The Megyn Kelly Show - Taking Risks, Time Management, and Leading a Productive Life, with Oliver Burkeman | Ep. 285

Episode Date: March 24, 2022

It's Wellness Week at the Megyn Kelly Show. Megyn Kelly is joined by Oliver Burkeman, author of "Four Thousand Weeks," to talk about how to live in the moment, productivity and how to be more efficient with your time, whether procrastination is good or bad, keeping your options open versus settling for less when it comes to relationships, the finite nature of life, the importance of saying “no,” setting priorities, learning to tolerate minor anxiety and discomfort, managing patience, the “Cosmic Insignificance Theory,” being bold and taking risks, the myth of leading the 'perfect’ life, the truth about finding happiness, how to thrive in uncertainty, filling your life with novel experiences, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Three words. Four thousand weeks. If you are lucky, that's your average lifespan. When we put it into those terms, life feels pretty short, pretty time limited. So how are you spending those precious weeks? Are you using your time wisely?

Journalist and author of 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for mortals, Oliver Berkman joins us today to advise on how to make the most of our finite time on this planet. Seems like a good use of our time right now. Welcome, Oliver. Good to have you. Thanks so much for inviting me. All right. So I have to tell you, in reading your book, I laughed because I thought to my, my first thought was, this is a book for my assistant, Abby. This is not a book for me because she and I are polar opposites when it comes to time management, planning ahead, getting to the airport, you know, all the things that you talk about in your book, the way your family was, you know, three hours in advance of the airport and one hour in advance of the train station and all that. I never do any of that. Never. And it drives my poor assistant nuts. But even if I were doing my own travel,

planning it myself and so on, I'm just not built that way. So I feel like this is an interview in part for her and that she's next to me going, yes. But then in the latter part of the book, you get to some stuff that I found very useful for me, too. So we've got everybody covered, I think. So it's not as morbid as it sounds, the 4,000 weeks. You're not trying to bum us out or depress us. What are you trying to do by framing our life experience in those terms? Yeah, no, I'm really not trying to be just sort of terrifying and depressing. I don't think that would be commercially sensible anyway, right? Writing a book, but no, I think that 4000 weeks idea, putting it in those terms, it is really startling. It is a little bit scary. And I plead guilty to wanting to startle people.

But I think that when you follow that through, it's actually really liberating. It's really relaxing because I think in the long, hopefully I can unpack this a bit, but if you really think about what it means to be as finite as we are, one thing that you can see is that like huge amounts of the way we try to do everything and get our arms around everything and not miss out on any experience and answer every email, you know, we can just, we can just give that up, because it's just not going to happen. You know, there's always going to be too much to do. There's always going to be more things that matter than you have time for. And I think in the end, that's actually a really kind of liberating realization, because it lets you stop trying to do something impossible and really get, you know, get to grips with doing something meaningful with the time that you have.

What creates the me versus the Abby? Because I can so easily, almost too easily, just ignore my inbox. I just, I just like, I, I will always get the things done that must get done during the day, you know, to maintain my professional responsibilities, my duties as a mom and all that. But I will never be like, I've got to get, I've got to respond. Whereas she over there, she will, she will not go to bed until they are all. She's doing her little emails right now. I can see if you're like clacking on like, she just it's not. So what makes somebody more like, like me, or more like, yes, I will get it done like Abby. Well, I'm, I'm really interested to learn this about you, because I think it is rare for people to be, you know, successful and driven and accomplished and not develop this kind of fairly pathological approach to time, which, you know, I think, I think a lot of people, a lot of people do. I mean, I'm sure it has a million different origins in, in the way people are raised and all the rest of it. But I do think,

you know, there is this overwhelming pressure in the world that we live in, the technology that we have, the kind of economy that we try to thrive and flourish in that pushes us towards, you know, trying to become more efficient, more optimized, get more and more done. And if it's always been the case for you, sincerely in your career, that you haven't done it that way, I am super impressed and I want to learn from this conversation. I'm just built this way because I think to impressed and I want to learn from this conversation. Yeah, no, I'm just built this way because I think to myself, I've thought many times,

maybe it's because I have Abby and she doesn't have an Abby. But I was like this even before she came into my life. I just, again, I would never miss an obligation. You know, I know what's important. I would never blow off an email

from my boss back in the day or something about my kids that really needed tending to. But if you're not in that field, I really don't feel the need to get back to you right away. And if you look at my email history, it's just flag, flag, flag, flag, flag, flag, flag. And within 30 days, I will go back and respond to all the flagged emails. I will like, I gave myself the time. And the benefit of that is after 30 days, half of them are no longer even relevant. Yeah, right. Totally. People email you to solve some problem and you don't reply.

They find some other way to solve that problem. It's a big secret that you learn if you are bad at email, which I have been, not due to being a relaxed person. Yes, but the texting is actually, it's more problematic because texting, you know, like the message service on your iPhone does not have a star function. So that bothers me. If I could remove the messaging from my phone, the text messaging, I would. Because that one's always lurking, judging me like, go faster. People expect responses to the text faster. But your point of your book is that most people are putting that pressure on themselves. They don't need the email box to be glowing or the iPhone to be beeping. They're doing it to themselves. Like, I've got to be more productive.

I've got to squeeze as much out of my abilities every day as possible. Yeah. I mean, look, I don't think it is without a huge amount of social pressure from the environment. But what I do think is it just doesn't actually help to buy into that. So even if you do feel a ton of pressure from outside to get through all your emails, it's not the best way to thrive at work. It's not the best way to live a meaningful life, to try to turn yourself into this person you can never be, who answers every single email you could ever receive, who is ultra efficient. Because apart from anything else, what happens when you get incredibly efficient at doing stuff is you get busier. Like you get really good at answering your emails really fast. One thing is guaranteed to happen. And I've experienced this. And that is that you'll just get a lot more email. So like they say, the reward for good time management is more work. It like they say, the reward for good time management is more work.

It's not a sensible tactic. Now, you do write about a woman in France who lived to be 122 years old, and I wanted to know more about her. Now, do we know whether this woman had some sort of crazy, she had more than the 4,000 weeks was the point of the book. But I was curious to know how this woman did it. Well, I don't know the details about Jean Calment in terms of her sort of health and the secret to her longevity. I bring her up because to say that even if you break records like she did and live to be 122, you still get like 6,000 some weeks. It really isn't a large amount. But I mean, I will say this. It's almost a cliche, isn't it?

But when interviews are conducted with people who've lived to these incredible ages, they always credit kind of alcohol and smoking and various bad habits that we frown on today as having been critical. It may just be that they are much more relaxed on some level about uh about everything about their health but also about about their time that bodes well yeah abby you got to calm down immediately she says she doesn't have

an inner um okay so you decided to be self-reflective about this and take a look at how you were approaching your own productivity your your own life and so on. And you you write about something called inbox zero and saying that you've squandered countless hours, not to mention money and so on, thinking that if you could just find the right time management system that, you know, do you apply these sufficient amount of self-discipline? You might be able to win the struggle with time, like you could finally have this well-ordered life in which you accomplished all your goals. And one of the things you tried was something called the 25 minute, or no, you call it the Pomodoro technique, which involves 25 minute blocks of productivity. Can you tell us what that is? Because you try different methods to figure out, is there one that works the best? Yeah. And partly it was because I was writing this newspaper column, right, where I got to test

them all out. It was in some ways really bad because I had the opportunity every week, you know, to try some new self-help system and believe that finally now this was going to be the one that did it for me. The Pomodoro technique, it's actually not a bad system, but when I encountered it, I got totally tangled up because I thought I was going to find the perfect system. And guess what? Like all the other systems, it isn't the perfect system.

So what is it for eight hours a day? You break it up into 25 minute blocks with little breaks? If you want to get technical about this, it is you divide, you work for 25 minutes and take a five minute break. And you do that four times in a row. And then you take a longer break. And you do as many of those whole things as you can get done in your working day, which is probably only like two or three when you actually think about it for a real working day with a lunch break or whatever. Again, you know, fine. Sure, absolutely. It's good to have

these little systems for bringing a little bit of order to your workday if it doesn't have any order. The problem, and I don't think this was just me, is in all sorts of different ways, people are always telling themselves that, like, they're almost there, they're almost on top of things, like in a week or a few months, they're're gonna they're gonna have things in working order you know that that feeling of like i'm gonna get to the place where it feels easy to to go through the day and i'm not always on the back foot always fighting against time and yeah one of the things i'm trying to say in the book is that attitude of trying to win the fight against time like that's a big part of the problem and actually just leads to more fighting and less.

