The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 455: Oliver Burkeman - How To Think About Productivity... Time Management For Mortals (4,000 Weeks)

Episode Date: January 17, 2022

Read my new book, The Pursuit Of Excellence https://bit.ly/excellencehawk Text Hawk to 66866 for "Mindful Monday" Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12    https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Oliver Burkeman is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals. It's a book that has become an international best-seller.  The final person Oliver thanked in his book? His grandmother: "My dear grandmother Erica Burkeman, whose childhood departure from Nazi Germany I describe in chapter 7, died in 2019 at the age of 96. I don't know whether she would have read this book, but she would definitely have told everyone she met that I had written it." The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. If you live to be 80, you'll have had about 4,000 weeks. But that's no reason for despair. Confronting our radical finitude – and how little control we really have – is the key to a fulfilling and meaningfully productive life. When someone close to you dies, Oliver writes, "Such experiences, however wholly unwelcome, often appear to leave those who undergo them in a new and more honest relationship with time. The question is whether we might attain at least a little of that same outlook in the absence of the experience of the agonizing loss." When stumped by a life choice, choose "enlargement" over happiness. Don't ask: Will this make me happy?", but "Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?" The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it. (This is why it's wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain; it's just that we're currently very aware of it.) Embrace radical incrementalism - People who work a little bit every day tend to cultivate the patience it takes to get good. Oliver tells the old parable about a vacationing New York businessman who meets a Mexican fisherman… The capacity to tolerate minor discomfort is a superpower. The solution to imposter syndrome is to see that you are one - Everyone is totally "winging it." The lesson to be drawn isn't that we're doomed to chaos. It's that you – unconfident, self-conscious, all-too-aware-of-your-flaws – potentially have as much to contribute to your field, or the world, as anyone else. The original Latin word for "decide" was decidere which means "to cut off" as in slicing away alternatives. The sooner you welcome uncertainty and not knowing as normal ways of being, the better off you'll be. People who work a little bit every day tend to cultivate the patience it takes to get good. These people also quit their day's work when it's finished: they identify what their chunk of time or task is per day, they do that and only that, and save more for tomorrow. "More often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality." To illustrate this point, Burkeman uses The Helsinki Bus Station Theory. As the photographer Arno Minkkinen explained, Helsinki bus lines start out traveling the same path but then diverge at different points in the route, spreading out to far and wide locales. When you find your work resembles someone else's, or you're on someone else's bus, traveling someone else's path, don't try to go back to the bus station at the very beginning and completely reinvent yourself and start from scratch, keep working and "stay on the bus!" At a certain point, your path will split off into something new. The central challenge of time management isn't becoming more efficient, but deciding what to neglect. In an accelerating world, patience – letting things take the time they take – is a superpower. In conditions of limitless choice, burning your bridges beats keeping your options open. The need to control events is unhelpful. There is too much uncertainty for that. Is "follow your passion" good advice? Find something you're good at instead. Do things "daily-ish" Harness the power of patience as a force for daily life. Relish the value of consistency. Goal setting: "We are incapable of living goalless lives." With that said, "a plan is just a thought." Excellence: A willingness to accept the truth of their present situation and not wear blinders. They are clear-eyed. Generosity to other people. They have a basic assumption of a non-zero-sum world. Four Thousand Weeks is an entertaining and philosophical but ultimately deeply practical guide to the alternative path of embracing your limits: dropping back down into reality, defying cultural pressures to attempt the impossible, and getting started on what's gloriously possible instead. It's about actually getting meaningful things done, here and now, in our work and our lives together – in the clear-eyed understanding that there won't be time for everything, and that we'll never eliminate life's uncertainties.

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Text, Hawk to 66866.866. Now on to tonight's featured leader, it's the great Oliver Berkman. author of multiple books, including the antidote, happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking, and most recently, the international bestselling hit 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. A few of the topics we discuss, how to better deal with uncertainty, that a new way to look at goal setting and why we should set goals, and then follow up by a great question to ask yourself when making a big decision. There's so much here. I think you'll enjoy this one with the great Oliver Berkman.

Oliver, so great to have you here finally on the Learning Leaders Show. Welcome, man. Thank you very much for inviting me. And thanks for your patience in setting this up. Of course. So I want to start with someone who I believe is important in your life. And I was reading the acknowledgments of your most recent book. and the last person you think. You write, my dear grandmother, Erica Berkman, whose childhood

departure from Nazi Germany I describe in Chapter 7, died in 2019 at the age of 96. I don't know whether she would have read this book, but she would definitely have told everyone she met that I had written it. Tell me a little bit more about your grandmother and what you've learned from her. That's a fascinating question that I have definitely never been asked before. I think a lot of people might relate to this, right? This idea of especially, I think it's grandmothers, especially. Maybe it's Jewish grandmothers because she is. My Jewish grandmother was, my Jewish grandmother, but this kind of intense pride in, uh, in the work of those below her on the family tree. Not necessarily, like I say, that she would ever actually read the book, but she would have

been very proud of this book existed. I mean, so actually in the context of the book itself, I know this wasn't quite your question. I'm, I'm a little bit rude in a affectionate way I suppose because I am kind of I'm attributing to her experiences her genuinely traumatic experiences getting out of Nazi Germany as a youngster this kind of family trait to be a compulsive planner that all down the generation since in lots of contexts where it doesn't matter it really does matter if you're escaping the Nazis that you have them you have a ticket on a ship and that someone's not going to stop you and demand to see your papers and

and and and tell you you can't do it or something, but it sort of gets at something about the need to try to control events that I think is generally unhelpful for us with regard to time. But it was clearly the formative experience of her life. I think the other thing I really learned from her, though, which is, you know, she was a bundle of hangups and neuroses like all of us are, and she had plenty of this kind of difficulty with uncertainty that I think had come partly from her. experiences. But she was like, she never lost her sense of humor to the very last, even when she'd lost a lot of her sort of physical capacities and all the rest of it. So I think what I really get from

