The Peter Attia Drive - #265 - Time, productivity, and purpose: insights from Four Thousand Weeks | Oliver Burkeman

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

View the Show Notes Page for This Episode Become a Member to Receive Exclusive Content Sign Up to Receive Peter’s Weekly Newsletter Oliver Burkeman is the author of The New York Times best-seller Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. In this episode, Oliver delves into the pervasive idea that time can be mastered, exploring whether maximizing productivity is an attainable goal or a perpetual trap. He discusses the allure of attempting to control time—and, therefore, the future—and shares his personal journey of experimenting with diverse time management techniques that failed to deliver the emotional satisfaction he sought. Ultimately, they explore the mismatch between being a finite human and existing in a world of infinite possibilities and how all of these concepts intertwine with finding a sense of purpose and meaning. Additionally, Oliver shares insights from his book on productivity, using our time wisely, and embracing our finitude to live a more fulfilling life. We discuss: Oliver’s experience that led him to write the book Four Thousand Weeks [3:15]; Human’s relationship with time and the struggle with the finite nature of time [7:15]; How productivity can be a trap [11:00]; The fallacy that being more efficient will open up more time and bring a feeling of control [16:45]; The paradoxical nature of trying too hard to be present in the current moment [22:45]; The value of relationships in meaningful experiences and fulfillment, and how time gets its value from being shared [26:45]; The importance of time synchronicity [36:00]; Identifying your biggest priorities and the paradox of wanting to do more than you have time for [41:00]; Oliver’s moment of clarity in 2014 [47:15]; The role of a sense of purpose in fulfillment [50:15]; Reconciling the finite nature of time and letting go of trying to master your time [59:00]; Why we tend to have a future-focused attitude and how to combat that with atelic activities [1:05:45]; The power of shifting your perspective about time and your experiences [1:12:45]; How to operationalize the three principles for the dilemma of finite time [1:20:15]; Harnessing the power of patience in the face of a problem or experience [1:28:00]; The value of incrementalism for being productive [1:34:15]; Embracing your finitude with curiosity [1:38:00]; Acting on an idea in the moment rather than letting the idea be the obstacle [1:41:15]; and More. Connect With Peter on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free.

If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peteratia-md.com forward slash subscribe. I guess this week is Oliver Berger. Oliver is a journalist and author of three books, including The New York Times' best seller, 4,000 weeks, Time Management for Mortals. If you listen to this podcast, you've most likely heard me talk about this book, as it's

one of the four books that I consistently buy in bulk and give out to friends. The other three being, Stoleness is the key by Ryan Holiday, from Strength to Strength, by Arthur Brooks, and Die with Zero, by Bill Perkins. I've been fortunate enough to have Ryan, Arthur, and Bill on the podcast to speak about their books, and so I'm really excited to round that out by having Oliver on as well. In this episode, we focus our conversation around Oliver's book 4,000 weeks, and this idea that we want to try to master time. And whether or not that's an illusion or not. We speak about the evolution of how people began to

keep time and why that mattered. If productivity is a distraction or a trap that can never be attained, and why it always feels like we're just about to master our time, but then we never quite get there. We speak about the various techniques people try to employ to control their time better and the role of productivity tools. We talk about our desire to control the future, but how we only have a finite amount of time and those two things seem in stark contrast. Lastly, we talk about how all of this relates to the idea of sense of purpose. Of the four books that I often gift to people with this being one of them.

In many ways, this is the one that's the hardest for me to wrap my head around. And it's the one that I've read the most of each of them. Actually, at the conclusion of my discussion with Oliver, I think it finally hit me why I struggle so much to understand this concept. I won't let the cat out of the bag on what that is, but I sort of have an epiphany at the

end of this podcast where I explain to Oliver where my lack of comfort comes with this subject matter. So, I hope you find this enjoyable. I hope this resonates with those of you who share much of the struggle I share, which is this desire to be the masters of our time, the desire to be productive. And why letting go of some of this can probably lead to a much more fulfilling life. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Oliver Burke. Oliver, thank you so much for making time to speak in your evening.

I've been looking forward to this for quite a while as I was saying earlier when we spoke. Your book is one of these four books that kind of fits into, I don't know, call it like books about the quality of one's life that have more to do with the way you live than some of the more physiological and biochemical things that I tend to think of commonly. In addition to your book, people have not only heard me talk about these books, but interview the authors Ryan Holiday with respect to his books, Stillness is the key, Bill Perkins with the Die With Zero and Arthur Brooks from Strength to Strength. So, to be able to sit here and speak with you today is really exciting because it sort of puts a bow on these four books. And it's a book I've enjoyed several times now and I still am not convinced I fully understand it, so I'm really looking forward to speaking.

Oh, thank you. I'm really, really happy to be here. I'm looking forward to getting into it, absolutely. When I read the book, there was a lot I could relate to, because I'm definitely a productivity geek. I probably have been as long as I can remember. I've always kept lists. I love pens and journals and I love to organize.

And even at a young age and growing up, it was clear that there is almost pathological consequences to this because if things were not done, there would be emotional consequences. Tell me a little bit about your experience in the serena. It sounds like this is something that came naturally to you as well. That sounds alarmingly similar to me as a young adult anyway, I don't know about as a kid, but certainly feeling very motivated,

not realizing at the time, obviously, that it wasn't just the normal way to try to get your homework done and get your college assignments in on time. But this real sense that there must be a way of getting on top of my time and structuring my time, that would enable me to sort of, yeah, deal with everything that was thrown at me, not have to make difficult decisions and fail to placate certain people who are making demands and not have to make any choices about which direction I was going in because I would be so efficient that I would do it all. And you get, well, in my experience anyway, you get to this place where you often feel very nearly like you're there, right? You feel like it might only be a month or two of really disciplined work before you're

going to be at the the sunlit uplands of effortless productivity, but instead you end up sort of making fresh starts, every, you know, introducing a new system, downloading a new app, buying a new notebook every month or two. So yeah, that was definitely me. And then I got into a position professionally where I could write about a lot of this stuff and continue to sort of go deep into it. And I think this book is probably what came from exhausting that, realizing that I'd got to the, I'd tried like a hundred different productivity systems and they hadn't given me the emotional thing I was seeking.

So maybe there was a problem with the question I was asking rather than that I just hadn't found the right solution. Yeah, there's a line in there you throw away and I don't remember who it's attributed to, but it's effectively, we teach what we most need to learn, something to that effect. Right, Richard Bach I think who wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Not only that in terms of where the book came from, but even in terms of the book itself, it's a whole bunch of advice that I needed to hear and still need to hear. So it's always a little bit funny to me or awkward when I run into people who assume that the book describes the daily state of serenity in which I actually live my life because I don't, and I certainly, you know, I totally still struggle with all of this stuff, but

that's what makes it interesting, I think, to me. It's not interesting to write about, to try to grapple with things that come easily to you. So this question of like, how you orient yourself inside time in a finite life. It's endlessly fascinating to me, but I certainly don't feel like I've resolved it all. You said something a second ago that I think is very important, especially for someone who hasn't read the book.

I think for those of us who have read it, it makes a lot of sense, and I'm gonna paraphrase you, but you basically said, all of this productivity, all of these hacks, didn't give you what you were looking for emotionally. And again, to someone who didn't read the book, that's a bit counterintuitive, because the whole purpose of productivity is not some emotional thing, it's to get more

stuff done, to be more efficient. But I think you're tying it back to something that is much deeper at our root, as individuals, that really comes down to time and our view of time, to time and our view of time and whether we consciously think about finitude or not, subconsciously we are all aware of it at all times. So let's talk a little bit about that. And maybe we can do it in any way that you find it helpful. But I think that the way you write about it through the lens of evolution is quite helpful and how we go from an era when we didn't keep time through the industrial revolution when all of a sudden time keeping became essential. Yeah, now I think that historical lens is really illuminating.

On some level, it's my working hypothesis, my working thesis that everyone has always struggled with being finite. We are these sort of unique creatures as humans who are both fully material animals. And at the same time can think about and know about the fact that we're going to die one day. So we're in this kind of unique anguished situation. But we haven't always had the kind of ideas about time that enable us to then try to use time management or productivity or planning or scheduling to try to engage in emotional avoidance of that scary issue of our finitude. All the way back through the record of philosophy back to the ancient Greeks and Romans,

there are people grappling with the fact that there is death, but it's only in a widespread way with maybe not the industrial revolution, but running up to that and certainly after it, that most people were thinking, I think, about time as a resource. So it's not just the medium in which your life unfolds. It's almost like there's you and there's time. And it's your job somehow to try to handle time in the right way. You feel like you have an adversarial relationship with time, right? Most people feel either hounded by all the stuff they've got to do in the time available

or some people might feel that there's not enough to fill their time with. But all of these things kind of imply a relationship between you and your time, which is actually quite an odd notion once you really start to think about it, the idea that it should be something separate. So I guess that the root of my argument is, yeah, the idea that most of the stress and the trouble and the anxiety and the lack of meaning and the things that we encounter in our relationship with time come from sort of pathological versions of this idea that it's something for us to try to use as well as we can, or handle, or manage, or master.

And most of our deepest experiences as humans of truly meaningful and fulfilling moments seem to involve a kind of falling away of those concepts and a falling back into just presence in this one moment that we have. Of course, you need to think about time as a resource in order to do all sorts of things that we do in modern society, but I think a lot of the problems arise from thinking that that is all time is

and that there is some place in the future we can get to where we have finally nailed our relationship with it. Does that make sense? Yeah, it really does. I mean, the idea that productivity is a trap is very interesting. The idea that it's a distraction from something else is even more interesting.