Now, what about, okay, so I'm talking about this from the perspective of, you know, Megyn Kelly, and I do have responsibilities and I have, you know, a large amount of data that I need to manage in order to be good at my job. But I'm not like a doctor where it's like, oh, no, you you must read all those emails or someone could die. You don't get the test result back in time. You know, there are many jobs out there where you absolutely do have to read all your stuff. And the vast majority of things that come into you must be responded to. You're a teacher. Can't blow off half the parents who write to you. not for very long and keep your job,

right? So how are those people supposed to apply this, you know, sort of being a little bit more relaxed about it to their own lives? Yeah, it's a really good question. And it does come up because people think like, well, okay, it's all very well saying that this is a ridiculous situation that we put ourselves in today. But hey, if you are in that situation, you've got to respond. Like you say, I think that the thing to understand here is I'm really trying to look at the ways in which we put impossible demands on ourselves, and also our corporations and our society makes these demands too. like we expect something of ourselves that we literally cannot do which is to uh in a world of sort of infinite potential emails to be able to answer them all

in a world of infinite potential uses with our time for our time to be able to get around to them all and and if the um demands being made of you are genuinely impossible then it doesn't matter if you think you have to do them. They're impossible. And the clue is in the word. And you're still going to have to triage. You're still going to have to make sacrifices here or there. So that teacher who's getting all those emails from parents and has 100 other lesson plans to do, they still can't actually do an infinite amount. They still have 24 hours in a day, which they can't use all for work anyway. So you still have to make tough choices when it comes to time in almost any walk

of life. And part of what I'm trying to get at in the book is I think we pursue all these ways of avoiding that. We don't want to feel what it feels like to have to make tough choices with our time. We want to believe that soon and with the right systems or the right, you know, amount of self-discipline that we're going to find somewhere, that we could avoid having to make tough choices. And I think we all, like, it's worth it for anybody, whatever their walk of life, to see that that's not gonna that's that's not gonna work like you do maybe it's like take the time to create the time for yourself in other words

if you're a teacher maybe you you do an automatic notification of i during the day i am busy teaching your children and therefore i will not be checking email except for once at noon you know or something like whatever some way of managing it so that you can do the thing that is most important to you. And you don't have to worry. I'm blowing off important people or important things like, but that even just doing that would take time to figure out how do I manage the week and the amount of data and demands on me. That system actually has worked well for me in my life too. Like I, you know, if you can, if you can figure out who you can stiff arm early on in your week, it's brilliant. Yeah. And like, yeah, an expectation management is so important because there's something in the way technology works and

the way life, modern life just is just getting faster and faster, that leads us all to think that everything has to be instantaneous, that you're failing if you don't reply to an email within an hour of receiving it or something. Time and again, you see, and I think you see this in the research studies, not just anecdotally, people are fine with things moving a little bit more slowly, as long as they can depend on you and trust. So if you're someone who always gets back to people, it's more important that you're someone who always gets back to people usually, than that you always get back to them incredibly fast. And it's way better that you get back to them in 24 hours, than that you're occasionally someone who's responding in minutes, and then other times you just like, they get their response for months on end so it's like there's a lot to be said for for figuring out the the expectations that people

have and then yeah if if what you're doing if there's something in your work that is the most important thing if you're a teacher it's teaching kids whatever it might be eventually you're just gonna have to sorry go ahead eventually you're just gonna have to make time for for that thing and let the chips fall where they will with the other stuff. Because otherwise, what's the point of doing that job? Right. What's the point? And honestly, most people would be honest about that. I would rather have my teacher teaching my child than responding to my stupid emails that I should have probably not sent prior to 3 p.m. unless it's a true emergency. Like, I've got to come get him early. Please deliver him. You write about how you had one of these epiphanies after you had your son about how, you know, we don't we don't tend to live in the moment. We do tend to worry about

what's coming at us down the pike. It costs our enjoyment of what's happening in the moment. And you can't always do it. Of course, you know, when you're at work, you're managing, you're an important person. You've got to think about, OK, this is a worry. And you can't always do it, of course. You know, when you're at work, you're managing, you're an important person, you got to think about, okay, this is a worry, I got to plan for it. But it's hard. I think the average person struggles to live in the moment. So what was your realization after your son was born? Oh, yeah.

I mean, I totally agree. I think all the forces in us and outside us, they push us to this notion that what really matters when you're measuring how you use the day is like whether it helped get you somewhere in the future. And you've got to do that if you want to make a living and do anything interesting in life. But if it's the only thing you do, it really saps the meaning from life. And that is so clear when you become, you know, you become a parent, suddenly, it's easily the biggest, well, for me, anyway, you know, easily the biggest responsibility you've,

you've ever had, you really want to get it right. And if you buy all the self help books about parenting, they will give you a million different pieces of advice that contradict each other about how to do it right. But they're all focused, implicitly or explicitly, they're all focused on this idea that what you're doing is trying to build the most successful adult later on, build the most successful older kid when you're looking after a newborn. And that's important. Of course, it's important. Of course. But if it's the only thing you're doing, then you just completely miss the actual childhood, right?

The actual relationship with your child in that moment. So I found, because I was still, when our son was born, I was still totally in this kind of productivity geek mindset. I found myself transferring that mindset onto being a parent. And it would be like, it wouldn't be like, am I, it wouldn't be just enjoying a moment with him as a newborn. It would be like, is he meeting that developmental milestone? Like, do I need to do something different? Is this thing going to work? Should we be changing the approach we have to sleep training? And yeah, it's important, of course. But if it's everything,

you sort of miss the moment. And then you're like, hang on, he's only going to be zero years old for one year. He's only going to be one year old for one year. This is true of all life and then you're like hang on he's only gonna be zero years old for one year he's only gonna be one year old for one year this is true of all life whether you're a parent or not by the way that every moment comes and then it's gone forever but it's so hard to ignore with a with a newborn that um it really helped me see how much of my life to that point i had spent just assuming that the real point was next month or next year. I love that idea. You know, he's got to get a more advanced extra saucer than this. He can do better. What are these stupid toys on this thing? He can be ahead of the other zero plus six months. You're old. you point out like it's hard to do and i see myself just with my kids and in my life wanting

time to be productive okay so like that i can relate to like wanting time to be productive as opposed to just it it just is you know and you write about how, what if I just stared at my little boy's hand opening and closing, you know, this, the miracle of this little baby figuring out his fingers and his thumb and made that my moment, as opposed to like, what if, why, how about if I teach him patty cake and we could advance his motor skills, you know, like. Right, right. I can fall into that thinking too quickly as well. And you do have to check yourself. Not everything has to be productive or about advancing. Right. Exactly. Or another way of saying the same thing I would say is, what does productivity even mean if there are never these moments of it's for this, it's for here, it's for now. So I, in a way, you could even say that

those moments are totally productive, right? I mean, it's, they're productive of what they produce, the value that they add, if we're going to use productive in its kind of, you know, economic sense, is the meaning that you get from letting yourself just be in that, in that moment. So there's something kind of unproductive about being totally fixated on future productivity, because when does the value get produced? You're just going to do it your whole life and then on your deathbed be like, great, I won, and then all over. That's no good. That's so true, right? Because if you were, and as parents, we kind of are are responsible for programming a little human being, you know, that somebody just gave you, let's say a three-year-old and said, okay, you know, make it into a well-rounded human. You wouldn't just have it work, work, work, work, study, study, study, study. You know, you would want time for whimsy. You would want the child to do the finger thing and to do some skipping and singing.

And yet when it comes to our adult selves, I think a lot of successful people really don't build that in. It's all about forward motion. It's not necessarily about the time management, but it's just about productivity, like doing something that has meaning and that will advance one. Yeah, totally. And I think one of the things about that is we don't want to rest in the moment, right? If you try to do it at first anyway, it feels kind of unpleasant to a lot of us. I think you get sort of antsy and like it should be doing something else. It doesn't feel good. So we get all these messages about how important it is to be here now

in the moment and books on meditation that make it look like such a beautiful, delightful activity to undertake, to just smell the roses, whatever. You try it. I think what you need to understand is to not expect it to feel that great at the beginning because the flywheel is racing. If you try to stop that, which I think we all should, we better expect it to feel kind of unpleasant at first because we are completely conditioned for the opposite way of being. What about procrastination? You've got feelings on this. Is it good? Is it bad? Do we do more of it or less of it? I think it can be good or bad. But what I think is really important to see is that at least in some sense, we're always doing it anyway, somehow. You're always procrastinating on something,

right? If you buy my basic idea here, that because we're finite and the world is infinite, there's always going to be more things you could be advancing on, things that could matter, things that would matter to spend your time on today. You're always going to be neglecting almost all of them. So if procrastination is like neglecting something important, then yeah, you better believe it. You're neglecting something important every day, all the time. And why this is an interesting way of thinking about it i think is because it it makes you see that the challenge the real challenge is not how do i get to the end of the

day and not feel like i neglected anything important because that's crazy but watch but how do i wisely choose what to neglect and how do i let myself neglect almost everything that I could do today so that I can focus on something that I care about. Now, I think procrastination does go bad and people procrastinate because they don't want to bring things or relationships or projects into the world of reality because it's not going to be perfect like it is in their heads. And so there's a sort of strong perfectionistic reason to stay paralyzed, which I've definitely experienced in my life. But some form of procrastination is going to happen. So I think it's kind of good to see that. You get to relax and say, okay, I can only do 1% of the things today. So which 1%?

