How to Stop Overthinking & Start Living a More Meaningful Life with Oliver Burkeman #580

Many of us feel under constant pressure to optimise every moment, to become more efficient, more productive and somehow more worthy. But what if embracing our limits could be the key to living a calmer, more meaningful life? This week’s returning guest on my Feel Better, Live More podcast, Oliver Burkeman, believes that accepting that we can’t do everything might just set us free. Oliver is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ and ‘The Antidote’, and for many years wrote a popular weekly column on psychology for the Guardian. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Psychologies and New Philosopher. His latest book, ‘Meditations for Mortals: A Four Week Guide to Doing What Counts’, takes us on a liberating journey towards a more meaningful life – one that begins not with fantasies of the ideal existence, but with the reality in which we actually find ourselves. Designed as a four-week ‘retreat of the mind’, it offers daily wisdom, solace and inspiration to aid a saner, freer and more enchantment-filled way of living. In our brilliant conversation, we discuss: Why the belief that life will finally feel easier once we clear our to-do list is such a persistent illusion How shifting our focus from endless achievement to small, present moments can transform the way we experience each day Why the fantasy of perfect decisions keeps us stuck in indecision, and how accepting the downsides of any choice can set us free How our fear of wasting time is often rooted in perfectionism, and why many of us feel we have to earn our worth through effort The liberating idea of daily-ish habits – a flexible, compassionate way to keep showing up without turning routines into self-criticism Why we don’t need to wait for life to feel calm or under control before we start living with more intention How embracing our limits and accepting that time is finite can help us feel more fully alive and connected I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak to Oliver again as he brings such clarity and compassion to questions so many of us grapple with. Instead of offering yet another system for getting more done, this conversation is about stepping back, loosening our grip and recognising that a good life isn’t measured by productivity but by presence, meaning and connection. I hope you enjoy listening. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://join.whoop.com/livemore https://thriva.co/ https://vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://betterhelp.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/580 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Yes, the attempt to do it all is going to make you feel incredibly anxious and overwhelmed. Yes, the demands that are made on us and the things that feel like they're essential and we have to do them will leave us feeling wiped out. That is not a war that any of us is ever going to win. And it's in that realisation that you can then, I hope, begin to feel the first glimmers of a different kind of energy, which is like, okay, that's the way it is.

• 0:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey guys, how are you doing? I hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better Live More.

• 0:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Many of us feel under constant pressure to optimise every moment, to become more efficient, more productive and somehow more worthy. But what if embracing our limits could be the key to living a calmer, more meaningful life? This week's returning guest is Oliver Burkeman, someone who for many years wrote a popular psychology column for The Guardian newspaper and more recently, someone who wrote the wonderful book, 4000 Weeks. His latest book, Meditations for Mortals, A Four-Week Guide to Doing What Counts, takes

• 1:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  us on a liberating journey towards a more meaningful life, one that begins not with fantasies of the ideal existence, but with the reality in which we actually find ourselves. Designed as a four-week retreat of the mind, it offers daily wisdom, solace and inspiration to help us find a saner, freer and more enchantment-filled way of living. In our conversation, we discuss why the belief that life will finally feel easier once we clear our to-do list is an illusion, how shifting our focus from endless achievement to small present moments can transform the way we experience each day, why the fantasy

• 2:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  of perfect decisions keeps us stuck in indecision and how accepting the downsides...

• 2:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Of any choice can set us free. How our fear of wasting time is often rooted in perfectionism. And why many of us feel we have to earn our worth through effort. The liberating idea of daily ish habits. A flexible compassionate way to keep showing up without turning routines into self criticism. Why we don't need to wait for life to feel calm or under control. Before we start living with more intention. And how embracing our limits and accepting that time is finite. Can help us feel more alive and connected. I was absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to speak to Oliver once again.

• 2:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  As he brings such clarity and compassion to questions. That so many of us scrapple with. Instead of offering yet another system for getting more done. This conversation is about stepping back. Loosening our grip and recognizing. That a good life is not measured by productivity. But by presence, meaning and connection.

• 3:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  In your new book. You talk about the kind of life that you would like to be living. And you describe it as calm and focused, energetic and meaningfully productive. And connected to others. As opposed to anxious, isolated and overwhelmed. I think that's the kind of life, Oliver, that many people would also like to lead. So I guess my first question is twofold. Why does so many people struggle to lead that kind of life? And secondly. How are you getting on in your quest to do so?

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Great questions. Yeah, I mean, I think there are so many reasons why why it's hard to to to live that kind of life, right? Reasons to do with the society that we live in, reasons to do with the ways we were parented and the messages we give ourselves. I think the reason I really want to focus in on, and that relates to your second question, is there's a problem with seeing that as something that you're striving towards, something that's off in the future and that you're going to work really, really hard and then eventually that's going to be your life. There's a big sort of mistake involved in that in that approach, as opposed to seeing it as something that you can actually claim for yourself right here in the in the moment. And of course, that doesn't get away from the fact that

• 4:44Speaker 00

  there's like too much to do and too many emails and the economic system that we live in exerts all sorts of pressures. But there's something really important, I think, about the idea that we can actually enter into that way of being right here, at least to some degree, instead of seeing it as this thing that we're constantly chasing on the horizon. So yeah, my to the extent that I have succeeded in living a life like this, which is definitely only only partial, is because I've found ways to sort of step into it now, instead of sort of reinforcing this notion that it's always in the future, that I've always got to do more until I can till I can get to it.