And the idea that it can never be fully attained is anybody who's tried is sadly true. We're not born this way. I mean, those of us that have kids clearly observe young children playing in a way that is untethered from time as a separate entity. And yet somewhere along the way, we become inculcated with, and maybe it's to varying degrees, you and I, probably more than others, with this sense of time, mastery being important. How and when do you think that transition occurs? My assumption is that it occurs in all different ways at different stages, and my son is six,

but I absolutely have seen some glimmers of his father's helpful attitudes to time. So maybe it's passed on in the genes or in sort of subtle ways that I can't clearly control. So he sometimes gets into this place of wanting to be sort of wanting to know exactly what's happening over the next 24, 48, 72 hours. I think here it's most useful though, just to look at the perspective that much kind of psychotherapy and depth psychology would point to,

which is that, you know, in various different ways, as we grow up and as we are raised, even when we're raised by basically excellent parents, there are things that are missing from our sense of things that give us less than a sort of completely comfortable, secure sense of self-worth and of everything being absolutely fine in the world. There are people who have this a much more extremely than others, but there's something that you're trying to fill by the time you're a young adult. There's something that isn't quite ideal there, and I think that we use all sorts of things.

And obviously some people use substance abuse and all sorts of other things to try to grapple with these things that feel like they're missing. And I think that productivity is especially, you know, people who for one reason or another have ended up with the idea that their value as people, that their right to exist on the planet or to feel that they are enough as human beings is somehow dependent on their output and on attaining certain levels of accomplishment. The people David Brooks calls insecure overachievers, which is a great phrase, and sums it up well. I think they're the ones who are naturally drawn to this idea that they've really got to try to double down on the technologies of time control to try to get as efficient as they can

and process as much as they can. There are, of course, other people. We know them right, who for some reason are deeply psychologically invested in not accomplishing things, in making themselves feel that they're not part of that whole process of accomplishment, of becoming sort of a slacker in a very sort of

proactive and deliberate way. So I think in all sorts of different ways we're just trying to kind of plug in a lax And the problems with that are going to manifest in different ways the obvious problem with productivity as a way to get to that kind of state of peace of mind is just that there's a complete baked-in mismatch between being a finite human being and existing in a world of effectively infinite possibilities, infinite emails you could answer, infinite ambitions you could have,

infinite places you could go. If your self-worth is staked on trying to get your arms around all of that, but it's actually an infinite quantity, that's just gonna be an unending struggle. So what would you say to somebody who says, no, no, no, it's actually an infinite quantity. That's just kind of the an unending struggle. So what would you say to somebody who says, no, no, no, it's different? I can actually do this. Like I can juggle these five projects

and I can get my inbox to zero. I just need a little more time. Like I'm right on the cusp of doing it. And if I just put my head down for the next six months, it's going to be okay. How would you explain to them that that's kind of a fallacy? I mean, there are two ways into that, aren't there? I feel like one is to say that one of the greatest questions in terms of self-change and self-knowledge, which is just, how's that working out for you so far? To some extent, these are kind of revelations of the middle of life because you have to have

tried this out for quite a while. And if you're 20, telling yourself that the real part of life is still coming makes a certain amount of sense. When you're in your 40s and you're still telling yourself that the real part of life is coming later and this is still a dress rehearsal for that moment, it might begin to strike you as no longer quite so credible. The other way of getting into that is just to say that there seems to be this pretty much universal law that if all you do is become more efficient in any system is made just more efficient with nothing else being done in terms of it, how you just

let your priorities. If all you're doing is trying to process more stuff, then all else being equal, that will attract more and more stuff to do into your life. So getting better at processing email at a faster tempo just basically attracts more email into your life for fairly straightforward reasons. You reply to more people and they reply to your replies and you have to reply to those replies and you get a reputation and your organization or wherever it is for being very responsive on email. So more people email you. So there's this kind of unending

aspect to it that occurs in lots of other domains beside email. And so you're not going to get through an effectively infinite supply of something by processing it more efficiently. In fact, the opposite is going to happen. And so I think that's why it always feels like this moment of mastery is just over the horizon, but it's never quite where you are. It is a very deceitful feeling for anyone who's struggled with it. Maybe the word struggled is the right word. Because you really do feel at times you're so close to just nailing it and then it will be different. Tell me about your journeys here.

I'm kind of one of these guys who tries to inbox to zero, never successfully. It's a called the Pomodoro technique. You briefly touched on your dabbling in that. What's that technique? And what are some of the other techniques that people are exploring as ways to defy the gravitational inevitability of what we're talking about? Well, this is a really interesting point, actually.

I think it's a one-worth emphasizing. The Pomodoro technique, as many people will know, I'm sure, is this approach where you divide up your work time into 25 minute periods, interspersed with five minute breaks, and then after you've done four of those, you take a longer break. And it's just a way of boxing up your time. Other approaches to the sort of classic approach of time boxing that involves giving every segment of your calendar a specific job. And there are, you know, a hundred other of these kinds of techniques. And many, many of them, including the Pomodoro technique,

are totally great. Like, there's absolutely nothing intrinsically wrong, I don't think, with using this or that protocol for... When you say great, meaning they will increase an individual's productivity. Well, they are fine as a way of structuring your day that might well help you make the right choices, understand how much time you have available, and therefore decide that certain things are more important, uses of that time than not.

And if you read the writing of the guy who invented the Pomodoro technique, he's very on board with this idea that it's about turning time from being an adversary to an ally. But I just sort of seeing that you're in some sense your time already is made up of 25-minute periods, right? And you could look at it that way. So it's just a question of being explicit about that and making choices about what you're going to put in those times and taking appropriate rest. All of these techniques are, when I say great, I mean, all of these techniques are like fine, if they work as a way of lending order to the day. I think the real problem that you see again and again, and I certainly had for a long time, is that people see them as

they throw themselves on them as kind of paths to this salvation that I think we are talking about in some implicit way, because it is a very sort of religious feeling in some ways. They think that they can ride this approach to life to that point of finally feeling like they're doing enough, finally feeling like they're the air traffic controller of their lives. That's the problem. I mentioned in the book, my early experiments with David Allen's getting things done, which kickstarted the modern phase of productivity writing. And there's so much

great stuff in that book, some of which I still in some ways practice today. But I completely – I was so fixated in this idea that I was somehow going to be able to do everything that I completely missed what he says very clearly in that book, which is it's about having too much to do and staying calm in the middle of having too much to do. And I totally took it as a way that was going to help me not have too much to do because I would have been managing to do everything. And we're just a certain kind of person anyway, I think, really drawn to take anything and co-opt it into this psychological project of trying to feel like we're fully in control of our lives in a way that we can't be.

I'm fascinated to talk to you about this because it seems you could easily see that a lot of the more physiological, physical, biological stuff could easily be draguned into a similar kind of project of feeling in total control of our situation. I don't know if you see that happening. I do. In yourself, maybe. I don't know if you see that happening. I do. In yourself, maybe. I don't know. No, absolutely. And I sort of write about us in the epilogue of my book where I sort of say, you know, I think

when my obsession with this topic began about a decade ago, maybe 15 years ago, in one way, but really in earnest, a decade ago, there's zero question in my mind with the benefit of the retrospectoscope I have today that it was 100% a, how do I run from death? Basically, it was just, this is just a, I'm gonna put my head in the sand and march my way towards something that deep, deep, deep down I know is impossible,

which is a mortality, but I'm gonna focus so much on this thing that I'm not going to confront my fear of death. Or I'm going to confront my fear of death by shouting louder at that fear with this thing. And this thing is all the things I'm going to do to live longer. I think a lot of people can relate to that, and I think people have different reasons for it. I talk about what my reasons were for that, but I can say now that I realize that completely, I have a slightly different take today,

but like you, I still struggle. Meaning I still watch people die and get very sad. Just recently, someone who I actually had on the podcast died. And he was in his early 80s, so by most people's standards, hey, he lived too and maybe slightly beyond normal life expectancy, but I don't know. It always bothers me when someone dies.

It still does. And intellectually, I know that that's a very bizarre way to feel. That he had his 4,000 weeks. He did a lot with those 4,000 weeks. He had a wonderful family. Like you have all of these things, like there's nothing to mourn other than the fact

that he's not here. And yet I still have a sense of sadness about that. And I understand that part of that produces a distraction from what's happening today. Like if you dwell on that too much, you miss out on the fact that, well, the best thing you can do to honor the legacy or the memory or whatever is to do your thing today.

But another thing you write about that I love is the challenge of trying too hard to be present. This has equally become kind of cult like, which is I am going to be the most present person ever. And I'm going to will myself into that. Say a bit about that. It feels like it's the natural reaction at first when you begin to realize that you've been running

into the future for so long through these kinds of techniques and this approach. It's like, Shulia, what I have to do is the opposite of that, and that's like, be really, really present. And then you read books on mindfulness that say, when you're washing the dishes, when you're loading the dishwasher, just do that thing, be present in that moment, and then you find, right, it's something sort of paradoxical about how the mind works in those contexts as soon as you're self-consciously trying to will yourself into the moment, then you're

not doing it because what you're actually doing is thinking about whether you're in the moment enough. And so, yeah, I tell this absurd story in the book about getting to witness the northern lights when I was in northern Canada and having been sort of like getting excited about it for several days with my trip. And when it finally happened, and I was sort of dragged out of the place I was sleeping by some neighboring guests at sort of two in the morning to see this, just finding myself thinking, firstly, trying really hard to be there and being very much aware that as a result I was not. And then just having stray thoughts like that it looked like an old PC screensaver and

all these kind of like these terrible thoughts that just totally, totally ruined the kind of sacredness of the moment because I had been so sort of cognitively engaged with trying to be there and by contrast you know we can all point I think to moments in life that perfect afternoons and things like this that were not planned there were not because we set out to have a perfect day. So there's kind of a theme that runs through all this, I think it comes up thinking about rest and recreation and leisure as well, that you do sort of to make there's a sense it just sounds like a sort of annoying paradox. There's a sense in which you do have to be willing to waste time to make the most of time. You do have to be willing to just sort of care a bit less about whether a given afternoon, given weekend, is spent

in a deeply meaningful way, in order to maximize the chances of it sort of licking out into one of those deeply meaningful times because you need to not be fixated on trying to force the matter. And what do you think that means? I mean, is that something that can only be appreciated in retrospect, or is that something that will also be appreciated in the moment? Do you mean the sense of meaning? Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, this experience that I think we're acknowledging we want, we're acknowledging that we want to feel a certain way. Yeah. And I think you're doing a pretty good job establishing, especially for anybody who's tried. You're not going to achieve that sense of meaning by achieving. Getting more things done on the to-do list

is not going to be the path to make that happen. And so what is that thing that we're trying to make happen? And do we know it when it's happening? Huh, that's a really good question that I don't know that I really know what I think about. Certainly just in my immediate direct experience, the best times in life are either best in recollection in hindsight, or they are, you know, flow states the moment, which as we know from flow states, right, it's like it's, can you be aware that you're in them? I think in some bodily sense you can be aware that you're in them, but you're not in them once

you're thinking too hard about them in a verbal way. I don't know if it's quite the same point, but maybe it connects. I think that one of the strangest parts of this is that, is that happiness feels like sort of the wrong framing for what we're talking about here. I'm always really, really fascinated by those moments in people's lives, and I've had a couple of them myself where somebody close to you is going through some sort of immediate, serious crisis.

