like that high

achieving driven people don't like doing that. They want to feel like they have everything. They're moving forward on every front. And it's actually a real inner psychological skill to be able to say, okay, I feel that anxiety, but this is the right way to make the most progress. By the way, it probably is. I think, I don't know what you'd say the best way to make the most progress. By the way, it probably is, I think, I don't know what you'd say, the best way to get through a larger number of those 10 things anyway, to work on them sequentially.

And it's the same with like, you know, can you come in, can you get to, can you turn on, can I turn on my computer in the morning and write, work on some piece of writing that I'm invested in for two or three hours, knowing that there are emails in the morning and write work on some piece of writing that i'm invested in for two or three hours knowing that there are emails in the inbox you know rather than telling myself i'm going to get rid of all the emails in the inbox before i send to the writing okay so i'm tracking with all this and i'll share like just a little business anecdote early on in my career somebody said to me an entrepreneur i really

respected um quote unquote in my my you know viewpoint like he did it well and he did it the right way so he he did well doing good and he said mike it's early days it's like riding a bunch of horses a couple of them are going to feel like stallions. So stay connected to those, but you have to ride a lot of horses early on. And in other words, he was in your framing, he was saying, he's saying, stay wide until you can know. And then, but your job is to know. And then once you feel, and it's like an internal experience, once you feel that this is a stallion, it doesn't mean that this is going to make you a lot of money, but it's like, this is going to be a good ride. There's something really powerful here that's grabbing my attention.

Then grab onto those stallions, but hold your hands around a couple other, because you're still young. You don't know. Stay honest. Keep taking inventory about how this feels. And then he says, and then at some point you'll know. And then as, as time has passed in the sophisticated language of business, I've got five initiatives that were kind of always working and I can't stay attuned to all five. That's why we have a full team.

And so, so my craving is to get through emails. My discipline is to be able to carve out enough time to go deep and to think and to feel. And so that's why I'm asking about that deep versus wide scenario. if you put any thought on kind of the origins of this fear that is taking place of wanting to touch many and to go wide? Is it more fear of missing out? Is it more of a fear of what people might think of you? How do you rock with the fear that sits underneath this pervasive need to do much i mean my i think it there are multiple answers and my cast of mind always wants to go back to like the most ultimate the most sort of uh it's the human condition type of thing so firstly to touch that point i would say the acknowledgement that you can't do everything and that you can't do many, many things effectively, and that you need to put some things on the back burner so that you can pour your energy into others.

Like that is a confrontation with limitation. If you could be present everywhere at once and you had a unlimited time, if you were God, you know, know these these issues wouldn't arise um so it's a confrontation with limitation and ultimately it's a reminder that you're going to die and that's that's the that's the organizing thing that we're keen to to not have to confront I do think that then on top of that, there are all these other forces that really encourage that, right? So it really feels in the modern, the way the modern economy is organized, especially if you're self-employed or independent, small business person, but applies to other people too, that you've got to be able to do more than anyone else

can do just in order to you know keep your head above water it feels like that's going to be the path to being sustainable in a sort of cutthroat um environment uh i think it isn't i think increasingly patience and the ability to focus on a few things at once is a huge competitive advantage, as well as better for long-term meaningfulness. So I think there's lots of different reasons why we are naturally predisposed towards doing more, feeling like we are on top of everything feeling like if there's something we could be doing or ought to be doing we're in there we've got our finger in that pie you know and and uh i think it's all an attempt to try to feel that we're not finite in the ways that we

in fact are so it's out of step with reality and it doesn't lead to the best results. But anyway, go on. Yeah. No, I mean, the thinking is rich, you know, so I'm appreciating it. People often ask me like, you know, what are the common threads for world's best? And what doesn't get talked about enough is patience. It takes time. It takes time to hydrate properly. You know, the, the, the essence of what it takes to really understand how to artistically express it, anything, whether it's movement or ideas. And the patience is, there's like a crosshairs between patience and unreasonableness. And there's an unreasonableness that comes with many of the best, which is no, it needs