• 5:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's interesting through through the lens of health, I think about what you just said in the context of weight loss. And something I've realized over my career is for people who are looking for sustainable weight loss, for whatever reason that might be, too often, it's put off into the future. When I lose weight and get to this weight, I'm going to be happy and go on holiday here and do this or do that hobby, whatever it might be. And I found it much more helpful for people to say, no, no, why don't you do those things now?

• 6:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  And then I think you'll find that the weight loss, obviously, you have to do some things.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Are going to come quite nicely as a almost like a second order effect of that rather than the other way around.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Totally. I can totally see how that will work in weight loss. I think of it in the context of like.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Overwhelmed, right? I have a huge tendency, I'm letting go of it to a large extent, but I have this huge tendency to say, right, okay, I want my life to be calm and peaceful. It feels incredibly overwhelming, overwhelmed with demands and obligations and emails and everything. So what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna really, really buckle down and power through and spend much more time on all the overwhelming stuff and actually have a less peaceful life and a busier life and a more stressed life, because I'm gonna get through it to this alleged vista of peace and calm on the other side. And I think where that connects to what you were saying is, if instead you can see how you show up in the day today as some form of expression of the life that you wanna live, not a perfect one, it's never gonna be a

• 7:06Speaker 00

  perfect one, but if you can sort of, if you say like, okay, I want to get to this point where I've lost enough weight that I can enjoy myself. So what if I took that focus on what I want to enjoy now? And I think it, time and again, yeah, people find that what happens then is like, then you're living, you're living the life you want to live. And so it's exciting and fun to get better at living that life and to lose more weight and to be more calm and to handle more of the demands without sort of spinning off into overwhelm.

• 7:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, there's also a compassion to yourself in living this way. I know you do talk about one of the chapters and you also acknowledge how self compassion can be a difficult term for British people to get our heads around, right? But through the lens of weight loss, you know, often people wanna beat themselves up, deprive themselves, restrict themselves until they've reached the goal of a set weight, so that then they're gonna start, you know, treating themselves in the right way. And it doesn't work like that.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  All you're doing then, right, is yeah, you're reinforcing this notion that you're bad.

• 8:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  You need fixing. You can't really fully participate in life until you have achieved that fixing. And the, I mean, I had such a struggle with this idea of self compassion because, as you say, there's something about it that invites me to think I'm being told that I have to see myself as super, super special and much more deserving of love and cuddles than anyone. None of that. The thing that really made the change for me was when I came across this idea from a philosopher called Ido Landau, who talks about the reverse golden rule. So not treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself, the famous golden rule, but, but. Don't treat yourself worse than you would treat other people. And I think that is, that was such a moment for me when I realized that I sort of went through

• 8:53Speaker 00

  my days often sort of berating myself internally in ways I would just never, like I would just never dream of doing that to, well, anyone, a friend, a person I met in a like day to day business context, it would be utterly outrageous to be that horrible. So all I was asking of myself, even if it gets labeled self compassion and triggers all sorts of cringe responses from Brits, like all I was asking from of myself was equal treatment that I would already perfectly, that I was already perfectly good at giving to other people.

• 9:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  In your answer to my first question, you said, it doesn't mean that there's not going to be too many things to do or too many emails. And it's kind of interesting, that really landed and kind of has been worrying in my brain since then. So my question is, is that really true? Are there always going to be too many things to do and too many emails? Or perhaps could it be the way that we're framing those things to do and those emails?

• 9:53Speaker 00

  The answer is yes. Right, it's totally a question of perspective. And I think this is something that I've tried to find ways to articulate lots of times in my writing. It's like you have an incredibly finite capacity for doing things because you are a human. And you have so much time on the planet and so many hours in the day and so much attention and energy. And so the amount of things that feel like they need doing is basically infinite, right? There's no reason why your brain can't feel that your obligations to your family, the ambitions you have for your job, whatever it might be, that just keeps on expanding, whereas your finite capacity really, really doesn't.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, from that perspective, there's always too much to do. But because there's always too much to do and there's no way around it, that is kind of another way of saying that there isn't too much to do because this is not, this is not a war that you can win as a finite human being. So there's a quote that I really like that says, I'm going to mangle it, but says something like, "The problem is not that we have, don't have enough time to do the things we need to do, it's that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have."

• 11:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  And of course, this is a lot harder for some people than others, right? You can absolutely feel like you have to do an impossible amount just to keep a roof over your head. And that's a very real and acute feeling. But actually, nobody can do an impossible amount. And so in the end, all you can ever really do with the time in your life is a handful of the things that you might feel you wanted to do with them. And when you see how totally inescapable that is, I think it's really liberating. I think it's like, oh, it's not because I'm a loser that I haven't figured out how to do all these things. It's not because I haven't found the right productivity system. It's because you don't get to do all the things.