There's nothing good about what's happening. If you could have chosen for it not to be happening, it wouldn't be happening. And then in the middle of this emergency, it's just obvious that you've got some, your job is to like, I don't know, do their dry cleaning. It might not be being a shoulder to cry on, it depends. Your job is something very mundane

to just make your contribution to somebody weathering this crisis. And that sense of knowing that you're in exactly the right place, that there is no question. It makes you realize how I feel, among my friends, I have a good reputation of being quite good in a crisis, which feels very flattering until you think about it. What it really means is you're just incredibly ambivalent and indecisive in all other times, right? It's when you have a choice about what you should be doing. There is this great sense of sort of second guessing

and fretting and being indecisive. And yet I think we all have these experiences when there isn't really a choice, when choice is taken away, when it's incredibly obvious what you should be doing to help in that moment, which are in some sense deeply fulfilling, even though they're not happy.

And I think there's a clue there to what we're looking for in other times of life. It is this sense that there's not really any option of manipulating our experience, fitting a few more things in, worrying whether we're missing out on something else, all that sort of goes away in those times. I don't know if it's the same point, but it does seem really important to me." Can that exist without some interaction with another person? Because the example you gave requires another person. In this case, it requires that you are there to help another person. I want to talk much more about the use of time as a good versus a shared good, but we'll come to that because I think that's one of the most important points of the book, and there are many.

But as I sort of rack my brain to think about the most joyful moments, and I say this as a 10 out of 10 introvert, I mean, I need endless amounts of time by myself to function. If I don't have that, I come off the rails. But the truest joy I have, even as a 10 out of 10 introvert, is with others. And it makes me wonder

is what we're talking about here so much about the relationship of not just time, but time with others. I'll give you an example. I play this game with patients where I sort of say like, if you could be in perfect health indefinitely, we're gonna grant you eternal life, but you have to do it on a desert island.

Now it's a great desert island because you don't have to find your own coconuts. Like everything you want is there. So we've somehow solved every problem. And away from the island, there are robots churning away, giving you everything you need. So, you've got your Netflix, you've got your food, you've got your, to your heart's content, you can have anything. The only thing you can't have is another human being. Are you happy? And most people, when I think about this for just a few minutes,

come to the conclusion, no, it would be very difficult to be happy. Right. Whatever we define happiness is, that's such a sloppy word. But fill in the blank, your positive valence, very difficult. I mean, what do you think of that and what does that tell us here? It's super interesting. I think it's basically right. I think that we're talking about things that can only happen in some form of relationship, I would say that

there probably can be such a thing as, you know, your relationship with parts of yourself, you know, that I think when people are journaling, for example, they are maybe in a relation with unconscious parts of themselves, I think you can be in relationship with the natural world in certain ways, but by and large, I think you're right in relationship with the natural world in certain ways, but by and large, I think you're right that the deepest ways in which we're in relationship are with other people. And I mean, there's a million different angles to endorse that point. Stated like that, it doesn't sound super controversial.

I think where it connects to what I'm so interested in and I'm writing about in the book is that there's a sense in which other people, other consciousnesses are kind of in some way they're sort of an affront to any idea that we can use our intellect to control our world, right? Because as soon as you're in any kind of even slightly intimate relationship or friendship with somebody else, it's like you'll have their own agenda. You're brought into an encounter with your limits because you can't just make the rhythms of family life go exactly as you want them to do. If you manage that, you find everyone else is very miserable and that's not what you wanted. So we're sort of brought into this encounter with the fact that we are these finite beings. And I think that's really important

and edifying for us somehow because part of what is going wrong, at least for me in my personal experience with the whole mastery of time approach, is it's some notion that I ought to be able to solve the problem of life with my intellect, that I ought to be able to figure out the workflow and the scheme and the goal-setting system and like work life out. And other people are at once, you know, a constant reminder that you can't use your own intellect to work out life because everyone else is living their own lives and has their own agendas. And also that huge numbers of just very practical things that mean anything to us just can't be done except in some form of relationship. So whether what you care about is raising a family,

making music, playing sports, pursuing a religious faith, or building a business, or being a political activist, like a million different kinds of things that energize people, but they all have that in common, that need to collaborate, and that understanding that like, you don't get to run life in the way that I think we often feel that we want to. And actually, I give some examples in the book

where I do people who sort of get into the position where they do have an extraordinary amount of control over how time unfolds in their own lives, and then find themselves kind of lonely and miserable. Let's talk about Mario. I mean, I don't know if that's who you're referring to in the moment, but it's an interesting story. I hadn't heard of this character. It's kind of bizarre. Yeah, and I feel like I shouldn't defame him. He may be, I suppose, as I say in the book, he may be happy. All I'm saying is I know that I would not be happy if I had designed.

I think that's a fair point. Let's do it through the lens of, I agree with you. I would be very unhappy in doing what he's doing regardless of the luxury, the opulence, the wealth. Sounds like you would share in that. Just tell folks briefly what the story is. Yes, so is this guy who is the subject of New York Times short movie called The Happiest Guy in the World? I think it's cool.

Which is how he described himself. And he's fellow who has constructed a life spent almost entirely living on board cruise ships as a sort of the ultimate loyal customer of the cruise line that he frequents. And this movie is just a short, really well made movie. And you can tell from the title that the filmmaker also is skeptical of his self-description as the happiest guy in the world. He has sort of total control in a sense of what he does with his time. He is not bound to a location, he's not bound to a job, he's not bound to chores because that's all handled for him. And there's just a sort of deep poignancy that comes across

in this short movie. Again, not sure he'd agree. This is my interpretation about what I would feel of what I would say is loneliness, right? It's this sense that he is out of sync. He's not synchronized with the rhythms of anybody else's lives. And as a result, there are these sort of awkward moments in the film where he's greeting the staff of the cruise ship referring to him as his friends and you have a kind of a sense coming off them that like

Yeah, they're going along with being his friends because they're the employees of the cruise line, right? They're not going to be rude to him, but it's not a friendship And I think that a lot of this has to do with the idea that what I would say if I was in that position I would say that I had made a major mistake in thinking that time is best understood as this thing that you should hoard as much of as you can for yourself, achieve a total sovereignty over it, if you can, as opposed to something that gets its value as a network good, right, gets its value from being shared. There's also v anecdotes from people

who become digital nomads, you know, and roam the world running their businesses from their laptops. Lots of plus points to that, I think it's maybe often a wonderful thing for two for a few years in your young adulthood. But they soon find, right? That they've sort of, with all this freedom, they've kind of exiled themselves from the very normal routines that actually we find deeply fulfilling of like, you know, several friends meeting up for a drink or, you know, going for a bike ride or just very normal things that rely on our surrendering some of our control, some of our individual control over time. And there are many other examples.

I think this point about regular goods versus network goods is important. Let's even continue to expand on that, right? So, classic regular good is money. All things equal, more of it is better than less of it. So, in other words, there's some, even though you could argue, you could hoard all the money in the world, it's not gonna make you happy.

But if you could choose between having more or less, it's logical why you would choose more. But I think you're the great example of cell phones, telephones. Right, you don't wanna have all the cell phones. You just need one and you want everyone else to have one of them. So that's what makes the net worth.

Such a great point, that's a network good. And to think of time as money is missing the point a little bit, you need to think of time as cell phones. It's, you have to have time that everyone else has. And to your point, let's maybe this would be a great time to kind of talk about the great Soviet experiment about the asynchronous of time. I thought that was so fascinating. I never really considered that before.

So yeah, there was this extraordinary attempt in the early decades of the Soviet Union to kind of leapfrog the state of economic development of the West by eliminating the seven-day week, five days of work, two days a week, and replacing it with a five-day system so that it would be five days through the year, four days of work, one day of rest, four days of work, one day of rest. And the sort of allegedly ingenious idea here was that it wouldn't be the same four days on one day off for everybody. Instead, the population was divided into cohorts, color-coded cohorts, and depending on which one you belonged to, your four days and one day would be different.