her, it's not for me to say that what I write or say is funny to anyone else, but that, but that reminder that like this whole situation that we're in as humans is kind of a bit ridiculous. and we are often ourselves kind of a bit ridiculous in the way we we try to handle it and I think that's just I think that totally like saved her in a way right I think that was just the the handrail all through her life like she could she could do that and I definitely get that from her and I'm stilled with admiration I love that I love that element of your personality you're writing even in your tweets I've actually kind of copied it for some of the stuff I do because I'm like, oh, I like the way he phrased that. I'm going to, I'm going to steal

that, you know, like Austin. Be my guest. Yeah. We could all stay like artists. I found, too, like when I talk to somebody like you who's got, you know, security in oneself, they love it when people steal their stuff. I'm like, no, I'm always out there looking. I'm always looking for people who are smarter than me to learn from what you made a comment there. The need to control events is generally unhelpful. And I think Oliver, especially for the type of person who's listening, and I know I'm speaking for myself, so I'm projecting a bit. That piqued my curiosity because I like being in control. I like kind of being the person to make the decision.

I think a lot of leaders do. Why is this need to control events unhelpful? Well, I mean, so firstly, you know, this book was absolutely a book of advice that I needed to hear. Or maybe I needed to hear when I was slightly younger. than I am now. So there's that element to it. I don't think it's unhelpful. I don't think, I don't think wanting to have a big influence on the world is unhelpful. I think that what I'm trying to target is this feeling that I think a lot of people have deep down underneath, that there's some kind of, it's kind of existential, right? It's this need to feel like you know

what's going to happen or it's this idea that you've, that the ambitions that you have for your life say they're not just really great, but you need. them to work out for your self-worth or for some other reason that is usually to do with our childhood and probably best dealt with by therapists but so so that's what I mean by control and then I do sometimes people have said to me in the past it's like yeah you know control is great you want to have control of your life and it's like well so firstly there's that stoic insight yeah control the things you actually do have control over don't don't worry about don't try to control the vast majority of things over which you don't have control. But I think another way of looking at it is like

influence versus control and that kind of needy side of control. I think that actually you're probably in the best situation to bring your most cherished ambitions into the world. If you kind of don't absolutely need them to work out, if you if the stakes are a little bit lower, and I think one of the things I keep coming back to in my work, and obviously it's because I need to hear it too is like we can lower the stakes and all this stuff. And then the result is not that you sit on the couch and you pizza all day. The result is it's liberating because the stakes are not so high. So of course, yeah, let me try that business venture.

Let me ask that person on a date. I mean, you know, not that I've been asking people on dates for the last decade and a half, but, well, one person. But the, the, it's actually freeing and energizing to realize that, you know, You're not such a big deal that it doesn't matter all that much, you know, and I think that's a really important part of what I'm trying to say here. Kind of the surrendering the outcome as a title of my friend Brooke Cupp's book, The Surrender the Outcome, which kind of a love of the daily process in a way of like saying the chips are going to fall where they may. I'm going to focus here. I sense that that seems to be a more happy.

You wrote a you wrote a post, I think in September 2020 titled The Eight Secrets to a Firm, fairly fulfilled life. And one of those, and I want to hit on a couple of them, but now that we're here, I'll just go straight to it. You said the future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it. This is why it's wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain. It's just that we're currently very aware of it. And I love for you to expand on this living with uncertainty because there are, I know there's some more science. out there that people would rather get bad news than to have uncertainty. Yeah.

Right. And so I'm curious to hear you here maybe now that you've been deep in this research and you've written about it as to why we should embrace the fact that uncertainty is kind of always the way it is. Yeah. I mean, I think the basic idea here is just that we feel like we live through uncertain times and then predictable times. And so we feel like the pandemic.

all sorts of other evils in the world are kind of mean that we're living in an especially uncertain time. But the point I was beginning, starting off with there is just that like you at any point you have precisely no certainty about what the next moment will bring. You can absolutely have make sort of good probabilistic predictions. I'm not saying I'm not saying that but you have no certainty. There's a great, it's like a church sermon that C.S. Lewis, the Christian writer, preached at the beginning of the Second World War, where he made this, it's called On Learning in War Time. So it's kind of possibly up your street on the learning side of it too. And he made this point that like the war does not create an absolutely new kind of situation. It just makes it

impossible to ignore the situation that we had already been in. Obviously, each event that happens does have its own particular characteristics. But paying attention to this constant fact of uncertainty, I think is really helpful because it's in all those areas of our lives where we think we can be certain about the future that the trouble arises, right? Because you sort of, you make plans, which is nothing wrong we're making plans, but you make plans in a way that is kind of an attempt

to force the future to conform to your wishes for it. or you, and I think worrying, anyone who's sort of a bit of a habitual warrior, and I certainly have experience in that field, is essentially constantly trying to get some kind of fixity from the future. You're saying, like, I want to be sure that this thing is going to work out or that I'm going to have enough money for retirement. And because you can never be sure 100% about anything that's not in the present or the past, that's just like a constant constant like failed it's like a failed loop that keeps keep keeps going to

keep trying again and so I think that I mean the reason we should try and accept uncertainty is is because we should always try to accept the way that things actually are right now as the as a first step to you know doing cool stuff in that in that context uh yeah I think that could be super helpful when somebody who does have the tendency to be a warrior and we we've maybe all been that person or we certainly know people who are that when when in reality i think your book and books and articles are helpful for that to like get tactical with how to get out out of that loop where you're just constantly worrying about things that aren't even happening one of the one of the other things from that article so i want to hit that

before we get to the book now that we already jump straight to it is because one of the things that i get asked about all over i'm sure you do a ton is people are looking to make a change in their career or maybe to go for a job or to leave a company. And you said, when stumped by a life choice, choose enlargement over happiness. Don't ask, will this make me happy, but ask, will this choice enlarge me or diminish me? I love the framing of this question. I love prompts, Oliver. I'm big on questions to ask, especially when decision making, these are big choices. and someone's thinking about something. Can you share more about enlargement versus happiness or diminishing yourself?

