Modern Wisdom - #840 - Oliver Burkeman - 8 Unexpected Lessons To Be Less Hard On Yourself

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Oliver Burkeman is a journalist, a writer for The Guardian and an author. Does trying harder to be extra productive actually work? Does it net more success or just more misery? For the Type-A people in the world, how can we learn to be less tough on ourselves and learn to have more fun in the process? Expect to learn what imperfectionism is, how to overcome decision paralysis & dealing with distractions better, whether or not there is an easy solution to imposter syndrome, the unexpected solution to fixing procrastination, the most effective ways to curb self-criticism, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MW10) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Oliver Berkman. He's a journalist, a writer for The Guardian and an author. Does trying harder to be extra productive actually work? Does it net more success or just more misery? For the type A people in the world, how can we learn to be less tough on ourselves and maybe have more fun in the process? Expect to learn what imperfectionism is, how to overcome decision paralysis and to deal with distractions, whether or not there is an easy solution to imposter syndrome,

an unexpected answer to fixing procrastination, the most effective ways to curb self-criticism, why you should stop berating yourself for not being sufficiently present, and much more. Oliver has probably been my favourite writer over the last 12 months, certainly in the top three, and I just love this sort of very unashamed, raw, open perspective on the fallibility of all of us trying to work harder and the inevitable face planting that we do on a daily basis. He's so great.

And I really, I really feel like he gives me license to open up more about my shortcomings too. He's so phenomenal. The new book's great. You should check that out. And yeah, there is just so much to take away from today. So please enjoy it. You might've seen that I recently went on tour in the UK, Ireland, Dubai, Canada, and the US.

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shorts I've ever found in my entire life. Their crest hoodie in light grey mall is what I fly in every time that I'm on a plane and their geo seamless t-shirt is what I've been training in every single day for years now. Basically, everything they make is unbelievably well fitted and high quality, and you get 30 days of free returns globally with global shipping plus a 10% discount site-wide. Head to the link in the10 a checkout that's gym.sh slash modern wisdom and MW10 a checkout. What is imperfectionism? This is my proprietary term, because I think you've got to have a proprietary term, an umbrella term for this whole approach that has been getting clearer and clearer in my mind in the last few years.

I guess the simplest way to talk about it is understanding your built-in limitations as a human, your finite time and finite talents, finite energy, finite attention as not things you have to spend your whole life struggling to do away with, but actually like the portal to a sort of energized and accomplished and interesting life. So it's about embracing limitations of all kinds, including the fact that we can't ever produce anything perfectly. I was going to say, what's an alternative perspective? What are people, what's the opposite of imperfectionism railing against that can't be beaten? Well, obviously, perfectionism is one way of putting it, but I think the problem with that

is that people think about perfectionism as meaning something very narrow, which is like, I'm so obsessed with producing perfect work. High standards. Right, right. I really want to say that that's one example of something broader, which I think is everywhere in productivity advice and personal development culture and all the rest of it, which is that what looks like an attempt to improve and do better and reach new heights is very often just a kind of psychological avoidance, a way of helping you not have to think about fact that time is short, that good relationships and an interesting life involve emotional vulnerability

and that you can't control the future and it's generally a stress-inducing challenge to try. So all these different ways in which we think we're getting more control over our lives, I think very often what we're doing is enabling this avoidance of, of, uh, really confronting what it actually is to key alive. There is something sort of, uh, uh, mortally hilarious about being a finite human with infinite tasks to do, you know, in my, like the, the 21st century memento mori is me thinking about the fact that one day I'll be dead,

but my email address will still continue to receive emails. So true. Yeah, it's terrifying. I mean, it's terrifying at first. I guess that, you know, the email example is so powerful because it is just the obvious example of an incoming supply of things that is to all intents and purposes infinite. We're surrounded by these, right? There is an effectively infinite number of things that would be useful and interesting to read of places it would be interesting to go of hobbies or business ventures or anything. It would be interesting to launch

and get involved in money you could earn, right? None of that has an end point, but we have end points. And so I think, and of course we've got, it's not just that the supplies are infinite, but we have minds that are capable of conceiving of the infinite and of more or at least of much more than we could do. You can have 20 completely incompatible dreams for the next five years of your life. There's no problem with that at all. The problem is when you try to bring them into reality. I think that's just the thing that I'm always coming back and back around to from a million

different angles. It's just like, what does it mean to actually drop into that reality that you're going to have to choose? And that most of the things you never get around to doing are not going to have been like tedious second tier things that you should have abandoned. They're going to have been good things as well, but you just didn't get to do them. And arguing that this is good news and really empowering and really in favor of productivity is my, is my, um, my mission and my challenge. You say, uh, the world opens up when you realize you're never going to sort your life out. What do you mean? I'm glad you brought this up because I think that is in some ways, it's like the governing example for a lot of people, maybe just kind of neurotic people like me, I don't know, but of the way in which we try to attain a kind of control over our lives that is not

actually open to us as humans. So that sense of like, it takes different forms, right? But it could be, I'm going to get completely organized. I'm going to get so productive that I never need to drop a single ball or fail to meet a demand. Or it's going to be that I'm so talented at what I'm doing that I really feel the confidence of knowing what's going on in work, in relationships, in parenting. There's one that you never feel like you've got a handle on. I'm saying if you pursue life with this idea that you're going to get to the point where it's all sorted out. You're constantly postponing the meaning

of life into the future. You actually end up doing less because there's all sorts of things you feel that you can't really fully get involved in until the point at which you've sorted life out. In some ways, this new book I wrote is kind of like a manifesto for like, okay, what happens if we just accept that you're never going to get life sorted out? Other people, it's like the news, the world is the too many crises. It's just a really anxious time in the headlines. I want to wait until that's all calmed down. And it's like, what would you, what would happen if you abandoned all that and said

like, no, it has to be now has to be now that you do interesting and meaningful and important stuff, because this future point of smooth sailing and control is, is never coming. That's got me thinking about sort of two types of people. There's many types of people, but here's two, a little taxonomy. One being the people who have not an external locus of control, but the restrictions on why they can't do things are because of something that's happening out there. How can I sort myself while the climate is still such a mess

or while there's these global conflicts going on or while we've got this person in power I don't like or this person trying to get in power that I don't like. And then there's another version of a person who does the exact same thing, but all of their restrictions are inside of themselves. How can I start doing my life while my to-do list is still all over the place? How can I begin to do that when I'm still at 17, 18% body fat and I don't know what

diet I'm going to follow? How can I do this before I, you know, it's the same psychology that many people that listen to this show and are fans of your work, uh, probably chastise others for, uh, the externalised locus of control. And it's like you have an internalised, externalised locus of control. Yeah, absolutely. And that's really well put. And it's like, if you're waiting, there's something sort of fundamentally absurd for any finite human to wait to really show up in life, whatever that means to you, until a point at which you have greater control. You're in the driving seat of the situation. Just to put examples on it,

absolutely. One of the things that I get from one portion of people who engage in a very friendly way but slightly critically with things I write sometimes or talk about is like, well, it's all very well giving this advice about how to handle too many emails, but the problem is that we live in an economy and a society that puts people in these impossible work situations. You can't just choose to ignore your emails because you have to pay the rent. That's true, but also you've still got to make decisions about what you're going to show up for as a finite human. That might involve neglecting some emails. Then, yeah, on the other side of the equation, it's like people who are very, very in love

with that idea that through any manner of philosophies or personal disciplines or the perfect daily routine, they're going to master life on their own and for themselves, which feels like a more independent way of living. It feels like you're much less indentured to what political parties empower and at what stage late capitalism is at. But actually, it's still sort of giving all the power to like future you who's going to be so great once you've developed all these habits you're going to develop and put in place all the systems and achieve the financial independence and all the rest of it. There's a satra quote where he says, I have led a toothless life, a toothless life.