• 11:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Your last book, just before this, Four Thousand Weeks, and this new one, Meditations for Mortals. I think one of the reasons they're striking such a deep chord with so many people around the world is precisely because of what you just said, this acceptance that I actually can't do everything. You know, well, let me put it to you.

• 12:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Your last book, Four Thousand Weeks, became a global smash bestseller, right? So first of all, congratulations.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 12:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  But related to that is the question, why? Why do you think that book at that time made ways in the way that it did? What was it in that book?

• 12:37Speaker 00

  I mean, who knows? And I think a lot of it is just luck and good fortune. But I suppose if I was going to try to answer that, I would say-

• 12:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  English modesty, I like it.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  Well, you know, but it's also true, right? But I also think if you were gonna try to, if I was gonna try to answer that, I would say, for various reasons, partly having to do with coming out of the pandemic, partly having to do with the stage that kind of books and thinking about productivity and stuff were at, at that point, it was time for something that-

• 13:07Speaker 00

  Sort of gently introduce people to this, to this like fact. Instead of this notion, so there'd been a lot of, a lot of the history of sort of time management advice is like, if you follow my system and you really try hard, then you're going to get to the point where you can do everything that needs doing. And then there was a bit of a rebellion that came in the, in the form of saying like, well, this is all rubbish anyway. Stop working for the man, rebel, like just chill out, which I don't even necessarily object to, but it's not what a lot of people want to do or can do. And so I think it was time for someone to say, look, you can be productive and ambitious and you can do, you can make a difference

• 13:51Speaker 00

  in the world. What you can't do is get your arms around an infinite number of potential demands, obligations, ambitions. And there's a sort of a, there's a moment there where you can, I went through it myself and I hope that the book has led people through it as well, where you can sort of, oh, just sort of relax into reality.

• 14:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  I've compared it in a couple of places to that feeling like you're, you're out in, you're out in the street and you haven't brought the right waterproofs and it starts raining. And for a while you sort of like keep trying to find ways almost unconsciously to keep the water off you. And the rain gets heavier and heavier. And eventually you're just like, okay, I'm going to get wet. It's like, okay, I'm going to be finite in this ocean of infinite possibilities.

• 14:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it's fine.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  And it's fine, right? Yes.

• 14:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  The problem is when you resist it.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Exactly. There is nothing wrong.

• 14:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Oh my God, I don't want it. I don't want it. You know, I didn't get the right clothes. That's, that's where the stress comes.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then you're just soaking wet. Okay.

• 14:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  That's life.

• 14:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  I, I, I would agree. I think that idea that you can't do everything. I, I think it particularly resonates now because of the world in which we live, you know, the amount of information we get exposed to on social media. We see all these incredible things that we could be doing and that some of your friends will be doing, right? But you've only got 24 hours in a day. It's funny, as I've been reading meditations for Mortals over the last couple of days, I thought maybe one of the reasons why, there's, there's an exercise that I call write your own happy ending, that I wrote about in my book on happiness. And it really had a profound impact on me. I wonder if I could put it to you actually?

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Totally, yeah.

• 15:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because I think it, I think it really. Embraces limitation and what matters at its heart. So there's two parts of the exercise. Part one is fast forward to the future. Imagine you're on your deathbed and look back on your life and imagine, you know, what are three things you will want to have done or spent your time on? And, you know, the truth is, we, we, we probably know what a lot of these things are because people have written books about the regrets of the dying and what people actually do say on their deathbed. But for us individually, we can imagine. So for me, for example, last time I did this exercise was I want to have spent quality time with my friends and family.

• 16:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  I want to have had time to pursue my own passions. And I will thirdly, want to have done something that improves the lives of other people. So that's part one. Then you go to part two, which is you come back to the present moment. And you come up with three, what I call happiness habits. So these are three things that I can try and commit to each week that will pretty much guarantee I get the happy ending I've just defined that I want.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  So how that worked for me was the, you know, the three things that I put down are, you know, I would specify how many undistracted meals with my wife and kids I want a week. And I think the, the, the current one is five.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 16:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay. It might be different for someone else, but for me, it's a nice thing. If I can have five undistracted meals with them and the kids, where I'm not thinking about work, if I keep doing that week after week, come my deathbeds, I will have ticks off number one. If I get a chance to go for a long run each week or play my guitar and write a song and have a sing, I will know that at the end of my life, I will have found time for my passions. And if I, you know, the third one was if I release an episode a week of this podcast, which I've been doing for seven and a half years, I know, and I keep doing that, I know I'm going to be doing something to improve the lives of others. And why it's been so helpful for me is because.

• 17:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  It embraces this concept that your to-do list is never done. There's always more you could be doing.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 17:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  But if I just do those three things each week.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm winning at life and I have to just let go of the other stuff. And it's not there as a stick to beat me with. If I have a busy week where I'm traveling and I don't get to do them. It's just a nice gentle reminder, hey, you only had one meal with Ben and the kids last week.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Don't let that become a pattern where you're doing that for a second week or a third week. So what do you think about it? Do you think that speaks to some of the ideas in your book?