Yeah, sure. And first of all, as I did in the article, I've got to give 100% credit for this phrasing to a great, great writer and therapist called James Hollis, who I write about in the book and elsewhere, and I've interviewed. And anyway, his work is great, and I really recommend it to people. The point about this enlargement versus diminishment question is that, like, we're really bad at knowing what's going to make us.

This is a very famous finding from social psychology. There are plenty of philosophies that would argue happiness shouldn't even be the goal of life. Maybe meaning is something different than happiness. So put all that aside, a much more reliable way to take these decisions or to interrogate whether you're on a path that is fulfilling for you, I think, is this question like, am I growing from this? Is this enlarging me or am I diminishing? Is it kind of like eroding my soul? And what this is, is it? Is it kind of like eroding my soul? And what this is, enables you to do is to distinguish between two kinds of discomfort and unpleasantness that you can feel. So in a relationship, in a long-term committed relationship, there are oftentimes when you have like a difficulty. Now that can be the kind of difficulty that is part of getting better at being in a relationship. That's kind of your growing. It's like strength training, whatever, you know. And then there's the part. And then there's the kind that should alert you to like, oh, no, this is a toxic person.

I've got to get out of this relationship. And I think the enlargement, diminishment question will always, Hollis's point is that you almost always know the answer, maybe not immediately, but with a little bit of thinking. And, you know, the one that, I don't need to keep going on, but the one that where it made a difference in my life, I was, I'm actually back in the UK with my family now for a while, but I've lived in New York for well over a decade with them.

There was a time just before I really sort of was in a relationship and then had a kid, but where I had this choice. I'd been in New York for a couple of years, and I had the option of like going back to the UK or staying in New York. Now, take two different people facing that choice. For one person, the decision to go back to the UK could totally be enlarging. It could be like, okay, you had this fun couple of years in New York. Now it's time to like face the music and get on with some things that you really care about.

The enlarging choice, even though it's a bit painful, is to leave. And for me, the enlarging choice, it was very clear after I reflected on this was to stay, because to leave for me would have been to sort of run away from certain questions that I needed to face and things that I wanted to do. And so that's a good example to me of like it's exactly the same action. And for one person, you're going to answer that enlargement, diminishment question differently than another. So that's why I think that is so useful. What about the capacity to tolerate minor discomfort is a superpower? Yeah, I love this too because again, it's been so useful for me. Maybe it's a

different question to talk about why so many meaningful things in our lives trigger discomfort in us. I'm happy to do that. But what I'm always stunned by myself is how little discomfort it takes to like throw you you know you sit down just you know an example from writing you know if you you can you sit down to work on a chapter of something that you really care about or an article or something the amount of pain that it that it that it triggers is before you're really willing to like go and spend three and a half hours doing anything else on social media it doesn't even qualify for the word pain it's kind of it's practically nothing and so I always think it's incredibly helpful to sort of drill that into your mind because then when the

discomfort arises and writing is a very classic one right lots of people find it difficult they think they have writers block but actually as Calaisne Newport so brilliantly points out that's just how it feels most of the time to do writing it's like it's hard and sometimes you get into flow and that's great but the rest of the time it just kind of feels a bit unpleasant it doesn't kill you It's like it doesn't even, you know, it's not even seriously unpleasant. It's just this incredibly minor level of discomfort that is enough most of the time to sort of throw us off track. So if you can sort of power through that for a minute or two, you've suddenly realized like, oh, it's not going to, it's not going to hurt me so I can keep going. I want to hit one more from that article because this is another question again, especially for someone maybe who gets promoted before they're ready.

which is a lot of people. Okay. Right. And he wrote, the solution to imposter syndrome is to see that you are one. Everyone is totally winging it. The lesson to be drawn, isn't that we're doomed to chaos,

it's that you, unconfident, self-conscious, all too aware of your flaws, potentially have as much to contribute to your field or the world as anyone else. This is one, Oliver,

that I really think about all the time. And I've been given feedback by others like, dude, you need to chill out on this. but what's helped what's helped i will say is doing this right here because i get to have these interactions with brilliant brilliant people and all of us one are figuring things out as we go and all of us still have kind of the normal daily challenges that everybody else has and you see that oliver's just a guy he's travel and he's got things we both had to reschedule

this one multiple times because we have life events that have happened and we're just guys like And I think that feeling of kind of seeing that, a little bit of a peek behind the curtain to see your heroes are really just people. It makes me feel much better when I'm questioning things and wondering what value I have to bring. And I really like that portion of what you wrote about. Yeah, I mean, I think about it a lot too. I think that you've always got to remember that the only reason

you can only hear your internal monologue of self-doubt is because you can only hear your internal monologue, right? It's not because everyone else doesn't have one. And you probably look incredibly confident on the outside to all sorts of other people who are doubting themselves. So yeah, I think a certain kind of confidence and assertiveness training is kind of really can be potentially unhelpful, right?

Because you're sort of, I mean, there are contexts where it's probably needed, but like this idea that we're all going to train ourselves to like pretend that we're not, experiencing these inner self-doubt. I think it leads to a lot of trouble. I think like half of politics would be much healthier if you could wave a magic wand and everyone was willing to say they didn't quite know what was what was going on, especially the time like the pandemic. I mean, I see why that's not how it's gone down, but like the willingness to say like we're sort of figuring

this out as we go, I think would have really maintained a lot more credibility in some institutions. So yeah, I just think not everyone is going to be in a corporate culture where it's going to work for them to get suddenly really sort of touchy-feely about what's about their inner experience in the, you know, in a middle of a presentation to the senior executives or something. But to the extent that you can, it's worth remembering. And yeah, I think people in a mentor position can actually do have a lot of, make a lot of contribution by sort of being honest with their mentees. about their insecurities and their own history with that stuff. Well, and just, I think the people who I found have the highest intellectual wattage, right, the ones who seem to really know their stuff are the ones who are constantly, the one, they're better at asking questions and giving answers.