I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone. Amazing. I've never come across that line. It's exactly the point. Yeah. Yeah.

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

I think, well, summer really hasn't, it still kind of hasn't started yet. And then before I knew it, I was getting ready to go back to school and I was thinking, summer hadn't really started yet. And then before I knew it, I was getting ready to go back to school and I was thinking, but summer hadn't really started yet. And I think that that is a, it's a microcosm for kind of how we see our life. It's this sort of common feeling that your life hasn't yet begun and that the reality you're in at the moment is some sort of prelude to an idyllic future. It's totally right. Obviously, I'm writing about stuff and talking about stuff that I am a sort of archetypal sufferer of. Otherwise, it wouldn't be interesting to me. But I think one other sort of point just to get a bit kind of

self-referential and meta about it obviously is that it is also possible to hear all this. There are a few books and gurus who talk along these lines and actually become a different kind of perfectionistic about seizing the moment and being present. I think what we're talking about here, this feeling that real life hasn't quite begun yet is in some sense almost universal and very, very natural because it's a protective mechanism against doing all the feeling and all the realising that comes from seeing what it really is to be a human, sort of born on the river of time en route to death. You know, it's terrifying and I don't think anyone

necessarily is sort of fully reconciled to it. So it's not that you can sort of snap your fingers and decide, okay, now I'm just gonna show up for my life right now. It's more a question in my experience anyway, of getting better and better at seeing what you're up to, you know, seeing what's happening when you get really, really invested in some new habit change project or some new goal

setting technique or something. Not that any of these things are bad, but that if what you're doing is really investing in them because you're en route to the time when life's really going to matter, I think that is a problem. There's a life cycle thing to this too, right? It's a lot easier and more reasonable to think that most of life is coming later when you're 19. And a little bit absurd, I can relate when you're in your 40s, right? That's what midlife does to a lot of people. It's like, Oh, hang on. At a certain point, I can't carry on claiming that real life is going to be.

Yeah. I mean, the August, I can't say that some is not, not started yet. Right. Right. Yeah. There's, um, it's funny thinking about how the, the push that we have, the tools that we use to kind of try and bring life under our control and how many of those end up

actually pushing life off. I do think, I've had this argument for a long time. My background was in productivity when I first started the show. David Allen was coming on and Peter C. Brown that wrote Make It Stick, you know, like I was fully in the weeds, absolutely Ali Abdaal-pilled. And I think that there is an argument to be made for insecure overachievers like us. I think there is an argument to be made

that you probably need to spend a good bit of time, ideally when you are a bit younger, because you can afford to waste it. Just learning what a GTD method is and learning about time blocking and learning about kind of the physics of the system. I think that is important in many ways, because once you've learned some of the rules,

you can then begin to play with them a little bit. But just saying, I have no idea how to manage my time. Now I'm just getting, like Oliver said, because once you've learned some of the rules, you can then begin to play with them a little bit. Just saying, I have no idea how to manage my time. Now I'm just get like, Oliver said, I can just be kind of this free flowing thing. I'm just gonna like live life, bro. You go, I get that. But if you'd had a little bit of the basic foundations to this, I think you can get a bit further.

So this is my justification for why everyone should be a productivity bro for six months out of their life. And then after that, they can graduate to being an imperfectionist. Oh, yeah, no, totally. And I think in many ways, it's even you can make an even stronger case for the productivity side of things. than that, I think, you know. I probably have in certain bits of journalism here and there just sort of mocked the whole world of productivity culture, but I'm a huge sucker for it myself. Definitely. It's a bit like Shakespeare or the Bible, right? There are so many bits of GTD and David Allen that we're all using all the time now that nobody realizes

that he deserves the credit for them because they've just sunk into our way of thinking. Absolutely. I think the problem for me was always, in hindsight, that I would jump on a new philosophy or a new system. It's almost religious. I don't think it's inappropriate to say that on some level, I would think that this was going to save my soul. I would think that this was going to be like my salvation. It was going to all the things that were largely unconsciously in me about feeling like an insecure or overachiever, feeling inadequate, feeling that I needed to do all sorts of things in order to just be basically okay and justify my existence. I would put all of that onto the new system that was going to organize my life.

I was going to get to a point where the system was in place and it was just like, set it and forget it. It's just like, then it's just going to run and life's going to be easy and all these achievements are going to follow without me having to go through the inner work. That doesn't work. But that's not the fault of David Allen coming up with a useful and interesting way of organizing your projects and your tasks. That's something that we do very naturally. Other people do it with religions or they do it with political movements or they do it with substance abuse probably on some level.

You could see all of these things as being different ways in which we're trying to like, uh, save ourselves from being where we, where we are and who we are as, as finite humans. And it's really great to sort of see through that. And then yeah, carry on using the productivity techniques. No problem at all. How do you describe insecure overachievers? I fear there's maybe quite a few thousand listening. Yeah, I mean, this is, I think there is a sort of very formal way in which this idea has been defined in psychology. But to me, it's just the idea of people who achieve a lot, get a lot done, are very ambitious, are probably, broadly speaking, praised or reaffirmed by

society in general for doing that, maybe described as driven. But ultimately doing all of that, ultimately, to try to fill some hole inside. It's the feeling that you're scrambling up towards a minimum baseline of being an adequate person as opposed to, you know, I'm an adequate person, everything's fine, I'm enough in the famous phrase, and now I'm going to accomplish some things because it's really fun to accomplish them. It's got that much more desperate sense of like, accomplish some things because it's really fun to accomplish them. It's got that much more desperate sense of like, ultimately, I need to do this or I'm kind of not okay. Once you start thinking in these terms and you just sort of look at politics and look at the world of business and all sorts of other areas,

you know, entertainment, the arts, you start to see, I mean, maybe it's unfair of me and I'm just applying, I'm just seeing my, my issues and other people, but you start to see like, there are a lot of very successful high profile people who it seems pretty obvious are sort of in that locked in that dynamic. I think a part of what I'm trying to do in my work and in this new book is rescue, ambition, and accomplishment and all the rest of it. I don't want to say in order to get past my insecure overachievement, I just have to settle for mediocrity and give up and do nothing. I want to say like, no, there is a way of not treating your whole life as a kind of scrambling towards a basic sense of