• 18:05Speaker 00

  No, I think it really does. I think one of the other thing I, one of the other things I love about that is that it sort of takes these goals that you have and brings them.

• 18:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Forward from the future into like, well, the goal is in doing these things in the present. Now, I'm not saying that I and some people whose minds work like mine wouldn't then be able to turn that into a stick to beat themselves with. It's like, have I done the five? Have I done the five? Whatever. And I think, you know, it's not a, the, the amount of, the proportion of the week that that might take. I mean, a podcast probably takes a lot of your week, but like, that's actually a relatively small number of the hours that you're awake. And that's very good too, because there's a strong tendency, I think, in a lot of sort of goal-setting, life visioning approaches to try to account for every minute of the day. And then you get very depressed and frustrated because you realize that an extraordinary amount of the day just seems to go in like, you know,

• 18:56Speaker 00

  just the, just, just living, just like getting dressed and like, you know, whatever, just, just stuff that doesn't fulfill you. And so I think if you can take that alternative approach that says, you know, here are a few sort of pinpoints in the course of a week that would express that long-term goal. I think that's, that's fantastic. Yeah.

• 19:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. That's very inspiring. I mean, you write about it beautifully in your introduction to Meditations for Mortals. When you give up the unwinnable struggle to do everything, that's when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things that truly counts. That's life, isn't it? A handful of things that truly matter.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  I think it has to be, yeah. And I think it's, I think that the problem is not that that's the way it is. The problem is just always that we are tormented by the thought that it should be more and it should be more. One of the ways you can think about that, that I've found very helpful is sort of seasonally, right? The fact that you're giving things up for now to focus on these few things doesn't mean you're giving them up forever, right? So maybe in your focus on these three things, there's something that you don't get to do. Maybe you don't get to indulge your passion for some other activity or, you know, something like that. But you can always, like, this is for now.

• 20:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  This is for now, exactly.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 20:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, it's not like when I'm sixty, I'm gonna beat myself.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  You said you were gonna do that, you put it down in twenty twenty-three on your list. You're not doing it now in twenty forty-three, whatever. All you can ever do is make a decision in the moment now.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  And it means that you're approaching the reality of, you know, you're, you're, it's awful for any of us with kids at home to think about. One day, your kids will be out in the world and, you know, maybe you'll persuade them all to live within like a half a mile of your house. But maybe you won't and you won't get so many meals in the course of a week. And that's fine too, because that'll be that season. So instead of trying to optimize everything, you focus on what you have now and how that can give meaning to what you're doing right now.

• 20:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, this idea of embracing our limitations. Yes, I think it helps us be, you know, calmer, less anxious, you know, enjoy our lives more, which I think is, is one of these core messages that you talk about. But it kind of also applies, I think, to other genres as well. I think it, it helps with creativity. As I've become a creator over the last years and I'm like, those, those limitations that we impose on ourself, and frankly, life imposes on us, that's what leads to creativity, that's what leads to a meaningful life. You know, acknowledging that you can't do everything.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Gives you the license to go, yeah, so what do I wanna do?

• 21:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, I think it's true. I think it's worth doing, just as a thought experiment, that philosophers have debated this, right? But like, if you were actually gonna live forever, not in any kind of religious sense that you may believe, but, but just in the sense of like your actual life here on earth going on and on and on and on forever. I think very possibly it would be terrible, right? It would be the quest, because the question, like, what should I do with my day? Would always be like, doesn't matter, right? There's always, there's always more days. And there's something about the fact that we are in these limited situations that, that gives value to the, the choices that we make. I've written before about like the joy of missing out, right? It's this sense that like, it matters more. If you're staying home for bedtime with your kids, it matters more to know that you, in

• 22:24Speaker 00

  principle, could have been somewhere else and you chose not to be somewhere else. That gives it value. And then the other thing that really, just on my mind, when you talked about creativity there is, I'm always at pains to try to emphasize, like, I think this way of embracing the truth about your finitude is completely consistent with like being very ambitious for your life. I think I am. And I think occasionally I've run into people who've sort of misunderstood and thought what I'm saying is like, ah, you can't do very much, like just settle for mediocrity, like there's no point trying to reach the heights because, ah, we're all just too limited. And it's like, no, no, no, it's the exact opposite. It's like, it is by acknowledging the limited reality of our, of the reality of our limitations,

• 23:09Speaker 00

  that that's how you can then like focus your life for the most meaningful ambitions that you're.

• 23:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is that because though, it's, you, you acknowledge that I can't do everything. I'm a finite human with a set amount of years on this planet. So therefore I'm going to choose very intentionally and carefully what it is that's truly important to me. So is it, is it that you're, you're doing less better?