to be better now. At the same time, this holding this container, like we got to put in our work and it takes time. So it's an interesting tension. It almost sounds like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth or each philosophy is competing with one another. But can you unpack those two? Because I don't have a better – I run out of language to try to articulate those two tensions, right? right which is the the high effort the deep intensity the unreasonableness to think that they can be their very best which might just be the best in the world and at the same time

i understand it takes time and it is a superpower in many respects this the valuing of patients yeah that's a fascinating way of talking about it because you're absolutely right. I mean, I go on at length in the book about the benefits of patients, but you're absolutely right that there's a flip side. I suppose where they come together for me is in this, see if I can unpack this, but like in this idea of active patients, right? When I talk about the benefits of patients, I'm I talk about the benefits of patients, I'm not talking about the benefits of being able to just wait. That can have its role. But I was really influenced writing the book by the work of an art historian at Harvard called

Jennifer Roberts, who has her students do something that I did for the book as well, which is to choose a painting and go and look at it for three hours straight without a break. And her argument is that you literally, and it's true, you literally see things in a painting. I'm not talking figuratively here. You literally see things in a painting after looking at it for an hour that you had missed for the first hour. If you're interested in art, it's a fascinating experience. But there's also this broader point that we're accustomed to thinking about patients as something that you say to the four-year-old who really wants

to go and do something now. And it's just like, deal with the fact that you don't have any control in the situation. Find a way to just live with the fact that it's not another half hour till we're going to the amusement park or whatever. But as Jennifer Roberts points out, as our society has accelerated, and as we live now in a culture that is geared for rush and hurry, to be able to be patient is actually a kind of control. It's a way of exerting influence over a situation. To be able to give certain things the time that they really just do take, whether that is appreciating a work of art, creating a work of art, or any of the many moving parts of any kind of business. In that case, I'm trying to bring these two things together that you rightly note our

intention and say, it may be that the fastest way, it may be that you need results fast, but it also may be that the fastest way to that result is patience on a moment to moment, day to day level. In other words, go as fast as you need to go, go as fast as the process allows, but don't go faster because you're just giving into this, this inner emotional tension that says like, I need the world to go much faster than it's going. Um, if you can, if you can act independently of that kind of, uh, inner anxiety, you will sometimes move fast and you will sometimes give things the time they take, but that, but the end result I'm convinced, uh, will be to get to better results faster

anyway. Right. And the example that I gave, if your, if your goal is to write a really perceptive paper about the work of a given artist, like if you just go and look at all their paintings for five minutes and then try and write it and realize you don't have anything to say, you have to go back to their paintings. You'll end up writing that paper slower than the person who just sat for three hours in front of the painting.

So patience in that case is a way of getting to the goal faster. Now, how or whether that analogizes to the other context you were talking about, I don't know. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day.

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If you're looking for high-quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash findingmastery and use the code findingmastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. As you say that, the crossover is deep focus. And so the unreasonable nature, what they're saying is, no, we need to focus more. We need to be all in. We need to commit. We need to believe. We need to like high effort with deep focus and then what you just described in patience is no have the discipline to spend time focusing and your mind wants to jump to this that the other answer emails answer the phone think about something else no no

return back to this present task yeah and have the. And I actually hear instead of patience, I hear like the discipline to be focused on the one or two things, like in particularly the one thing. And as you're talking about the time nature, our producer was an elite athlete in college. He was a kicker at one of the big football universities, USC.

And one of his coaches share with him and he he shares it with us, is that take the time it takes so it takes less time. Perfect. That's all I spent the last 10 minutes trying to say. That's brilliant. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, fantastic.

I'm going to have that tattooed on my wrist or something. Yeah. Oh, God. Okay. All right. tattooed on my wrist or something yeah oh god okay all right so let's let's slightly shift gears to what you're suggesting is a radical idea because the world and our brains in many respect is designed for surface engagement multitasking is the thing we had to actually square up and find that from a neuroscience perspective,

that it's really inefficient and actually is quite unhealthy. So what you're asking or calling for, ringing the bell on is quite radical. And what I found is to make changes, either you need to kind of really be off axis from your community and your social group or your social group. You have enough people in your immediate circle that you can populate the idea and they go, yeah, I'm in. So then it becomes a bit easier to be able to have that community of people that are reinforcing a first principle.