Well, you write about figuring out why you're procrastinating this thing and then coming to terms with the negative feelings you're probably having about that thing and more accurately, your abilities to do that thing. You don't generally procrastinate the thing you're amazing at that you know you're going to nail, it's going to be a breeze. So talk about how it's an opportunity to learn a little something about yourself and actually relieve a pressure valve on you. I totally think so. Yeah. I mean, this is all about this idea, which I think runs through all the stuff I'm writing, talking about here. We're limited in all these ways. We don't want to feel the ways in which we're limited because that feels like a that feels like a defeat you know we want to feel limitless the way to feel limitlessly talented about a

project is never to start it the way to feel limitlessly confident about i'm amazing at the saxophone so good right the way to feel like the way to cling to the idea that married life has no problems in it is to never get to the point of actually getting married. This reminds me of a line in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, you know, the one with Colin Firth and Jennifer Eil. I'm not sure how to pronounce it. Anyway, where the sort of very rich old stodgy aunt who's got the amazing estate is telling Lizzie how she should play the piano better and says to her, if I had ever learnt, I should have been a true proficient. She's never played a key in her life, but she's got all sorts of thoughts on how to do better. Yeah, no, exactly. It's so lovely to just like wallow in how great it's going to be. And the moment you bring anything into reality, by definition, right? This isn't, this is not

me, the Brit being defeatist and a good American would be relentlessly optimistic about the topic. It's by definition, the project is not going to live up to perfection because the encounter with reality is going to mean that it isn't perfect relationships are with real people who have their own problems and uh creative work is something that brings you up against your edge and and just life's problems in general you can't them perfectly. And so it's always going to feel more comfortable to procrastinate for a certain personality type anyway. And yeah, I think if you see that, if you see that it's inevitable that when you put this thing into the world, it's not going to measure up to the fantasy. That's hugely liberating because then you you get to realize like it's not because you're no good or you didn't do it properly or something that's just how it is for humans

and then it's like well okay i might as well make the bold move i might as well uh embark on the relationship i might as well write the novel you know insert all the examples here but the point is there's no reason if you're holding on to perfection like that ship has sailed so that's great that means you can just go do it and um and i think that is really liberating for a lot of people is that sort of like don't let the uh don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good or in this case the so-so yeah exactly or the good enough right exactly because um otherwise you just won't do it at all. And obviously it has more value if it exists. But how do you get yourself past that? You know, you're in that place where you're procrastinating it for a reason. You know, it's weighing on you. It's daunting. There's so much work to be done.

Whatever the project is, you feel overwhelmed by it. How do you get to that point where you're willing to move it right in front of you onto the plate, right? When there are so many other things you could devote your attention to and it feels so good to ignore that big bear. I mean, yeah, that's the question. And part of it, I hope, is just this perspective shift that we're talking about here. I think if you can see that perfection is not possible in reality, then that makes it easier. The other thing that I think really helps is to get almost absurd in how incremental you're willing to be, right? How tiny a step you're willing to take. There's something you can do on any project that that

would make a difference and that you actually would do now and it might be nothing you know it might be opening the file on your computer that is going to be the great american novel it might be uh you know arranging to have coffee with one friend to talk about how you're thinking about changing careers like it's just there's something that you actually can do that is that gets just under that um that bar of being too intimidating to do and and if you can find that like that thing to do that decision that you could make now and and do it um the momentum effect is, is bizarre, quite frankly, you know, it, it, everything becomes progressively easier and easier and easier.

And before you know it, you are actually making real progress. Now you talk about though, how, if you're going to go that route and I like that route, that seems doable. That seems manageable. You know, one tiny little teaspoon, you know, not have to do the whole big quart of water. Um, then the next day, let's say that's Monday. And I, I take the little teaspoon. I'm going to do it. Okay. I can do this amount. But then Tuesday I'm like, okay, I'll take, I'll do a teaspoon. Then I get to Wednesday. I'm like, now I'm, now I'm ready to go. I'm ready to drink the whole liter. And you're under this philosophy. You say, don't do it. It's just

teaspoons. It like just small amounts every day. That's what incrementalism is. That must be of impatience right you get to that point you're like okay now i'm going to binge it now i'm going to race through to completion and what's going on there actually and i this comes from various work that's been done on the psychology of writers and other creatives people like that is it's actually an unwillingness to let it take the time that it takes so i'm not necessarily saying you have to only do five minutes like every day for the rest of your life until the the project is done but you probably have to do less than you feel like you could do and if you call it off at that point and you actually can get up and walk away while there's still that sense that you haven't done all you could have done what you find is there's way more motivation to come back to it

the next day and the next day and and it doesn't become this incredibly large thing in your life which then becomes intimidating or you resent it or you just can't be bothered with it. If you binge instead, right, okay, maybe two or three days, you'll be incredibly productive. But then you'll be exhausted, you'll you'll start to hate the activity involved. You'll fall off the wagon. And then you'll just be like, well, if I didn't do it today, I might as well not do it at all. And it'll be six months later before you get back to it. there's something yeah there's something really powerful about stopping even when you kind of don't want to because it goes against all the kind of drivenness that we that we have but it's it's good to push back against that's cool yeah my my husband he's a writer and he told me that uh he loves ernest hemingway and i guess ernest

hemingway when writing books would always write the one next line, you know, of the, if you finished chapter two, he would write the first line of chapter three before he walked away. Um, so, you know, leaving even himself wanting a little, a little more when he left the project. And then of course the next time around you, one would presume he got after it easier said than done. But I like it as an approach. You have a similar philosophy. Well, you know, the name of my book was Settle for More. And you have exactly the opposite philosophy when it comes to, for example, relationships. And I thought this is fascinating.

You don't really mean it, but you kind of mean settle for less in that if settling for more in the relationship department means you sideline yourself from the market for 10 years because you just haven't met that perfect gal or guy, you're losing. You are settling. This isn't a winning approach to life. Yeah, right. Let me explain what I mean, partly because I'm always concerned that my wife is going to get the wrong idea and think I'm saying something hugely demeaning about her. It's not that you should settle for less. It's that there's a specific sense in which you are always settling in some way, whether you like it or not. And it's a bit like the procrastination case, right? You're always procrastinating in some way on something because you're finite and there's an infinite number of things you could be doing. So every decision you make with time, because we have

such a limited amount of it, is a decision to not do something else or not to do a million other things. And it's really obvious when we talk about settling as in entering a relationship with someone who like you could do better than right because then you're like wow that person's going to spend the next however many decades of their life not being in some notional other relationship for doing in favor of this one and we criticize them or judge them but like you say if instead, you decide to spend 10 years refusing to settle and looking for the absolutely perfect partner, then you are settling. You're settling for spending that 10 years of your life, not getting the benefits of being in a

committed relationship. It might be the right decision for some people at some points in life. I'm not saying it's the wrong way to settle. I'm just saying, let's see that it is a kind of settling as well. And so this idea that you can even keep your options open for a very long period of time in relationships, in work, in anything else, it's not really true, right? Because one option that you're losing then is to use the time that you're keeping your options open to do something more satisfying or potentially more satisfying and the reason that that is useful it's not just a sort of you know philosophical abstract point is again i think it frees people up to see to see more clearly the choices that they face and sure

you might well not want to enter a certain relationship because that person is really no good. But it might also take the edge off some kind of extreme perfectionism that was holding you back from a very fulfilling relationship because you are comparing that person to the perfect fantasy. Or hold off from launching into a career because it isn't quite exactly what you fantasized about. Because guess what? Nothing in the real world can be exactly what

you fantasized about. And what is perfect when it comes to a mate, you know, that you're waiting for the perfect mate? You don't even know. You may think you know, but you don't know. You know, you may think, well, I want someone who's incredibly smart. Well, what if you got somebody who's only smart, not incredibly smart, but they also happen to be incredibly funny and dynamic and very social, whereas you're more shy and they get you out there into the world. The hubris of presuming, you know, what quote perfect is in a mate without trying a lot of these mates on are other kinds of difficulty that you encounter when you really try to have a deep relationship with a whole other human that you probably wouldn't ever have chosen those difficulties. And yet they are absolutely crucial in the end, right?

They're part of maturing. They're part of, you grow as a result of that kind of challenge. So it's not even that you right i mean i think you do see relationships that flounder because one person just doesn't challenge the other person's sense of themselves in any way whatsoever and there's sort of no there there in those in those relationships so even some of the bad bits are good bits and we're just totally not set up psychologically to go in that direction, right? To choose things, to choose difficulties that are good for us. We don't like that at all. So how does it relate to the 4,000 weeks, right? Like how does that, the relationship advice relate to our

limited finite time here on earth? I'm still a bit surprised to hear that I ever am giving relationship advice. It seems so strange, but that's the only bit of relationship advice. That's true. That is the only, but I thought it was interesting. It relates to that because all of these things we're talking about only occur

because we have a short amount of time, right? If we had either thousands of years of life or, you know, hypothetically infinite lives, you would never, that would be terrible in certain ways, I think, but you would never have to face these decisions. You could like spend a hundred years in one kind of relationship and another hundred in another kind and another hundred, whatever. You could pursue 12 different careers to a very very high level so you wouldn't have to make the kind of choices that we have to make those choices are imposed on us by by being finite and i think we do all we can to sort of pretend that we don't have to that we don't have to face them but um so that's

why it all links back to the 4,000 weeks. If you weren't finite, then very finite. Well, this is another piece that you write about is understanding that, the finite nature of life, the importance of saying no. You know, like Oprah says, no is a complete sentence, although I have to tell you, like your thoughts, you don't attack Oprah, but you do attack some of the healthy, like the, the lifestyle advice she gives

in your other piece, your other book on happiness. And I was like, I love this guy. This is like, you're so right in what you have to say about happiness. I want to get to that in a minute. But anyway, one of the good things that Oprah did say was, um, no is a complete sentence. I love that. You don't have to explain it. You can just say no to it. And you're one of the positions is if you want to live a well-managed life, right? Not, not a life in which you're constantly worried about the amount of things that you've stuffed into your day and the amount of phone calls that you fail to return. So, but a well, a well-lived life, you have to learn how to say no, not just to the things that you don't want to do that you genuinely don't want to do, because a lot of people say yes to the stuff they don't want to do because they feel bad, but even to the things you do want to do.