• 23:37Speaker 00

  It is, but again, there's just, there's also danger there, right? There's a danger which is like this becomes incredibly high stress. It's like, oh my goodness, time is precious. I've got to make the right choices. And it'd be terrible if I made the wrong choices and I've got to like watch myself like a hawk every minute of the day to make sure I'm doing really cool and important things.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  I went through a phase of thinking that, but where I have sort of ended up is actually, no, it's a bigger relief than that, right? If you really sort of feel your way in to this limited situation, you get to cut yourself an immense amount of slack because you get to say, okay, like, the fact that something is important, or that somebody wants me to do it, or that it would please my parents, or that it would be morally good, that can't be enough to mean I've got to find time to do it because I'm just too limited for that. And something sort of falls away and into that space you can say, well, okay, almost any choices that I make, as long as they're, you know, if I make them honestly

• 24:40Speaker 00

  and being in touch with myself, they're going to be meaningful things to do. I don't need to sort of go through life double checking and being incredibly, sort of putting a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that I'm doing exactly the right things or extraordinary things or anything like that. It's like, no, once I really feel where I am, you know,

• 25:01Speaker 00

  helping a handful of people in your life matters. Cooking a nutritious meal for your kids matters, right? We don't need to, it's great. Some people change the world in huge ways and invent extraordinary inventions and have sweeping effects on humanity for the better. But that can't be the standard of, that you have to reach to live a meaningful life. So I find, I don't know if I'm expressing this properly, but it's sort of, it imbues more things with mattering, I think, to, to live in this way that's truer to our real situation.

• 25:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  A few years ago, you made a very big life move, didn't you? You were working, I believe, as a journalist in Brooklyn.

• 25:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you have moved to North Yorkshire. Can you contrast for us, you know, what has the difference been? You know, what, I guess, what led you to go to Brooklyn? What was your life like in Brooklyn? And how does that compare to what your life is like in Yorkshire?

• 26:03Speaker 00

  I mean, as always, these things have more moving parts and are more complex than it looks from the outside. I do come from North Yorkshire, but to a significant extent, it was led as much by my wife as me in terms of wanting to have a spell of time outside the city. To some extent, we're like another data point because it happened at the end of the pandemic when it turned out that almost anyone who could ended up making this sort of move. We thought we were being terribly unique and individual at the time, but it's just like, just statistics. I think that when it comes to those kinds of big decisions, I've got more and more able to see that these are things you have to reach intuitively,

• 26:46Speaker 00

  right? It's not going to work to make a list of pros and cons and try and add number scores to each thing and figure it out. I've been in a situation several times in my life where, and I've become more able to see that this is going on as I've gotten older, where clearly the direction of just sort of growth and generativity and enlargement is a phrase somebody, James Hollis, the Jungian therapist uses, lies in a specific direction, right? So it's like, actually, to continue in this particular place right now, doing this stuff, it wouldn't be challenging in the right way, it wouldn't be leading

• 27:29Speaker 00

  me into the next chapter of things. And it's really hard to put into words because it is actually like all your unconsciousness as well, that has this kind of amazing amount of information in it that's very hard to express explicitly. But, you know, if you want to put it another way, I was interested in being near my extended family. I have friends in the area that I wanted to reconnect with properly. I love the landscape of the North Yorkshire Moors where we live. I've always, since I was a child, felt a really deep connection to that sort of rather bleak and windswept place. So there were all these things that sort of pointing in that direction. We thought it would be a good place for our

• 28:10Speaker 00

  son, at least the sort of early years of his schooling. So, you know, all these specific things. But actually, what it was on a deep level was this sense that like it might be fun in some ways and difficult in other ways, but all of those would be in the direction of Something kind of juicy and something that was like alive. Whereas not doing it and coming up with all the good rational reasons why it wasn't sensible to do it right now or whatever would be against that spirit of aliveness. More and more, I come back to this thing called aliveness, which I don't even know what it is, but it seems like it is what we can navigate by.

• 28:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  You have this inner sense that this is what you needed to do. That's what you wanted to do, you know, maybe you couldn't rationally argue it. So, you know, a pro V con list and go, oh, I'm balanced, it's got six pros, that's got four. It's like, well, I just really will. I mean, I really do feel more and more, even when it comes to health, I think the most important things are led by our intuition and that inner guts feeling that we just know. You write in the book about Sheldon Copse's phrase, "You are free to do whatever you like, you need only to face the consequences." Right? Let's use that phrase to examine your move from Brooklyn to North Yorkshire.

• 29:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, you were free to do it. What have the consequences mean? Has, you know, the theme in these last two books of yours about living that more meaningful, calm, less anxious life, has that move helped you towards that goal? And what have you lost by not living in Brooklyn? Today's episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker, everyone around you seems to be coming down with something and suddenly that well being you felt in the summer seems a long time ago.

• 30:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals and one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years. And one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it contains, for example, vitam Vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium supports a healthy immune system. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous improvement and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances.