They say, I don't know. They kind of take time to think. I had Tim Urban. I don't know if you knew Tim Urban, but he's an amazing writer. Oh, yeah. Okay, okay. And Tim was, I love the episode, don't get me wrong. so much of the spoken portion, which is the whole thing of a podcast, is him kind of figuring things out as we go and then he would get there eventually.

And it was like, oh my goodness, this is amazing. But it didn't always start amazing. It sometimes took a little bit of like, let me think that through. And those are the ones who I really like to be around. I really like to learn from. And those are the leaders that I can trust the most. And trust is kind of the foundation for how this stuff works. Right. And it's so funny that people think otherwise, right? They think that they're. I need a really shiny facade because that people are going to have confidence in them that way. But I don't know. Sometimes I've thought this is a cultural thing, British versus American, but it sounds from what you're saying like it isn't. I mean, I don't trust those people. I think someone who's worked too hard in an obvious way to make their facade incredibly slick is I wonder what's really going on behind that.

I do. I do too. Okay. I want to get to some more of the 4,000 weeks stuff. So your latest book, which is absolutely exploded, which has got to be pretty cool. Did you have any, when you publish it, do you think, I got a real shot here? Like, this thing could explode and kind of go viral for books. Or what were you thinking when you published it?

No, I wasn't thinking that. I think you're definitely encouraged by everything you hear and see in the publishing industry to not assume that anyone's going to notice anything you have to. I mean, I was confident, I was sort of quietly confident that it was, there was a good thing and that there's a sort of necessary perspective shift there and I thought some people would be helped by it. But no, it's done a lot better than I could have envisaged. I want to talk about in relation to this near-death experiences. So I was watching the Will Smith series on Disney Plus. I'm not sure if you've seen this, but basically Will Smith kind of travels

the world and he usually has some sort of a guide with him to help him wherever he is traveling in the world and it's beautifully shot it's amazing like high definition and and will um was meeting with one of his the guides and he said how to and this guy called himself an explore basically he's traveled the world just exploring these beautiful places all over the world so how did you become and choose the life of being an explorer and um the guy said well there was one point a little bit earlier in my life where I was held at gunpoint and the gunman pulled the trigger twice and the gun jammed. And from that moment, I decided that my life's work would be to be an explorer. Basically, like he felt like he had kind of won because he should be dead. When you hear that,

what do you think about stories of near death experiences and how that can then change the trajectory of somebody's life and what they decide to do? I mean, I think that those kind of things are just, they can be tremendously powerful. There's a very famous one involving Fyodor Dostoevsky, I think, the novelist, right, who was spared, I think he was spared the firing squad early in his life for some reason. I don't know the full story, but that's a classic example of it, right? Suddenly everything is, is extra, you know, every, every moment that you have beyond that is, is additional. The sort of, the flip side, I guess, is that it's the slightly more mundane versions of that,

which is like where people get a really serious illness diagnosis, but then they get through it or whatever. It's kind of famous that these things don't last, right? I mean, it's kind of famous that these insights do not. Like the example you give is, if that's true that it was for the rest of his time, life up to that point he was saying that, that was how it was, then that's really impressive.

I don't think it's a given at all. I think it's amazing how seeing the truth about, the preciousness of life isn't enough to just sort of live it that way. Because even those of us who haven't had any experience, like as dramatic as that, you know, we can all see that it's true that there's sort of no reason that every moment that we have on the earth is kind of like, there was no reason it had to be that way. We're not entitled to it. And it really isn't enough, I think, for most people most of the time.

I guess part of what I'm trying to do in this book is sort of come at that question from a lot of different angles and hopefully something will flick the switch for people. But then also talk about like here are some ways you can sort of go through the world but kind of reinforce it a little bit because, you know, if those moments of epiphany were all it took, then obviously all you would want to do is try to trigger one of those moments of epiphany without being held at gunpoint. What do you think about the advice of follow your passion? A long time ago, I was very, very sarcastic about this because I thought it was like, you know, I mean, I still am to some extent the way that's used to name check Cal Newport again. I really like this notion of like choosing something that you're good at and that you like and then turning it into something that you're that you're sort of passionate about through, through improvement and training and excellence. And I definitely think that like, you know, this notion that there's something out. there a priori and that we have to go and find it and that when you find you know the first time you're learning stonemasonry or something you'll suddenly be like oh this was the thing i'd never

thought about it before but it turned out that this is my passion anything like that is is totally sort of not true where i sort of want to get a bit less cynical about the idea and have and i think this is where my sort of the influence of karl young and jungian psychology has something um that I set some store by is I do think that idea of a vocation or a calling, whether it's true or not in some objective sense that it's like there in our neuroscience somewhere, our neurobiology, I think it's a very useful framing to sort of go through life thinking there is somebody that I'm sort of supposed to become as I go through my life. I don't think it's the case that like you can only do it in one profession or with one partner or in one city.

I don't think there's any reason to believe that. Like this sort of idea that there is something in you that's trying to achieve its full flourishing and that some ways of life can be wrong for that, I think that's a really important idea to keep in your head. Otherwise you get to this notion that like you can force any situation to be good, for you and I don't think that's I don't think that's true I think I think I think that's true I think I really I resonate with you yeah it does here I'll explain so I identify with this because my first so I played sports growing up went to college on a scholarship to play football American

football and a little bit after college I played and then I had to get a real job for the first time in my life you know early 20s and I was in a cubicle as a new business telephonic sales reps so new business meaning I had to call people who didn't who weren't already customers, right? So you're making a ton of cold calls. By the hell, yeah, right? You've got to get creative. Yes, a lot of people say that. You got to get creative with your emails and all the stuff. And the reason I'm sharing this story, though, is important, I think is while there is nobody who would say they were passionate about even whether it was what we were selling or doing or showing up in the cubicle by a certain amount, by a certain time

every day and leaving at a certain time and getting a little lunch break, nobody was passionate about that. However, I was passionate about trying to be excellent at whatever it is that I was doing. And through the course of this desire to be excellent at it and, you know, probably played on some of the competitive juices that were especially immediately coming from the football field of scoreboards and competition, I was very determined to be good at the job. And so once I got pretty good at the job and my name's the top of the sack rankings and they send you on these awards trips and they pay you a lot of variable commission. You start getting passionate about the work, about that aspect of it.