adequacy where you are then actually freed up to do a whole ton of cool, meaningful, interesting, impressive things precisely because you're no longer actually doing it for this other reason. And that it kind of doesn't work when you're doing it for that other reason, right? I mean, people do get a lot of success, but there's always this undertone of dissatisfaction and problems with like deep procrastination that come up and all sorts of stuff. Desperation, guilt, shame. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm intimately, intimately familiar. The insecure overachiever thing that I actually, I didn't know it was a thing outside of your work, but I first read about it through you and your fantastic blog mailing list thing, the imperfectionist and uh, fuck me. I was seen. I was seen. It was for the first time in my life. Somebody saw, uh, I was seen for the first time in my life, somebody saw, uh, I was absolutely like pierced through the soul. There's a point, I think just to hammer this home for the insecure overachievers

that already feel too seen, um, that they don't have fun while they're doing it. I think that's an important element of it, that you go through all of this rigmarole and effort and achievement, worldly, internally, personally, professionally, all of it. And you look back and you go, and how much fun did you have doing that? And it was all swimming in this milieu of desperation swimming in this milieu of desperation and necessity and obligation and fear and lack and uncertainty. And at no point did you feel this sort of liberated free thing. And you

go, well, hang on, what was the point in going through all of this if it didn't even have fun? Like what, literally what was the point in going through all of this if it didn't even have fun? Like, what literally, what was the point? I'm aware that there's a difference, strictly speaking, in psychology between happiness and meaning and blah, blah. But really, the moment to moment experience of you doing most of your life's work, whether that is personally or professionally, should in some form be fun. And I think that the insecure overachiever is able to imbue even the most fun activity

with the least fun frame. Totally. And I just want to, I really want to point out like not only have I suffered deeply from this and been in this situation, but like on some level I still am. I think I've got a lot of distance on it and a lot of higher altitude on it. I think I do enjoy my life and my work much more than I once did. But on some level, I don't think these things ever entirely go away. In fact, I think it is perfectionistic to expect them to entirely go away. So fact, I think it is perfectionistic to expect to entirely go away. So there, but you know, it's like, no, it's so resonant for me that sense of like deficit,

right? That sense that magic superpower ability to turn great things, even just like purely enjoyable or purportedly enjoyable kind of leisure experiences, holidays, whatever, travel into that sense of like, either am I getting enough out of it? Am I using this well? And I still have this happening to me today with, you know, the last book, 4000 Weeks did a lot better than I was expecting. And so a thing would happen now and again that somebody quite high profile would say something positive about it or I'd get mentioned somewhere in a way that was amazing. And I'm getting better at catching myself, but my immediate response to that is, oh, it's amazing. And then two seconds later is the thought, I've got to be capitalizing on this somehow. It's really bad that I don't have

these like on a nice page of my website that I'm still trying to redesign my website. It's like, you know, I've got to use this somehow. Otherwise, like who even am I? Ridiculous, completely ridiculous. I think I see this so much in my life as well. You know, if I'm sat by the garden reading on my Kindle, reading some article, maybe one of yours, or something from Astel Codex 10 or whatever, I read this great thing about GLP-1s and the economics of them the other day. And I remember stopping reading

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

that article. Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are to just enjoy that article? How terrible of you. But yeah, it's, it's something that like I say, I'm intimately, intimately familiar with this. And then there's the other side. There's a bunch of different areas.

I had, I've got this idea for the book that I'm currently working on at the moment, the four horsemen of the productivity apocalypse, um, uh, one of them being productivity purgatory, which is that even the leisure activities you do have to serve some sort of purpose. Like you're not playing pickleball because you like to play pickleball. It's because you've read from an Andrew Huberman blog that if you do have to serve some sort of purpose. Like you're not playing pickleball because you like to play pickleball. It's because you've read from an Andrew Huberman blog that if you do social activities for 45 minutes, two times a week, that you've got a reduced chance of mortality.

The dark playground from Tim Urban, which is when you're supposed to be working but doing something leisurely, which means that the leisurely thing isn't enjoyable and you feel guilty about it. And also the work thing isn't enjoyable and you feel guilty about it. And also the work isn't getting done and you feel guilty about that too. So, you know, there's just, there's, there's so many places that this shit can come into your life.

But yeah, I am the insecure overachiever. That's a, that's a question actually. So on your rehabilitation arc from insecure overachiever to rehabilitating insecure overachiever. What would the, what were the things that you did? Was it practices? Was it a reframing thing? I'm a big fan of, of mantras and philosophies and stuff, but it seems like it's such a fundamental part of people's lives that simply some mental tool that tweaks the way that you look at a particular

perspective doesn't that doesn't seem like it would be powerful enough. No, I know what you mean. And I think actually not only not powerful enough, but can be really easily co-opted back into the same insecurity project. Right. the things I talk about in the new book, not really picking a fight with James Clear because he's A, really wise and brilliant and B, how stupid would it be to pick a fight with a towing habit? Hinting that there's another view here which says that actually focusing on developing good habits can be really a distraction from what we need to do. And this is an answer to your question, sorry, the long term because actually turning anything into a project of habit change for various reasons that we can talk about can really cause you not to just do the thing, right?

It can really create these kind of psychological structures in your life where it becomes terrible if you miss a day or where you're, again, just thinking like, it's only when I've fully embedded this habit that I'll really be a properly functioning human. Or it's like, I'm going to meditate for 10 minutes today because I have a plan that within about three months, I'll be meditating for two hours every day. And suddenly that is just a huge, intimidating, long-term thing that will prevent you from just sitting down and just the leap of faith that is involved in just meditating for 10 minutes today with no guarantee that you're going to do it another day or come back to it or make anything regular

out of it. This is all by way of saying, I think there are things you can do to embrace the outlook that we're discussing here. But at the very end of the day, I think it's important to be clear about the fact that it is, it is just a sort of long and two steps forward one step back process of like unclenching, right? It is a sort of, it's a, it's a, almost like a bodily gesture. It's not a doing of something to get into this mindset. It's a being willing to not do something. It's like an untightening of your musculature and of your sort of whole attitude to the world. I've written about some ways that you can encourage that and we can talk about those, But I really want to say that, yeah,

I think in the end, it isn't about tools and that in my experience, it has been journaling about it early in the morning for years and catching myself back in the mindset of not enjoying myself and scrabbling to try to get everything done so that I can feel okay, catching myself again and again and again. And so yeah, really happy to talk about tools and techniques, but I think on some level it's important to see that, that it's just like a, it's a, it's a slow and it feels very uncomfortable at times, it's slow kind of unclenching of some kind of muscle. Have you read any Jed McCanna? Are you familiar with that guy? Oh, years ago. Yeah.

