The Savage Irony Of Trying To Be Productive - Oliver Burkeman

what is imperfection ISM this is my proprietary term because I think you got to have a proprietary term for a sort of umbrella term for this whole approach that has sort of been taking getting clearer and clearer in my mind the last few years and I guess it is the simplest way to talk about it is understanding your built-in limitations as a human your finite time and finite talents finite energy finite attention as um not things you have to spend your whole life struggling to do away with but actually like the portal to a sort of energized and accomplished and interesting life so it's it's about embracing limitations of all kinds including you know the fact that we can't ever produce anything perfectly I was going to say what's an alternative perspective and what are people what's the opposite of imperfection ISM railing against that can't be beaten well obviously perfectionism is one way of putting it but I think the there's a problem with that is that people think about perfectionism as meaning something very narrow which is like you know I'm so obsessed with producing perfect work high standards but right right and I really want to say that that's one example of something broader which I think is everywhere in like productivity advice and personal development culture and all the rest of it which is that what looks like an attempt to like improve and do better and reach New Heights is very often just a kind of psychological avoidance a way of a way of um a way of helping you not have to think about fact that time is short that good relationships and an interesting life involve emotional vulnerability and uh you know that um that you can't control the future and and it's generally a dress inducing challenge to try so you know all these different ways in which we we think we're sort of getting more control over our lives I think very often what we're doing is enabling this avoidance of of uh really confronting what it actually is to C life there is something sort of uh uh mortally hilarious about being a finite human with infinite tasks to do you know in my like the the 21st century momento Mori is is me thinking about the fact that one day I'll be dead but my email address will still continue to receive emails so true yeah it's it's terrifying I mean it's terrifying at first I guess that you know the email example is so powerful because it is just the obvious example of an incoming supply of things that is to all intents and purposes infinite um and we're surrounded by these right there is an infinite effectively infinite number of things that would be useful and interesting to read of places it would be interesting to go of hobbies or business ventures or anything it would be interesting to to launch and get and get involved in money you could earn right none of it has an end point but we have end points uh and and so I think and of course we've got it's not just that the supplies are infinite but the we have Minds that are capable of conceiving of the infinite and of more the or at least of of much more than we could do so like you know you can have 20 completely incompatible dreams for the next 5 years of your life there's no problem with that at all the problem is when you try to bring them into in into reality so I think that's just the thing that I'm always coming back and back around to from a million different angles it's just like what does it mean to actually drop into that reality that you're going to have to choose and that uh most of the things you never get around to doing are not going to been like tedious second tier things that you should have abandoned they're going to have been good things as well but you just didn't get to do them and arguing that this is good news and really empowering and really in favor of productivity is my is my um my mission and my challenge here you say uh the world opens up when you realize you're never going to sort your life out what do you mean I'm glad you brought this up because I think that is is in some ways it's like the governing example for a lot of people maybe just kind of neurotic people like me I don't know but uh of the way in which we try to attain a kind of control over our lives that that is not actually open to us as humans so that sense of like it takes different forms right but it could be I'm going to get completely organized I'm going to get so productive that I never need to uh drop a single ball or fail to meet a demand or it's going to be that I'm so talented at what I'm doing that I really feel the confidence of of like knowing what what what what's going on in work in relationships in parenting there's one that you never uh feel like you you've got a handle on and I think I'm sort of saying like if if you pursue life with this idea that you're going to get to the point where it's all sorted out you're sort of constantly postponing the meaning of life into the future you actually end up doing less because there's all sorts of things you feel that you can't really fully get involved in until the point at which you've sorted life out and so in some ways this new book I wrote is kind of like a Manifesto for like okay what happens if we just accept that you're never going to get life sorted out other people it's like the news the world is there's too many crises it's just a really anxious time in the headlines I want to wait until that's all calmed down and it's like what would you what would happen if you abandoned all that and said like no it has to be now has to be now that you do interesting and meaningful and important stuff because this future point of smooth sailing and control is is never coming that's got me thinking about sort of two types of people there's many types of people but here's two a little taxonomy one being uh the people who have not an external locus of control but uh the restrictions on why they can't do things are because of something that's happening out there I how can I sort myself while the climate is still such a mess or while there's these Global conflicts going on or while we've got this person in power I don't like or this person trying to get in power that I don't like and then there's another version of a person who does the exact same thing but all of their restrictions are inside of themselves how can I start doing my life while my to-do list is still all over the place how can I begin to do that when I'm still at 17 18% body fat and I don't know what diet I'm going to follow how can I do this before I you know it's the same psychology that many people that listen to this show and are fans of your work uh probably chastise others for uh you externalize locus of control and it's like you have an internalized externalized locus of control yeah absolutely and that's really well put and it's like if you're if you're waiting there's something sort of fundamentally absurd for any finite human to sort of to wait to really show up in life whatever that means to you until a point at which you have greater sort of yeah like greater control like you've you you're you're in the driving seat of the situation and so yeah just to put examples on I mean like absolutely one of the things that I get from one portion of people who engage in a very friendly way but slightly critically with things I write sometimes or or talk about is is like well it's all very well giving this advice about how to handle too many emails but the problem is that we live in an economy and a society that that puts people in these impossible work situations you can't just choose to to um to ignore your emails because you know you have to pay the rent um and that's sort of true but but also you've still got to you you know you've still got to make decisions about what you're going to show up for as a finite human and that might involve neglecting some emails and then yeah on the other side of the equation it's like people who are very very in love with that idea that through any manner of philosophies or personal disciplines or the perfect daily routine they're going to master life on their own and for themselves which feels like a more independent way of of living it feels like you're much less um you know indentured to what political party is in power and what stage late capitalism is at but actually it's still sort of giving all the power to like future you who's going to be so great once you've developed all these habits you're going to develop and um uh you know um put in place all the systems and achieve the financial Independence and all the rest of it there's a satra quote where he says I have led a toothless life a toothless life I have never bitten into anything I was waiting I was reserving myself for later on and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone Amazing I've never come across that that line it's it's exactly the point yeah yeah uh yeah ginda Bogle has a similar idea about deferred happiness syndrome that you sort of this sense and it's so it's so common I remember I used to I used to think think this when I spent the Summers uh in between school so I played Cricket uh growing up like a good British boy and um the season obviously really ramps up as soon as you get into summertime especially as a youth Cricket player and I