So they were all kind of staggered through the year. And the idea was that this would enable the factory machines to run every single day of the year and never need to stop. This would result in extraordinary economic gains. What it did very quickly, among other unintended consequences, was to sort of desynchronize the whole population, right? Because if you had a friend or even a spouse, and spouses were supposed to be assigned to the same cohorts, but it often didn't happen, I think. If you had somebody you wanted to spend time with, and they were in a different cohort, you never had the same weekend to spend time, it hugely disrupted, therefore, the family, and it disrupted the church, and

as others have pointed out, right, both of these will kind of feature, rather than bugs, from the point of view of the Soviet leadership, that you're sort of undermining these other centers of power in the society. But you got this amazing letter to a kind of amazing that was written at all, but somebody complaining that a holiday isn't a holiday at all if nobody else in your life is available to spend the holiday with and you've just got to like go to the cafe and drink a cup of coffee on your own. So it's a sort of extreme example of how damaging it is to our quality of life to be put in a situation where our time is not properly synchronized with other peoples. But as various people, including the writer, Judith Schulovitz, who I quote in the book, has pointed out, like, we've kind of done something like that to ourselves in the 21st century, US and UK, because, although we do not have that kind of deliberate, top-down government messing with our attempts to synchronize

our time, pretty much everybody, for one reason or another, both the kind of people who are sort of called into work irregular shifts in retail, but also the more privileged people who set their own hours and work on their laptops or whatever, all of us are all at different schedules than everybody else. And this helps explain this kind of notorious problem that everyone talks about, especially in big cities where it's just so difficult to find a time when like you and two friends can meet up for a beer. It's not that you don't have any time. It might be that you feel very busy as well. It's just that it's not the same time. And I think this is the real

and the sort of a growing problem, the way we've sort of completely fallen out of sync with each other, because almost anything you do, and I write in the book about how much I've got out of singing in amateur choirs over the years, you know, but anything like that, you all need to agree that it's going to be at the same time of the day, on the same day of the week, otherwise it's not happening. So I think there's a kind of a deep point there that has quite a few sort of low-level practical ramifications as well. quite a few sort of low-level practical ramifications as well. Well, and that's the interesting thing, right? Without time, you couldn't do these things. We couldn't synchronize, and synchronization is so important

for civilization, and yet it's potentially the thing that gets us back to this root problem, which is we now think we can master this thing called time. And I think we're learning if you try to master time, time will master you. We need time to have a civilization. We can't really synchronize it because of the successive civilization. Ergo, we try to gain control over it by mastering it. Some of us more than others.

And we end up feeling like we can't. And I love the way you point out the flaw in the logic of the story about the rocks, the pebbles in the sand, which I've always thought I lived by that thing. I know my rocks, I know my pebbles, I know my sand. Maybe explain to folks what that is and why that might be a fallacy.

Right, if there's anyone on the planet who hasn't heard the original story, I know my sand. Maybe explain to folks what that is and why that might be a fallacy. Right, if there's anyone on the planet who hasn't heard the original story, which is, I think, probably reproduced in a thousand time management books, it is this anecdote has different versions, but it's basically, in the one I know, a professor arrives in a classroom one day with some large rocks, some pebbles, some sand, and a big glass jar, and he challenges the students to fit all of this stuff into the jar, and the students who have to be kind of dumb for the purposes of the story, start putting in the sand first, and then the pebbles,

but then the rocks don't fit, the pebbles first, and the sand, the rocks don't fit, and then he very smuggly points out, no, no, no, look, if you put the big rocks in first, then the pebbles first and the sound the rocks don't fit. And then he very smuggly points out, no, no, look, if you put the big rocks in first, then the pebbles and the sand nestle in the spaces in between. The moral of the story is, if you make time for your biggest priorities, then you'll get them done and you'll have other time for other things. But if you don't, first of all, make time for your biggest priorities, you won't find time for them because all this other stuff will fill up the finite space. And it's actually true so far as it goes, there are kind of decisions to be made between

things that really matter and things that don't really matter. But I think much more importantly is that it's a scam, right? It's a rigged demonstration because he has only brought into the classroom the number of big rocks that he knows can be made to fit into this jar. And I argue in the book that a problem that we have as humans, but especially as humans in the modern world, the real problem that we have is that there are just far too many big rocks.

There are far too many things that legitimately matter or could be said to matter. So there are certainly marginal benefits to around the edges, you know, to kind of how you're arranging your day and making sure that you're putting in the important stuff and not spending too much time on stuff that doesn't matter. But the really big challenge, I think, is seeing that there will always be more big rocks than we'll have time for, and having the courage really to neglect a whole lot of them in order to focus on a few of them, being willing, Elizabeth Gilbert says this, right? She goes, it's a great line about how we think that saying no

is so important, because if we say no to all the stuff we don't want to do, we'll have time for the things that we do want to do. But actually the true art of saying no is saying no to things you do want to do in order to do some other things that you do want to do. But actually the true art of saying no is saying no to things you do want to do in order to do some other things that you do want to do. Because deep deep deep in our minds, there seems to be this assumption of some sort of natural law that says, well like we're only going to feel that the number of things we're going to feel like they matter has ultimately got to match up to the time that we have. It just isn't the case. We can feel that vastly more matters than we're going to have time for. And so I think that really goes to the heart of this idea that like figuring out what to neglect, being willing to let things go, waving goodbye to possibilities,

this sort of very dark kind of disappointment that's baked into any life. It's sort of handling that is the big challenge, I think. Well, I love the story that you tell, whether it's apocryphal or not, about Warren Buffett speaking with his pilot. I think you described it as the allure of middling priorities. I think that actually captures the essence of what you just said, which is a far more realistic version of the rock problem.

Do you want to share that parable story? Sure, and I think it's pretty established now that it wasn't Warren Buffett or the Warren Buffett denies it and I make this clear in the book. If people say wise, that's always close. That's a relevant who says it. Yeah, and when people come up with wise saying, it's either Confucius or the Buddha or Warren Buffett,

basically who gets them attributed to them. Right, he's allegedly asked, how should I set my priorities in life? And he replies that you should make a list of the 25 things that matter to you most in your life goals, priorities, rank them in order from one to 25. And the top five are the ones that you should sort of pour your time and energy and attention into. But the next 20, and this is where most of us might come to a different conclusion, right? Many people might say, well, the next 20, those are kind of pretty important. So whenever you get a little corner of time,

do something on one of those. And he says, no, those 20 other ones you should avoid at all costs, because they're the ones that matter to you enough to lure you away from the top five, but don't matter to you enough to be the top five. Even in this story, there is a little bit of not quite facing the truth of the matter, I think, because it could simply be that there are many, many things that all belong in the top five, more than five things. I mean, you're still implying that you can do that ranking,

but I think what's so important about it as a way of approaching life is that it doesn't ask you to believe that everything you're going to decide to not do, that all the things you're going to neglect, you have to convince yourself didn't really matter in the first place. It's like, no, they did really matter. It would have been good to do those things. But finitude, our state, as humans, demands that we make some choices anyway. And actually, I think it's very comforting in the end, right? Because if you feel that you want to not only be great in your work and be a great parent and pursue a couple of, like, leisure activities, but also do these other 20 things, and you feel that there must be a couple of leisure activities, but also do these other

20 things. And you feel that there must be a way of doing it. That's a very tormenting way to live. When you see that, like, oh, right, there's just always going to be more that I want to be doing than that I can be doing. I think that actually allows you to let go of some of those other things, to see that it's just our job as human beings to like pick a handful of the things that really compel us and focus on them rather than to somehow

make infinity fit into a finite container. What is it that you sort of realized circa 2014, you write about this sort of moment of clarity, I think you were sitting on a bench somewhere in Brooklyn. Oh, yeah. Prospect Park. Yeah, yeah. How did this sort of coalesce for you then? This was very much on the sort of productivity and work

side of this whole thing. And it was a kind of an intellectual epiphany. I don't know, you might resonate with this, right? You can sometimes figure things out in an intellectual level. And then it takes kind of years to live into them in a real way. So it wasn't like my life changed that moment, but it was a winter morning in the middle of the week. I had like a huge, even more large number of things I felt like I had to do by the end of that week, the normal. And I was on my way to my co-working space where I worked

then in Brooklyn. Sitting on this bench, like trying to game it out, trying to figure out, like, what combination of scheduling and what order I could do things in and how I could make it work to really power through and actually get to the end of all these things that felt like obligations for that week. And just suddenly being struck by the thought, the understanding that like, oh, it's impossible. Oh, I see. I'm trying to do something impossible. And feeling that as a sort of like a burden being lifted,

right, in that moment, it's like, oh, right. I can't be expected to find a way to do all this. I've taken on more things than I can do in the time that I felt I had to do them. And maybe there are going to be some downsides to having to renegotiate things or fail to meet some deadlines. But then I'm going to have to deal with those downsides, because, you know, there's no alternative. And I find this to be, I think it runs through a lot of what we're talking about here, a lot of what I've written maybe, this move where you sort of see that your problem is worse than you thought it was, and that is incredibly liberating because you go from thinking that

you face an incredibly hard challenge to seeing that actually it's not really hard, it's impossible. And the shift from really hard to impossible is actually quite important because you can stop beating yourself up for not being able to do something impossible. And I'm thinking now just in terms of what you were saying before about the initial motivations for your interest in the physical stuff. I think there's a similar liberation to go through, right? And seeing like, finding a way to live forever, that's impossible. Then you drop through into the ground of, okay, we can work on.

Certainly you one can maximize one's chances of a longer life. You can certainly maximize the quality of the life that you have, but you sort of drop away from that kind of me against the universe thing that you can throw years of energy into, but you're never actually going to win. And then there's something much more engaged with the world about being in the realm of the possible, right? Because then you're like getting stuck in. I don't know if that the people say getting stuck in in America. I don't know, but in Britain, that's the idiom, right? It's like you're getting actually into the activity

of doing real things in the world. You know, one of the things that I'm struck by in reading your book, and you and I were speaking about this earlier, but your book is, as I said, kind of one of these four books that I've read many times, but I've tried and failed many times to come up with a unifying theory of them. And I set it as a goal to do this before I turned 50.

So 18 months before I turned 50, I had sort of set this goal of, by my 50th birthday, I will come up with a unifying theory on this aspect of life. As it ties into what these four authors have said, what you've written, what Bill Perkins has written,

Arthur Brooks, Ryan Holiday, no doubt there are others out there who are writing in this area as well. I wanted to limit myself to just these four things. I thought this can't be that hard. Well, that birthday came and went. There was just another thing I failed at. And I'll tell you one area where I'm really struggling is sense of purpose. What is struggling? Is sense of purpose.