So what you're suggesting are first principles that are radical. And how did you do it? And how do you recommend other people do it? And maybe I need to put a little sharper handle on this. What is the first principle? The first principle is have the discipline to focus on few and to go deep with that. Take your time and be patient. This is not about work-life balance this is about being fully present with what matters most to you and how do you get the community or or have the the n of one you know in science it's like the just the one individual the subject of one to be able to make that move so i'm now asking something very practical yeah and this is i mean i have some thoughts but it's also like the big question uh i think it's it's so fascinating and i've been sort of looking into it further recently since the book was out this question of how do you what do you do with an insight right if i say i say i succeed in this book uh in um in sort of re rewiring your

your understanding of time a little bit like what do you what do you do with that and there are a whole bunch of sort of specific techniques that i outline in the book and at the end of the book but it's the bigger question than that it's like you know how do you cross that gap from from knowing to uh to to doing and you're absolutely i mean you know this but you are i think you're completely right that that that um that peer influence and accountability um certainly in my life with anything from like fitness to coaching meditation all the rest like it just, there's just no comparison if somebody is involved in it with you or is waiting for your results that week

or something like that. For people who aren't in a position to do that or feel like they're not in a position to do that or just feel like they're totally going against the grain, I do think this can be approached incrementally. It really can. And what you learn if you sort of try to lean I do think this can be approached incrementally. It really can. What you learn if you try to lean into this way of being a bit more is two things.

It feels uncomfortable, and then you get almost instantaneous feedback that that discomfort is fine. It's not going to kill you. If you go into some of the writers who've looked at the sort of in the psychotherapeutic vein of this there's a writer called Bruce Tift whose work I really really admire and he points out that like on some unconscious level the reason that you find it that one person finds it difficult to let go of something, to stop doing something, to focus, to disappoint someone in order to focus on something more. There's some concern there that you're going

to feel a feeling and that that feeling would somehow destroy you, right? That it would be so intolerable to feel that you'd let your parents down or to feel that you'd um that you hadn't kept on top of all the things you think a good person would keep on top of and so it's incredibly useful to expose yourself to little bits of that feeling and to realize guess what they they don't actually destroy you they don't annihilate you. You talking about your parents or the feelings? The parents don't annihilate you, but even the feelings don't annihilate you. Right. Exactly. And so the patience thing is such a good example of this, because if you're prone to like getting impatient in traffic jams or something

like it really feels in that moment, like to just take a breath and just be with the fact that the traffic's not moving, it feels unthinkable. Now, in a very small number of cases, if there's like a woman going into labor in the backseat of your car or something, it really is bad that you can't make the traffic go as fast as you need it to go. But most of the time, that's just this kind of slightly petulant need to have the world go as fast as you think you need it to go. And to let that stop, and this obviously applies in lots of more interesting cases than traffic jams, the discomfort that arises is fine. You get used to it. because you get sort of, you develop this kind of taste for doing the difficult thing in a slightly,

I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. I don't know how you quite put it into words, but that sort of nourishing or juicy sense that like you're kind of building a cool new skill, which is the skill not to just give in to hurry give into the desire to have every email in your inbox squared away um there's something in that resistance which is kind of like feels good I love the word nourishing you know that feels real that you know I use the word hydration earlier there's something super organic about what takes place when you are met with a challenge and you're working through it yeah and that's how that is how elite athletes and elite performers organize their life every day they train capabilities physical

technical and mental capabilities and then they organize some sort of activity to test those capabilities then they've got coaches as a feedback loop in a community that report back to them saying, hey, let's look at the film. Did you feel that? Did you see that? How can we get this better? I think that can get better. And then you go back the next day and you develop physical, technical, mental capabilities and you test them. And that is like, it's not complicated, but where do we find that in business where do we find that in our daily life and this is where the structure of let's call it world religions have been so valuable but have fallen apart yeah you know in many respects so like where do we

where do we get that if we don't cultivate it in our own smaller communities as well? I'm interested to ask you, or I can talk about it too, but whether you think in this context about the word and the concept of craft, because I do think that there's something very powerful in the notion. It's very easy to see in the context of a material craftsperson, a carpenter or somebody who sculpts things out of clay or something, but I think it's present as well in the kind of work that all we people doing, like concepts and keyboard toting, whatever it is that we do in virtual space, it applies as well.