always remember that I would think well summer hasn't really started yet and it would be half a week in and then it would be a week and a half in I think well summer really hasn't it still kind of hasn't started yet and then before I knew it I was getting ready to go back to school and I was thinking but summer hadn't really started yet and I think that that is a it's a microcosm for kind of how we see our life it's this sort of common feeling that your life hasn't yet begun and that the reality you're in at the moment is some sort of Prelude to an idilic future it's totally right and I have you know obviously I'm writing about stuff and talking about stuff that I am a a sort of archetyp sufferer of suffer otherwi would wouldn't be interesting to me but um I think one other sort of point just to get a bit kind of uh self-referential and meta about it obviously is that it is also possible to to hear all this and there are a few books and gurus who talk along these lines and actually become a sort of a different kind of perfectionistic about seizing the moment and being present right I think what we're talking about here this feeling that real life hasn't quite begun yet is in some sense almost Universal and very very natural because it's kind of a it's a protective mechanism against like doing all the feeling and all the realizing that comes from from being uh from seeing what it really is to be uh a human sort of born on the River of time on route to death you know it's terrifying and I don't think anyone necessarily is sort of fully Recon iled to it so it's not that you can sort of snap your fingers and decide okay now I'm just going to show up for my life right now it's more a question in my experience anyway of getting better and better at seeing what you're up to you know seeing what's happening when you get really really invested in some new like habit change project or some new goal setting technique or something not that any of these things are bad but that if what you're doing is really investing in them because you're you're on route to the time when life's really going to matter I think that is a problem there's a life cycle thing to this too right it's like it's a lot easier and more reasonable to think uh that most of life is coming later when you're 19 and kind of a little bit absurd uh I can I can relate when you uh when you're in your 40s right it's like that that's what midlife does to a lot of people it's like oh hang on at certain point I can't carry on claiming that real life is going to be I mean I'm in mid August I can't say that Summer's not not started yet right right yeah there's um it's funny thinking about how the the push that we have the the tools that we use to kind of try and bring uh life under our control and how many of those end up actually pushing life off um I do think I I've had this argument for a long time my background was in uh productivity when I first started the show you know David Allen was coming on and the Peter C Brown that wrote make it stick you know like I was fully in the weeds uh absolutely Ali abdal pilled and I I think that there is an argument to be made for for insecure overachievers like us I think there is an argument to be made that you probably need to spend a good bit of time ideally when you are a bit younger because you can afford to waste it uh just learn learning what a GTD method is and learning about time blocking and learning about kind of the physics of the system I think that is important in many ways because once you've learned some of the rules you can then begin to play with them a little bit uh but just saying I have no idea how to manage my time now I'm just like Oliver said I can just be kind of this free flowing thing I'm just going to like live life bro I get that but if you'd had a little bit of um the basic foundations to this I think you can get a bit further so this is my uh justification for why everyone should be a productivity bro for six months out of their life and then after that they can graduate to being an imperfectionist oh yeah no totally and I think in in many ways it's it's it's even you can make an even stronger case for the the productivity side of things uh than that I think you know I probably have in certain bits of Journalism here and there just sort of mocked the the whole world of productivity culture but I'm a huge sucker for it myself definitely you know there are there are it's a bit like Shakespeare or the Bible right there are so many bits of GTD and David Allen that we're all using all the time now that nobody realizes that he deserves the credit for them because they've just sort of sunk into our way of way of thinking um and absolutely I think the the problem for me came the problem for me was always in hindsight that I would jump on a new philosophy or a new system and it's almost religious right I don't think it's I don't think it's um inappropriate to say that on some level I would think that this was going to like save my soul I was think I would think that this was going to be like my salvation it was going to all the things that were largely unconsciously in in me about you know feeling like an insecure overachiever right feeling inadequate feeling that I needed to do all sorts of things in order to just be kind of basically okay and justify my existence I would put all of that onto the new system that was going to um organize my life and I was going to get to a point where the system was in place and it was just like um set it and forget it you know it's just like then it's just gonna it's just going to run and life's going to be easy and all these achievements are going to follow without me having to go through the the sort of um inner work and you that doesn't work but that's not the fault of David Allen coming up with a useful and interesting way of organizing your projects and your tasks that's something that we do very naturally and other people do it with like religions or they do it with um uh political movements or they do it with kind of substance abuse probably on some level you could you could see all of these things as being different ways in which we're trying to like uh save ourselves from being where we where we are and who we are as as finite humans and it's really great to sort of see through that and then yeah carry on using the productivity techniques no problem at all how do you describe insecure overachievers I fear there's uh maybe quite a few thousand listening yeah I mean this is I think there is a sort of very formal way in which this idea has been defined in Psychology but to me it's just the idea of people who achieve a lot are you know get a lot done are very amb are ambitious are probably broadly speaking praised or reaffirmed by Society in general for for doing that uh maybe described as driven um but ultimately doing all of that ultimately to try to sort of fill some hole inside right to to sort of it's the feeling that you're scrambling up towards a minimum Baseline of being an adequate person as opposed to you know I'm an adequate person everything's fine I am enough in the famous phrase and now I'm going to accomplish some things because it's really fun to accomplish them it's got that much more desperate sense of like ultimately I need to do this or I'm kind of uh not okay and I think that um you know I think once you start thinking in these terms and you just sort of look at politics and look at the world of business and all sorts of other areas you know entertainment and the Arts you start to see I mean maybe it's unfair of me and I'm just apply I'm just seeing my my issues and other people but you start to see like there are a lot of very successful high-profile people who it seems pretty obvious are sort of in that locked in that Dynamic and I think a part of what I'm trying to do in my working in this new book is like rescue ambition and accomplishment and all the rest of it not so I don't want to say in order to get past my insecure overachievement I just have to kind of like settle for mediocrity and give up and do nothing I want to say like no there is a way of uh not treating your whole life as a kind of uh scrambling towards a basic sense of adequacy where you are then actually freed up to do a whole ton of cool meaningful interesting impressive things precisely ly because you're no longer actually um doing it for this other reason and that it kind of doesn't work when you're doing with other reason right I mean people do get a lot of success but there's always this undertone of dissatisfaction and problems with like deep procrastination that come up and Desperation guilt shame yeah yeah yeah intimately intimately familiar the insecure overachiever thing I actually I didn't know it was a thing outside of your work but I first read about it through you uh and your fantastic uh blog mailing list thing the imperfectionist and uh [ __ ] me I was seen I was seen it for the first time in my life somebody saw me uh I was absolutely like pierced through the soul there's a point I think just to hammer this home for the insecure overachievers that already feel to seene um that they don't have fun while they're doing it I think that's an important element of it that you go through all of this rigar and effort and and achievement worldly