What is the role of sense of purpose? Now, I have vacillated in my life on this. There have been times when I had such a grandiose view of my role that I felt everyone should have a legacy. It was a bit of an inside joke. So my wife and I who met in Baltimore, where you met your wife, when I was in residency, which was a, you know, kind of a slog. This was, you know, you're working 110, 120 hours a week and talk about asynchronous time, right? My wife is working two jobs. I'm working

one job that might as well be three. I mean, we're virtually never together. And when we are, I was just working. So I was either swimming or working on this surgical manual. I wanted to write. I wanted to write like the all singing, all dancing, Bible for surgical residents. Wow. And she's sort of like, what the hell are you doing? Why don't we just chill out? And I was like, no, no, no, no.

Like this thing's to be my legacy. And she thought it was so funny that she got me a t-shirt that said, what's your legacy? But it said like, PA, it was my initials, colon, quotes, what's your legacy? Like she's just mocking me with this t-shirt. And then I think about where I am now, where I'm so far at the other end of the spectrum that I also worry it's problematic, which is, I don't think there's any such thing as legacy. We're all gonna die, none of it matters. If I died tomorrow, nothing changes.

The earth will continue to move on its axis with the exact same precision as if I live to 100. Like nothing will change. And if I live another 40 years, no matter what I do in those 40 years, it won't matter. Nothing will change in the universe. And you write about this idea of cosmic insignificance therapy. Both of these seem problematic.

The total lack of sense of purpose, which I'm not saying I don't have a sense of purpose, I'm just saying I feel so insignificant. I flirt with the idea of being so insignificant that I think it there are days I struggle with doing things because I'm like, well, I do them because I'm good at sort of doing things, but that's very different. Whereas Arthur Brooks in From Strength to Strength would really talk about this important of sense of purpose, the joy, the fulfillment that comes from having a purpose that's larger than yourself.

So I'm sure you've thought through all of these things, how do you rectify that particular issue of, is what we're talking about here, too nihilistic? It's so interesting. What we're circling around here, I don't think I'm going to solve the mystery of the theory that unites the books. I think we're circling around this idea of finitude and reconciling ourselves to what it means to be finite. Obviously, that's my particular angle. So I'm doing it from my perspective. But it's this way of thinking about meaning in life that doesn't accept this binary of like either we are gods, either we do things that echo

down the centuries forever, or if we can't, that must mean that we're nothing and there's no point in it all. There's something kind of very seductive about it, I'm as bad as anyone falling into this, but there's something sort of inhuman about that because it doesn't kind of meet who we really are as humans, which is sort of extraordinary and capable of extraordinary things and also very much not gods. So in the section of the book on cosmic insignificance therapy, I'm sort of, first of all, explaining how I feel that it's very, it can be very energizing and empowering to sort of drop the requirement, the inner requirement that everything we do in our lives has to be sort of extraordinarily important on a grand scale, because obviously if you zoom out far enough,

you can make anybody's life completely unimportant, and you can do that with like Mozart if you zoom out far enough. I mean, some people might be remembered for several thousand years, but just making a million years instead. So there's nothing we can do that matters in that sense. And I think that can be very liberating. It means that if you're prone to indecision and spending time feeling like you've got to do things exactly right, then it's a good reminder that doesn't matter enough to worry about.

But yes, then of course the risk is that you're sort of lifted out of that terrible kind of like, oh no, am I doing things extraordinarily enough with my life? Am I getting things right? Or am I going the wrong way? You lifted out of it so far that it becomes sort of lighter than air and it's like, why am I even here? What's the point? I've been really, really influenced here by the work of a philosopher called Ido Landau, who wrote a book called Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World. One of the points I take him to be making there is just like, it's quite strange that when it comes to thinking about what meaning is, what purpose is, we insist on using these criteria

that either no human, or maybe in some cases sort of a tiny number of humans in each generation, could ever hope to meet. There's something sort of crawl to ourselves in saying that meaning is only at this cosmic level. It's slightly arbitrary, it probably is motivated by our fear of death and wanting to feel like we're immortal and that our legacy will last forever. But you can sort of drop it to some extent. You can say, well, if what I'm doing with my life, influencing a number of, you know, making life better for a number of my contemporaries, or even just, you know, being a good parent, being a good member of my neighborhood. If I'm using a standard of meaning that is defining that as pointless, well, maybe I can just use a different standard rather than have to feel what I'm

doing is meaningless. And so I think Landau would argue that the nihilist, the person who thinks like, there's no point in anything, he thinks he's being really sort of facing the hard facts of life, right? He's saying like, don't kid yourself. There's no point in anything. He thinks he's being really sort of facing the hard facts of life, right? He's saying like, don't kid yourself. There's no point to any of this. But in fact, he's kind of still clinging on to a fantasy, which is that like that he should be able to... he's got very high standards for what meaning should be. And then he finds that the nihilist, then he finds that life doesn't measure up to the standards. So he's like, well, it's all pointless. But in fact, those standards, I feel like we even know that those standards don't apply. Again, we're talking before about meaningful times when you're helping a friend through a crisis

or something like that. There's a feeling of meaning in those times, or a feeling perhaps of aliveness some people might say, that is kind of feels self-justifying. Sure, you can still point out that in any X number of thousands of years it wouldn't have mattered that you were there for that person, but it mattered then. And Landau has this great line about, we're always doing this thing to ourselves where we're saying, well, it's not a meaningful human existence because something that we couldn't be expected to do as humans is something that we're not doing that thing. If someone loves their dog, you don't kind of correct them and tell them

that actually their dog is no good because it can't drive. If someone has a really nice chair in their house that's real pleasure to sit on, you don't say, well, no, it's a useless chair because it can't boil water for a cup of tea. We don't expect those things of those things, so fine. And can we maybe not expect of ourselves as finite humans, these kind of godlike acts of cosmic meaning, and still find that the meaning that is available to us as finite humans is actually like really, really something serious and important, and that becoming more and more wholeheartedly human is maybe a better goal in life than trying to sort of escape the human condition and become a

superhuman. That makes a lot of sense and that's the only place that I can reconcile it all of her is. Yeah, in the big picture, I'm never going to bend the arc of the universe. I have no delusion about that, but I'll matter to my kids and I'll matter to my wife and I'll matter to my friends and that's the focus. Which then brings us back full circle to the trap of productivity. Because, at least for me, this is maybe, I don't know if you struggle with it in this warped way, I then say, well, gosh, I have this real sense of urgency. I'm back to now wanting to control time because I know this statistics. Once my kids are 18, I have virtually no time left with them.

They say on average, you have 19 years with your children. 18 of them occur in the first 18 years of their life. One year of total time with them occurs once they go off to college. That's it, cumulative time. So I then think, oh my gosh, I have to master my time because I have such a, it's not just the finitude of my life. It's an even greater finitude of the time I have with my kids.

Now I'm doubly whipping myself to make the most of my time. And you know, my wife and I have this discussion a little time, which is like, God, I wish I didn't have to do anything. Like, I wish I could do nothing until our kids were all gone. And I wish I could do a reverse retirement. I wish I could retire for the next 15 years.

And then I'll work the remaining decades of my life when they're gone anyway. All of these things are irrational thoughts, but this is the psychoses, neuroses that kind of fuels it. It's funny, the format of conversation like this is such that you say that and then it's like, I feel like now I'm going to offer the solution, but I'm just like, yeah, I totally get it.

And I think that, and I totally feel it too. And I'm not sure that there is a solution, but I think that a lot of what we're talking about is I think there's a shift from doing things unconsciously to doing things consciously that is a solution. But I think that a lot of what we're talking about is I think there's a shift from doing things unconsciously to doing things consciously that is really important and that, you know, knowing and seeing that there is this trade-off is in some ways the best that we can hope for that trying to solve the problem through time mastery is not going to make things better because that's going to be undertaken in the unconscious belief that there's a way of maximizing your capacity so much that you can spend all the time that feels like it matters with your kids and you can spend all the time that feels like it matters on the work and it's like if the starting point is that that isn't possible, then firstly you make wiser decisions around the edges. Maybe you do backpedal a little bit on certain work things in order to maximize a bit more time with kids. Maybe you do

organize your time in certain strategic ways to sort of make those gains around the edges and free up capacity. But more fundamentally I feel like you can just sort of see, yeah, it's a sad truth about being who we are and being fortunate enough to have these different domains of our lives that we value it, if people who are parents and people who have work that gives them meaning or whatever other things might be competing in their lives. And so this comes back before actually, I wanted to say in response to you talking about the person you're talking about who died and the fact that one doesn't stop feeling sad about those things or struggling with these things.

The person who thinks they're going to find a way to master their time and make enough time for everything is trapped in this kind of future-oriented anxiety. The person who sort of sees the truth about trade-offs and the truth about fin, doesn't suddenly become happy and reconciled to it all, but it's a different kind of feeling. It's a kind of poignancy, right? There's a sort of sad tinge to life that you don't get away from, but I'm sort of struggling to articulate this, but it's part of living a meaningful life

is to just sort of be consciously in that fact that we don't get all the time we would wish to have. I don't know if that made sense. It does, and I think going back to what we talked about earlier, I think that's why I have yet to construct this unifying theory because a unifying theory in some ways suggests a solution. It's a unifying theory in some ways suggests a solution. It's a series of equations. Unifying theories and physics are equations.

I don't think there's an equation here, even though my engineering background wants one. And there isn't. And a lot of the physiologic stuff can be broken down into equations. We can talk about cardiac output as a function of contractility and stroke volume and heart rate and systemic vascular resistance and all these things. Like, we can really talk about physiologic stuff that way. Now, of course, at the cellular level, we're still hosed. I mean, there's a lot we can't talk about in that regard.