It's hard to express, but for me, and I'll get out of the way because I'm interested in your thoughts, but for me, it's something to do with the idea that there is an encounter. When a craftsman works on a piece of stone you know there is an encounter between the physical limitations of the world and their skills there is no sense that you're going to sort of become sort of over master the whole um uh the whole thing there is no sense that it can all be done in a moment patience is absolutely essential and yet dedicated work and honing of skills is absolutely essential it's not it's not grunt work it's not it's not um you can't make it algorithmic and just do it there is this kind of moment to moment encounter between you and the material limits of the world um that

is for me always embodied in this idea of that what we're doing is craft, maybe as opposed to art or science or something. I don't know. So I'm interested. That word sort of encapsulates a lot of this for me. This is two parts to it. One is, I'm on record saying this a lot, which is that there's only three things humans can train. They can train their craft, they can train their body,

and they can train their craft, they can train their body, and they can train their mind. And so the word craft matters a lot to me. And I think the craft that gets a little bit more complicated is when it's not physical like stone or canvas with paint, what is the craft that you are wrestling with? And I can answer for me me my craft is it's invisible and which makes it in some respects harder because the feedback of the invisible world is difficult yeah and like it's this this porous connection between an idea and being able to take ideas and then hopefully they're they're

stemming from some insight slash maybe even a deep wisdom and then putting those into words and sometimes those words come out in physical form meaning through body language yeah and sometimes they come out in written form like the the book you've written. So that is the craft is working with ideas and being able to express ideas and or working with people to help them express their ideas. And the subtexture of that craft is the relationship between thoughts and emotions and the relationship between thoughts, emotions, and the unfolding environment yeah and so it's i love the science and i love this craft because i find it to be um rich and deep and fertile and complicated and um the world of the invisible is fascinating and it feels in some respects overwhelmingly

um full of imagination and imagination can be provoke high anxiety i find it yeah trying to you know think about what word and you you recognize like what word am i going to choose what phrase is going to cap what if i'm sloppy what four phrases are going to capture this idea you know let alone for 40 pages right so yeah yeah No, no, no. I think craft is a beautiful way to think about a worthwhile cause and to say, what is your craft? And that's for all of us. Yeah. And I think it's really interesting because it's so hard in the, it's so easy in the virtual world and the world of virtual feedback and virtual or invisible also craft as you put it to it's very easy to end up in these sort of hamster wheel pursuit of that goes beyond one's

limitations right to seek a sort of crazy perfectionism one assume for example you ought to do more than you possibly can do in the time available. I assume that it occurs less frequently to somebody who is cultivating vegetables for a living that they ought to be able to cultivate an infinite number of vegetables. That is not going to occur to you.

You can feel and see the limitations. The notion that I ought to be able to cope with any number of emails that come into my inbox is actually a very popular one in our society um or the idea that if i you know if you if you write something or you're giving a talk or something you somehow ought to be able to make it perfect in a way that will completely torment you forever as you try to make it more and more perfect and never get there. In a way, again, that I assume that anyone who, I mean, I have never built a house with my bare hands, but I assume that if you do that on some level, you acknowledge and accept and understand that there are imperfections all the way through a structure

like that. I mean, I'm sure people are different, but it's very easy to go off on these, down these rabbit holes of chasing the transcendence of your limitations in a way that I think is unhelpful. So yeah, I'm always struggling with that. So we would not argue about the time it takes to build something, you know, like we might say it's, we might be unreasonable and say, I want a house built in X number of months when it really, to do it beautifully well would be 18 months, let's say, or whatever the numbers are. I don't know. But we wouldn't argue that for, it's like almost blasphemy to say, we need these peppers to grow faster, you know, like, and at the same time, I would say this, it is also true for relationships, your relationship with yourself and your relationship with others, that it takes time.