internally uh personally professionally all of it and you look back and you go how much fun did you have doing that and it was all swimming in this milu of desperation and necessity and obligation and and fear and lack and and and uncertainty uh and at no point did you feel this sort of liberated free thing and you go well hang on what was the point in going through all of this if you didn't even have fun like what literally what was the point I where that there's a difference strictly speaking in Psychology between happiness and meaning and blah blah but really the moment to moment experience of you doing most of your life's work whether that is per personally or professionally should in some form be fun and I think that the insecure overachiever is able to imbue even the most fun activity with the least fun frame totally and I just want to I I really want to point out like not only have I suffered deeply from this and been in this situation but like on some level I still am I think I've got a lot of distance on it and a lot of sort of higher altitude on it and and you know I think I do enjoy my life and my work much more than I once did but it's like on some level I don't think these things ever entirely uh go away in fact I think it is perfectionistic to uh expect to entirely go away so there but you know it's like no it it's so resonant for me that that sense of like deficit right that sense that that that magic superpower ability to turn great things even just like purely enjoyable or purportedly enjoyable kind of leisure experiences holiday exp whatever travel into that sense of like either am I getting enough out of it am I using this well and I still have this happening me today with um you know the last book 4,000 weeks did a lot better than I was expecting and so a thing would happen now and again that like somebody quite high profile would say something positive about it or I'd get mentioned somewhere in a way was like amazing and I'm getting better at catching myself but my immediate response to that is like art it's amazing and then like two seconds later is the thought like I said I've got to be capitalizing on this somehow like I've gotta like it's really bad that I don't have these like on a nice page of my website that I'm still trying to redesign my website it's just like it's you know I got to got to use this somehow otherwise like who who even am I ridiculous completely ridiculous I think I see this so much in in my life as well uh you know if I'm Sat by the garden reading on my Kindle reading some article maybe one of yours or or or something from AEL codex 10 or whatever I read this great thing about gp1s and the economics of them the other day and I remember stopping reading and starting to do space repetition memorization so that I could recall it on a podcast later and I was like I'm not going to talk about the [ __ ] economics of glp1 like just allow yourself to enjoy this nice article as you sit in the sunshine just allow yourself to do it there's this permanent feeling that we're falling behind that we should be doing more that we could be doing more that we need to scramble back up that even leisure activities is this sort of weird puritanical [ __ ] guilt that we have where it's like you're just enjoying that article who do you think you are who do you think you are to just enjoy that article how how terrible of you but yeah it's it's something that like I say I'm intimately intimately familiar with this uh and then there's the other side there's a bunch of different areas I had I've got this idea for the book that I'm currently working on at the moment The Four Horsemen of the productivity apocalypse um uh one of them being productivity pergatory which is that even the leisure activities you do have to serve some sort of purpose like you're not playing pickle ball because you like to play pickle ball it's because you've read from an Andrew hubman blog that if you do social activities for 45 minutes two times a week that you've got a reduced chance of mortality um the dark playground from Tim Urban which is when you're supposed to be working but doing something leisurely which means that the leisurely thing isn't enjoyable and you feel guilty about it and also the work isn't getting done and you feel guilty about that too um you know there just there there's so many places that this [ __ ] can come into your life but yeah I am the the insecure overachiever that's a that's a question actually so on your uh rehabilitation Ark from insecure overachiever to rehabilitating insecure overachiever what would the what were the things that you did was it uh practices was it a reframing thing I'm a big fan of of mantras and philosophies and stuff but it seems like it's such a fundamental part of people's lives that's simply some mental tool that tweaks the way that you look at a particular perspective does that doesn't seem like it would be powerful enough no I I I know what you mean and I think actually not only not powerful enough but can be really easily co-opted back into the the same insecurity project right I mean and one of the one of the things I talk about in the new book not really picking a fight with James CLE because he's a really wise and Brilliant and B like how stupid would it be to pick a fight with a to sort of like hinting that there is another view here which says that actually focusing on developing good habits can be really a distraction from what we need to do and this is an answer your question sorry in the long term because because actually turning anything into a project of habit change for various reasons that we can talk about you know um can really cause you not to just do the thing right it can really make it it can really create these kind of psychological structures in your life where it becomes terrible if you miss a day or where you're again just thinking like it's it's only when I've fully embedded this habit that um that uh I'll really you know be a properly functioning human or it's like you know I'm going to meditate for 10 minutes today because I have a plan that within about three months I'll be meditating for two hours every day and suddenly that is just a huge intimidating long-term thing that will prevent you from just sitting down and just the leap of faith that's involved in just meditating for 10 minutes today with no guarantee that you're going to do it day or come back to it or make anything regular out of it this is all by way of saying I think there are things you can do to to embrace the the Outlook that we're discussing here but at the very end of the day I think it's important to be clear about the fact that it is it is just a sort of long and two steps forward one step back process of like unclenching right it is a sort of it's a it's a um almost like a bodily uh gesture it's it's a it's not a doing of something to get into this mindset it's a it's a it's a being willing to not do something it's like a an untightening of of your musculature and of your sort of whole attitude to the world and I've you know I'm I've written about some ways that you can I think it you can you can encourage that and we can talk about those but I really want to say that yeah I think in the end it isn't about tools and that in my experience it has been you know journaling about it early in the morning for years and um catching myself back in the mindset of not enjoying myself and scrabbling to try to get everything done so that I can feel okay catching myself again and again again and again um and and so yeah really happy to talk about tools and techniques but I think on some level it's important to see that that it's just like a it's a it's a slow and it feels very uncomfortable at times slow kind of unclenching of some kind of muscle have you read any Jed McKenna are you familiar with that guy oh years ago yeah yeah spiritual enlightenment now yeah I'm really not very well versed in spirituality stuff at all and I'm not convinced that he classes as that he's like the most uh straightforward writing spiritual teacher I guess that you could find but he has in in his book um release the tiller is one of his cues and he's talking about how people hold on to the tiller which is the thing attached to the rudder that steers a ship he's talking about how people grip it so hard they grip it very firmly trying to get you to move in the direction that you want and his uh contention is to release the tiller of the boat and sort of to allow it to go where it goes as he says and in your uh most recent newsletter again I keep talking about it because I read it all the time uh in your most recent newsletter you said reality doesn't need you to operate it oh my God so I'm quoting Michael Singer I want to pop in there and say this is not my my sort of um phase but yeah yeah and somebody else sent me in response to that another way of expressing the same idea which was something like let go or be dragged basically right that's great I love that like those are your options um yeah I think there are guy I tell you what there are because I don't want to be a person who just says like oh no it's just sort of years of years of slow progress there's nothing you can do about it I think there are ways that you can navigate day-to-day like Frameworks or