And why I'm so grateful that that was my first job, my first 12 years was doing a job in that line. There was promotions all in ways. So I started managing people doing that is because now, if you look at what I do, a big part of my podcast is I have to sell people to come on my show. you're an example of this. No PR person set this up. I sent you a cold email.

Oliver, I'm impacted by you, right? Whatever I said. And it compelled you to say yes. And so those skills were not built out of a job that I was passionate about, but I became passionate about the work because I saw that if I deployed some of the work ethic and persistence and resilience that I learned and something I was very passionate about playing football, that good things would happen. And then that experience, I'm 100% certain.

That experience, I should say 99, you can't be 100%. I'm almost virtually 100% certain that that is why my podcast has worked better, especially in the early days when I had to call to email the end for every single guest, much like I got you. So I think that's something I think for people to think about when they're building their career is some of them are just steps. It's not like linear necessarily, but there are steps. and there are skills to develop and build,

and you've got to throw your passion towards the work, and then you're not necessarily sure what's going to happen, but this ended up being the result, and I'm just very grateful for that. I share that whole story, because I think it could be helpful for other people. Yeah, no, it makes total sense to me, absolutely. And, like, yeah, I know.

I can think of parallels in my own work, but absolutely, yeah. But, like, I think about you getting the writing reps, that you're not able to write 4,000 weeks, By the way, can you describe why it's called 4,000 weeks before I dig into that? Oh yeah, that is very approximately the average lifespan in the West. It's super approximate because I wanted the round number. And obviously people get a lot more and a lot less depending on their good fortune. But that's what it is.

It's just a way of sort of shocking people into thinking about how we all on average have about 4,000 weeks. Okay. But leading up to that, like can you give a short synopsis of your career leading up to the publishing of that book? Like the things that you had done, the daily work, the accomplishments, I mean, there's other books. There's obviously writing. Like, can you, can you share more about that? Yeah. I mean, and I think I'm conscious that when I do talk about my career, to some people outside

journalism, it does seem like I was doing pretty cool stuff right from the beginning. Unlike, as you, you said that that wasn't true of your feelings about that first, that first work. But like, out of college, I was doing freelance sub-editing and kind of copy editing and a little bit of writing and research. for national British newspapers and then gradually working my way into being a being a writer on those publications and then then I then I had the opportunity to go and do some work from the US for the Guardian newspaper as a foreign correspondent and then I went freelance and carried on writing for them while I did my column on a freelance basis for a long time while I did other stuff and wrote I published a book of my columns and then I published my first sort of written book the

antidote and then and then this one so that's super super brief the point i want to make is that seems important to me is like yeah to somebody wants to break into journalism doing any kind of work on a national paper out of college is the goal and if you've done that then you've succeeded in the goal but for years and years there there were like plenty of pieces i wrote that are not like it's not just like me giving free vent to my deepest creative expression it's it's uh you know day after day kind of short news stories. It is feature writing that we did. I mean, I'm I worked with an editor who was and remains brilliant, but he was sort of very, very demanding in his in the sort of turnaround time. So we had to sort of come up with these 2000 word features that were supposed to like we would a new story would break on a Monday, be covered in the press on a Tuesday and then by Wednesday they'd want the kind of feature piece. So on Tuesday, on Tuesday. So on Tuesday, morning you'd have the day to put together a sort of 2,000 word article, but that had to kind of sound like you'd been pondering this kind of topic for years, right? It had to sound sort of knowledgeable

and it had to be accurate and so sort of background stuff. And this was really useful discipline in hindsight. I mean, because I see some people who just go straight into sort of book writing and who struggle with that because it is intimidating to write a book and they are huge things. And I'm really grateful for the fact that I was and to a certain extent remain a journalist because in journalism deadline comes and you just got to send what you got and with that column each week I had to have an idea and there was a time on a sort of roughly on a Monday evening where if I didn't have a really good idea I had to use my idea that wasn't really good and you just have to do it and you have to keep doing it and and then you see that you can turn a bad idea into a

good column. You learn that the things that people really go crazy for are probably going to be the ones that took you an hour and you didn't think were any good. And then you can spend two months writing a magazine piece and it just vanishes without trace. You know, so you learn all that stuff and you have to learn it because it's like that it's that kind of environment. Again, you know, often I wasn't particularly into the topic necessarily. And often I was quite often, I was sort of self critical about the result. I was like, oh, I could have done that much better if only I had had more. time. But in hindsight, super useful discipline because it sort of got me over myself, which is something I tend to need. One of the principles from this book is, you write about harnessing the power. So there's a few principles, but it's about harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life. And one of these is you say embrace radical incrementalism. And it's like basically people who work a little bit every day tend to cultivate the patience it takes to get good. They're okay with the fact that it's not going to be world class today. And they almost have to fall in love with that element of this work of this patient.