Explain that. Yeah. And this, I mean, that's almost a quotation that I use verbatim from Elizabeth Gilbert in the book, because she makes this point so well. We hear all this stuff about how important it is to say no. And I think most people, in the back of their minds, what they mean by that is, if I got really good at saying no, maybe I could get rid of almost all the tedious stuff that I wish there wasn't in my life. And then I'd have time for all the stuff that counts. But as Elizabeth Gilbert says, it's actually a lot harder than that. You also have to say no to a whole bunch

of stuff that you do want to do. And the reason is just again, there are far more things that would be worthy uses of your time, of my time than we'll ever have the opportunity for in the short lives that we lead. So there's just no reason why everything that feels like it matters to me will magically be able to fit into the time that I have. So that necessarily, right, it's just math. You're going to then have to be saying no to some things that would be perfectly good uses of your time.

Because if you don't, you'll be chopping up your time into such tiny bits between them that you just won't get any value out of any of them. I mean, I find this really hard because I just, yeah, my upbringing is to really hate the idea that someone is mad at me or disappointed at me. And if someone asks me to do something, I have an overwhelming impulse to just want to say yes so that they're happy. And I've had to get better at doing the reverse because the truth is that you're always disappointing somebody. Even when you say yes to that person,

you're probably going to end up shortchanging somebody else as a result there's no option here which involves meeting every expectation that you or other people can can put on you it's just again it's off the table to begin with so it's all about setting priorities i mean because you're you're going to have to figure out all right what am i going to say no to that i don't, that I don't want to do, but I normally would say yes to just because I owe that person one, or I feel bad saying no to that. And then to go a layer deeper of like, oh no, I'd really love to do that. And then you think, oh, but if I do that, I'm going to miss, you know, two more nights out of my house with my kids. But like, so how do you figure that out? You have your, your top three priorities and everything else falls by the wayside or, you know, what's the approach to figuring that out? Yeah. For me, it remains

very intuitive. I can't really do it in a sort of algorithmic way. I do have to just sort of think, hang on, is this really one of those things that if I don't do it, it'll just feel like something radically missing from my life. But there are these kind of techniques. There's one I mentioned in the book, which is attributed to Warren Buffett, but I'm pretty sure it didn't really come from Warren Buffett. He's big on no. Yeah. And wise sayings just tend to get attributed to Warren Buffett. That's how it works on the internet. But this practice, which allegedly comes from him, is that you should list your top 25 goals in life and rank them from one to 25. And then the top five of those, he says, those are the things you should focus all your time and energy on.

The next 20, the bottom 20 of this 25 long list, those are the ones you should avoid like the plague because they're the middle priorities in life, the things that really do call to you a bit. They're not the things that it's easy to ignore because you hate them and don't want anything to do with them. They're the ones that are important enough to you that they could eat into your time and that you could give them a lot of time, but not important enough to really justify using your limited time. So I don't know whether literally doing it that way is right for everyone, but the principle there seems really important. It's like the problem here is not like certain acquaintances you've got that you never want to spend any time with because you just naturally never spend any time with them. The problem is in the middle.

Friendships that, yeah, they sort of got into a groove and it's fine and you give them some time, but maybe neither person is getting much out of it. Meanwhile, every hour you give to that is an hour you're not spending with your kids or your closest friends. Same applies to work projects. It's these things that are kind of like, yeah, somewhat interesting and somewhat meaningful, but are the dangerous ones. I like that. I'm just going to short form everything in my life. Now, top five, Abby's a top five. Nevermind. Don't even bring it to me. It's not a bad approach. One of the things top five or not, I don't know.

You tell me, cause we are on these things all the time, all the time. Um, and they're distracting. They enhance our lives and they ruin our lives. These iPhones and devices and so on. Um, I don't think I can step away from it. I know that everybody says try that, but like, you know, I'm in the information business and this is how I communicate with my team. They're all over the country. You know, it's like not going on email and not reading the news is not an option for me. But the time suck and the forces working against us to make it a time suck are very, very powerful. Yeah, no, absolutely. And that's the distinction, right?

It's not that you should never give your attention to your smartphone or to various social media platforms or email, whatever. It's that the business model, one of the things is that the business model for a lot of these devices and platforms is precisely to keep you there as long as they can, and to monitor all your activity on them in such a way as to then, through algorithms, offer you more of the stuff that's going to keep you there longer. And I think that's a real problem. And I'm actually kind of, I'm fairly in support of certain kinds of, you know, regulatory things we probably should be

doing with regard to Silicon Valley. But the bit that we forget, and that I try to emphasize in the book is like, we give into that distraction willingly. I think we tell ourselves, or at least people who understand the attention economy and how it works tend to tell ourselves like, I'm powerless because my attention is being commandeered in this way. And it is. And that's a serious issue. But when I get distracted from my work to go and scroll through my phone and waste half an hour instead, it's not like I was unwillingly yanked away from the chapter I was trying to write. It's that the chapter I was trying to write was making me feel uncomfortable because I don't know if I can do it. And it's bringing me up against my limitations and all the rest of it. And it's way more comfortable to just run away and just scroll and be distracted.

The other example I give in the book, right, is that like, if you're supposed to be having a kind of a serious conversation with your partner, say, and actually you're scrolling through your phone under the dinner table, we say what's happening there is you're being distracted by your phone. That's not what's happening. The phone is where you're going for a more comfortable experience than a difficult conversation that leaves you feeling emotionally vulnerable or something like that. So I think it's really important to see that because then when you encounter that desire to distract yourself in the middle of

something important, it's actually easier to resist that when you see like, oh yeah, this is that feeling that I know I get whenever I'm working on something I really care about. It's the desire to go and do something much, much more comfortable and low stakes instead. You know, it's not unlike the way they battle, they tell you to battle addiction, right? They say like, if you're, if anything's becoming too dominant in your life, you know, it could be desserts, it could be social media, it could be alcohol, it could be whatever's pot. They say you take that thing away, try it for like a week, take the thing out of your life. And while you're jonesing for like the Twitter or the joint,

whatever the person's preference is, you're supposed to be paying attention to how you feel. Like what is it that's making you want it? What are alternatives to having it? How could you fill your life without it, you know, in a way that would assuage whatever need you're feeling at the moment? And I don't think we look at social media that way enough, you know, and even just talking to you right now, I'm like, well, what if I didn't do that? Like, I'm a news person. I get the newspapers. I get a bunch of them delivered to me every day. What if I just read the newspaper? Crazy. That's crazy.

Just given the way we consume information and it's up to the minute now, you know, with Twitter and so on. But that's not necessarily required for my job. Maybe it's just maybe I'm trying to avoid some sort of a problem by going on there all the time, just putting it all together. Well, yeah. And like if we're going to talk about news journalism for a moment, I think there is going to be, and already is, you know, some sort of real competitive edge to be found in one's ability to step back a little bit from that minute to minute to see the bigger

picture and to see the patterns that are happening. and you can really like get to a point in social media where you can't see the the the forest for the trees because of because of um how that works and then yes just to the addiction point i mean i don't want to speak to substance abuses when i say what i'm about to say because they can be serious in a different way but the discomfort that you feel when you're jonesing for your phone or whatever it might be, we respond to that like it's really unpleasant and unbearable, and so we just have no option but to scuttle away back to the device or whatever. It's not unbearable.

If you can show yourself a little bit of tough love and sort of bear it for five minutes, it doesn't kill you. And you find very swiftly that it dissipates, attenuates, it gets easier to deal with by the minute. So sometimes I think this is just a question of learning to tolerate kind of minor discomfort. It's so useful in life if you can just like be OK with the fact that you feel a bit antsy or a bit anxious or a bit adrift. Learning to tolerate minor discomfort. I want to follow up on that. But what you're saying right now, it's reminding me of when I was young in my career and I was going on the O'Reilly factor.

First, it was once a week, then it was a couple of times a week. And I used to spend a lot of time with Bill. He was back then a mentor to me. And he used to have the nation captivated. Even the people who hated him loved to listen to his opening talking points, which I would still love to listen. I mean, Bill, for all of his flaws, and there are many, the ability to deliver like a cogent synopsis of the news is not on the list of flaws. He was great at that. And I asked him one time, like, how do you do it? Like, what are you, what are you reading during the day? What do you do? And he said, I read and I think Kelly, I think I don't have a

blackberry. I don't have a blueberry. I sit there and I think. And, you know, you don't see a thought from him every two seconds on Twitter, but he sends out these headlines on Substack that always make me laugh or give me pause. And the latest one that I was thinking of was, his latest one is entitled, this is about what happened in Canada with Trudeau. When boring people turn dangerous. Canada's insane power grab. He's clever that way because he's reflective. Yes. Now the problem with all of this is that it's siloing us, right? And everyone is kind of going to their specific newsletters,

their specific websites, and they're getting their analysis and it's totally different to like the other side's analysis. But yeah, it has this great benefit that it isn't just the sort of relentless, sort of ever tinier facts and facts that five minutes later turn out not to be facts. You know, just like it's just I think there's an argument to be made that you're better informed when you sort of try to impose a slightly slower timescale on yourself, especially with respect to the news. So back to your point about sitting in the discomfort,

being okay with a little discomfort, getting ourselves used to that concept. And by the way, it's reminding me of, I like intermittent fasting as a way of eating. I don't eat after 8 p.m. generally and before noon. And I find that to be very helpful for my for my well-being, for my body, for all the stuff. But one of the things that helped me with it, because you do get hungry. I mean, that that 10 a.m. to noon period is kind of hangry. One of the pieces of advice I read was learn to be OK with hunger. Like we have been taught to be okay with hunger.