kind of questions and I've written in the past I think we may even have spoken in the past about the the one from James Hollis about whether a life choice enlarges or diminishes you you know if you're facing some Choice it's like well if I went down that Avenue I don't know if I'd enjoy it I don't know if it'd be painful but I can intuitively connect to the sense of whether it will be an enlarging direction or not that can be very useful um and then also maybe this is a little bit um broad brush but it's almost the case that if some practice or some way of thinking makes you feel incredibly sort of uncomfortable and especially if it makes you cringe that this is probably something that you that you need so for me and I think for many people and maybe for people in the audience for this um the whole field like self-compassion and being kinder to yourself is that it makes you want to just sort of like I do not want to read more about how I'm supposed to be kind it's like but actually that's sort of a sign that maybe it is that so you know anyone who has remained following this conversation after I said the phrase self-compassion weeded out the people who are so who cringe edit so much that they won't even move forward then then you get to the point of oh yeah probably the reaction I have to that idea about being kinder to myself is is quite a useful sign that there's something valid there yes yes so getting into the new book there's a I've picked out some of my favorite lessons one of which I think relates to what you were just talking about the reverse Golden Rule on not being your worst enemy yeah and I begin I begin each of these little chapters just quickly the the the structure of the book is that it's is that it's sort of 28 short chapters divided into four weeks with the kind of invitation that you uh read one a day obviously I can't control how how people read a book and I don't think you have to but but uh read them one per day but that's the idea and so the and each one begins with a quotation from someone else that that um really made a powerful impact on me and that one on not being Your Own Worst Enemy begins with this quotation from Adam Phillips the psychoanalyst who makes this very Vivid point that if you for many of us anyway if you met at a party the person who is like in your head berating you half the time shouting at you to do more and work harder or like criticizing the results of what you do that sort of inner inner critic voice like if you met that person so socially like you would just think they were damaged right you wouldn't give them the you wouldn't take seriously somebody who comes up to somebody else at a party and just starts ranting at them in that way is is they're they're the problem but um and he says more very interesting things but but but but we sort of accept that level of uh criticism of ourselves in a way that that we wouldn't even you know you wouldn't show to it's impossible to think of sort of addressing your friends in the way that I think a lot of us either verbally or it's almost sort of implicit and unconscious like address ourselves and so what I love about this idea of the reverse Golden Rule which comes from the philosopher Idol land it's just the idea that you should uh not treat yourself in ways that you wouldn't treat other people um what I really like about this is that it's a very um uh palatable form of self-compassion for those of us who want to sort of vomit when we hear the phrase It's not this idea which you come across in certain social media context and elsewhere of kind of treating yourself as this kind of uniquely wonderful and special person who requires both your own and the world's care and stroking it's none of that it's just saying like you value friendship right you're a good friend to people you like to think of yourself as a good friend to people it's good that people are good friends to each other like don't just randomly exclude yourself from that basic ethic with which you go through life if you're the kind of person who likes to think that you're decent to your friends just kind of be decent to yourself as well um when it comes to taking a cleare eyed look at how much you've achieved in a given day or the standards of something that you've done or how whether you did your best to navigate some interpersonal thing even if it didn't work out as well as it could have done you know what I mean just that sort of it's just that basic sense of like bring the way you treat yourself up to the level that you already treat other people the minimum bar that you should you have for everyone else yeah there's something uh inescapable in stock about realizing that you treat yourself worse than you treat people that aren't yourself and even if you were born with an identical twin or you and your mother uh live to be live to the same year together and you spend all of your time together so on and so forth there is nobody that you're going to have as intimate of a relationship with as yourself and you're just yeah this incapability that the insecure overachievers Among Us have to just be [ __ ] kind to ourselves to give ourselves a break to be able to see us see the actions that we took with a bit of equinity a bit of rationality God forget even the emotions getting into it just simply not being irrational always in the direction of negativity and chastising uh yeah I I I see it I I I feel it I feel it viscerally uh so moving on to the next one it's worse than you think on the liberation of defeat and you've got this uh Eugene gendlin uh quote what is true is already so owning up to it doesn't make it worse not being open about it doesn't make it go away and because it's true it is what is there to be interacted with anything untrue isn't there to be lived people can stand what is true for they are already enduring it that quote still gives me goosebumps you can't say that by your own writing can you but I think you can say it about uh writing that you quoting somebody else in your writing yeah yeah um I think this this comes near the beginning and and that idea that um there's something incredibly liberating about seeing the sense in which your situation is worse than you thought it was I think that's really a kind of organizing principle of the book um and understanding the sense in which that's actually empowering not just that it's relaxing but that it's empowering as well so you know I'm talking there about to give the productivity example if you think of your the challenge of getting on top of all your to-dos and achieving all your goals on a very tight schedule if you think of that as incredibly difficult then that makes life very agonizing and unpleasant and a constant slog uh towards a imagined future moment of fulfillment but if you see that it's actually completely impossible because there's an infinite amount of stuff effectively that you could do and you're not going to be able to do an infinite amount that shift from very very difficult to completely impossible is actually very powerful and positive I think because you suddenly see like oh okay there's no point trying to get my arms around all of this it's going to be a huge distraction from what I could be doing which is pouring my finite time and attention into the things that are going to make the biggest the biggest difference and then I sort of take that same idea like it's worse than you thinking that's good news to lots of other areas is like you know if you're a suffer from impostor syndrome you might think it's really the big problem is that you've got to um uh spend years getting much much better at at what you do before you'll finally feel like you know what you're doing in most situations actually it's worse than that which is like most people don't really know what they're doing in most situations especially if they're doing new interesting uh Innovative things almost by definition so actually you can give up for quest to feel like you know exactly what you're doing and as a result you can get on with doing the things you were poning until you until you knew what you were doing uh and then just one more example in there is like relationship troubles I think people are very prone to thinking during sort of Rocky patches in relationships and things like that that they're they're in the wrong relationship or like they've got to do tons of work on themselves to get over their issues and like obviously might be true I I'm not saying nobody should ever leave a relationship but it's also true that if you're going to be in a long-term commitment with another person then you are just going to push each other's buttons and not ever fully understand how the other person sees the world these are just sort of built-in limitations of Being Human so it's worse than the idea that it's just your problem and and that again is liberating because it's like oh okay I I was tormenting myself with this expectation that people get to this point of total control or you know uh um confidence in understanding of everything that's happening I don't need to torment myself with that anymore I can actually dive into this experience here and now too much information on the art of reading and he's not reading I think this is probably a challenge that a lot of people deal with um