Yeah. Spiritual enlightenment now. Yeah. And stuff. Yeah. I'm really not very well versed in spirituality stuff at all. And I'm not convinced that he classes as that. He's like the most straightforward writing spiritual teacher, I guess, that you can find. But he has in his book, release the tiller is one of his cues. And he's talking about how people hold on to the tiller, which is the thing attached to the rudder that steers a ship. He's talking about how people hold onto the tiller, which is the thing attached to the rudder that steers a ship.

He's talking about how people grip it so hard, they grip it very firmly, trying to get you to move in the direction that you want. And his contention is to release the tiller of the boat and sort of to allow it to go where it goes, as he says. And in your most recent newsletter, again, I keep talking about it because I read it all the time. In your most recent newsletter, you said reality doesn't need you to operate it. Oh my God. So, I'm quoting Michael Singer. I want to pop in there and say, this is not my, my sort of phrase, but yeah, yeah. And somebody else sent me in response to that, another way of expressing the same idea, which was something like let go or be dragged basically, right?

That's great. I love that. Like those are your options. Um, yeah, I think there are guys, I tell you what there are, cause I don't want to be a person who just says like, Oh no, it's just sort of years of, years of slow progress. There's nothing you can do about it. I think there are ways that you can navigate day to day, like frameworks or kind of questions.

And I've written in the past, I think we may have even spoken in the past about the one from James Hollis about whether a life choice enlarges or diminishes you. If you're facing some choice, it's like, well, if I went down that avenue, I don't know if I'd enjoy it. I don't know if it'd be painful, but I can intuitively connect to the sense of whether it will be an enlarging direction or not. That can be very useful. And then also, maybe this is a little bit broad brush, but it's almost the case that if some practice or some way of thinking makes you feel incredibly uncomfortable and especially if it makes you cringe that this is probably something that you need. So for me and I think for many people and maybe for people in the audience for this, the whole field of like self-compassion and being kinder to yourself is that it makes you

want to just sort of like, I do not want to read more about how I'm supposed to be kind to someone. It's like, but actually that's sort of a sign that maybe it is that. So, anyone who has remained following this conversation after I said the phrase, self-compassion, weeded out the people who are so, who cringed at it so much that they won't even move forward, then you get to the point of like, oh yeah, probably the reaction I have to that idea about being kinder to myself is quite a useful sign that there's something valid there. Yes, yes. So getting into the new book, I've picked out some of my favourite lessons, one of which I think relates to what you were just talking about, the reverse golden rule on not being your worst enemy. Yeah, and I begin each of these little chapters just quickly. The structure of the book is

that it's sort of 28 short chapters divided into four weeks with the kind of invitation that you read one a day. Obviously, I can't control how people read the book and I don't think you have to but read them one per day. That's the idea. Each one begins with a quotation from someone else that really made a powerful impact on me. That one, on not being your own worst enemy, begins with this quotation from Adam Phillips, the psychoanalyst, who makes this very vivid point that for many of us anyway, if you met at a party the person who is in your head berating you half the time, shouting at you to do more and harder or like criticizing the results of what you do that sort of inner, inner critic voice. Like if you met that person socially, like you would just think they were damaged, right? You wouldn't give them that. You wouldn't

take seriously. Somebody who comes up to somebody else at a party and just starts ranting at them in that way is They're the problem. He says more very interesting things. But we accept that level of criticism of ourselves in a way that we wouldn't even show to – it's impossible to think of addressing your friends in the way that I think a lot of us either verbally or it's almost implicit and unconscious address ourselves. What I love about this idea of the reverse golden rule which comes from the philosopher Ido Landau, it's just the idea that you should not treat yourself in ways that you wouldn't treat other people.

What I really like about this is that it's a very palatable form of self-compassion for those of us who want to vomit when we hear the phrase. It's not this idea which you come across in certain social media contexts and elsewhere of treating yourself as this uniquely wonderful and special person who requires both your own and the world's care and stroking. It's none of that. It's just saying you value friendship, right? You're a good friend to people. You like to think of yourself as a good friend to people. It's good think of yourself as a good friend to people. It's good that people are good friends to each other.

Like, don't just randomly exclude yourself from that basic ethic with which you go through life. If you're the kind of person who likes to think that you're decent to your friends, just kind of be decent to yourself as well. When it comes to taking a clear-eyed look at how much you've achieved in a given day or the standards of something that you've done or how, whether you did your best to navigate some interpersonal thing, even if it didn't work out as well as it could have done, you know what I mean?

Just that sort of, it's just that basic sense of like, bring the way you treat yourself up to the level that you already treat other people. Yes, the minimum bar that you should have for everyone else. Yeah, there's something inescapable and stark about realizing that you treat yourself worse than you treat people that aren't yourself. And even if you were born with an identical twin or you and your mother live to be, live to the same year together and you spend all of your time together, so on and so forth,

there is nobody that you're going to have as intimate of a relationship with as yourself. And you're just, yeah, this in capability that the insecure overachievers among us have to just be fucking kind to ourselves, to give ourselves a break, to be able to see us, see the actions that we took with a bit of equanimity, a bit of rationality, God, forget even the emotions getting into it, just simply not being irrational, always in the direction of negativity and chastising. Yeah.

Yeah, I, I, I see it. I, I, I feel it. I feel it viscerally. So moving on to the next one. It's worse than you think on the liberation of defeat. And you've got this Eugene Gendlin quote. What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true for they are already enduring it. That quote still gives me goosebumps. You can't say that by your own writing, can you? But I think you can say it about writing that- You quoting somebody else in your writing.

Yeah, yeah. I think this comes near the beginning and that idea that there's something incredibly liberating about seeing the sense in which your situation is worse than you thought it was, I think that's really a kind of organizing principle of the book. And understanding the sense in which that's actually empowering, not just that it's relaxing, but that it's empowering as well. So, you know, I'm talking there about, to give the productivity example, if you think of your, the challenge of getting on top of all your to do's and achieving all your goals on a very tight schedule if you think of that as incredibly difficult. Then that makes life very agonizing and unpleasant to the constant slog towards the imagined future moment of fulfillment. If you see that it's actually completely impossible,

because there's an infinite amount of stuff effectively that you could do, and you're not going to be able to do an infinite amount, that shift from very, very difficult to completely impossible is actually very powerful and positive, I think, because you suddenly see, like, oh, okay, there's no point trying to get my arms around all of this. It's going to be a huge distraction from what I could be doing, which is pouring my finite time and attention into the things that are going to make the biggest difference. Then I take that same idea like it's worse than you think and that's good news to lots of other areas. If you're going to suffer from imposter syndrome, you might think the big problem is that you've got to spend years getting much, much better at what you do before you'll finally feel like you know

what you're doing in most situations. Actually, it's worse than that, which is like most people don't really know what they're doing in most situations, especially if they're doing new, interesting, innovative things almost by definition. Actually, you can give up the quest to feel like you know exactly what you're doing. As a result, you can get on with doing the things you were postponing until you knew what you were doing. Then just one more example in there is relationship troubles. I think people are very prone to thinking during rocky patches in relationships and things like that, that they're either in the wrong relationship or they've got to do tons of work on themselves to get over their issues. Obviously, that might be true. I'm not saying

if nobody should ever leave a relationship, but it's also true that if you're going to be in a long-term commitment with another person, then you are just going to push each other's buttons and not ever fully understand how the other person sees the world. These are just built-in limitations of being human, so it's worse than the idea that it's just your problem. That, again, is liberating because it's like, oh, okay, I was tormenting myself with this expectation that people get to this point of total control or confidence in understanding of everything that's happening. I don't need to turn that myself with that anymore.