And nurturing that time, there's the patience. And no wonder 50% of marriages end. We're trying to answer emails rather than kind of answer like deeper needs. And so, okay. On that note, I find that, you know, once you're done with the book, it's kind of like, what did I write? You know, but do you have any stories either in the writing process that you're like, oh, this was so wild or fun or meaningful or stupid or whatever it might be like stories that happen while you're writing and or stories that you uncovered and shared in the book that you're like happy uh or would love to share let me think i mean most of the insights that i gained during the writing process will feel very down to earth and not sort of amazing stories if i if i if i tell them because it was very much that kind of process of incrementally figuring out what the book was. And I feel like I had to change my personality a bit to be able to even complete the book. And there was a moment when the COVID lockdowns came and I didn't begin the book then. I've been doing it for far too long really

but but that really that really helped me finish it ironically not because I had a great insight about life from the pandemic but just because a couple of weeks I was some terrified that terrified that the world publishing industry was going to collapse and I wanted my delivery payments before all the publishers around the world had collapsed. So this was an interesting education to me because I try not to say to people that you should be motivated by fear, but for a couple of weeks there I was and it did get me over some kind of hump. And after that, when it was very clear that actually book publishing was

going to do very well from uh the tumult of the last two or three years um uh by then i was just on course and i was going and i was motoring again and i got over this sort of blockage but i'm i i always feel a bit bad telling that story because i feel like the lesson there is scare yourself into productivity and that kind of goes against quite a lot of what I what I feel I believe but it's um but it happened so uh so there's that you're hitting on something that is mechanically important which is there's acute stress like you know alarm bell goes off someone kind of breaks through your front door there's the acute stressors and then there's moderate stress, which is, you know, between, let's call it up to six weeks, somewhere in that range. Right. And that moderate stress actually can do, we can do some of our best work during that. It's

not sustainable. We fall into the chronic stress pretty quickly, but like we can do some of our best work with that heightened intensity. And I hear you saying, I don't want to promote that. But if you have strategies to recognize, okay, I see the phase I'm in, and I am going to be disciplined for this X number of high intensity, maybe fear-induced higher productivity, then okay. Then it's okay as long as you can understand that I'm going to really take care of myself nightly and I'm going to take care of myself at this end of this kind of four, six week.

Yeah, that is the conceptual framework to approach it in because yeah, I don't regret that for three or four weeks there I was in that heightened state. But yeah. Strike when the iron's hot. There's lots of phrases. Yes, exactly. But I'm glad that I didn't have to keep it up. The only other story I was going to mention, I write in the book about Shinzen Young, the meditation teacher, recounting his early training as a Buddhist monk that, long story short, involved living in a hut on a Japanese mountainside in winter and dousing himself with ice-cold water from a bucket, his naked body with ice-cold water from a bucket three times a day um

we can talk about the this is obviously now extremely fashionable uh the cold exposure stuff but it's uh but back then it was uh it was reserved for uh people on an ascetic path um and he makes this point that um what you learn if you have the commitment to do that to yourself multiple times a day and people who've done the sort of cold shower stuff will probably concur, is your first instinct is to try to not focus on what's happening to you. And to think about other things or to, you know, like, think about what you're gonna have for dinner or just just not be mentally present with the with the the um unpleasant sensation but what you learn as he explains very eloquently i mean uh in is um is that the way to reduce the um sense of suffering in the moment is to pay more attention to the to the sensations to be more fully present with those sensations and i'm sure that you've got I'm sure this touches all sorts of things in your, in your work. I've had a limited experience of that in, on meditation

retreats. When one thing that happens on meditation retreats is your knees begin to absolutely kill you if you're me. And there is a very interesting moment when you get so focused on pain that it stops being painful because I don't know why. I think one way of thinking about all this that is just useful and it comes back to the deep focus point is that in some sense you have a limited attentional bandwidth and you need to have some of that spare in order to use it to suffer or to moan and whine about your situation and the more completely focused it is on your actual situation the less suffering there is even if the situation is a bad one even if the situation is characterized by pain so if you can fill up your if you can get better at being present if you can