it's really funny to me that at an earlier point in the history of the internet people thought that the whole sort of problem of there being too much stuff to that you wanted to consume or read or know or learn would um would go away because we get really really good at filtering just the stuff that we were most interested in and um we have got really really good at filtering the stuff we're most interested in when social media is working well that's that's what it does um and you know there are all sorts of Discovery mechanisms on you know Amazon and everywhere else that sort of bring you the stuff that you want doesn't make information overload go away because the supply is infinite so now you've just got a pure fire hose of things that you really want to read instead of you know uh a whole lot of dross around the edges so the problem if anything is if anything is and I'm making the point there that um the only way to relate sanely to this is to understand those information flows as as Rivers not buckets right by which I mean rivers of stuff that flow by you and from which you pick a few things that look interesting you let the rest uh go by without feeling guilty as opposed to buckets like you've got to empty it right that if that if you've that if you've sent 50 articles to your read later app then your job is to process every single one of them until the inbox is clear which I feel and it's funny because I sort of for years I've kind of teased my dad and sometimes other people in that generation for seeming to think that like if there's a magazine or a newspaper in the house like they've got some sort of moral obligation to read every page to check if there's anything they and I was always just like why are you doing that it's just that's just some sort of weird sunk cost bias that says well I paid for the newspaper so now I've got to look at every page um but that's exactly what we end up doing with me You' you've got an obligation to a completely free pocket or insta paper read later list that'sit exactly into which far more material can friction frictionlessly be shunted than uh can fit in the the pages of a of a newspaper um and I think related to that mentioned also in that in that section and it's you your mention of space repetition um uh brought this up for me bit earlier it's like there's a huge there's a very very widespread idea now it seems to me on the in social media basically that that you should that you should want to try to um retain everything that you read or that the ideal would be that you could remember all the things that you uh that that you consume um and it interacts interestingly with the whole sort of you know personal Knowledge Management and note taking and stuff which I think you know there's lots of really useful and interesting stuff being explored in that area but there is also this kind of weird obsessive control idea people who get a little bit too into like you know zettle Caston and all you know I haven't got I don't know what that is yeah oh right oh this you know this this whole world I'm sure you're aware of the world in general right of people sort of using different note taking apps obsidian external brain type thing right right right and yeah exactly and and like that's great that's a great thing and I try to do it myself but but there's a there's a way of doing that that becomes this kind of attempt to like own almost kind of like eat you know all the knowledge that you're exposed to too and so another point that I'm making in keeping with the sort of rivers and buckets ideas there is that like that's not the primary point of reading I'm all for people taking notes about really interesting things that leap out at them but your the benefit of reading say a really good book is not to sort of squirrel it all away for some later moment of use which is the same old problem of postponing everything to the Future it it's because it if it's a good book it will change you a little bit in the activity of of reading it and actually that's something I've tried to sort of guard against in this book um the the tendency that I know in myself and therefore I suspect in my readers to want to be like okay I'm into this it's a really good system I'm going to take very detailed notes on every page and then like at a certain point in the future I'm going to execute on it all and I've really wanted to try to pull the rug out from under that at every opportunity and be like no just do some tiny little thing differently in the next hour and a half you know I think that's much more powerful in the long run than any number of hypothetical plans for radical change so true I think about you know you'll be episode 840 maybe on the show and I I would guess that at the very least there is one to two pieces of advice per episode perhaps maybe many more on some of the more tactical ones and uh who who the [ __ ] is able to do that who is able to apply 2,000 pieces of advice to their life and uh you know I I recently especially I I found myself getting caught up as I've become busier this year as being the busiest I've ever had and um I've forgotten some of the lessons that I previously taught myself which is a particular circle of hell that you can descend into where you've forgotten a lesson that you needed and you don't need to discover something new to fix it you need to ReDiscover the thing that you already tried and then and then stopped doing and Tim Ferris has this idea called the good [ __ ] sticks and I think it's the best way to remember what you learn if it's the sort of thing when reading that forces you to get your phone out and take a photo of it and send it to a friend and go oh my god dude I can't believe the there you go like that's it so you just raise the the bar for activation energy or whatever so that only the things that really hit home are the ones and it means that it's I think that the way that I read sometimes when I'm not reading mindfully is I read as if it's my obligation to keep a hold of the information that's in whatever I'm reading whereas it's not it is the obligation of the thing that you're reading to make it worthwhile for you to keep a hold of it it's the other way it should be the job of the book or the article or the podcast to make you go I need to pause that I need to I need to stop and sort of look at the sky for a little bit and reflect on what that means to me uh and working in from that frame that it's on the content to do that to me uh liberates you because there's no way that you can do that wrongly there is no way that you can't do that correctly I think that's really well put and I think yeah absolutely it's almost as if when you take a note the the note taking is is not to try to preserve the thing mainly it's almost more just like a it's just some sort of physiological thing that you've got to do because the point was so powerful like they it's got to this something something's got to sort of come add in that way um also there's a writer who I called Sasha chapen who I think is brilliant and who I quote in the book as well who um although I don't think I quote him saying this uh he's got a great newsletter on uh substack um who makes the point that you know if you're reading uh if you're trying to take notes on something in such a way as to kind of record everything that the author meant to say or you're trying to take notes on it because you think it some sense of Duty towards consuming all the interest all the acts that are that are there or something like that you're imposing some frame onto it other than your natural um spontaneous response and so you know what I'd say about that is like it's not you have no obligation to the author of a book you read right it's like um they may have wanted to convey a certain set of things but they will be conveying a certain set of things that land with you and it's those that that are that's that's a really good point that um different people will take different things away from the same piece of content or the same book or the same article and uh again assuming that this thing is meant for you it it should be actually a uh enjoyable process for you to go through a bunch of podcasts or documentaries or whatever and not have to get your note taking thing out you go okay look at that I was just able to enjoy it for what it was now obviously there can be a world in which you watch it take nothing uh from a practical standpoint away from it and also it was crap so that you know that that's that's a bad situation to be in but um yeah I I just I really really think the good [ __ ] sticks don't expect you know if if you can just do one thing it's not the takey away it's not the notes that you've got written down it's what's the thing that's so apt for you that you can't not do it and you think okay I'm just going to try and do that thing because one tactic that you that you try and Implement is better than 50 that sat in the ass end of anky that you're never going to let it's totally true and on the podcast front it's like I've even caught myself and I do this with books as well getting better at it like literally not listening to something that I really want to listen to or read something that I really want to read because I feel like you know that's something I'm going to want