Like we have been taught that that feeling of hunger, I mean, I'm talking about in the first world country where we have plenty of access to food. It doesn't have to be a bad thing. Like you can say, oh, there's a feeling it's hunger. Anywho, you know, and you're kind of saying the same thing about discomfort, whatever, whatever's causing it. And you came up in your book when you were talking, I think, about patience. And there were a few things you need to keep in mind to have patience. This section is for my husband, Doug.

And one of them was that, right? Learning how to sit with that feeling. Right. Absolutely. I think patience is a super interesting thing even though it doesn't necessarily sound like it's going to be super interesting because um i think impatience is one of the central ways in which we try to kind of win this battle with time right we try to we try to make everything go at the speed we think we need it to go in order to get to the end of

the day and have done all the things we're supposed to have done. And so that's why it's so sort of enraging to people, sometimes kind of homicidally enraging, you know, to be stuck in traffic, or even things like, we noticed how, how impatient it makes you to wait, have to wait, like, six seconds for a website that's supposed to load in 0.5 seconds. You know, these kind of tiny little delays. And apparently it's fine. If you have to wait three days for something to come in the mail, that's fine. But if you have to wait six seconds for it to load in a browser, that seems like really

offensive somehow. And I just think there are so many activities in life, enjoyable ones, but also sort of professionally important ones that just take the time they take, basically, and that you can't hurry beyond a certain point. So certain parts of the creative process or creating strategies for business, lots and lots of reading. You can speed up your reading a little bit before you completely lose the experience of reading a novel or a sort of deep book, but not a lot. And you just have to be like, okay, it's actually kind of not up to me how long this takes. It's sort of up to the book. If I'm going to get the value from this thing,

I have to sort of go with it. And being in traffic, it's certainly very much not up to you how fast the traffic moves. And there's something in the traffic case, it's just peace of mind, because then you don't live your whole life in a kind of frenetic, anxious rage. But in the case of reading, thinking, all the sort of knowledge work that so many of us do in one way or another now, there's like real benefits to having the willingness to let things take the time they take.

You get better results, I say anyway, than if you're always racing to get the thing done as fast as you can. So again, yeah, it's not pleasant. And if you sit down with a, if you're a driven person, racing through life, millions of emails, and you sit down with an hour to read a novel, even if you have that feel that you have that hour, it won't feel nice at first, it'll feel uncomfortable trying to do things at that speed. It'll feel like, come on, can I listen to this at 2.5 speed and

get through it quicker? And maybe sometimes you just can't. It's funny. So my husband, Doug, doesn't have, he can easily sit down and read a novel and not feel the need to rush through, et cetera. But when it comes to problem solving, if we have an argument and he wants to make up, it has to happen right away. I'm like, step back. I need my time. Or if he's waiting on something, let's say somebody leaves me a provocative voicemail, like I've got something interesting. He's like, call him back. You know, I'm like, you know me.

I already explained how I am about the calling back and all. I'm like, he's like, what do you mean? Don't you want to know? I'm like, you know, like this thing wasn't on my phone two minutes ago and I was just fine. And I'm equally fine now that it's sitting on my phone. Like eventually I will get back. So we are just built totally differently that way.

He like, he would not be sitting in the, in the discomfort well at all. And for me, there's actually not even any discomfort. It's just like, eh, I just got my list of priorities straight. Yeah. it's just like i just got my list of priorities straight yeah so it's i mean you mentioned relationship tensions but like parenting as well i think is another place where this comes up if there is some if i think something is amiss with how things are going in our family or how my son is being or something the temptation to just like reach for some completely random solution and be like, okay, bedtime is going to be an hour earlier from now onwards. Okay. When we're never going to have more than an hour screen time in the day from now onwards,

these kind of radical solutions that are not solutions because they're just my desire to have this feeling of problem go away as fast as possible. I don't want to like be in the problem. They don't help. I mean, actually, what helps is being willing to sit in that and live in it for a while. And then, you know, real solutions tend to make themselves felt. Well, you write about how when you were expecting your child, I had the same experience. You have two schools of people coming to you, you know, the school that's like, you know, this book has got all the answers and it's about this rigid schedule that the baby has to stay on. Otherwise the child's going to be completely unhappy and, you know, too dependent

on you and blah, blah, blah. And then you get the other school that's coming to you with the, no, you have to do it the more natural way. And, you know, like let the baby eat when he wants and let him sleep when he wants and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And everyone's, they think they've got it figured out. You won't be surprised at this point in our relationships, in our relationship for me to reveal to you, I was like, eh, it's going to work out. I don't know. I'm not going to read the books. But I will say I had great advice because, you know, Steve Forbes, I was at a book event of his when I was very pregnant with my first child and his wife. They have they have a lot of kids. I think they have like six kids.

I can't remember how many. But she came over to me and this is the mother of all these children. And she comes over and she goes, I've got one piece of advice for you. She goes, read nothing. Go on instinct. Like that was amazing. That was the best piece of advice for you? She goes, read nothing. Go on instinct. I'm like, that was amazing. That was the best piece of advice I got. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. It's like, yeah, everyone is convinced that they have the way to make your feeling of discomfort, which you say you didn't feel in this way. So good for you. But I think many people do, to make it go away. And yeah, so they have to offer

what seems like a clear solution to cling to. What you find, I think, in parenting, but especially, but in lots of realms, if you really try to follow someone else's rules in that way, just to get away from the discomfort, yeah, it turns what you're doing from an experience you're having into an attempt you're making to conform to this framework that you've been taught. And it's like, it's only really a problem that your child sleeps X number of hours one night and a smaller number the next. Like, it's only really a huge problem if you've read some chart in a book that says it's supposed to be two hours longer than that every single night you know and if you never read that chart you might be you might be fine with that it's so true like that

so many times that when you look around you think i'm really enjoying this moment and then there's a voice in the back of your head saying oh but you should you should be getting the kids to better you should be making sure that they're reading you should be making sure that it's like but you know what i'm really just enjoying this stupid moment where we're not doing any of that. We're just doing something totally mindless, but we're together. And, you know, and so is that an American thing? You know, like that, that voice in the back of the head, that's always like, do it, do it, do it, or a British thing, or just a flicker. What is that? I feel like a lot of countries aren't this way.

I mean, I think it's probably worst in the States where I lived for a long time and it's pretty bad here in the UK. I definitely think it is a sort of, it's an Anglo-American thing. It is everywhere on some level and it has to do with

certain kind of economic, political factors. But what it is, its root, I think, is this desire to feel that you're doing it right, that you're measuring up, that you're justifying your existence, that you're guaranteeing the future somehow. And, yeah, there are definitely cultural differences there.

There are definitely cultures where it seems more like everyone's like you basically when it comes to time instead of instead of like me yeah well we're gonna meet in the middle at some point i need i need to torque it up slightly and you need to torque it down slightly um yeah the the one of the main points that you raise in the book which i think is so great it's so great mean, I personally refer to this as my own Paul Newman theory of life, but you call it cosmic insignificance therapy. Um, and I'll do my, my Paul Newman theory of life is basically you can live your life perfectly, which I, I don't know. He, he seemed to like, what do I know from the outside? He's gorgeous. He married for love

to another Hollywood movie star. They had alist careers. They get to choose whatever movie they wanted to be in. That's what every actor dreams of. They won awards. They were beloved. They weren't really that controversial. They had a great family, children who loved them. They made so much money. They started a charity in which they donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charity, you know, like, and it goes on, you know, and died at an advanced age. All of it. I'm like, it's amazing. You know what happened to Paul Newman? He's still dead and buried in the ground. You can live the quote, perfect life. It ends the same way for all of us. Putting all these chips into the bank does not extend life. It doesn't give you extra chips that the rest of us losers don't have. It's going to end the same for everyone, whether you live it perfectly or not perfectly, or you're the most productive person or you're

the least. And that brings me calm. That brings me serenity when I think about my life. Like I don't have to, I'm not living a perfect life. And even if I did, what would the reward be? Well, I don't know. Was he any happier with his Oscars than I am being with my kids? No. So it's like, what are you chasing, right? You figure out what makes you happy. You chase that and then you don't chase perfection. You call it cosmic insignificance theory. And for the reason I just stated, this resonated with me. It's basically like, you don't really matter. I'll let you explain it. Yeah. I know it doesn't sound like it's going to be therapeutic, does it, at the beginning. But I mean, there's a number of different reasons why I think it's really useful. But one of them is just like, I think that we stress ourselves out, a lot of us anyway, going through life with a real sense that like every decision we make matters as if the future of the universe hung on it. people hold back from doing things because they're terribly worried they might make the wrong decision about what to do with their with their um with their time on the planet um

they set they set a definition of a meaningful life that what would count as using their time well that is so extraordinary and so based on so much fame or wealth or something else that that the probabilities are just sort of against them meeting that. So you endlessly kind of stress yourself out and make it harder to live a meaningful life. If you stop and realize, by contrast, you know, that 100 years from now, almost none of the decisions that you make on a day-to-day basis are going to matter at all. I think that is not a recipe for despair. I think that's a recipe for saying, okay, I might as well make bold decisions. Might as well take

some risks. Might as well do the thing I've always been telling myself is what I want to do with my life. Might as well see if that works out because you get to like take away this crazy high stakes notion that but basically the world's going to end if you get it wrong um no the world is going to continue just fine uh and long after you're after you're gone so i think that's one we can talk about more but i think that's one reason why it's just really useful to see we all sort of bring a certain kind of grandiosity, I think, even those of us who are not kind of megalomaniacs, you know, who are very sort of shy and retiring.