do what shinzen young was doing and focus on how it really feels to have ice cold water hitting your skin on a cold mountainside in winter, you've actually got less brain space left over to be sort of railing against that and wishing things were otherwise. So I think that's an interesting way of thinking about attention. You know, the response that I have to that is that when we do thing, what we're in pain, like the discomfort pain that you're talking about, or the cold, that discomfort is that it's the fighting it that is draining. It's the fighting it that creates extra tension in the process. But the noticing and the curiosity about, oh, look at my knee shake, or look at my hip shake, or look at my low back. That's interesting. My back, it's doing this and,

oh, look how my mind and, oh, wow, now there's emotions and I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this and what are they going to think of me and, and, and, and. And so it's that narrative that is so draining that when you can actually just observe and be curious about it instead of being critical and worrying about it, it fundamentally changes the experience. Not to mention, it's a little bit like this. I don't know if you've ever downhill skied. Technically, yes. And in all other respects, no.

I've tried skiing once basically in a doubt. Yeah. So it's a little bit okay so you'll relate to the early part of this but everyone else on my slopes was about seven years old or something i was that was my that was my level anyway yeah perfect so when you're when you start to pick up speed it's really natural to want to to kind of pull your body weight back and which is the worst thing to do because now you're out of control. And so if you allow your skis to do what they do, there's going to be speed. Now you can embrace that speed and even look for speed

if you know that you have what it takes to adjust, to work with the speed. But that's the big part. If you know you have what it takes for your knees to hurt just a little bit longer no big deal they're not going to rip off yeah if you know you have what it takes to deal with this intense cold right now no problem you know and so there's that framing which you have to build that capability to say, I know I can, I can figure this out. I can deal with hard things. And then, you know, the idea that it's good and bad is actually quite problematic as well. It just versus, oh, this is interesting of what the actual experience is.

Yeah. Okay. So I hear your Buddhist philosophy rolling in, you know, very cool. And then, can you talk quickly, this is super mechanical now, about the two different to-do lists? And then I've got a bunch of kind of quick hit questions I'd like to ask you. Sure. This is a very, this, the two to-do lists idea is just a very simple way of implementing this idea of limiting your work in progress. The idea that it's very helpful to set a really strict limit on the number of items you sort of allow to have on your plate at any one time. People listening who are kind of totally into productivity techniques and stuff will be able to imagine more complicated implementations of this. But the really simple idea, keep two to-do lists. One of them is open.

It's just everything goes on it that you could possibly need to do or have on your plate or thinking about doing. Maybe it's got 300 items on it, right? It's going to be insane, but you don't have to do that to do the complete that to-do list in this approach. What you do is you keep a second list, a closed list that maybe had, that has a fixed number of slots on it. Let's say 10 slots. And you feed items from the open list to the closed list. So you take like 10 things that need doing and you put them onto those 10 slots. And then the rule is you can't move anything else onto the closed list until you freed up a slot by completing one of those activities. Anyone familiar with Kanban will know that this philosophy is there too.

Anyone familiar with GTD, getting things done, will immediately want to ask questions about whether this applies to projects or to tasks. And that's all good stuff. But the basic idea here is just create a deliberate bottleneck in your workflow so that there has to be a moment when you say okay here are 300 things i could in principle do but here are the ones i'm going to do

now and i'm going to make the others wait until some of these are done and i've just found this an incredibly and other versions of it an incredibly powerful way to sort of tolerate hang out with that anxiety of like, should I be doing all this? It's like, no, you're saying to yourself, you're sort of taking yourself by the hand and treating yourself like a child in certain ways, but you're just, sometimes that's necessary. And you're just sort of saying, no, this is what we're going to be doing now. And let's just do that. And then we can bring more things on.

And of course the big discovery is that it's a quicker way of getting through more tasks anyway to have that patience of not um trying to do all of them at once and you know if you're feeling really uh up for it try five slots try try four slots right try to sort of create a smaller and smaller bottleneck and then just kind of move things through until they're done. It's very, very satisfying. And I love that. Do you have it written at like a hard copy in front of you, or do you keep it on a digital list? Or does that not matter to you? I, at the moment, I'm always in transition with these things. And I think that's an important

piece of wisdom too. Like I'm always like, it these things. And I think that's an important piece of wisdom too. Like I'm always like, it was a big moment for me when I realized that I wasn't going to get to a point when my productivity systems were fixed and final forever, that they're just going to be evolving. And that's fine. I think that's an important thing to remember. But so basically I keep this all set up in a task management software called Things 3, which you probably know about. And then when it comes to the day, I then move it onto a little piece of card and keep it in front of me like that.