• 31:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering a free AG1 flavour sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavours, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers. All you have to do is head to drinkag1.com/livemore to claim this offer before it ends. Today's episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker, everyone around you seems to be

• 31:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  coming down with something and suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals and one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years and one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it contains, for example, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports a healthy immune system. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous improvement and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy

• 32:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering a free AG1 flavour sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavours, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers. All you have to do is head to drinkag1.com/livemore to claim this offer before it ends.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  It totally has helped me, I think, but it has helped me partly because it's helped me understand the truth of that phrase, right? You're free to do whatever you like, you need only face the consequences. We are not asked as human beings to make choices that have no downside. That is never a possibility for us. So whenever you face any kind of big decision, or little decisions, actually, like whether to stay at your desk for another hour of emails at 5:30 or to go home to your family, if you have that choice, even that kind of choice is relevant here as well, right? Sure. In every one of those moments, there's a downside to the choice that you end up

• 33:49Speaker 00

  making. And there would be a downside to the other choice. And what I find so amazing about that Sheldon Kopp quote, what helped me about it was it's like, oh, right, all I'm doing is choosing which set of downsides I want to take responsibility for. I don't have to worry about not having found a version of this life that doesn't have the downside. So, you know, in the context of the move, as you asked, I definitely miss a lot of people who I had become close to in New York and a certain kind of ease with which it was possible to just make a plan to see them and fall into deep, long, stimulating conversation. That was wonderful. There's a vibrancy to living in Brooklyn and a sort

• 34:31Speaker 00

  of real sort of energy in that place that I will always love. And I don't know, maybe we'll be back there, I don't know. But so these things really, like, once I realized that I didn't have to persuade myself they were, they didn't matter, that's what makes it possible to make a move, right? Because you're saying, yeah, no, that will be, that will be a disadvantage. That will be a downside. And also, there's the whole disadvantage of uncertainty, right? Like, maybe there'll be other downsides, one downside of a move from one country to another is that you don't know what all the downsides are going to be. So like, it goes on and on and on. But that enables you

• 35:10Speaker 00

  To enable me to let go of that tendency that I definitely had from a young age, to constantly be second guessing myself and being like, I messed up here because I'm not, because there are downsides, right? Because I'm missing out on things, or it would have been good for my career to be in this place, or it would have been good for my son to have this benefit of living. It's like, no, yes, it would have been. And also, right? And also, there are wonderful, amazing, utterly unplannable advantages of being where we are. I've talked about the landscape, but the people as well, right? And you know, it's like, it's a different kind of amazing.

• 35:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think some of this frustration or this umming and ahing comes from perfectionism.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? A belief that it is possible to make the perfect decision.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  With no downsides.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it isn't. There's a consequence to everything.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think, for me at least, once you get good or better at recognizing that, number one, then number two, trying to articulate them, trying to go, oh, yeah, as you said, you know, there were things you miss about Brooklyn. Yeah.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, right.

• 36:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  There are. You can't have that.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  In rural Yorkshire.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  You have to accept that. I go, yeah, and I've made my choice that at this moment in my life.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  This is what's happening. I mean, I don't know if you would necessarily agree with this, having read Meditations for Mortals. Well, I've got quite an interesting relationship with regret in the sense that I don't have any anymore. I think for many people, regret is a form of perfectionism.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's a belief that I could have made a perfect decision, and I didn't, so I'm going to berate myself. It's like, no, no, wait a minute. If you go from the starting point that a perfect decision is not possible, it's like, well, what is there to really regret? I mean, you do things based on who you are, and hopefully you can learn from them and go. Yeah, you know what? That possibly with hindsight now wasn't the best choice, but I didn't know that back then.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  No.

• 37:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Those weren't the made it.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  But now I can go, oh, if I'm presented with that situation again, I've learnt something. So for me, I've realised that regret keeps me trapped in my previous perfectionist tendencies. And of course, you know, you are known as the imperfectionist, aren't you? You write about that a lot. If that's the name of your newsletter, right?

• 37:34Speaker 00

  It is, yeah.

• 37:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  The imperfectionist. Well, perhaps you can elaborate. What is your perspective on regrets? But also, what is an imperfectionist?

• 37:44Speaker 00

  It's so interesting to hear you talk about regret in that way because I too am someone who, at this point in life, does not feel like I, I don't feel like I have significant regrets. I'm not one of the people who's sort of very weighted down by that sense of the lives unlived. But what I have been anxious about all my life, it's a lot better now, but like is the fear of future regret. So the fear, the feeling that like I'm about to make a choice here that I will come to regret. Totally belied by the fact that I don't actually then feel the regrets, but, but, but always sort of having my life choices constrained by this sense of like, ah, but you're going to regret this in future if this happens or this happens.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  And so released from that, I think, if you are someone who's prone either to act to regret or to fearing regret in the future, is to see that in a certain sense, like regret is inevitable. Another way of saying you never need to feel it is that you can't avoid feeling it. It will just depend on your personality, right?

• 38:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  But the, but the, but if regret is the fact that you had to wave goodbye to, like every single moment of life, if you want to get really philosophical about it, right? You wave goodbye to an infinite number of other paths, like, you know, branching off like a river delta, you know, just forever and ever and ever. And all you're doing at every single moment is just waving goodbye to possibilities that will always be closed to you forever. But again, it's so.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  Absolutely inescapable, that it can become, that it can be quite liberating to see that. It's like, there's no way of not doing that. There's no way of making a choice that completely protects you from future regret. And of course, even if you look at a decision and say, well, with hindsight, I wouldn't have done it that way. It's like, how did you gain the hindsight? By making the choice and living through that bit of your life. So, you know, I don't see any reason that this is going to be true in the case of the move to Yorkshire. But if it had been, that what we'd realized very swiftly after getting there was that we'd made a terrible mistake. Like, in a sense, that wouldn't be a terrible mistake. That would be like, realizing you've made a terrible mistake is a good thing.