But we still have biological mechanisms that we somewhat understand. This is much more difficult. And if people are sitting here listening to this on a podcast that's about longevity and asking why are we talking about this, well, I would argue if you're not talking about this, what the hell does that other stuff matter? Right, and I think you really put your finger on it with the idea that a unifying theory suggests a solution. It's the acceptance of the fact that there isn't a solution that is such a powerful psychological transition, I think. And it totally goes along with doing everything you

possibly can to maximize both the quality of your experience and the amount of time you can have the probability of having more time to have those experiences, but it steps away from this idea that one day you're going to find the solution to the human condition. There are all these great sayings and phrases and ways of putting it that come out of Zen Buddhism where people are sort of pointing to this notion that what drives us crazy is thinking that there has to be a solution to the condition in which we find ourselves. So quote, I used at the beginning of the book from Jocco Back, the American Zen teacher, is she said, what makes it unbearable is your

mistaken belief that it can be cured, which is quite an interestingly sort of medical way of stating the problem. Friend of mine years ago, who's a meditation person as well, said, from a certain point of view, everything is palliative care, because none of us is getting out of this alive. There are plenty of sort of moclecious sayings that pinpoint the same problem. I don't think that's a recipe for nihilism. I think that's a recipe for letting go of a quest that wasn't possible in order to really, really get involved in the quest that is possible. There's so much I learned from your book. And again, as I said, I think there are places

where it overlaps so much with others, and it reinforces things that I've already seen the value in. And one of the most important is what Ryan Holiday writes about as stillness and what you write about as atelic activities. My reading of this, because I take notes when I'm reading a book. So what I wrote at the bottom of that page was atelic activity is the antidote. That was my note in red pen. The antidote meaning what I was referring to I think was the aversion we have to being still. The aversion we have to being alone with our thoughts and things like that. Same more about this. Why is, you know, you have so many great examples in the book.

You could draw from any of them, but just broadly speaking, why are you and Ryan coming at this same conclusion from totally different, you know, Ryan is coming at it purely through a stoic philosophy lens. You're coming at it, frankly, through the lens of observation and empiricism. The idea of an atylic activity, which is coming by a philosophical cure and set here, is this the notion that of an activity that is done for itself alone, not to get somewhere, not to get something else,

that it's not the kind of thing that you will ever have done enough of. And so the example I use in the book, just because it's something I enjoy a lot, is hiking. You can't make hiking in a meaningful sense more efficient, because you're just, I'm sure you can walk in more efficient ways than others, but the point is simply that the reason that people are drawn to an activity like that is for the experience itself.

Sure, there are some ancillary health benefits, absolutely, but you're not trying to get somewhere either in terms of training or in terms of geographically trying to get somewhere. It's just, it's done for itself alone. A lot of kind of activities around arts, music, dance can be pursued in a more sort of, in a way that culminates in something, but they don't have to be, and a lot of the enjoyment people get is in itself alone. And yeah, I think what Ryan means by stillness is also something that almost by definition can't be an instrumental use of time. And so I think the unifying idea here is that there is something wrong with pursuing a life in which time is considered exclusively instrumentally, so that you're always assessing the value of how you're using

your time by where it's leading you and how well it's getting you to that goal. Because of course, at some point either this has to cash out in a present moment of meaning, or you're always postponing, it has the effect of sort of always postponing the moment of truth into the future. And there's a great quote that I use in Book as well from John Maynard Keynes, the economist, who I think gets at the point of why we do this, why we want to live for future activities, even though it's a kind of anxious way to live, even though we're never quite at the moment of fulfillment. It's because by projecting our interests in what we're doing constantly into the future, you're sort of securing what Cain's called a spurious immortality for them.

So he's got this quote where he says, the pervasive man does not love his cat, but only the cat's kittens, nor in truth the kittens, but only the kittens' kittens, and in truth the kittens, but only the kittens kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of catdom, as he puts it. And it's kind of a terrible way to live because you never get to actually love your pet or plug in there, whatever the other benefit or value of an activity would be. But it has this great advantage on a subconscious level that like it's all because of some way you're getting.

And as long as you're still getting somewhere, then you don't have to fully kind of face the pain of the fact that like, no, this is it, that it's not a dress rehearsal, that this is the time you have to use meaningfully if you're going to have a meaningful life. And I fall into this trap all the time, you know, of sort of catching myself, seeing that I'm really thinking about two days time when this stuff's out of the way, when this other stuff has been completed, when I figured out how to do something like, then I'll start living in a present way and really getting the value of life. But what we're really doing, I think I agree with Keynes about this, is constantly projecting

that moment forwards because it kind of feels like you don't have to die. Yeah, and I think it's worth saying that again, Oliver, because it's so profound. I think this is the jugular issue. I think it is this connection to our mortality and our finitude that is underpinning all of this difficulty because on the one hand, it just shouldn't be this hard. I sometimes laugh at my struggle with this where I'll have a number of things over the next month that ostensibly all are enjoyable. Oh, I'm doing this thing with my kids on this day

and we're gonna go camping on this day and oh, I've got a day set aside to go racing my car on the track. I mean, these are all things that are just pure bliss to me. And when I look back at the month after the fact, I realize every time you were in one of those moments, you were thinking about the next one, right? It's just, it's tragic.

And I think this point of, am I doing that because subconsciously, I need to do that to avoid confronting the finite nature of time. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's kind of how I'm hearing and processing this. Yeah, it makes total sense. And I think, you know, certainly in my experience, but I take solace from the fact that in, I don't think, the great philosophers of history found any alternatives to this, it's not that we need to aim to leave that mindset behind in favor of a kind of total perfect reconciliation to mortality. It's just that you shift from this kind of avoidant stance, which triggers so much kind of

saps the meaning from life, to a stance that kind of looks it in the face and feels kind of sad about it. It's like it's not that you don't want to get tripped up on the idea that you're supposed to become totally zen about this awful human fate. You can just integrate to some extent, only to some extent in my case, but you can integrate that poignancy into the experience. Then you do sort of land, you do, you do sort of fall back into the moment that you're in. It's tricky because I think that those of us in this kind of productivity mindset have

spent a lot of time kind of beating ourselves up for not doing enough yet or not getting to a certain point. And it's very easy to take that same stance towards the challenge of reconciling yourself to it all, right? And then feeling that you're somehow falling short because you don't feel completely zen about mortality. I don't think there's any reason to believe anyone ever does. You know, I took some comfort in knowing there was at least one other person who did the math, which I forget who it was you were referring to in your book. You

referring to someone though who had basically done the math on how improbable each of our existence is, anybody who I guess has thought through embryology can't help but think about that, which is, what's the probability that that sperm on that day hit that egg on that month to result in me being here? And you only need to think about this through the lens of siblings, like you have siblings that are, they're genetically similar, but they're completely

different people. And so therefore, there's a sub trillion probability event that I even exist. And one of the things you point out that can be, again, I'm sort of thinking about the two lens of partial antidotes. There's no solution to this problem, as you said, it's palliative care. But what are some partial antidotes. There's a solution to this problem, as you said, it's palliative care. But what are some partial antidotes? Another one might be flipping the problem statement from not, oh, I can't believe I only have 4,000 weeks. How am I going to make the most of them to, I can't believe I even get one week.

It's just a miracle we're here. Absolutely. 100%. Going to that idea of getting to have the time is such a powerful transition. Partly because, and this is kind of, hide-a-guer and all sorts of stuff I grappled with and trying to write this book and don't recommend anyone else, grapples with hide-a-guer, but partly because it shifts the attention from the specific content of experience to the fact of their being experience. And that is really helpful because it means that actually you don't need to spend quite so much time worrying about what you're doing the right things because you just get that sense that it's a miracle that you're doing anything. It makes, potentially, makes sitting in a traffic jam, at least, if not pleasurable,

then less enraging because experience is happening, like, one of the chances, and that's kind of amazing, even if you're doing something that we would normally characterise as really frustrating. I mentioned somebody in the book who had this experience after a friend of his died unexpectedly and really dialing into an appreciation of the fact that there is experience as opposed to exactly what it is you're experiencing. One of my friends said something very similar and I thought this was just such a great thought, which is we all sort of lament getting older. Let's put aside the number, the birthday. But just the changes that occur. It's not fun to experience more pain. It's not fun to have a little more ache. It's not fun to have less pep in your step. And at some point, we're all experiencing that. And she

said very wisely, well, consider the alternative, right? Being dead. Yeah, maybe it sucks to turn 65 and look in the mirror and not see the face that you saw when you were 25. But isn't this better than having died when you were 25? It's another way to sort of think about this problem. Let's go back to Martin Heidegger because I'm going to take your word for it because after you read a little bit of his writing, I realized I'm not going to be smart enough to interpret what he writes. It was way too obtuse for me. I'm not sure it's a question of smarts. It's a very, very impenetrable and endlessly debated question, what an, what an earth he means. Yeah. But anyway, but let's talk about this idea of having versus being time, because this comes up so much in the book,

but I think you're always going back to his work, not withstanding the disclaimer that he was a Nazi sympathizer and that can color maybe your view of him as a person, but his philosophy nevertheless is interesting. No, absolutely. And slightly to my regret, after the book came out, I discovered very similar outlook on this question in the work of one of the founders of Zen called Dogen, writing in I think the 12th, 13th century, and he wasn't a Nazi, so I should have, and he was the original.

I mean, he thought about it like centuries before. Right, he came first and he wasn't a Nazi, so and it's much clearer. It's kind of puzzling, but it's not aggressively impertorable in the way that a Heidegger often is. But this is just this thought that, yeah, I think you're right. It comes up again and again in this material that maybe in some sense, being and time are the same thing. Heidegger's master work is called being and time are the same thing, Hydrogas Masterwork is called being and time.

One of Dogans, most famous works, translates as being time with a hyphen as if they're the same thing. And it's kind of strange to think about it first, but there's something very true about it, this notion that maybe, if the idea that we have time, if you can see the ways in which that is flawed, you never really have time. You never really have more than a single present moment.