There's still a kind of self-centeredness about it that adds to the stress. You can sort of let go of that and say, it doesn't matter that much, and so why not do something like exciting or cool or it's going to make a big difference. Right. I, I, I love this. I go to Stanford business school once a year and I speak to the students there about reputation management. And these kids have spent, you know, an entire semester learning about this from, you know, corporate leaders and world leaders and how to manage reputation. And they're going to be tomorrow's world leaders. And I,

I think the reason they want me to go there is because my message is, this is all bullshit. You've just wasted a semester of your lives. There's no such thing as reputation. It's a mirage. It's bullshit. It counts for nothing. It's this false creation, false idol and a false God that is totally and utterly meaningless. And even if you get the nicest things written in the New York Times about you when you die, what does it matter if you didn't do the things you wanted to do while you were here? Or as you said, take the risks you wanted to take come what, after taking them. What does it matter if you led the perfect life, right, quote unquote, but didn't feel

satisfied by it or have tons of regrets and looking back at your choices or weren't able to live in the moment and enjoy the hand opening and closing with the baby as opposed to taking a selfie of it and then tweeting it out with a cute caption? You know, what does it matter? It's all a mirage. Reputation is totally and utterly meaningless. What matters is your experiences. Yeah, totally. And yeah, absolutely. And that really puts a point on it as well that like, you fall into this idea that you're working towards some moment of truth, right? That

the reason to manage your reputation, to to use this example which i think is really like resonates right why managing your reputation it's it's got to be because you want to get to the end of this life having thought okay i kept my reputation intact or it's because you're storing it all up for some moment when you're going to cash that reputation out into um into some huge accomplishment and like these moments of truth they basically never come and if you're constantly living for them uh you find yeah you don't you don't live you don't you you're you're you're deferring the meaning of life off to the future and off to the future and then eventually it's off to a future that where you're where you're not even alive anymore the future and off to the future. And then eventually, it's off to a future that way, where you're not even alive anymore. The future's there, but you're not. So yeah, I just think it's

so relaxing to just think, okay, I don't need to take myself as seriously as I tend to take myself. And that, you know, basically, basically it doesn't matter what I do with my life. And that is therefore a reason to do something exciting. Yeah. Swing for the fences, you know, or just whatever, whatever gravitational pull there is in your life of the thing that you really want to try, but you don't want to, or the thing you really want to say, but you don't dare. It's so gratifying to be on the side of, you know, risk taking and just living a big, bold life for whatever that means to you. You know, it could be totally different things. Well, I think that's another point worth making, right? In a culture that is as dedicated to fame and headline-grabbing achievements and wealth as ours is, maybe the bold thing to do is to be willing to live a life below the radar.

Maybe it's to be focused on making your neighborhood incredibly beautiful or the community you live in, incredibly vibrant, you know, it could be very mundane things. And that could actually be the bold choice given that we live in this culture that's so dedicated to, you know, grand gestures and celebrity. No, I mean, I talked to my stay-at-home mom friends about it all the time because they still, even in this day and age, beat themselves up about not being working moms outside of the house. You know, like, I want my daughter to think I'm doing this. I want them to picture me. And it's like, why, why, what kind of a value judgment is that? You don't, the society's put that on you. You don't have to put that on yourself. And you certainly don't have to teach it to your daughter that mom doesn't matter as much if she doesn't have some big high powered job, you know? And the more you telegraph that to your child,

the more that will be her imprint, you know, and the more you telegraph that to your child, the more that will be her imprint. You know, like why, why lie about going to a meeting when you're really just going out to like own it. You should say like, mom made these great choices and this is what I love about it. And this is some things maybe I don't love about it, but like, these are all the great reasons I did it. Instead, we allow society strangers whose values we know nothing about to drive us to live our lives in a way we

might not want to. It's lunacy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that approach telegraphs to your kid, if you do it right, that telegraphs to your kid that they can choose what they want to choose. And that might be, you know, a big career. Absolutely. Right. So it's to do with the freedom to, to go where your energy truly, truly is, I think. And that means it takes boldness, but it doesn't necessarily result in, in what we tend to think of as the high status. We've got to talk about happiness. So you, you wrote a book on it and it's the anti-Oprah book. I'm sorry, but it is. If you watch any Oprah, she loves that book, The Secret, which you take some shots at. She's all about the positive thinking and the gratitude journal and all this stuff. And you're basically like, if you've been trying all that and it hasn't worked,

there's a reason. Yeah, I feel like I want to defend myself against being on some campaign against Oprah here. I think the reason that- It is I. I am the one against Oprah. The interesting thing about Oprah

is I basically think she goes into so many different areas and is so open-minded and tries so many different things that you're going to get a whole lot of value. Like, you know, work with eckhart tolle i think is really interesting stuff about yeah power of the moment or so and then you're also going to get a whole lot of stuff that i that makes me really angry and i think is stupid like um like the secret in the law of attraction anyway so you're going to get it all read the secret

but but it's basically what i gather is it's basically like think about being successful, think about being powerful, think about being rich, and then you will be. I'm going to get into so much trouble if I go off on this conversation into a rant about that specific book. But yeah, I think you basically got there, you know, the kind of motivational seminar where you're supposed to, where you can like people walk barefoot across hot coals by just by thinking that they're not going to burn their feet. And then sometimes they actually do burn their feet. positive thinking, which is the sort of ultimate American credo of focus on the good stuff, fill your mind with positive emotions, set incredibly ambitious goals, believe you can do anything, believe that failure isn't an option. All of this is a really pretty disastrous way to try to actually bring happiness into your life and that and that being open to the negative to uncertainty to failure to the to feelings of sadness you know instead of constantly trying to

stamp them out and seeing them as a huge problem if they arise uh is is a better way so yeah this book led me to do things like i went to a motivational seminar in San Antonio, which is like the, I mean, British people just can't, you can barely exist in that. It was like being a- I was going to make a crack about that, but I'm glad you did it instead. I tried to leap out of my chair shouting, I'm so motivated as we were instructed to do by the leaders of that. I did my best. Did they really have you do that? Um, they did, they did really have us do that. And, uh, and I, and I just about did it. I think I got up from my chair, but it's like, Oh my God. And as the kids say today, Oliver, that's awkward

AF. Um, so, okay. So instead, what are we supposed to be doing? Thinking negative thoughts. I can't do it. I'm not going to be successful. That's not really exactly what you're positive. Right. No, exactly. That was one of the misinterpretations here, especially when people realize I'm British, if they're American is like, oh, you just think we should think that mediocrity is all we're entitled to, that we should just be sort of miserable, as befits the population of a nation where it rains almost every day.

But no, I think the point is to be capable of experiencing those negative things when they come, not adopting a philosophy of happiness that is sort of inherently allergic to all that side of life and to seeing that it's just an inevitable side of life. So, you know, an obvious example of this, which is pretty widespread now, I think, is the idea that failure is something that you certainly can't rule out from life. And in fact, you're going to be more exposed to the more you are trying to do things that count and that bring you up against your edge and that if you really want to try to eliminate the possibility of failure from life you're going to become very sort of small in your in your goals and in your in your outlook um though there's a whole chunk in that book about the philosophy of stoicism which which uh asks us to think about the ways in which actually lots of negative events that happen to us, we don't need to think of them

as catastrophic. We can think of them as like negative. Sure. Yes. And actually, if you're a positive thinker, if you can't handle a negative event, you're much more likely to sort of fall off the wagon, jump off the deep end, whatever, and go into catastrophizing mode when you can no longer keep your veneer of positivity. So it's actually just a much more resilient way to be, I think, to be sort of open to this side of life and not to be always insistent that a negative emotion is a problem somehow, just because the very fact that it arises is some kind of symptom that you're doing it wrong i like i love stoicism and that's very in vogue right now but i i had on ryan holiday and i think i i am a natural stoic i don't know how much marcus and aurelius and i would have had in common but i like reading his

stuff ryan sent me a book with his daily meditations and I love them all. It's reminding me of, this is like the hour of my personal stories, but my husband and I, when we first got together, first got married, we didn't have kids yet. We had two little dogs

and we woke up in the middle of the night and he said, oh my God, I said, what? And he said, the one dog crapped in our, they were both in our bedroom, in the dog bed. And the other one had completely covered herself in it. And I look at him, it's like two in the morning. And I remember saying, I wish that weren't the news.