• 39:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, I've been just playing around in my journal about this, the concept of wasting time recently. And really questioning, is it even possible to waste time? Because to say it's a waste is prejudging that you knew the consequences of that time. So if you are mindful of the time, or you review it afterwards, and you realize that it wasn't the best use of your time. Is that a waste? Or actually, was it a very powerful learning opportunity?

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 40:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Again, I don't know how relevant it is, but it's just what I'm playing around with at the moment. This concept of wasting time, I'm like, I don't think I'm wasting any time. I'm just spending time and then trying to learn from it. Do I like it and I want to repeat it? Or have I learnt something and like, yeah, I'm not sure about that anymore?

• 40:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think that's brilliant. I think it's totally in keeping with what we're talking about. Because to think that you could know in advance is to feel yourself more perfectible and more unlimited than we really are. But to realize that you can act on the basis of the accumulated information, that's being a really full, wholehearted, finite human being.

• 41:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Some people will call you a productivity guru. Are you one?

• 41:14Speaker 00

  Oh, I don't know what that, I mean, you know, I think on the one hand, I hate the idea because I think productivity has come to mean, you know, just getting, ways to get as many things done as possible. And a big part of what I'm, as you can tell, like, a big part of what I'm trying to get at here is that just doing more things is A, not inherently valuable, depends what the things are, right? There are plenty of people in the world at large who I might like to be doing fewer of the things they do. I thought, well, it would be a better place if they didn't, if they did fewer things. And, and all of us can only do so many things anyway. But also because, but, but at the same time, rather, I think there is some meaning of the word productivity that I, that I think is important,

• 41:59Speaker 00

  that, that I do want, I am someone who wants to, like, do cool things with my life that make some kind of a difference. There's a danger, whenever we talk about this kind of paths to more peace of mind and out of anxiety and all of these things, there's a danger which you occasionally see reinforced by certain kinds of spiritual teacher and spiritual book, that suggests that like, there's either the life where you do all the stuff and it's kind of frenetic and overwhelmed and anxious, or there's the life where you just sort of float through your days and you don't care anymore about doing things because you've transcended to this level where all of that is irrelevant. And I feel like one way of expressing everything I'm trying to do is to say, no, I think we

• 42:41Speaker 00

  can have both of these. I think we can have the peace of mind and the creativity and the generativity and the energy, not, not in the spirit of trying to make ourselves feel like we're doing enough, but in the spirit of saying, okay, I am enough, but now what I want to do with this thing, person I am in the world is like, express, express this through, you know, creativity, through, through work, through, through building things.

• 43:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  I, I think you're a meaningful productivity guru as opposed to a toxic productivity guru.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  I'll take that. The guru thing is interesting too, although this is where I like, in terms of like, our profile as advice bestowers, it's even more of a interesting thing for, for, for you than for me, perhaps, but like, I spent a long time being very sort of self-deprecating about, oh, I don't have anything special to tell, to say. And I think it's important to be very honest, and I try to be, in terms of like, that I'm not like, living some perfect life, and now you lucky, lucky people get to copy me, right? That's not the spirit of any of this at all. We're all just muddling through. But, on the other hand, more recently, I have come to understand that this sort of knee-jerk, British self-deprecation can be a little bit unhelpful and annoying.

• 43:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  And you do have to hold some element of the authority that is vested in you. Like, that's actually helpful to people. As I say, I suspect you know about this much more than me, but like, you don't, it's no, it's not a useful contribution to the world to say, oh, I've got nothing to teach.

• 44:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, exactly. You know, this is such an interesting point for me. Let's take this podcast as an example. I've been very clear, I think, I hope, over the many years that this show's been running, that I didn't tell anyone what to do. I have no interest in telling someone what to do with their life, because that would also imply that I know what is best for

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Their life.

• 44:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Their life. And I can't know. And I also don't believe that anyone does anything long-term if someone else tells them to do it. I've seen that times, I went, we all know that experience ourselves, right? So, my goal on each show, each episode, is to have a meaningful, authentic conversation, that hopefully, on occasion, is going to connect with someone. And they go, oh, you know what, I recognized myself in that. God, you know, wrong as guests this week. Yeah, God, I've got that thing as well. I'm interested in trying that thing that the guest mentioned, as opposed to, you should be doing this.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 45:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, because, and also, that, you know, you take that one step further. Let's say we look at your life from the outside and go, oh, well, Oliver was a successful journalist in Brooklyn and the pandemic hit and him and his wife decided that actually we don't want to be in the city now. We want to go out, be nearer your family in rural, you know, beautiful countryside of North Yorkshire. And then he went and wrote a global bestseller 4,000 weeks. Oh, so from the outside it can look as though that's the prescription. I need to move from where I live, go out into the country, then I'm also going to write a bestseller like Oliver Burkeman.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  Right.