I can actually dive into this experience here and now. Too much information on the art of reading and he's not reading. I think this is probably a challenge that a lot of people deal with. It's really funny to me that at an earlier point in the history of the internet, people thought that the whole problem of there being too much stuff that you wanted to consume or read or know or learn would go away because we get really, really good at filtering just the stuff that we were most interested in. We have got really, really good at filtering the stuff we're most interested in. When social media is working well, that's what it does.

There are all sorts of discovery mechanisms on Amazon and everywhere else that bring you the stuff that you want. It doesn't make information overload go away because the supply is infinite. So now you've just got a pure fire hose of things that you really want to read instead of a whole lot of dross around the edges. So the problem, if anything, is worse. I'm making the point there that the only way to relate sanely to this is to understand those information flows as rivers, not buckets, by which I mean rivers of stuff that flow by you and from which you pick a few things that look interesting. You let the rest go by without feeling guilty as opposed to buckets. You've got to empty it. That if you've sent 50 articles to your Read Later app, then your job is to

process every single one of them until the inbox is clear. Which I feel, and it's funny because for sort of, for years, I've kind of teased my dad and sometimes other people in that generation for seeming to think that like if there's a magazine or a newspaper in the house, like they've got some sort of moral obligation to read every page to check if there's anything they, and I was always just like, why are you doing that? It's just, that's some sort of weird sunk cost bias that says, well, I paid for the newspaper, so now I've got to look at every page. Um, but that's exactly what we end up doing with. Meanwhile, you've got, you've got an obligation to a completely free pocket

or insta paper read later list. Exactly. Exactly. Into which far more material can friction, frictionlessly be shunted than, uh, can fit in the pages of a newspaper. Um, and I think related to that, mentioned also in that section, and your mention of space repetition brought this up for me a bit earlier, it's like there's a huge, there's a very, very widespread idea now, it seems to me, on the social media basically,

that you should want to try to retain everything that you read or that the ideal would be that you could remember all the things that you consume. It interacts interestingly with the whole sort of personal knowledge management and all the things that you consume. And it interacts interestingly with the whole sort of, you know, personal knowledge management and note taking and stuff, which I think, you know, there's lots of really useful and interesting stuff being explored in that area. But there is also this kind of weird obsessive control idea. People who get a little bit too into like, you know, Zettelkastans and, you know, I don't know what that is. Yeah. Oh, right. Oh, this, you know, this, this whole world, I'm sure you're aware of the world

in general, right? Of people sort of using different note-taking apps, Obsidian. External brain type thing. Right, right, right. And yeah, exactly. And, and like, that's great. That's a great thing and I try to do it myself, but there's a way of doing that that becomes this kind of attempt to own, almost kind of like eat all the knowledge that you're exposed to. Another point that I'm making in keeping with the sort of rivers and buckets ideas there is that that's not the primary point of reading that I'm making in keeping with the sort of rivers and buckets ideas there is that that's not the primary point of reading. I'm all for people taking notes about really interesting things that leap out at them. But the benefit of reading, say,

a really good book is not to sort of squirrel it all away for some later moment of use, which is the same old problem of postponing everything to the future. It's because if it's a good book, it will change you a little bit in the activity of reading it. Actually, that's something I've tried to guard against in this book. The tendency that I know myself and therefore I suspect in my readers to want to be like, okay, I'm into this. It's a really good system. I'm going to take very detailed notes on every page and then at a certain point in the future,

I'm going to execute on it all. I've really wanted to try to pull the rug out from under that at every opportunity and be like, no, just do some tiny little thing differently in the next hour and a half. You know, I think that's much more powerful in the long run than any number of hypothetical plans for radical change. So true. I think about, you know, you'll be episode 840, maybe on the show. And I would guess that at the very least there is one to two pieces of advice per episode, perhaps many more on some of the more tactical ones. And, uh, who the fuck is able to do that? Who is able to apply 2000 pieces of advice to their life?

And, uh, you know, I recently, especially I found myself getting caught up as I've become busier this year has been the busiest I've ever had, and, um, I've forgotten some of the lessons that I previously taught myself, which is a particular circle of hell that you can descend into where you've forgotten a lesson that you needed and you don't need to discover something

new to fix it. You need to rediscover the thing that you already tried and then, and then stopped doing. And Tim Ferriss has this idea called the good shit sticks. And I think it's the best way to remember what you learn. If it's the sort of thing when reading that

forces you to get your phone out and take a photo of it and send it to a friend and go, Oh my God, dude, I can't believe this. There you go. Like that's it. So you just raise the bar for activation energy or whatever, so that only the things that really hit home are the ones. And it means that it's, I think that the way that I read sometimes when I'm not reading mindfully is I read as if it's my obligation to keep a hold of the information that's in whatever I'm reading. Whereas it's not, it is the obligation of the thing that you're reading to

make it worthwhile for you to keep a hold of it. It's the other way. It should be the job of the book or the article or the podcast to make you go, I need to pause that. I need to stop and sort of look at the sky for a little bit and reflect on what that means to me. And working from that frame that it's on the content to do that to me liberates you because there's no way that you can do that wrongly.

There is no way that you can't do that correctly. I think that's really well put. And I think, yeah, absolutely. It's almost as if when you take a note, the note taking is not to try to preserve the thing mainly. It's almost more just like a, it's just some sort of physiological thing that you've got to do because the point was so powerful. Like they've got to this, something's got to sort of come at it in that way. Also, there's a writer who I called Sasha Chapin, who I think is brilliant

and who I quote in the book as well, who although I don't think I quote him saying this, he's got a great newsletter on Substack who makes the point that if you're trying to take notes on something in such a way as to record everything that the author meant to say, or you're trying to take notes on it because you think it was some sense of duty towards consuming all the facts that are there or something like that. You're imposing some frame onto it other than your natural spontaneous response. What I'd say about that is you have no obligation to the author of a book you read, right? It's like, they may have wanted to convey a certain set of things, but they will be conveying a certain set of things that land with you. And it's those that are- Yeah, that's a really good point that

different people will take different things away from the same piece of content or the same book or the same article. And again, assuming that this thing is meant for you, it should be actually a enjoyable process for you to go through a bunch of podcasts or documentaries or whatever, and not have to get your note-taking thing out. You go, okay, look at that. I was just able to enjoy it for what it was. Now, obviously