So maybe you can share more about that. If people are building a career, not necessarily as a journalist, but maybe about leadership career or just a career in general of this little bit every day. of embracing radical incrementalism to build a fulfilling and solid career. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I won't just keep it on writing, but this was something that I sort of wish I'd understood sooner. In a very deadline-driven environment, not only journalism, you can certainly get a lot done just by the stress of the situation, and I did that. But if you want, either in the midst of one of those environments or if you don't have one of those environments,

if you want to improve and you want to pursue, you know, passion projects to use a loaded phrase, I guess, but you want to do things within that context that are really important to you, I think that this idea of really going a lot further than you think you should in terms of how small your the time investment should be, but then, but then prioritizing consistency, sort of above all else. Even the consistency, I don't think you should be rigid about, right? I wrote a post a while ago about this idea that comes from Dan Harris, the meditation, teacher, podcaster about doing things dailyish. I'm trying to hold yourself to a dailyish schedule and having just that give so that if you do something five times a week instead of

seven. You don't like fall off the wagon and refuse to carry on because you broke your streak. But equally, you know, if you only do two days a week, no one, you know deep down that wasn't dailyish. So I think if you can do small amounts of something dailyish, one of the crucial things here, borrowing here from the psychologist Robert Boyce, whose work I write about in book, is that the thing you're doing never becomes such a huge intimidating part of your life that you start like having an inner reaction against it. It never, you know, if you're trying to write a book, I should stop using my few examples, but like if you're trying to create something in the midst of a busy life, firstly if you say it's got to take four hours of each day or just most days,

you're just not going to find that time in the middle of that busy life. Secondly, even if you do, it's going to become this huge high stakes thing. It's going to feel like everything's riding on it. You put so much time into it. And that can actually then make it feel really sort of repellent and unappetizing as something to do. If you go the other direction, start really small. And kind of, this is the tricky part is actually forcing yourself to keep it really small for a while. Because if it goes well, it's really tempting to go on longer than the 30 minutes you've allotted or whatever. But it's a really interesting practice for a few weeks at least to make yourself stop when the time is up because then you find that it has this

kind of like it's hard to put into words but the activity sort of develops this kind of charge or magnetic it's something that you want to go back to precisely because you stopped before you were kind of spent and I think that I think that's a really helpful way to think about some things and I mean what have you got to lose if you're not going to get around to spending two hours learning a new language or meditating every day or whatever for the next month then like there's nothing to lose in spending five minutes every day like maybe it'll maybe something amazing will happen and if it doesn't you'll know worse off I also have borrowed a trick from others who are prolific writers who end in the middle of a

sentence or end in the middle of a story right because there's nothing worse when it comes to writing, then looking at the blank page. So sometimes if you end in the middle, you can pick up where you left off and you're even excited. Maybe you've been taking notes on your phone on your notes app to say like, oh, I want to go here, here. So that way, I think the friction is usually at the beginning, big beginning of things. So if you can help yourself pass that first friction point of the beginning and get to the middle as quickly as possible, then you can keep going and then you stop. Like you said, you stop. And you almost have some like excitement and joy to get back to it. Then you can have a daily.

is a approach. Speaking of that, Oliver, I'm curious because I've read a lot about goal setting, anywhere from set crazy, big, ambitious goals to set no goals and everything in between. What is your philosophy on goal setting? It's a good question. I don't know if I can give a straight answer. In my earlier book, The Antidote, I really, there's a whole chapter in there that really impacts the dark side of becoming too attached to your goals. But even then when I was writing it, I didn't, like, I knew I wasn't, didn't want to argue that sort of drifting completely aimlessly through life should be the goal here to put a

pun not intended, I guess. And that really speaks to something, which is I think we are incapable of living truly goalless lives, right? I don't think anybody, if you think about it in a sort of precise philosophical way, nobody is ever not trying to achieve something, even if it's just to like stay nourished or, you know, get a night's sleep or something. So I think it's a question of, it's a question of that kind of, it's two things. It's the it's the narrowness of focus.

That was what I was focusing on in the antidote, this idea that like if you, if you put everything into one goal, which is, you often do get that advice in some parts of the literature. it can very easily sort of distort the rest of your life in your work so much that it actually wasn't worth that level of commitment. So that's one sense in which I think it's important to have a sort of broader perspective. And then I guess in this book, I'm thinking more about what it means to have a goal or a plan and the way that the relationship between your present moment goals and the future. So I think goals setting, it's endlessly fascinating topic,

but I think basically the point is it's good to have some clear goals in your work and it's good to have ambition goals in your work as tools for answering the question, what would make the most sense to do right now as sort of navigational aids for today. I think where people go wrong is in thinking, that a goal or a plan is that if it's a, there's a sense that if it's ambitious enough and you're sort of driven enough, then you can force reality to bring that goal about, right? So it's like the fact that the idea that a goal should scare you, like on one hand, sure, if it's scary because it's really touching something that's deep in you about what you want to

be and do and you're not sure you've got what it takes, I think that's great. If it's because you just think that like intimidating yourself is some kind of one, of way to force motivation. I think that there's much less reason to believe that that's going to work. And I love this line, I'm quoting the book from Joseph Goldstein, the meditation teacher. He's talking about plans, but I think goals pretty much applies almost anonymously. What we forget is that a plan is just a thought, right? We forget that it's just a present moment statement of your intentions for how you'd like to use your influence over reality. And absolutely be ambitious about that influence. And absolutely.

excite yourself about that influence but don't fall into this notion that that's somehow a way of kind of conquering uncertainty or conquering bringing reality under your like under your thumb does that does that distinction well so and i don't know if this aligns but i'm going to try anyway so okay i've read many people write about the mexican fisherman fisherman story and it's in your book too. Yeah, yeah. And maybe I'll have you kind of recount the story because you got a better accent than I do. And it's sound better coming from you. But let's pause for a second. Let's do that. Can you share the parable of the Mexican fisherman story real quick? And then maybe we'll super quickly because I think it's true that a lot of people have heard it. So in this standard

setup, sort of highly successful New York businessman goes on vacation to Mexico, gets talking to fishermen. He asks him what he does all day. A fisherman says, I fish for like a couple of hours, but I spent most of the day drinking wine in the sun, playing music with my friends. And the businessman is kind of offended by this. He's like, you know, no, no, you need a much better, much more rigorous approach to your goal setting and time management. It says, here's what you should do. You should, if you put in more hours to fishing, then you can accumulate some capital. You can hire some other boats.