It's a great line. We use it to each other all the time now. Whenever something bad comes into our lives, you don't have to wallow in its badness. You also don't have to make it positive in no world is this a positive it's just gee i wish that weren't the news and then onward yeah no absolutely and i think that's that that difference between whether something is your preference uh which clearly that an event like that is certainly not your your preferred course of uh, versus whether it's like a huge problem that reality did not unfold that night according to your preference is a really useful written about, you know, your other book and with respect to the pandemic. But I think this book we're talking about, this is called The Antidote from 2012. And the subtitle is happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking. But that's, it's had some bearing over the past two years, part of getting through this pandemic. Let's put aside for now, personal loss. I mean, that's something there's no shiny thinking on it. But, you know, just dealing with the shutdowns and the change of life and the restrictions that we've had, some of it has required a change in attitude. Like, how are you going to approach it?

Are you going to lean into fear? Are you going to lean into sadness? Or are you going to try to lean into some of the good things that you're recognizing with these changes around us? I know you've written about that, too. Yeah, no, I mean, I think there are these kind of strange, ironic upsides that have come out of the experience. And also just this, you know, just this reminder that it's very easy to think that we're living through extremely uncertain times at the moment but but but i think when people have sort of had the chance to reflect on that during the pandemic that's kind of not the point i think the truth is the future

is always completely uncertain you never know what is going to happen next day next week next month in your life. But an event like the pandemic brings us, it makes it impossible to ignore. And there's something very edifying about that. Absolutely agree with you. This is not something I would find easy to say to someone who lost close relatives. But there is something beneficial about seeing firstly, that life is always completely uncertain. This isn't actually an unusually uncertain time because the future is always 100% uncertain. It's the future. And secondly, that by and large, we're a lot better at weathering that uncertainty than we think.

We think we want to make plans and have life go our way. And then it turns out that we can basically cope and in fact, often be very creative and resourceful when it doesn't go our way. And the sort of flip side of that is if you look back at your own life and all the things you really love about your life, people you met, job opportunities you had, almost never do they emerge from the plans that you made. They emerge from coincidences and people you met you weren't expecting to meet and, you know, random encounters, random opportunities that arose and that you were able to capitalize on.

That's so true. So in both these directions, right, I think it enables us to sort of reconcile ourselves to how uncertain life is and to thrive more in uncertain conditions, which as I say, I think are what conditions always are. And that leads me back full circle to why Abby should not try to send me to the airport three hours in advance. She should not try to put me at the train station an hour in advance. She should not try to put me at the train station an hour in advance. There is no reason to be doing this. And I'll tell you, Oliver, I'm up to it because my husband, Doug, is her co-conspirator. They have the same approach. They're like,

we're having a family trip and Abby plans it for us. You know, like, you got to be at the airport at seven. I'm like, okay, what do we have? Like an eight 30 flight. She's like, no, your flight's at 11. I'm like, you're fired. And she's like, Doug, maybe do it. Right. But you, you were raised in a family like this. And I know half of my listening audience right now is like, yes, I agree with MK. And the other half is like team Abby. So you were raised in a family that made you do that. And why do people do that? Because they do have a belief they can control the future. Yes, exactly. There's an Onion headline, which is,

Dad suggests arriving at airport 14 hours early or something like that. I'm not getting it exactly right. And that really sort of resonates with me. Yeah, I think what people are doing when they engage in compulsive planning, and as I say, I think I know where I speak when it comes to this approach. Me too, by the way. I mean, you know, I tease my parents both in the book and in life about it, but it's in me as well. You've caught it. Whatever. Yeah.

I think we think of that kind of planning as a way to guarantee that things are going to go the way we need them to go. So you make these plans. You're trying to nail down what's going to happen next week, next week, month, month, months ahead so that you can relax and be like, okay, things are going to go the way I need them to go. But you never, ever get to that state of knowing that things are going to go the way you need to go because it's built in to the nature of the future, right? That you can't know about it in the present. Sounds obvious, but easy to forget. So the truth is that no matter how many

hours early you arrive, how many hours you build in for your trip to the airport, you can't actually be certain that something won't get in the way. If you plan the next like six months of your life in incredible detail, you don't get to relax because then you suddenly realize there's another six months after that that you should probably be planning. So we're always trying to get this kind of reassurance from the future and the future never gives it to us. And the people who have a healthier attitude towards time,

such as apparently you and me now, to some extent, you know, now that I've been through this, being through this process is, yeah. She said, I don't like Oliver. Keep going. is yeah is i wanted to go yeah right she said i don't like all of her um keep going this you you come to see that like all you're ever doing is just sort of surfing the moment after moment after moment right you can tell yourself that you're being super super dutiful about making sure there's lots of slack in the schedule but it won't stop something going wrong with the plan. So it's actually all sort of, by and large, just wasted anxiety and effort.

She's arguing over here that you reduce the chances of something bad happening. You do reduce the chances. She's saying, tell him you missed a flight. Literally, I've been working with her for 12 years. Every time I get to the airport with my lungs burning, that's what I consider a win. I sit down on the plane with lungs burning.

I've done it right. In all the thousands of flights she's planned for me, one time I missed it. That's a win. My system is working. Think of all the hours I have saved myself not sitting in that seat. Go ahead, Oliver.

Yeah, you do reduce the probability of something going wrong with that specific thing. But as you point out, it's funny arguing with someone I can't see, by the way. The sacrifice you make is all the things you could have done with that time. And you will never actually reach this perfect state of being totally relaxed that it is going to go fine because you will never know. You never know that you get to the airport on time until you've already got to the airport.

And then it's too late. Who cares about how many hours you left? So it's a way of seeking reassurance. I think all worry is like this, right? It's a way of somehow trying to feel like we've got a handle on what's coming. And you can get a certain amount of predictive handle on the future, but you can never get that real security that we compulsive planners crave. Well, I know you write about how your parents want you and your wife to

commit to your holiday plans, your Christmas holiday plans in June. They're coming to you in June. I broke out in a rash just reading that. I can't stand making plans. You have to do it. I've learned by age 51, you have to do it if you want to have any sort of a social life. But I hate it. If I could just be the person who's like, yeah, Friday night, let's do something. You know, I would love it. But now you can't because everybody else around you is a planner. They're all social calendars filled up. You know, I've realized you have to do some committing. But there's there's the other extreme of it's June and your parents want you to commit to what days are you coming over the Christmas break? Yeah. Now my, my, I think my dad is, uh, my dad disputes the details of

this claim, but I say I can, I've got the emails to prove it. Um, yeah, right. There is, there is this level of coordination that is required to, to just sort of make, make life work and be nice if it wasn't, but, but it is required the problem with trying to get all that all your ducks in a row as they say you know months in advance is that it doesn't get you to the place of peace with respect to time because then there's like well why not why not what's going to happen the week after that the week after that the week after that um yeah you need to be able to just on some level just relax into where you are right now, instead of always trying to like grasp the next bit of time to yourself, if you want to have any sort of a life. Otherwise you're stuck alone on Saturday night. You've got to make some advanced plans or like vacation. You know, that's another, like you gotta, if you don't book enough in

advance, you're going to be paying an arm and a leg, like certain things you have to force yourself to do. So you've got, you've got tips in the book for embracing your finitude and that that takes us back to the four thousand hours you know we have a finite time on this earth there it should be embraced it shouldn't be rejected it shouldn't be we don't have to deny it in order to live a happy life um nor do we have to deny our pessimism our cynicism we can still be happy in fact we it's key to embrace those things. And let's just go through a couple of them because I don't totally understand them all. One is adopt a fixed volume approach to productivity. What does that mean? This is just the general idea when it comes to sort of managing your workday. And obviously people have radically different amounts of control over how much they can organize their workday. But thinking first

in terms of portions of time, and second, about tasks instead of the other way around. So I'll explain what I mean by that. If you decide that, say, you've got nine hours available for work, or maybe you've got four hours when you really think you're going to be able to do serious, focused thinking work, say. And that's sort of a little box on your calendar. Time boxing is one of the techniques that embodies this principle. Then once you see that amount of time, you can make some decisions about like,

okay, given that I can't do most things today, what are the three or four things that are most important to put into that box? Then maybe the box ends at 5.30 PM, 6 PM, whatever. And you get up and walk away and you're onto the next stage of your life. If you put tasks first, in other words, you get up in the morning and think these are the 12 things that must be done, regardless of the time I have, they just have to be done. You find that you don't get through more than two or three of them the list gets longer it's 20 items long by the end of the day um you're still at your desk at 11 30 at night trying to trying to cross them off and over the long haul you actually get less done so the idea of fixed volume approach is of saying like okay this is how much time I'm going to dedicate to this instead of this endless commitment to fantasy

that I'm somehow going to, first of all, answer 500 emails and spend several hours on this project. And then apparently I'm also going to have enough time to do this, like 10 more things on my own. Well, I like that because, you know, you, in my case, I want to be a good mom. I want to be present with my kids and my husband at the end of the day. But there's always more work I could be doing. And so unless I put a cap on it, it will never be capped. It was actually one of the things I hated about practicing law because they say the law is a jealous mistress. And it really is. It's constantly there needing you, wanting to be with you, wanting to interrupt your time with your spouse.