there can be a world in which you watch it, take nothing from a practical standpoint away from it. And also it was crap. So that, you know, that's, that's, that's a bad situation to be in. But, um, yeah, I just, I really, really think the good shit sticks don't expect, you know, if you can just do one thing, it's not the take away. It's not the notes that you've got written down. It's what's the thing that's so apt for you that you can't not do it. And you think, okay, I'm just going to try and do that thing because one tactic that you, that you try and implement is better than 50 that

sat in the arse end of Anki that you're never going to learn. It's totally true. And on the podcast front, it's like I've even caught myself and I do this with books as well, getting better at it. Like literally not listening to something that I really want to listen to or read something that I really want to read because I feel like that's something I'm going to want to really take notes on and focus on. And then you just end up listening to some people arguing about politics or something because it's sort of whatever. Well, I mean, that might be your thing, but if it isn't your thing, it's like a second tier experience from the one that you actually wanted because the one that you wanted involved too much of that kind of work at, at, at consuming it properly, you know,

which, which, which makes, um, which, yeah, which makes no sense. Similarly, you can't care about everything on staying sane when the world's a mess. And William James quote says the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. I wanted to speak in this section to people who do feel that, you know that they have some responsibility to the world that is wrapped in so many different crises and seeing so many images of so much suffering all the time. I sort of want to I sort of want to salvage that instinct from – there's definitely all sorts of wild overreach of what gets called activism these days that I'm as critical of as anybody. But that basic idea that actually maybe we do have a bit of a duty to be good citizens in a certain way. If you buy that, I think you have to face the fact that in the attention economy as we live in it now and the environment that we live in, the point

I'm trying to make, I guess, is that if you're the kind of person who feels like you ought to care about anything outside of your own immediate life, you're going to be asked to care about everything, maximally, all the time. Every campaign group, every media organization is incentivized, even if they're very honorable in how they operate, they're still incentivized to present what they are campaigning for as the most important thing in the world, the only thing that you should give any attention to. I think we've got ourselves into quite a tangle with all sorts of things, climate, COVID, lots of things where I want to say that these are incredibly serious, real crises that then get into this kind of hyperbole machine that the attention economy is and

everyone gets sorted into like maximal panic or denying that it's an issue at all. Because again, you're going to be asked to care about absolutely everything and some people just get tired of that and disconnect or get hostile and other people just drive themselves into a sort of frenzy. I'm really just making the argument in that section for the idea that it is okay and in fact necessary to sort of pick your battles and to disconnect from an awful lot of what's going on in the world at large. Not because it doesn't matter, but

precisely because if you're going to make any kind of difference, you have to be willing to choose one or two things that you're going to focus on. I quote there a great blog post from David Kane, who runs the blog Raptitude, who has this image of public concern being something that is distributed like raindrops over thousands and thousands and thousands of little buckets. What would happen, the buckets being the different causes we could care about? What would happen if we just said, this issue is going to be the concern of these several thousand people? This issue is going to be... I mean, it's a hypothetical, but what if we concentrated our available compassion for things like that and tried

to actually make a difference instead of this very performative, very despair-inducing, vague attempt to appear like we're caring about everything. Let the future be the future on crossing bridges when you come to them. I think one of the most fundamental ways in which we're limited, even though it's harder to see, is the way we're sort of temporarily limited to right now. I think any kind of worry and anxiety is basically an attempt to exert some control over what happens in the future, which in that sense you can't really do. Obviously, you can do things that make it more or less likely that the future will go well for you. That challenge of like, oh, I can't control now what's going to happen

in the future, but I can trust that I will be up to dealing with the things that happen in the future. I think that's an incredibly powerful shift. There's a quote I have there from Marcus Aurelius, which is something along the lines of, you shouldn't be disturbed by the future because you'll meet it with the same resources and skills and talents that you meet the present with. If you were incapable of dealing with the things that life throws at you without dying, you would presently be dead, right? So clearly, you do have it in you to give up that kind of anxious reaching after total certainty about what's going to happen later. Yeah, I definitely think about that as well. That was what hit me with the reality just doesn't need your help to operate it.

Insight, which is, does this sense that by worrying, we somehow get to extend out temporally into the future and kind of, it gives us some degree of, it gives us a sense of a degree of control over what's going to happen. If I just worry enough. Yeah, right. Then that thing can't come to pass or it'll come to pass in a different way. There's this, you know, we even get in your totally fucking hysterical moments when you're laid awake

in bed at one in the morning or whatever and you can't sleep, you almost even start to think about stuff like, well, because I know, or because I'm thinking about the fact that it might happen, there's no way that it could happen. Because all of the things that I think about that happened don't actually end up coming to pass. It's always the things that you don't see that get you. So by thinking about the thing, you're like, what do you, this is divination class? Am I like going to start drawing tarot cards in a desperate attempt to control the future? What's going on here?

Yeah. Yeah, no, it's amazing. There's a- Deranging. No, absolutely. There's a lovely phrase from Robert Saltzman, who's another spiritual writer, who says that all sorts of what we do and a lot of spirituality, I think he would say as well, is ultimately an attempt to distract ourselves from the fact that we suffer from what he calls total vulnerability to events. This idea that essentially, literally anything consistent with the laws of physics could happen in the very next moment to you or to anybody, always. We're always engaging in certain kinds of irritable psychological activity to make that

not be the case, but it always is the case. My wife has this incredibly vivid memory that has always, I think it might mean more to me than to her at this point, of being a teenager growing up in Baltimore, having had a childhood where she was really steeped in going to the movies and just really into cinema and film. Walking across a bridge, I don't know, just in the middle of the day sometime in Baltimore and suddenly realizing that if something absolutely terrible were to happen to her or to somebody close to her, it wouldn't come with foreshadowing music like in the movies so that you can sort of gird yourself and get ready for it. Just that, you know, that kind of realization,

it's like, obviously you know it intellectually, but then you're, oh, yeah, I'd kind of been assuming I'd get some warning and actually like, that's not how it works. And we're always trying to find ways to buffer that. I think about in a similar, even more macabre way, how many people have died being surprised? You know, that's every that's, you know, someone's, someone, someone ends up in a

random unfortunate passerby, uh, catches a stray bullet in a shootout between two gangs or something like that. They've never been shot before. Maybe they'd never heard a gun go off before and they look down to go. before, maybe they'd never heard a gun go off before and they look down to go, I've been, you know, they die in surprise. I wonder how many millions and millions of people, their last sense was, oh, surely not. Like, you know what I mean? Like exasperation at, it's not like they're surely.

Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's not like this, surely. Yeah, no, it's, yeah, I mean, it's just, on some level, it's just completely unacceptable to us, right? That's how it is. And on no level am I saying I'm completely at peace with it, but it's really useful to see what's going on there. I have to say, just in the macabre topic, you're reminding me of a slightly different point, but it's clearly related. When I was working as a journalist years and years ago, I was one of many people in London London reporting on the 7-7, the tube and bus bombings. I remember in a follow-up piece I did about that coming across this idea least most of the people who died on that day never knew anything was wrong. Maybe not everyone, I don't know about the details of the different deaths, but it would be possible to just be going along and then it's lights out.