Eventually, like, you can just pay people to do all the fishing. You can have a huge fleet. You can make millions, billions, whatever, I don't know. Then you can retire early. and the fisherman says, and what would I do after I retired? And the businessman says, well,

then you could spend the day drinking wine in the sun and playing music with your friends. So that's the parable. Right. And I think the reason that every time I read about that and think about that, it has impacted me. I mean,

just so you know, Oliver, I left a corporate America job now. It's been four and a half years. It's crazy. How quickly how much time has passed four and a half years ago. And with no guarantee, of obviously as a VP level of a big business and left it to do this full time to write and to

speak and to podcast because like I think about that stuff like this is what I would do if I won the lottery, right? Like that's kind of the Mexican fisherman story in a way. And is there a way? And at the time when I left, there were opportunities enough to support my family, not near at the level where I was, but enough to where I could do it. And I had confidence and support system that I think I could do it. So like, These things can be motivated. They can change you. So what do you think about when you think about this Mexican fisherman story of kind of, I guess, doing the thing that you want to do, even though we do have real life that we have to take care of as well? Like how do you, how do you approach that? How do you think about that? When you're sharing advice with others, what do you say about that? Well, I wonder if my interpretation of that story is the same as yours or not. And if it's not, that's great.

That's great. We can have a sort of conversation about it. But to me, that story speaks specifically to this tendency to invest mentally in the future so much, right? To think like, I mean, at any moment in anything you do, I think, especially if you've got a sort of job that is or work that is fulfilling to you, you're going to be both gaining something. in the moment and building towards something in the future. And I think it's great to have both of those. But the businessman in this parable is so fixated on sort of the instrumental aspect of time, on using your time in the most efficient and accumulative way possible,

that he completely neglects the present moment. And the Mexican fisherman, assuming that it is his true desire to spend his days drinking wine in the sun and playing music with his friends, has a better approach to that because he's keeping the instrumental part of his life to the minimum to support the present moment. So I think that the challenge that I've had a lot in my sort of psychology and work is this sense of always, or for many years of my life anyway, always thinking that I would. I was building up to some moment of truth. I was getting ready for some point at which everything would be well organized. I would have the skills I needed. I would have wrangled all the sort of small demands on my time so that I had this big space of time. And this operates on different timescales, right?

Partly you look at your whole life that way. Like, you know, next year I'm finally going to have this time. And then you also look at it on the level of the day. It's like if I can just get all these emails out of the way, then I'll have this expanse of time to focus on the thing I really. care about and um uh i think it's i take this story as a corrective to that because obviously if you spend your whole life gearing up for something in the future you uh miss your life um but there may well be people who could do with a bit more of the new york businessman's ethos they're probably not listening to this podcast but there may be people who are like you know who who's for whom the

better reminder would be you know put put some put some things in place for the future Don't just idle around all day. Well, it also makes me think of Brad Stalberg. Brad's an amazing writer. He was on the show as well. And I was asking, so he does some similar things that I do. He gets asked to speak, and he's a prolific writer, and he coaches leaders. And I said, well, how do you scale this business?

Because everyone's telling me, you know, you've got to scale your business. You've got to involve a bunch of other people. And Brad just goes, I think that's the wrong question. The question is, how do I design this business around the life that I want to live? And if you're asking me, that's what I would do. Not worried about whatever scaling means in your business. How do you design your business around the life you want to live? And I was like, oh, it really knocks me back for a second because that's more Mexican

fishermen too. Like, how do you design, you've developed some skills to be able to design a pretty cool setup. How do you then don't feel like you have to follow this path because everyone says you have to scale? How do you design it around the life you want to live? And that's kind of part of my interpretation as well. Yeah, no, I think it's totally, absolutely. I mean, I'm sort of approaching it in this kind of analytical sense of like the future versus the present.

And you're just putting out that one of the main things that we fill that future with in our economy and in our culture is this idea of sort of business growth in terms in size terms. You want to keep growing as a person, but it's not necessarily going to be through business scale. And if you're someone who wants to found the next sort of multi-billion dollar company, then great. But I think it's generally a curse for those people who didn't want to be doing that and end up doing it. A couple more questions before we got to run, Oliver. So you've done so much research with all of your writing that you have to be well read. stories about history, stories about current day and everything in between. When you think about people who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time,

what are some of the common behaviors of those people? Wow, it's a very interesting question, which I will now fall silent while I think about. I mean, you might say, I would say this because it's so closely allied to the message of the book, but I think that it is true. and I think that is a very specific kind of willingness to accept the truth of their present situation. The willingness to sort of, and this comes up in Brad Stillberg's work as well, this willingness to sort of not wear blinders or blinkers about where they are now.

This is totally consistent, I think, with those occasional figures that you get in history who have like dream and possible dreams and bring them into reality and invent incredible like technologies that we never the rest of us have never conceived of but that but this kind of willingness to be clear-eyed about how things stand I think that the power that there is the incentive that we face to deceive ourselves about that is just absolutely enormous and you know that kind of you know that kind of and maybe you're not like this, but I certainly have been where like you would almost sort of rather not check out some medical complaint because you don't want to hear bad news or you might even like not want to check your bank balance because you don't want it to be, you don't want to get a nasty surprise. And like, I think that what's going on there is just such a basic common reaction to the potential of negative, negative facts about about reality and the ability to sort of not do that is something. that I think is probably pretty widespread and I sort of really admire when I when I encounter

people like that. I also feel like there's a sort of a I guess I just mean a generosity towards other people but I don't know maybe that doesn't quite get to the point. There is a sort of a basic assumption of non-zero-sum dealings which I'm always really impressed by. I saw somebody tweet the other day and I think this is really true it's quite striking if you look at and I mean I've been very bad at answering your emails and many other people's recently so so I'm not counting myself among these people but people who sort of respond quickly to requests and requests for favors or inquiries like it's not it's not that people who are really successful and busy never respond and people who are really not that respond

immediately. What I'm trying to say is some people who I'm really surprised that they have time to respond to emails tend to respond very quickly to certain kinds of emails. And there's a sort of, I think there's a readiness there to see that like you cannot predict, firstly that you cannot predict where your own benefits are going to come from when it comes to sort of being part of a network in a community. And secondly, that it's like it's not even ultimately about your own benefits. It's kind of delightful to be part of something and helping other people do stuff. I love that. If you are meeting with somebody who is a recent college graduate, maybe they've been

in the professional world for a couple years, what are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to them? It's very hard for me not to just lecture my own self as a sort of 20, 20, 21 year old or something. and I would say like, and then I would just be, then I would just want to say like, it doesn't matter as much as you think it does. The stakes are not as high as you think they are. Everyone is out to tell you that you've got to get every single step exactly right.