You don't get it to keep in the way that physical possessions say we have. You don't have time in that sense. And if there are all sorts of problems that come from treating time as this resource that we need to maximize, and then it starts doing strange things like you try to maximize it, and you end up with more stuff to do, and all these kind of perverse things because we're treating it as something that it isn't. Well, maybe it makes a bit more sense to think of the idea that you are time, that you are the moment, and that you are a kind of, in hindsight, your life will have been

a portion of the time that you were. This is not an idea necessarily that, you know, people working on the physics of time would have much time for, but there's a really powerful shift here that it's basically beyond words. So I'm just sort of pointing at it and hoping that some people hearing this will be able to feel the shift that I'm talking about. It sort of returns you to your life. It stops you engaging in this attempt to sort of, yeah, be the air traffic controller of your life from above or sort of try to get out in front of your time and steer it.

And it puts you back into the position of just being a portion of time in a way that feels to me really liberating. There's a very famous quote from a story by Jorge Luis Borges, the novelist, a really mangling, but it goes something like, time is a river which bears me along, but I am the river. Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. Time is a tiger that attacks me, but I am the tiger. And I think he's making the same transition, right? We're constantly trying to sort of fight time, but actually we just are time. And yes, I think it's probable that this is not just beyond words for me, but that it might be sort of, in some definitive systematic sense, beyond words,

which is possibly also why it's so hard to understand in the work of Heidegger. But I think we're gesturing at something important here anyway. How do you think about, or how should one think about almost doing what we're kind of suggesting not to do, but for a different purpose? So I think what we're sort of saying is, look, if you jump into the productivity hack space, it's a fallacy.

You're going to chase your tail and you're never going to be made whole. Just as, and you use this example, just as the alcoholic can never quench their thirst fully. Just as no amount of alcohol can numb the pain that is at the root of that addiction, no amount of productivity can numb what is gnawing away at the need to achieve and be productive. I know that for people out there who can't relate to extreme appetites for either

alcohol or productivity, they might not have a clue what the hell we're talking about, but they're going to have to take it on a leap of faith. Those are very true statements. But nevertheless, I think as humans, we work with tools. We work with protocols. We work with procedures. We work with tactics. And we try to make the best of the situation.

We try to pally it. You write about several of these. I think we should talk about some of these things because I think they make a lot of sense. So let's talk about these three principles of paying yourself first, limiting work in progress, and of course we already addressed, but it's worth revisiting, resisting the allure of middleing priorities. I like those three. Let's talk about how to operationalize them. Sure, and I think you're right. We're getting at this question of like, what is the role of a technique, or a method, or a productivity system? Once you

have begun a little bit to go through this process of kind of disenchantment with the lure of total productivity and infinite capacity. And yeah, I think that's the moment at which to use these kinds of techniques. It's once you're sort of no longer thinking that they're going to save your soul, they're just useful things to do. And specific ones, like the ones you mentioned, are well-attuned to the job of embracing limitation and finitude. They're not the kind of techniques that are going to lead you astray back onto that treadmill. To paying yourself first, very well-known concept in personal finance, that when you you get paid you should take some money

out of your paycheck and put it into savings and investments right away. And then your regular expenses come out of what's left rather than spending what you need to spend and hoping that there'll be some leftover at the end because there isn't because we live up to our means. And the same thing is true of time. If you take the approach of like clearing the decks, I'm going to get through all the stuff that I need to get through so that I get to this time when I can finally put real focused attention onto the things I care about, that's never going to happen. For some of the reasons we've discussed, the decks will never be, never be clear. So paying yourself first is just the act of taking that important thing and doing like at least a little bit on it now. First thing in the morning, right away,

in other words, not trying to clear the space for it, but just claiming the time for it and learning to tolerate the anxiety of the fact that while you do that, more emails will be coming in, more things will be filling up the decks, asking for your attention. And this can be, you know, work related, but it could be something else. Like, if there's a project you want to work on, a creative pursuit, a relationship you want to nurture, like, it's just the acceptance that at some point you're going to have to do that in a present moment.

And it's not going to feel like it's the right time. It's not going to feel like everything else is out of the way, because everything is never going to be out of the way. So you could operationalize that as, you know, spending the first hour of the work day doing your most important priority, something like that. There are lots and lots of different ways to make that concrete. Limiting your work in progress, again,

is one of these methods that just acknowledges up front that your bandwidth is incredibly limited, that your time is incredibly limited and says, okay, now what? And there are again lots of ways to do this, but this is just the idea of setting an upper limit to the number of tasks or projects that you're going to allow to sort of be on your plate at once. So I illustrate this in the book using this idea of two-to-do lists. This is an extremely simple

way of doing this, right? You could in principle have two to do lists. A one, an open list where you put absolutely anything and everything that's on your plate. It could have like 400 items on it. The other is a closed list. It might only have five slots on it. And the rule is that you feed tasks from the long list to the short list, until those five slots are full. And then you can't add any more until you've freed up a slot by completing one of those tasks. So it's just a sort of artificial bottleneck that you're placing on your workflow. And all that's happening here is you're taking a fact that is already true for all of us, which is that

we can only give our attention to a handful of things on a given day and a given week. And you're just making it conscious and you're saying, okay, I'm going to make all these other things wait outside the door until these things have been done. There are lots of other ways of implementing this. Anyone who's familiar with Canban methods of project management will recognize the resonance is here. It's just a way of articulating and making conscious the limitations that we work with as humans. And the extraordinary thing is that when you do this, you actually find you do get more

productive. By being willing to make the other things wait, you do end up processing more tasks, more projects than if you didn't. And then yes, finally, the middleing priorities I do is just that there are lots of things that really feel like they matter. And those are the ones you have to be aware of if they are not the ones that really matter the most, because the urge to try to find a way to make time for all of them and end up not doing any of them well is really strong. You made a point before but I want to reiterate it because I think it's so important which

is there's two types of saying no. There's saying no to things you don't actually want to do that maybe on the surface might look like they're worth doing but deep down you don't want to do them so you're going to have to say no. But then they're saying no to things that you do want to do, but you know are not top five. And, you know, about three years ago, I really started to take that seriously. So seriously, in fact, that became the source of, or the substrate for my journaling was, I kept a no journal.

All the things I said no to, with an emphasis on things that I actually wanted to do were all FOMO machines, but I have some strong FOMO genes. Boy, it was really difficult to do that and I created a system of accountability where I had a person that I would show up with to discuss my no list. These are all the things I said no to that I actually wanted to do. So, again, I think those three things all fit together very well around that. I think, again, that's not a solution. It's abandoned. Right. And the discomfort that you feel, I think it's really important to sort of zero in on that, the discomfort that we feel when we say no to something that we did want to do. It's very different to the kind of talked up feeling that you get when you're racing through stuff to try to not

have to say no to anything. It's unpleasant, but it's an encounter with reality and it's good in the end. We didn't talk much about it, but I think you part and parcel with this because we've touched on it is this idleness of version and the flip side of that is the need to be patient. And how impatient we are. Tell the story of, I forget the name of the professor at Harvard, but she has a class and art class and the students going through it have to do this painful experience which you yourself undertook. Yeah, Jennifer Roberts. She has her incoming art history

students at Harvard choose a painting or a sculpture in the area. There are many, many venues to do that in the Harvard area. And then go and look at it for three hours straight. And I did this, yeah, with a painting by DeGar in the Harvard Art Museums. And the idea here, the motivation for her came from seeing the students who were coming into her course and feeling that their whole lives were so geared to speed, both just generally because of the way the technological culture works, but also because of the pressures of highly competitive university, right? There's all these kind of incentives to get stuff done

as fast as you can. That it was actually her job she felt to kind of try to influence the tempo of what they were doing to slow them down. And she did it herself and I did it. And the really fascinating thing that you learn in this context, in the art case, I'll explain why it's relevant beyond that. But in the art cases that like, if you can sit with the intense discomfort that is involved in looking at a painting for such an obviously absurd amount of time, right?

She knows it's an outrageous length of time. That's the point. After the first sort of hour or whenever it happens for you, when the discomfort begins to fall away a bit and you really just get into a different zone, you literally see things in the painting that you hadn't noticed before. I don't mean you come up with smart, fancy sounding new interpretations of what you're seeing. I mean like literal objects in paintings that you apparently didn't see for sort of 45 minutes of looking and looking at that painting. So the reward for kind of, you're giving the experience

the time that it takes instead of trying to dictate the time that it takes, which is extremely tempting for us in all sorts of contexts. And so I'm sort of using that in the book as one example of the benefits of sort of being willing to take experiences at the speed that they need. Reading is another really classic example. You can sort of do a certain amount to read faster and to train yourself to read more efficiently, but it's very small, really really before you start losing the experience, especially with kind of creative writing fiction.

And I think that a lot of the time when people say that they don't have time to read or that they don't like reading anymore or so whatever, what they mean is that they really hate that it needs them to slow down, that a sort of mind conditioned to speed and to going fast, it has to kind of surrender to the fact that reading, especially if it's like a good novel, something is just going to take a certain amount of time that you just have to let it take. And it's really striking how uncomfortable that feels, how deeply unpleasant it is to sort of give up control over the pace of something like that. Because like, it doesn't feel like it doesn't make any sense that it should be as painful as it is, but it is. And then I think that on the other side of that,

there are huge rewards. What do you think problems that we encounter tell us about how to become more patient. In other words, what is our relationship with a problem have to do with becoming more patient? Wow, I could go in so many different directions. What's coming to mind is that there's a patient that's involved in allowing a problem to be problem to be unresolved until a solution presents itself and being willing to not hurry forward to resolutions just to get rid of the feeling of having a problem. I've found this myself, I got it from this book The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck, but I found this myself in really mundane context, but it's so interesting. It's such an education. When something sort of goes wrong in the house, like, you know, when there's some problem with the... I remember this happening very vividly when there was a problem with the water supply to the dishwasher, comes out from...