The mistress is annoying. And news is a little bit like that, not as interrupt your time with your spouse. The mistress is annoying. And news is a little bit like that, not as much. So I like that. Sorry, but it's over between us at 5.30. That's it. Yeah. Exactly. That idea of there'll always be more to do. So how long today am I going to spend dipping into this infinite pool of tasks? right? Yeah. I'm just, I'm out of time. Yeah. Clearing the infinite pool is not, that's not going to happen. Yeah. Yeah. Now this also relates to another one of the tips and I like this, which is I do have to-do lists like most people, you know, because otherwise I'll just forget stuff. I got to take care of my kids, my job. And you're explaining how it's, you say it's supposed to

work. It's supposed to be like, you've got your to-do list, but then you also have your done list and the two must relate and interact in a useful way. Yeah. Two different points about to-do lists. And I'll focus. Yeah. The done list is this idea that you should not only keep a list of all the things you think you need to do that you haven't yet done, but also keep a list that gets longer during the day of the things you have done, so that it's clearly displayed somewhere on your desk, in your organizer, planner, on your computer, whatever. This list of things that is getting longer during the day. I think so many of us get up in the morning feeling like we're sort of in productivity debt

right that you've got to you've got to pay off this debt during the day by by getting a certain amount of things done otherwise you're you don't really deserve to you know your place on the in the plant on the planet or whatever and you can reverse that a bit with a with a done list because um it helps you sort of see look you could have done nothing any day. You could have stayed in bed, right? And instead you did this, you did this, you did this. So it, it slightly sort of reframes that idea that you're always on the, on the back foot and it helps you sort of see and give some appreciation to the things you did do. And then, you know, you can get rid of that feeling where you get to the

end of the day and you have no idea what it was you did now maybe sometimes your dumb list will reveal that you spent it on the wrong things and you can factor that into future behavior but it's really great to just you can really surprise yourself in a positive way that is, I think, just encouraging in a world of overwhelm. It's really good to be able to see how much you actually do manage to do on many a day. And you also talk about how you need to embrace boring and single purpose technology. And this takes me back to the iPhone. I like this. You can make your iPhone less attractive, less appealing, less addictive in a couple of actually pretty simple ways. What are they? Well, the way I really like is the function that allows you to turn it black and white so that it's all grayscale.

How do you do that? There's no colors on your phone at all. You have to go into – wow, this is technical stuff. You have to find changes based on operating systems. But on an iPhone, you have to find the accessibility shortcuts in settings because it's an accessibility feature. But you can do this. Display, text size.

All right. Differentiate without color. Maybe that's the one i don't know color filters off oh i don't know what this is i'm not sure i have no idea but i'll play around because you want me to get rid of a slightly old iphone so it's probably not going to be useful well it's not like i have mark zuckerberg here i mean he probably could tell me but your point is figure it out and get rid of the color it's easy. You'll find it online for your model of phone, a way to turn it black and white. And you can toggle this, right? It can be on a button so that you can still take color photos when you want to make, when

you want to do that. But the rest of the time, instantly, it's quite bizarre how much less appealing it becomes to just pick up the phone and scroll through. It's kind of embarrassing because it just shows that on some level we're all just excited by bright colors you know it's like it's not it's not a very intellectual uh way of way of dealing with life but it but it works yeah and then you know i think the other part of that is just uh there is really no need to have a lot of social media and other stuff on your phone even if you're an active user of those of those things they can you can make a

big sort of environmental intervention in how much you use those if you make yourself use them on a laptop or a desktop even i have a very good friend whose name everyone would know, who's very big on Twitter, who told me what he now does because he has the problem that so many of us have, is he just dictates a couple of tweets to his staff to post for him because that way he can make his thoughts known,

but he doesn't get sucked into this wasteland of time spent during the day. Yeah, that's great. If you've got the team to do that, I think like absolutely, that's another way to sort of buffer yourself from those dynamics. And the thing about single purpose technology

or boring technology, any kind of device that does a thing and it doesn't allow you to just scoot off to some other thing as soon as you are feeling uncomfortable is really, I think is great. So I've got a, I've got a Kindle e-reader. I've got a tablet called a Remarkable. They're sort of less well-known, but both of these are tablets for reading. And in the case of the Remarkable for writing, they kind of can't do anything else with them. There is a web browser on the Kindle. It's difficult to use as long as you don't have one of the fancy Kindles that's got a really good web browser. And that's great

because it means when you're reading a book and you get that little sort of impatient feeling that now it would be time to just sort of distract yourself with something meaningless you you can't do it and you don't do it so you keep reading um yeah and so i'm a big fan of um of devices that only do one thing and there are all too few of them around yeah i mean this this reminds me to of a discussion i had with a technology expert who was telling us um don't let your kids start using message services that are embedded in one of the social media apps like Tik TOK or Snapchat, because then it goes from being just a pure message exchange to all the demons of the social media, where they try to lure them over to bad places or keep them on forever.

You know, I was like, that's actually a very good tip that I don't think a lot of parents know. Okay. Here's the last one I want to, I want to mention with you. Seek out novelty in the mundane. I love that. Can you explain? Yeah. I mean, the context for this in the book is that one of the many ways, one of the sort of acutely awful ways in which our finite time makes itself felt to us is that as soon as you're older than about 25, you become aware that time is speeding up the older that you get. A month seems to pass quicker when you're in your 40s and when you're in your 20s and when you're in your 50s and when you're in your 30s and so on. This is kind of really awful because not only do we not have very much time on the planet, but we seem to lose it faster the older that we get. And, you know, if you talk to people in their 70s, 80ss about this they will talk about whole years apparently just like flashing by and there's a whole theory for why this happens uh and it has to do with how routinized our lives tend to get after childhood and young adulthood and so people are often

advised that one way to sort of push back against this is to fill your life with novel experiences go to exotic places all the time, how to do things you've never done before. I think that's true, but it's also pretty difficult for anyone who's a parent or got a job or in a relationship, you know, all these things require a certain amount of routine and sameness to be done well. So there's a meditation teacher called Shinzen Young who makes this brilliant

point that the other way to sort of slow down time and feel like your life is not like speeding by, instead of filling your life with exotic experiences, is to sort of discover a new level of exoticness in the things that you're already doing, to find ways to pay more attention to where you are firstly because it's just more fulfilling in the moment but secondly because it will have this effect of making your life feel kind of like more expansive and like it's not like it's not sort of uh dribbling away faster and faster and faster so you know this could be anything from taking a different route to work uh meditation is good for it journaling is good for it but but lots of hobbies like photography spending time with kids almost in some way obliges you to do it because you sort of have to try to see the world

through a fresh set of eyes um there are so many different ways of doing this but the governing idea is just you know look closer at what you're already doing and in some ways uh that will often prove just as interesting and and meaningful as doing something like radically strange or weird with your with your day it's so true i love what you said about the kids. It's just having my kids. It's made me appreciate the mailbox more. It's like my kids, especially when they were little, it was like, what do you mean you put up the little flag and then somebody comes and they deliver it to any place in the world for just sense. Like it's, it is amazing now that you think about it. And like, they're talking to me about how the telephone works. How does the telephone work? I'm like, I have no idea. It is a miracle. I, how do our voices go? I like,

I don't get it, but they help you appreciate the wonder in things. And I'll give you one other example. Now there's a guy on Twitter. He's one of the forces for good on Twitter. And his name is Joseph Massey and he's a poet. And I started following him because he does exactly what you're talking about. He tweets out pictures of leaves floating in a puddle or the shadows that a building is casting on a city sidewalk or the sun hitting a post in a field just so. And he's a poet too. So his tweets accompanying these images are always pithy and beautiful and conjure to the podcast and I love that. And, um, I, because, you know, I'm so lame in responding. It took me a long time to respond, Oliver. It was, he sent me a note in July, July 13th. I responded August 5th. I thought that's pretty good. This August 5th. I didn't know him. So I

respond to Joseph Massey and I write as follows. Keep in mind, his name is Joseph Massey. Paul, I am bad at checking DMs, but a belated thank you for this and for putting beauty into my days. You may be the most thoughtful person on Twitter, which I realize is a low bar, but still. And then he writes back, you're going to love this. Megan, your note made my night. Thank you. Your work is fearless and an inspiration and always great company. I like the name Paul. You can call me Paul. You can call me Paul if you want. Normally, I go by Joseph. It's all very Catholic either way. Love this guy. If you want to follow him, by the way, it's jmasssey, M-A-S-S-E-Y, poet. That's at jmassseypoet. But to your point of appreciating the novelty in the mundane, the beauty in the mundane,

both my experience of this guy on Twitter and my exchanges with him as well, allowed me to appreciate that very thing. Yeah, it was a lovely story. Yeah. All right, Oliver. Well, one of these days, I'm going to see you in person and you and Abby, you're going to hash it out. It's going to be fun. Yeah, right. Yeah, we'll resolve this matter. That's right. The next time. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you right. Yeah, we'll resolve this matter. That's right, the next time. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you so much for all of your insights and expertise. Same here. Thank you so much for inviting me. Take care. Go ahead and download The Megyn Kelly Show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher. While you're there over on Apple, we'd love to hear a review. If you wouldn't mind giving me five stars, that helps us out. We'd love that.

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