to really like take notes on and focus on and then you just end up listening to some people arguing about politics or something because it's sort of whatever well I mean that might be your thing but if it isn't your thing you know it's like a second tier experience from the one that you actually wanted because the one that you wanted involved too much of that kind of work at um at consuming it properly you know which which which makes um which yeah which makes no sense similarly you can't care about everything on staying sane when the world's a mess and William James quote says the art of Being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook I wanted to speak in this section to people who do feel that you know they have some responsibility to the world that is in in wrapped in so many different crises and seeing so many images of so much suffering all the time um you know part and I and I sort of rescue I want to sort of Salvage that instinct from you know there's definitely a kind of a all sorts of like wild overreach of what gets called activism these days that I'm as critical of as anybody but you know that basic idea that actually maybe we do have bit of a Dy to be good citizens in a certain way and if you buy that I think you have to sort of face the fact that in the attention economy as we live in it now and the way that we the environment that we live in you've got to I mean the point I'm trying to make I guess is is that if you if you're the kind of person who feels like you want to care about anything outside of your own immediate life you're going to be asked to care about everything maximally all the time every uh campaign group every media organization is incentivized even if they're very honorable in how they operate they're still incentivized to present what they are campaigning for as the most important thing in the world the only thing that you should give any attention to that I think that even I think we've got ourselves into a lot of a quite a tangle with all sorts of things climate covid lots of things where like I want to say that these are incredibly serious crises that then get into this kind of hyperbole machine that the attention economy is and everyone gets sorted into like maximal Panic or denying that it's an issue at all because again you know there's just you're going to be a to care about absolutely everything and some people just get tired of that and disconnect or get hostile and other people just drive themselves into a sort of frenzy and so I'm really just making the argument in that section for the the idea that it is okay and in fact necessary to sort of pick your pick your battles and to disconnect from an awful lot of what's going on in the World At Large not because it doesn't matter but precisely because if you're going to make any kind of difference you have to be willing to choose one or two things that you're going to to focus on um I quote there um a great blog post from uh David Kane who runs the blog raptitude who um sort of has this image of like um public concern being like something that is sort of distributed like raindrops over over thousands and thousands and thousands of little buckets and like what ha what would happen the buckets being the different causes we could care about like what would happen if we if we just said like this issue is going to be the concern of these several thousand people this issue is going I mean it's it's a it's a hypothetical but like what if we concentrated our available compassion for things like that and tried to actually make a difference instead of this very performative very despair inducing kind of vague attempt to feel to appear like we're caring about everything let the future be the future on Crossing Bridges when you come to them I think one of the most fundamental ways in which we're limited even though it's harder to see is the way we're sort of temporally limited to to right now and we spend and I think any kind of worry and anxiety is basically an attempt to um exert some control over over what happens in the future which in that sense you can't really do obviously you can do things that make it more or less likely that the future will go well for you and that challenge of like oh I can't control now what's going to happen in the future but I can trust that I will be up to dealing with the things that happen in the future I think that's an incredibly powerful shift there's a quote I have there from Marcus aelius which is something along the lines of you know you shouldn't be disturbed by the future because you'll meet it with the same resources and skills and talents that you that you have that you meet the present with um if if um if you were incapable of dealing with the things that life throws at you without dying you you would presently be dead right so clearly you do have it in you to to give up that kind of anxious reaching after total certainty about what's going to happen later yeah I I definitely think about that as well the that was what hit me with the reality just doesn't need your help to operate it Insight which is we there's this sense that by worrying that we somehow get to extend out temporally into the future and kind of it gives us some degree of it gives us a sense of a degree of control over what's going to happen well if I just worry enough yeah right then that thing it can't come to pass or it'll come to pass in a different way there's this you know we even get in your totally [ __ ] hysterical moments when you're laid awake in bed at 1: in the morning or whatever and you can't sleep you almost even start to think about stuff like well because I know or because I'm thinking about the fact that it might happen there's no way that it could happen because all of the things that I think about that happen don't actually end up coming to pass it's always the things that you don't see that get you so by thinking about the thing you're like what do divination class am I like going to start drawing cards in a desperate attempt to control the future what's going on here yeah yeah no it's it's it's amazing there's a no absolutely there's a this lovely phrase from Robert Saltzman who's another spiritual writer who says that you know all sorts of what we do and a lot of spirituality I think he would say as well is ultimately an attempt to um distract ourselves from the fact that we suffer from uh what he calls total vulnerability to events um this idea that essentially literally anything consistent with the laws of physics could happen in the very next moment to you or to anybody um always and we're always engaging in certain kinds of kind of irit irritable psychological activity to to make that not uh be the case but it but it always is the case um my wife has this incredibly vivid memory that has always like I think I me might mean more to me than to her at this point for of being being a teenager growing up in Baltimore having had a childhood where she was really sort of steeped in going to the movies and they just really sort of into Cinema and film and and walking across a bridge I don't know just in the middle of the day sometime in Baltimore and suddenly realizing that if something absolutely terrible were to happen to her or to somebody close to her it wouldn't come with um like foreshadowing music like in the movies so that you can sort of gge yourself and get ready for it just that you know that kind of realization it's like obviously you know it intellectually but then you oh yeah I'd kind of been assuming I'd get some warning and actually like that's not how it works and always trying to find ways to buffer that I think about in a similar even more maab way um how many people have died being surprised you know that's every that's you know someone's someone someone ends up in a a random unfortunate passer by uh catches a stray bullet in a shootout between two gangs or something like that they've never been shot before maybe they've never heard a gun go off before and they look down to go I I I've been and then you know they die in surprise I wonder how many millions and millions of people their last sense was oh surely not like you know what I mean like exasperation it's not like this surely yeah no it's it's it's um yeah I mean it's just on some level it's just completely unacceptable to us right that that's how it is and on no on no level am I saying I'm completely at peace with it but it's really useful to to see uh to see what's going on there I have to say just in the macabra um topic you're reminding me of um a slightly different point but it's clearly related when I was working as a journalist years and years ago I was I was one of many people in London reporting on the 77 uh the the the the tube and bus uh bombings and I remember in a follow-up piece I did about that coming across this this idea that some of the people involved in uh the rescue operation some of the I uh medical people uh said that if you it's pretty likely that um that at least most of the people who died on that day uh never knew anything was wrong but uh you know or at least or at least I mean maybe not everyone I don't know about the details of the different of the different deaths but you know it would be possible to just be going along and then it lights out and and actually that