I don't know anything about plumbing, but like comes out from under the sink and then it connects to the dishwasher. And the urge that we have, and Scott Pet writes about this in the context of fixing a car with no knowledge of how to fix cars, the urge that we have in those contexts is so often to just sort of like fiddle around in the hope that almost by chance you would like fix the problem and never works, you know,

because it takes expertise of some sort of understanding of what's going on anyway to be able to fix the problem. And instead learning, and this I do literally do this now with things that involve appliances and things like that, to just be willing to look at the situation, to trace where the pipes go and where they connect and what the joins are. And like, you don't learn how to be a plumber in this process, but you just see the situation. And the solution becomes clear, right? It becomes obvious that, oh, I see, right, that should go there.

And it's come loose from there. So I can just tighten that. Now it'll work. And you know, that's a really mundane example, but I think the point there applies in all sorts of other kinds of problems that we hurry to solutions because we want to feel like we're in control of the process, even if it leads to some terrible outcome. And to sort of stay in that space of not knowing. John Keats, the poet, called negative capability, such an extraordinary phrase.

The ability to stay in uncertainty and not having a resolution, and not always to be kind of like fidgety restlessly trying to get things all tied up with a bow. So yeah, that's what that makes me think about. And let's think about incrementalism, because I loved this idea, which is that, you know, it's a bit of a tortoise and hare thing. You write about the professor who, or the study, I think, that looks at more productive versus less productive academics, and just from a writing perspective. And the amount of writing done by the more productive people on any given day is rather unimpressive, right? I feel like this is something that you, I'm sure, can speak to in the sort of physiological side of things, because it is something to do with like the nature of writing as an athletic activity or something.

But Robert Boyce, the professor you're talking about, found that the most consistently productive writers were the ones who made their writing work only a modest, moderate part of their days and their weeks. This meant that it didn't become something intimidating. There weren't these sort of huge psychodramas with having your life dominated by these tasks. They didn't start to resent it or to procrastinate on it for that reason. It was just this modest thing, and then the consistently applied over days and days and days and weeks, the output really built up much more rapidly than the people who would sort of swing wildly back and forth between putting in huge numbers of hours and exhausting themselves, and then not being able to do it for days after that because they were too

tired. Where this has really made a difference to me, just literally in my writing practice is in the power of stopping, right? Because this is the part of what he emphasized was that he actually advocated that if you find yourself on a role, right? If you say, well, I'm only going to write for an hour or two because I'm going to keep it this modest thing in my life, if you find yourself on a role at the end of that time, it's incredibly tempting to just like want to keep going and ride that wave of motivation. And he was a proponent of stopping at that point, like making yourself stop being as important as making yourself start. I don't know, you may have a better explanation of what's going on here, but I've found it in all sorts of contexts, right? If

you stop the thing that you're doing sooner than you want to, it does something very helpful to the motivation, like it makes you want to come back to it the next day in a way that is not the case if you let yourself get spent. And boys makes the point that that's actually wanting to ride the wave of motivation is actually a kind of impatience very often. It's a kind of belief that you've got to grab the inspiration while you've got it now, grab the energy while you've got it now because you might not get it again. And it's actually very, actually great confidence to be able to say, no, I'm going to stop now. Like I said, I sense, and I would even say that physically, I've transitioned more to that type of a relationship with exercise in my older age, call it. My philosophy used to be the exact opposite. Maybe there was a bunch of other reasons for that.

But it was clearly a sense of every day you had to burn every match. That was really how I felt about it. And today, and I think it's a healthier approach, it's, I will always leave matches in the match box at the end of the workout. I'm never going to burn every single match. Now, there's an exception here and there. You know, some days you just really want to go for it and really see what your limit truly is. But it is actually better, I think, from a longevity standpoint. And I say that physiologically, but it is actually better, I think, from a longevity standpoint, and I say that physiologically, but just as much psychologically, to leave the workout with a little bit more,

with a little bit of, I could do a little bit more, and I can't wait to get back and do it again. And I think part of that is just preserving the drive to be back in there, because I think if you're burning every match every day, it gets awfully hard to show up. And in reality, you're probably not actually doing as much good physically. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Oliver, you close the book with sort of 10 steps. 10, I think you called them tools or steps for embracing our finitude.

We won't go through them now because I want people to get the book. If they haven't already done so, I want people to get the book if they haven't already done so. I want them to read the book. I want them to kind of go through this in the way that I've done it with a highlighter and tried to learn what can be done. But are there any of those ten that you think we haven't at least somewhat peripherally touched on that you want to dive into? I think we haven't spoken so much in general about the degree to which this desire for control over time manifests as a desire for control over the future for as an antidote to worry as well as being a sort of

productivity can all the rest of it. I'm certainly a sort of inveterate warrior about the future and I write in the book about the ways in which a lot of worry and kind of obsessive planning can be understood as an attempt to kind of from the standpoint of the present kind of throw a straight jacket over the future, right? To feel like you've got it under your control, you know what's coming. When in fact, another of the aspects of our being finite human beings is like what's been called like our fact another of the aspects of our being fine-eyed human beings is like what's been called like our total vulnerability to events, right? Anything could happen at any moment to anyone. That's just the way it is to be a human. And so one of the things that I, we haven't talked about, it's one of those items in the appendix is this idea of a quite

precise idea about curiosity as a stance to take towards life. And in the context of that, I'm talking about being a, I'm borrowing the advice of somebody else about being a researcher in relationships, right? This stance where your attitude towards any kind of interpersonal relationship, although it comes from how to sort of relate best to small children, as a parent or a caregiver, is this idea of like instead of trying to get things to go in a certain way, or hoping that they'll go in a certain way, taking the stance of like wondering how they're going to go,

taking the stance of trying to sort of find out what you can about another person. Having that sort of open stance that says like, I wonder what's going to happen. I wonder what this other person is like, rather than that kind of attempt, that background attempt to kind of see if they're going to line up with what you feel you need to happen or how you feel you need people to be. So I think that sort of to happen or how you feel you need people to be. So I think that sort of idea of being sort of curious, it's a bit of a cliché these days, right? You should be curious in life. But it's specifically that kind of stance that is agnostic within limits about what happens next or how a relationship with somebody turns out to be. I think that's a really resilient and helpful attitude to have in life.

It's probably one of the least specific of those 10 at the back of the books, but it seemed like the one to mention here. You know, there's another one all over that's sort of on this list that I think about a lot. It actually kind of overlaps with Bill Perkins' ethos and die with zero, And it's the idea of being instantaneously generous. And not sort of punting generosity until another day. I think you'll

enjoy reading die with zero. That was certainly one of the three most important things I took away from that book is we have all these plans to do things tomorrow. It's like, God, this person has been so great in my life. And I can't wait to show them in 10 years how great they've been. It's like, what the hell does it? How about you show them today? How much they've mattered to you. So tell me for you how this came on that list. What brought this on the list for you?

Well, I just came across this extraordinary line from the meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, about how his personal practice is, if a generous thought arises in his mind that sort of implies some action donating to a charity, sending a note to somebody to say you appreciate them, his practice is to try to do that thing immediately rather than later. What really resonated with me about this is, I've always had a lot of difficulty with stuff, especially coming out of mindfulness and Buddhism that implies to me that we should be more generous or we should be more grateful or kind. It's quite hard to will that kind of situation. But what this is is a way of saying, well,

actually a lot of these urges in most decent people do arise all the time, right? You already think that a certain friend you appreciate that they're in your life. You already feel like actually, it'll be really good to make a donation to that particular philanthropic cause. The problem is that you just then like, say, well, I'll do it later

when I'm gone all these other things out of the way. The problem is acting on it, not generating the warm feeling. It's hard to generate the warm feeling originally. So I really took this on board from reading about it and tried to do it, but it's also, I think it goes beyond just this one example of generosity that I think it's really important to do it in that context. Time and again, you find yourself in this situation, or I find myself in the situation of wanting to become the kind of person who does things in a different way, who is always sends lots of generous notes to friends, or who I don't know, could be lots of other good habits in life.

And the desire to become that kind of person actually ends up as an obstacle to just doing that thing because you tell yourself like okay, well, that's gonna take a whole like reorganization of my schedule or like you know just a bit busy today to start being that kind of person. I heard from somebody who said that like he'd made a deal with himself that he was gonna send like three appreciative notes a week or something to people in his world, or maybe even it was every day. And catching himself, like as a result of this plan, not just sending a appreciative note because like he was on track to becoming the kind of person he did all the time. It's one of the downsides of the otherwise, you know, very laudable aim of trying to develop good habits is you can really let the kind of idea of development of a habit

stand in the way of doing the thing. It's daunting to consider that you might spend 20 minutes a day from now on meditating every day, and I can get in the way of just like doing it once now and then deal with tomorrow tomorrow. The instantaneous part of that I I think, is really important. It's like, you'll find a way and a reason to postpone that thing, but it's really powerful to try to make it your actual,

make the explicit practice be, I will do that kind of thing when the thought arises. Well, there are eight other great points there, which again, I just want to make sure we're not overselling this. They're not the solution to this problem. You're not going to go and adopt these ten ideas or behaviors, and somehow, at least if you're me, presumably for you, be at complete peace with the duration of your life. Never struggle again with trying to achieve something, never again, struggle with trying to be productive. I mean, none of these things. But, boy, if we can move the needle a little bit and focus on these experiences and enjoy the experiences that do define those

4,000 weeks more than the trying to grasp water, which is effectively what it's like when you're trying to master your productivity. I think there's something there. And for me, I think just coming to grips with getting a little bit better, as opposed to being perfect, is the best step I can take. The only defense I make for the book not containing the solution to all of this is that no other book contains it either, right? And that moving the needle, that's our job. That's the thing that we can do. That's the thing that's available to us as finite humans. Well, Oliver, thank you very much for not just making the time today, but obviously more importantly, putting the years into this work here, which, as've said before and we've said now, this is kind of one of those books that is a growing list of books for me that speaks to another piece of a life well-lived, both in quantity but more importantly in quality.

Thank you so much. It's been such a privilege to have this conversation. I've really appreciated it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. It's extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members.

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