And actually that being some slight form of solace on the part of their relatives and friends, but like that's sort of even, that's sort of narrowing down even taking away that moment of surprise. It's just like, we're here and then we're not here. Yeah. Extraordinary. Finish things on the magic of completion. And Sarah Manguso, when my husband does the dishes, he always leaves some platter in the sink, some surface unwiped.

I tried to correct the behavior until I remembered that if I finish everything in my work in progress folder, I'm afraid I'll die. I love that line. Yeah, this is just, this is a slightly more sort of, I guess, tactical, productivity ish day in the book, because it's, it's just this idea that like, day in the book because it's just this idea that there's an extraordinary kind of power in finishing things. There's a kind of energy that comes from completing things, even though you wouldn't think that's how it would go. You'd think that slogging to the end of something would deplete your energy. I'm really making the case for finishing things, but also specifically for conceiving of your working life, your working day as a sequence of finishings and changing finishing from being something that you maybe do every few months

on some big project to something that you're doing sort of throughout the day, defining endpoints, intermediate endpoints, obviously for big projects and taking things to completion. I use this word deliverable, working in daily deliverables and deliverables through the day, precisely because it's so kind. It's such a soulless corporate idea that it takes all the drama out of something to say, what's the deliverable here? What's the deliverable here? What's the deliverable here? What's the deliverable here? And it's actually a really, especially for creative work, and it's a very powerful way to think about things because it's almost like you're falling in line with what it really means to be finite, which is that we are always doing one thing at a time in sequence

anyway, whether we like it or not, and by sort of pushing yourself to get to a completion point, even if it's completing 50 words, not completing the chapter or whatever it is, I think that's a really powerful way to think about productivity. Treating yourself like a CNC machine that's doing a 3D etching into a piece of steel or something like that. What will be done at the end of this? Well, this is what will be completed at the end of this. It reminds me of your idea of a done list, which we spoke about last time. And me and my friend George, we went on the road for about a full month across America.

And we came up with the idea of a well done list, which was a build off the back of yours. Originally his name for it, fuck, I can't remember it fully, but his name for it was, um, the, the case of the defense in the prosecution against the, the 10,000 year old amygdala or something. And I was like, why don't we just call it a well-done list? All of us got this cool idea. Um, but it was basically that at the end of the day, you would be able to look back and think about the things that you've done well.

What went well today, not, not just like the gratitude thinkers with the gratitude thing, you're always, it always ends up being really fruity and fluffy and kind of an, and that's, I had a great walk and I looked at the sky and I'm grateful for the fact I've got my health and I'm grateful for the whatever, the well done list was something a little bit different to me. And it was, I managed to, um, remain cordial today during a difficult meeting, despite the fact that I was tired. Like that's a well done. That's something that's really well done.

And it takes into account where you were at the time. And I'm not convinced that that would sit in the way that you'd write that in a gratitude journal would be, I kept my cool in it. And it's always sort of pro-social and something else. The well-done list feels a lot more kind of personal to me. But anyway, I am No, and I really liked, I mean, the way you described it then anyway, was just like, yeah, it really interacts, it really connects to where you were at.

Right? So you can be like in bed sick or wake up on the wrong side of bed and you can still within that context do that life, the life you got given today. Well, yeah. Well done. Yeah, exactly. Rules that serve life on doing things daily-ish. I'm talking here about the idea that it's very easy, as we've spoken about, to let the sort of productivity rules and rules for how you want to run your life become the things that you're kind of looking for for your salvation, not things that you're using as tools to help you enjoy life and accomplish things that matter to you, but as things that you then are enslaved

to. It's that very familiar feeling for many of us, I think, of setting up the exciting new schedule system or timeboxing system or whatever. Then two days later being like, well, I have to do this? This is so heavy and't want, I don't have to do this. I want to be free. Um, and so I give some examples of rules that I think lend themselves to that more, uh, serving life kind of frame. And one of them is this idea from Dan Harris, the meditation teacher. I think he maybe would resist being called meditation teacher anyway, podcaster, who suggests that the right frequency for a meditation practice is dailyish. I think

you can apply it to lots of other things as well. It doesn't mean just do it when you feel like it. It's not completely self-indulgent. It's this idea of like, I'm going to be consistent, but I'm not going to be obsessively consistent in a sort of brittle way that causes the, causes too much more guilt. Spirals up and spirals down. Right. And you know, everyone knows that if you did something five days out of seven, you did it dailyish. And if you did it two days out of seven, you did it daily-ish. If you did it two days out of seven, you didn't do it daily-ish.

There are certain times in life that maybe three would count for. You know when you're fooling yourself and you know when it's a reasonable thing. That enables you to actually, I think some of the ways consistency gets talked about these days is, is unhelpful because it implies a sort of rigid consistency that, that, that, that breaks very easily. My favorite is actually from James in Atomic Habits. And it's, I think it's the best takeaway. It's an absolute sleeper of an insight that no one really ever talks about. Uh, although I keep on trying to fly the flag for it.

Uh, and his rule is never missed two days in a row. And I think that just as a general rule, never missing two days in a row. Stopped one missed habit becoming a new habit, right? One day is a missed habit. Two days is the start of a new habit. And just, I've used this for some, I even used it in reverse to reintroduce caffeine. I did a huge amount of time without caffeine and wanted to keep the sensitivity because it meant that I could have a, you know, just a teeny tiny amount of caffeine and get, get a big boost out of it.

And I didn't want to lose that. So I set myself a rule of, I only have caffeine one day. I can't ever have it two days in a row, which meant that if I didn't have it yesterday, then I could have it today. But if I had it today, I knew I couldn't have it tomorrow. And it created this sort of artificial scarcity that made me think about my caffeine use so much more mindfully. I'm aware this is like the most autistic thing that I could come up with.

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

I know what you meant. Yeah. The least enjoyable way. Three hours on finding focus in the chaos. This is this idea that I've, I think in some circles become known for, I think, that if you're doing the kind of work that gets called knowledge work, if you're doing anything creative, anything that involves deep thinking, it's actually a really good strategy not to aim to do more than about four hours of that in the course of a day. If you look back, and Alex Pang has written

brilliantly about this in his book Rest, look back at all the routines and daily rituals of so many authors and artists and scholars and scientists through history, it's extraordinary how often three or four hours was how much they demanded of themselves of deep, deep focus. I found this to be true from experience as well. There's certain research to suggest, it's not just purely cherry picking anecdotes to suggest that there's something about that kind of amount of time, not necessarily all in one go, but in a 24-hour period. What I really like about this is, on the one hand, it emphasizes the importance of protecting time for that kind of thing. But on the other hand, it doesn't

get into this idea of trying to protect 12 hours a day for it. These kinds of things that I think rarely work for people. What I'm advising there is that if you have the autonomy over your time, it's a really good idea to, on the one hand, really be serious about ring-fencing that amount of time to be undisturbed, undistracted, not to have meetings, to be at a time of the day when your energy levels are high, but then also to not try too hard to protect or structure the rest of the time in a way that will only cause frustration and will sort of deny you the kind of serendipitous encounters that come from being interrupted and disturbed. So it's that sort of, what's the word, I guess, binary approach.