being some slight form of Solace on the part of their relatives and and and friends but like that's sort of even that's sort of narrowing down even taking away that moment of surprise it's just like didn't even know we're here and then we're not here yeah extraordinary finish things on the magic of completion and Sarah manguso when my husband does the dishes he always leaves some platter in the sink some surface unwiped I tried to correct the behavior until I remembered that if I finish everything in my work in progress folder I'm afraid I'll die I love that line um uh yeah this is just this is a slightly more sort of I guess tactical um uh productivity is um uh day in the book because it's it's just this idea that like there's an extraordinary kind of power in in finishing things uh there's a kind of energy that comes from completing things even though you wouldn't kind of think that's how it would go you'd think that like slogging to the end of something would would deplete your energy um and so I'm really making the case for for finishing things but also specifically for kind of conceiving of your working life your working day as a sequence of like finishings uh a and and changing finishing from being something that you maybe do every few months on some big project to something that you're doing sort of throughout the day defining endpoints intermediate endpoints obviously for big projects and and taking things to completion and I use this word uh deliverable working in Daily deliverables and and deliverables through the day precisely because it's so kind of you know Linked In right I mean it's just like it's such sort of sort of um soulless kind of corporate idea that um that uh you um it takes all the drama out of something to say like what's the deliverable here what's the deliverable here what's the deliverable here and there's it's actually a really especially for Creative work and it's a very powerful way to um think about things because it it's almost like you're falling in line with what it really means to be finite which is that we are always doing one thing at a time in sequence anyway whether we like it or not and by sort of pushing yourself to get to a completion Point even if it's completing 50 words not completing the chapter or whatever it is I think that's a really powerful way to think about productivity treating yourself like a CNC machine that's doing a a 3D etching into a piece of steel or something like that what will be done at the end of this well this is what will be completed at the end of this uh it's it's reminds me of your um your idea of a done list which we spoke talk about last time and uh me and my friend George we went on the road for about a full month Across America and we came up with the idea of a well done list which was a a build off the back of yours um originally his name for it [ __ ] I can't remember it fully but his name for it was um the the case of the defense in the prosecution against the the 10,000 year old amigdala or something and I was like why don't we just call it a well done list all of us got this cool idea um but it was basically that at the end of the day you would be able to look back and think about the things that You' done well what went well today not not just like the Gratitude thing because with the Gratitude thing you're always it always ends up being really fruity and fluffy and kind of an un I had a great walk and I looked at the sky and I'm grateful for the fact I've got my health and I'm grateful for the whatever the Well Done list was something a little bit different to me and it was I managed to um remain cordial today during a difficult meeting despite the fact that I was tired like that's a well done that's something that's really well done and it takes into account where you were at the time and I'm not convinced that that would sit in the way that you'd write that in a gratitude Journal would be I kept my call in a and it's it's always sort of pro-social and something else The Well Done list feels a lot more kind of personal to me but anyway I um no and I really like I mean the way you described it then anyway was just like yeah it really interact really connects to where you were at right so you can be like in bed sick or wake up on the wrong side of bed and you can still within that context do that life the life you got given today well yeah well done yeah exactly rules that serve life on doing things daily is uh I'm talking here about the idea that it's very easy as we've spoken about let the sort of productivity rules and rules for how you want to run your life become the things that you're kind of looking for for your salvation not things that you're using as tools to help you enjoy life and uh accomplish things that matter to you but as things that you then sort of are enslaved to it's that very familiar feeling for many of us I think of like you know setting up the exciting new schedule system or time boxing system or whatever and then like two days later being like well I have to do this this is this is so kind of heavy and depressive I don't want I don't have to do this I want to be free um and so I give some examples of rules that I think uh lend themselves to that more uh serving life kind of frame and one of them is this idea from Dan Harris the meditation teacher I think he maybe would resist being called a meditation teacher anyway podcaster uh of who suggests that the right um frequency for a meditation practice is is daish I think you can apply it to lots of other things as well it doesn't mean just do it when you feel like it it's not completely self-indulgent it's this idea of like I'm going to be consistent but I'm not going to be obsessively consistent in a sort of brittle way that causes the causes too much spirals up and spirals down right and you know everyone knows that if you did something 5 days out of seven you did it daish and if you did it two days out of seven you didn't do it daish but there but there are certain times in life that maybe three would count four you know you know you you you know you know when you're fooling yourself and you know when it's a kind of reasonable thing and that enables you to actually I think some of the ways consistency gets talked about these days uh is um is unhelpful because it implies a sort of rigid consistency that that that uh that breaks very easily my favorite is actually from uh James in atomic habits and it's I think it's the best takeaway it's an absolute sleeper of an Insight that no one really ever talks about uh although I keep on trying to fly the flag for it uh and his rule is never missed two days in a row and I think that just as a general rule never missing two days in a row stops one One Missed habit becoming a new habit right one day is a missed habit two days is the start of a new habit and just I I I've used this for some I even used it in reverse to um reintroduce caffeine I did a huge amount of time without caffeine and um wanted to keep the sensitivity because it meant that I could have a you know just a teeny tiny amount of caffeine and get get a big boost out of it and I didn't want to lose that so I set myself a rule of I only have caffeine one day I can't ever have it two days in a row which meant that if I didn't have it yesterday then I could have it today but if I had it today I knew I couldn't have it tomorrow and it created this sort of artificial scarcity that made me think about my caffeine use so much more mindfully I'm aware this is like the most autistic thing that I could come up with like if it works for you yeah look I'm now back to being a large sort of caffeine degenerate um but even when I want to dial it back down you know if someone is fully caffeine pilled uh just don't do it two days in a row I think is it really is a nice uh a nice and don't take caffeine pills actually because that's just that's that's what we did at universities and it's to work it's the least enjoyable I know what you meant I know what you meant yeah the least enjoyable way three hours on finding focus in the chaos this is this idea that I've I think in some circles become known for I think that that if you're doing the kind of work that gets called knowledge work if you're doing anything creative uh anything that involves deep thinking uh it's actually a really good strategy not to aim to do more than about four hours of that uh in the course of a day if you look back Alex Pang has written brilliantly about this in his book rest um you look back at all the routines and daily rituals of so many authors and artists and Scholars and scientists through history it's extraord how often three or four hours was how much they demanded of themselves of kind of deep deep focus and I've found this to be true from experience as well and there's certain research to suggests you know it's not just purely cherry-picking anecdotes that to suggest that there's something about that kind of amount of time not necessarily all in one go but in the 24-hour period what I really like about this is on the one hand it uh emphasizes the importance of protecting time for that kind of thing but on the other hand it doesn't get into this idea of trying to protect 12 hours a day for for it uh these kind of things that I think rarely rarely sort of rarely