So if I need to go back and get more tasks from the big lists, I will go back into Things 3 and move them onto the paper but the idea is that a little index card should see me through a day rather than having to sort of go deep into the the belly of my thousand task task management system it's it's a well-tested system you know i can hear the software engineers in our community or the coders like yeah that's what we do we pick up tickets you know so they've got a whole list of kind of parking lot tickets you know i'm mixing metaphors they've got a whole list of tickets that they can pull from and then they just kind of grab the ones as they come up yeah yeah that's cool okay so a couple quick hits all right all right um thought stems and as a reductionist exercise here okay it all comes down to understanding that reality is not a problem

you have to solve cool if i had i could ask you about 20 different answers to that stem that's good okay um if i had a boat the name of it would be? Wow. I think I would try to be clever and cutesy, and I think I would call it the same boat, because that phrase about us all being in the same boat, I use about 12 times a day. Wait, so the name is?

I think I'd call it the same boat. The same boat. I know that's an unacceptable kind of, maybe I should name it after my grandmother and call it Erica. I know that's what people do with boats. Go either way. Okay, good. All right.

If you were to come back again, if you could come back again and do it all over again, your craft would be? I'd still write. I'm not a nice person to be around if I've spent more than a couple of weeks not doing any writing. It's too fundamental to who I am. I, I, I'm not a nice person to be around if I've spent more than a couple of weeks not doing any writing.

It's too fundamental to who I am. I can't imagine being a person who, who doesn't want to do it. Um, I mean, that said the experience is often very irritating, but you know what I mean? And that, in that, in that higher sense of wanting to do it, uh, I, I can. I can fantasize about wanting to be a shepherd or a number of other things, but no, not really. Writer, sorry. Yep. I got you. Procrastination is? Unavoidable, semicolon. the important thing is to procrastinate on the right things

if you knew what I knew these are vicious you take my advice with a pinch of salt listen you had you had to pull the uk humor in at some point okay i was waiting for it all good man all right so um what would you name this episode when i name this episode this conversation yeah oh gosh i feel like the idea we're tracking is something to do with coming back down to the ground with seeing that reality is the place where things good things happen not in states of denial um there was an approach to therapy

years ago which got trademarked i have no idea if it's anything to do with what I'm talking about here, really, but which was called reality therapy. Oh, yeah. Glasser. Yeah. I don't know if it's connected at all, but I think that reality therapy is a little bit of, you probably don't want the word therapy anywhere near these conversations conversations but i do think that like reality therapy is a little bit what we're talking about here yeah you know it's i haven't had the conversation with somebody a long time because it kind of had this moment and i i went to a seminar that he like a workshop that he gave and it was awesome you know like somebody would come up it was like a master class in in reality therapy and he goes uh he'd have somebody come up on stage it's a full auditorium and um and he says right so what are you working on and the person goes uh kind of nervously well you know this and he goes um the reality the nature of reality therapy is like, what are you doing about it? And the person's like,

I'm talking to you. He goes, that's not going to do it. Like, what are you really doing about it? You know, it goes, well, I don't really know. He goes, well, that's your point. You don't know. Like you have to go, like the reality is like, hey, go to work. That's the reality therapy. It was awesome. Oliver, thank you. It's been a pleasure. Not an entirely inside my comfort zone pleasure, but certainly a pleasure. So thank you. So I hope that we find another way to spend some time because your insights are rich and practical at the same time, which is a intersection that I really value. So thank you for the time, the insight, the contemplation that you expressed in looking to express what was honest and true for you. And it's a breath of fresh air. So I just want to say thank you. Where do you want

to send our community to pick up your book and to follow along with your writings? Well, the book, 4,000 Weeks, is wherever you get books and audiobooks, things like that. But on my website, oliverberkman.com, has more about this and my newsletter and all the rest of it. Appreciate you. Thank you very much indeed. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you.

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