It's like there is, there's this time, but I'm not going to worry about making the other time like that. And I think that's a really powerful way to make progress in creative work. I think I spoke about this with you last time, that there was no problem that I've ever encountered in my life until I really, really started to think mindfully about it, where I didn't just assume that the solution was work harder. Like I just always thought, well, it's more, right? Or more focused or more intensely or better as opposed to, you know, I've really, like I say, this year's been just so

obscenely busy and this week is the first week that I've thought of where I've had a little bit more downtime. And I was late in the, late in the sauna earlier on, I went to the sauna place obscenely early this morning. And I thought, this is nice. I'm coming up with all of these ideas and I'm like just allowing, I don't know, this weird sort of, um, like exhaust fumes from my brain to just like, you know, like how you, when you go to sleep, there's these toxins in your brain and

it sleep clears them away. I think that's the reason we need to sleep and lying in the sauna was like a waking version of that, or I just evidently had loads of bullshit thoughts that just needed to get up and they could percolate and then they'd they're away and then here's another one and that's a way, oh, actually, no, that's, that's something that's interesting. And so on and so forth. But yeah, I think the most bizarre thing about this is to anybody that scoffs only three hours of deep work a day.

How much deep work do you get done most days? Cause if I get three hours of deep work on a. How much deep work do you get done most days? Because if I get three hours of deep work on a single task done in a day, it is an absolute triple A gold medal outlier. No, absolutely. And if you want to start with 90 minutes or an hour, I think you'll even then most people will be amazing themselves. If you can do that daily-ish for a very short while, the cumulative benefits are clear. And on some level, that's not an original point, right? Do stuff, keep coming back to it, don't do too much. I think the point I'm trying to drive home is like, there's no reason to see it as a shame that you didn't do seven, eight, nine hours,

right? It's like, actually, that's part of this process. They both belong in the day, the time when you're really focusing and shutting the world out and the time when you're not doing that. Yeah, it's the reason why so much of the progress that I made from whatever sort of total toddler I was in my twenties to full on adult infant I've become in my thirties was through a really aggressive morning routine. I had this very obscenely luxurious morning routine

that was my best part of two hours long. And arguably included in the morning routine was lots of things that people would do later in the day. So I call it what you want, but my compliance with it was really, really high, you know, for, for years and years, I'd get up and go for a walk for about 15 minutes and I'd come back and I'd sit down and I journal and then I'd do breath work and then I'd do meditation with headspace or Sam Harris or insight timer or something. And then I'd read and then I'd do yin yoga mobility and then I'd cook and prepare my

food for the day. And then I'd go about my day and absolutely, you know, tell me that this guy doesn't have children without telling me that this guy doesn't have children. I'm aware that's, you know, an absolute, that's the most bourgeois thing that I could have spoken about doing. It's not flying in a helicopter or getting a jet or going on a cruise. It's having this unnecessary two hour morning routine. That being said, the main lesson that I took away from that was I was doing lots of things that were quite high impact daily ish for a very, very long

amount of time with huge compliance. Like, uh, you know, I would do that five or six days a week. And I did that for, you know, four years or something. It did like, I've got a stack of journals like this, just from how much I did. And I never thought about myself as a journaler, but you just realize when you, when you accumulate this stuff over a long enough amount of time, you look back and you go, oh my God, look at all of this stuff that I did. And now as somebody that has, is giving himself the excuse that he doesn't have time to have

that big of a morning routine on a morning. All of the things or many of the things that I loved about that and the byproducts of it are things I'm missing in my life. And the answer's back there. There's that embarrassing thing about the answer that you already need is something not only that you know, but something you've done in the past and then like go off. One of the things that I really appreciate about the way that you wrote this book as a, like I say, an avid stan of your imperfectionist blog, um, was that you included some of my favorite posts that I'd read previously and you can't hoard

life, I think is, is probably my favorite posts. So I was so glad that it got a feature in the new book. You can't hoard life on letting the moments pass. What's that mean to you? on letting the moments pass. What's that mean to you? It's kind of embarrassing to admit that how easy it is, I think, to not enjoy life even when what's happening is on the surface completely enjoyable, the kind of thing that you always wanted to have in your life because of this idea that you've got to really hold the experience or take ownership of it or something. There's great insight in Buddhism, I think, especially lots of traditions, but

especially Buddhism, that we make ourselves miserable not only by not having what we want or wanting things that we don't have, but by trying to cling really hard to things that we do want and do have. And I give the example of being here in the North York Moors where we live now and just sort of having this experience earlier in the time we were here of being out early on a winter morning with snow on the ground and a barn owl flying by, drinking my coffee, pink sunrise in the distance. Just absolutely my favorite kind of landscape and time of the morning and everything. Insert here whatever your personal one would be.

I'm catching myself thinking, okay, this is the kind of experience I want to have. So firstly, I want to make sure I'm really enjoying it. And secondly, I want to make sure that whatever I'm doing in my life and my career is going to guarantee that I keep having this experience forever and ever and ever. And just all these different ways in which, yeah, we're trying to hoard life is the phrase that I've used there in a way that is completely opposed to enjoying it. And it comes back to this idea that I've sort of bumped into in different ways again and again in my work and in my life that you sort of have to be willing to, in some sense of the word, waste

time in order to live fully. you have to be able to stand on the side of a hill in a beautiful sunrise in winter in the North York Moors and just be like, yeah, let it go. It's nice. It's not that valuable in some sense in order to really be in it. Otherwise, you get into this whole attempt to acquire the experience for squirrel it away for what? For some future purpose, right? When you can sort of, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know why we want to, what we think we're holding onto those things for, except, of course, that, yeah, on some level, level it's sort of a bulwark against, feels like a bulwark against having to, about against being finite and against the fact that every moment is just passing by and going forever. Yeah, I know that exactly. This sort of sense that this is a peak experience and in the

moment of the thing that you're supposed to enjoy, you begin to lambast yourself for not having a life where there are so many of these things in it. And you're in a life that's in it, right? I mean, I don't know if I mentioned this in the, I don't think I mentioned the book, but I was with an old, old school friend of mine who came up here and we went on a hike in the middle of the week of the day on a weekday and I caught myself having the thought, I wish I had the kind of life where I could do this sort of thing.

It's like, what's that about? It's wild. Yeah, it's, uh, it's important. All of it. I love your work. I really do. Everyone should go and check out the new book. Everyone should go and subscribe to your mailing list.

Why should they go? They want to keep up to date with what you're doing. It's all at OliverBergman.com. I love it. Oliver, until next time. Thank you. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks, Chris.