work for people so what I'm advising there is that if you have the autonomy over your time it's a really good idea to kind of on the one hand really be serious about Ring fencing that amount of time to be undisturbed undistracted not to have meetings uh to be at a time of the day when your energy levels are high but then also to kind of not try too hard to protect or structure the rest of the time uh in a way that will only cause frustration and will sort of um uh deny you the kind of serendipitous encounters that come from being interrupted and disturb so it's that sort of um uh what's the word I guess binary approach it's like there is there's this time but I'm not going to worry about making the other time like that and I think that's a really powerful way to make progress in Creative work I I think I spoke about this with you last time that there was no problem that I've ever encountered in my life until I really really started to think mindfully about it where I didn't just assume that the solution was work harder like I just always thought well it more right or more focused or more intensely or better uh as opposed to you know I I've really like I said this year has been just so obscenely busy and this week is the first week that I've thought of uh where I've had a little bit more downtime and I was laid in the laid in the SAA earlier on I went to the SAA Place obscenely early this morning and uh I thought this is so nice I'm coming up with all of these ideas and I'm like just allowing I don't know this weird sort of um like exhaust fumes from my brain to just like you like how you you when you go to sleep there's these toxins in your brain and it sleep clears them away I think that's the reason we need to sleep and lying in the sauna was like a waking version of that where I just evidently had loads of [ __ ] thoughts that just needed to get up and they could percolate and then they they're away and then here's another one and and that's away oh actually know that's that's something that's interesting and so on and so forth but yeah I think the the most bizarre thing about this is to anybody that scoffs at only 3 hours of deep work a day how much deep work do you get done most days cuz if I get three hours of deep work on a single task done in a day it is an absolute AAA gold medal outlier no absolutely and if you want to start with 90 minutes or an hour I think you'll even then most people will be amazing themselves if you can do that daily-ish for a very short for a very short while the I mean the cumulative benefits are clear and on some level that's not an original point right do stuff keep going back to it don't do too much but keep I think the the point I'm trying to drive home is like there's no reason to see it as a shame that you didn't do seven eight nine hours right it's like actually that's part of this process they both belong in the day the the time when you're really focusing and shutting the world World out and the time when you're when you're not doing that yeah it's the um it's the reason why so much of the progress that I made from whatever sort of total toddler I was in my 20s to fullon adult infant I've become in my 30s uh was through a a a really aggressive morning routine uh you know I had this like very obscenely luxurious uh morning routine that was like best part of two hours long uh and arguably included in the morning routine was lots of things that people would do later in the day so I you can call it what you want but I my compliance with it was really really high you know for for years and years I'd get up I'd go for a walk for about 15 minutes and I'd come back and I'd sit down and I'd journal and then I'd do breath work and then I'd do meditation with headspace or Sam Harris or or insight timer or something uh and then I'd read and then I'd do Yin Yoga uh mobility and then I'd cook and prepare my food for the day and then I'd go about my day and absolutely you know tell me that this guy doesn't have children without telling me that this guy doesn't have children I'm aware I'm aware that that's you know an absolute that that's the most Bourgeois thing that I could have spoken about doing it's not flying in a helicopter or getting a jet or going on a cruise it's having it's having this unnecessary two hour 2our morning routine that being said the main lesson that I took away from that was I was doing lots of things that were quite High impact daily-ish for a very very long amount of time with huge compliance like I you know I would do that five or six days a week and I did that for you know four years or something like I've got a stack of journals like this just from how much I did and I never thought about myself as a journaler but you just realize when you when you accumulate this stuff over a long enough amount of time you look back and you go oh my God look at all of this stuff that I did and now as somebody that has is giving him self the excuse that he doesn't have time to have that big of a morning routine on a morning all of the things or many of the things that I loved about that and the byproducts of it are things I'm missing in my life and the answer's back there there's that embarrassing thing about the answer that you already need is something not only that you know but something you've done in the past and then like so yeah yeah yeah one of the things I really appreciate about the way that you wrote this book as a like I say an avid Stan of your uh imperfectionist blog um was that you included some of my favorite posts that I'd read previously and you can't hoard life I think is is probably my favorite post I was so glad that it it got a feature in the new book you can't ho life on letting the moments pass what's that mean to you it's kind of embarrassing to admit that how how easy it is I think to to not enjoy life even when what's happening is on the surface completely enjoyable the kind of thing that you always wanted to have in your life um because of this idea that you've got to sort of really hold the experience or take ownership of it or something this great Insight in Buddhism I think right that that especially lots of traditions but especially Buddhism that we make ourselves miserable not only by not having what we want or wanting things that we don't have but by like trying to cling really hard to things that we do want and do have and I give the example of being here in the North York MOS where we where we live now and just sort of having this experience early when we early in the time we were here of being out early on a winter morning with snow on the ground and like barn owl flying by drinking my coffee pink sunrise in the distance just absolutely my favorite kind of landscape and time of the morning and everything you know insert here whatever your personal one would be and catching myself thinking like okay this is the kind of experience I want to have so firstly I want to make sure I'm really enjoying it and secondly I want to make sure that whatever I'm doing in my life in my career is going to guarantee that I keep having this experience forever and ever and ever and just all these different ways in which yeah we're trying to hoard life is the phrase that I've used there in a way that is completely opposed to enjoying it and and it comes back to this idea that I've sort of bumped into in different ways again and again in my work and in my life that you sort of have to be willing to in some sense of the word waste time in order to live fully you have to be able to stand on the side of a hill in a beautiful sunrise and winter in the north mes and just be like yeah like let it go it's like nice it's not it's not not that valuable in some in some sense in order to really be in it otherwise you get into this whole kind of attempt to acquire the experience for to sort of squirrel it away for for what for some future purpose right when you can sort of I don't know yeah I I don't know why we want to what we think we're holding on to those things for except of course that yeah on some level it's sort of a bullwark against uh feels like a bullwark against having to about against being finite and against the fact that every moment is just passing by and going forever yeah I I I know that exactly this sort of sense that this is a peak experience and in the moment of the thing that you're supposed to enjoy you begin to lambast yourself for not having a life where there are so many of these things in it and your inner life that's in it right yeah I I mean I don't I don't know if I mentioned it in I don't think I mentioned in the book but I was with an old old school friend of mine who came up here we went on a hike in the middle of the week of the day on a weekday and I caught myself having the thought I wish I had the kind of life where I could do this sort of thing it's like what what's that about it's wild yeah it's uh it's important Oliver I love your work I I I really do everyone should go and check out the new book everyone should go and subscribe to your mailing list where should they go they want to keep up to date with what you're doing it's all at Oliver burman.com I love it Oliver until next time thank you I've really enjoyed it thanks Chris if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give them a watch