And I don't think that's true. I think you can afford to experiment and relax a little bit. obviously, you know, some people can't because they've got to keep a roof over their heads, but to the extent that you can, like, especially don't tangle it up with your self-worth, if you can. Don't tell yourself that you've got to be a certain level of productive or you don't kind of deserve to exist or something like that, just to get very, just to get very sort of therapyish about it. Because I think that was my, on some level, sounds really pathetic to say, but I think that was part of my assumption. Like I had to, I think for a lot of people, kind of

people who do who do kind of who do well in high school and stuff and then they get into the world of work and they're in that fixed mindset where each new accomplishment is just a new bar that they have to keep meeting all the time so it's actually kind of stressful to be successful because then you're like oh no now I've got to keep impressing people and convince them that I can keep up this level and and you don't have to do that the people who are the people who are looking out for you in life will will be fine with it if you make some slip-ups and then the people who want your skills in their business or their organization i think they are probably more accommodating of slip-ups than you think and

less accommodating of kind of false confidence and um you know a refusal to admit to mistakes than you think yeah i'm i'm curious of when you have something blow up sometimes I'm just wondering here, like 4,000 weeks has, are you nervous about what's next, about the next book not being as much of a hit? Do you think about that? I assume you're kind of ideating and writing about this, or maybe you're right in the middle.

I don't know. But like, I wonder how that goes. This is something I've talked to James Clear a little bit about whose atomic habits has exploded, you know, number one book on in 2021. Like, do you think of it? about that? Are you a little worried about that? You're nervous? Like, what do you think? Well, first of all, when I've answered, I want to know what he says because 4,000 weeks has done well,

but atomic habits has done insanely well. So I really want to, I really want to know how he's thinking about that. I heard Elizabeth Gilbert once talking about how sort of liberating it was in a way, difficult but liberating to realize that after she published Eat, Pray, Love, she'd almost certainly published the most best-selling thing she was ever going to she's ever going to publish. I think that's such a great. There's something kind of, if you can get that inside yourself, I think it probably frees you up for the future. I have to say, I haven't started thinking yet about what if a next book didn't do as well,

but I do still have quite a big trace of that so-called fixed mindset in me. That's, you know, this idea of the fixed versus growth mindset. If I, you know, the book does well, then I get some opportunities to like go speak in some places or to write for certain places. In an ideal world, I would think to myself, well, all these people like what I've done because I've done it. So they have a lot of confidence in me and it shows I can do it. So I can just relaxedly go and do these things. What I actually think is like, this is a new challenge. I don't know if I can handle it.

And then I get stressed about how I need to try and do it as well as I. possibly can. And so there's that kind of, there's that kind of slight curse, I suppose, of something doing well in that sense, which is that it gives you new opportunities, but they're kind of slightly intimidating new opportunities. Books are interesting. In terms of the success of a book, I do think that so much of it is down to sort of things you can't control, that if a future book were to be significantly less successful than this one, I think I'd be able to rationalize it pretty easily. Yeah, no, I'm just curious about that.

Well, I highly encourage people. It is a quake book, meaning it'll kind of rattle you, rattle you to your core, like an earthquake. 4,000 weeks time management for mortals. I think I'm just appreciative that you've done the work and then had the guts to publish it, which takes guts to do, to put it out there, to be challenged, to be questioned.

And then you've been honestly a joy to work with, even though we both had to reschedule this thing a few times. And I learned a lot about people like through that course. Like that's what's interesting about this too is just how you handle these situations. And I felt terrible. I actually had to cancel once to go to a funeral of my wife's grandmother. And I remember thinking like, wow, I'm canceling this guy. We're kind of talking about life and death and in 4,000 weeks.

And I felt bad, but you were just a joy to work with. And I think it's worth it. And I should acknowledge that. So I encourage people to read this book. 4,000 weeks time management for mortals. It's really, really well done. Oliver, and I'd love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. Great. Thank you. Yes, I'd love that. This was great. Thanks so much, man. I really appreciate critical thinkers like Oliver Berkman. He writes these amazing articles and great books that are useful, but you can tell he's constantly a work in progress,

rethinking things, trying to be helpful for others as well as help himself. And I find that line of thinking and that just philosophy of life to be the type of person that I want to be around. I hope you enjoyed that one as much as I did a few takeaways from my notes. When stumped by a life choice, choose enlargement over happiness. Don't ask, will this make me happy? Ask, will this choice enlarge me or diminish me? A lot of people are in the middle of their careers,

thinking about making a change, whether it's personally or professionally, and I like this prompt. Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me? Don't ask if it'll make you happy. Is it an opportunity for growth? And then the future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it. This is why it's wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain. It's just that we're currently very aware of it. So that's something you think about as a leader and for the people you're leading, the reminder that the future's always uncertain. We're never fully sure. That doesn't mean we get paralyzed and don't take action. It's because we aren't 100% certain of what will happen. And then embrace radical incrementalism. People who work a little bit every day tend to cultivate the patient

it takes to get good at whatever they're doing. And that is part of, I think, falling in love with the process of striving to get just a bit better each day, not necessarily fully thinking about the results, but focusing on working on the craft to get better. Whatever this may be for you, I think this is useful. Again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with Oliver Berkman, it will make you a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that and you continue to write reviews on Apple podcast and you rate the show, hopefully five stars, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis.

And hey, we're only here for about 4,000 weeks. So I am appreciative that you are helping me make the most of it. Thank you so, so much. Talking to you, can we?