• 45:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  But there's so many other factors in. So just because it worked for you, doesn't mean it's going to work for me. It's not going to work for anyone else. There's a subtlety there, which I, you know, I think about this a lot through the lens of patience. I think, I spoke about this on my tour in March, I was saying that, you know, in an era where there's so much knowledge out there, we have to acknowledge that, you know, we've said for years, we need more knowledge. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is information. I'm like, well, would you accept that there's more health information out there than ever before?

• 46:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 46:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  They go, yeah. So, okay. So if information was all, and knowledge is all we needed, we should also get associated better health outcomes, but we don't.

• 46:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 46:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Physical health is getting worse. Mental health is getting worse. So there's a disconnect. And I think for me, it comes down to the difference between external knowledge and internal knowledge. Like, take the information in from the outside, but then put it through your own filter, experiment and go, you know, does this work for me? How does it? That's how I see it.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  I think it's so wise. And I think, you know, there's so, there's such a tendency, there's a sort of a collusion, isn't there, between certain kinds of guru advice bestowing people and the people who are in their audience. There's a collusion to, to, to take that advice, to give advice and then to take it and express it and like try and follow it to that. Everyone wants to do that. But actually, yeah, I think anyone who gets to the point where they have a sense that some of the things they do in their life work well, and they might want to pass that information on, has come to that in a whole journey.

• 47:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  That they had to go through to get to, to get to. And so actually, one of the things I do early on in this book, it's divided up into lots of small chapters over the course of four weeks. The idea is that you could do like roughly a chapter a day for a, for a month.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  And I say, like, if you're the kind of person who I have been, right? Who gets a book like this and wants to try to squirrel away every bit of information in it, or take detailed notes, or put it all into practice, like, maybe instead of that, just sort of go through it and see what sticks.

• 47:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  Because if something sticks, that's a really good sign that it's meeting you at the right time. And if something else is like, okay, well, that was mildly entertaining, but it's, doesn't really resonate, then like, that's information. The idea that you should then take that and try and force yourself to do that thing in that chapter, even though it doesn't resonate, is a mistake.

• 48:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it was interesting to see how you followed up from 4,000 weeks. I think the structure in this book is brilliant. It is such a beautiful, yeah, I think you call it a retreat for the mind. Just trust that if it resonates, it will stick. And I really like that, as opposed to, you know, jot it all down, make notes, going, oh, you know, Oliver said I must do this, and now how do I apply this? It's much more freeing, I think, than that's.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  I'm glad you think that. And I think the other, the other thing that I was hoping to get at with that is like, I didn't want to create, it would have been totally contradictory and hypocritical of me to create a book where the feeling of it was like, you know, get all this into your head, and then when you get a free week in a couple of months' time, and you're through all this other stuff, like, then you can put it into practice, high energy, perfect, like, hit all the points. I wanted it to be something that you can read right now, before you've got through all the emails, before you've fixed your terrible problem with procrastination or distraction, or whatever terrible problem you imagine yourself to have, right?

• 49:25Speaker 00

  Just right here, before the world calms down and the news headlines stop being so terrifying, because that might never be going to happen. And so just right here in the middle, that's this idea of retreat of the mind, right? Not you have to go on a retreat for a week when you can finally book the leave, but like, no, just in the back of your mind, now in the middle of it all. And so that required the chapters to be very short, because like, it's gonna be on a commute or with a morning coffee.

• 49:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, that's, that's the best, that's, I think that's the gold in this book, or one of the. Pieces of gold and and actually you could you can make the case or I'll make it for you. Probably too modestly that you could just continue with your life the way it is and just read one of these short chapters each day for 28 days as you propose. And you're probably going to get some quite profound benefits because it's just these gentle realizations, I think, that people are going to get about the state of their daily life. And as you say, the important things are going to stick because, you know, with the best will in the world, not everything, and I don't mean this in your, but not any in my box or anyone's. Not everything is going to resonate with everyone.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  It can't do.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because we all hear things differently.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, totally.

• 50:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so can you just summarize then it's week one, week two, week three, week four. Being finite, taking action, letting go and showing up. Can you just give us a little paragraph on what each one of those means and why you chose that order to take us through this mental retreat?

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Totally, although even saying I chose it seems a little bit too much. It was one of those discoveries where it just sort of like after going through lots and lots of permutations and long conversations with my two excellent editors in the US and UK like this just sort of it was just obvious it had to be this way, you know, there's sometimes you'll feel like you're discovering things rather than willing them into into reality. So, yeah, it seemed very natural by the end of that process to feel like you want to start with being finite, facing the truth of our limitations, sort of feeling what it's like to accept the fact that we are in this position of limitation. Not just limited amount of time, but I think really important part of this is how

• 51:36Speaker 00

  limited is our control over how that time unfolds and our limited knowledge of the future and all the rest of it. And then the question that occurs naturally, I think, is, well, okay. So how do I actually like do the stuff I got to do in that context or that I want to do? And so that's the that's the week week two on taking action.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  One of the things that has been so important to me and that I have struggled with myself is the theme of week three, that actually, a lot of the time, the way to bring more meaning into your life and to more creativity, more meaningful productivity, involves sort of getting out of your own way and letting things happen, rather than in that sort of dominating way, making them happen. So that idea of letting go is about letting go as a kind of an active practice. And it all seemed very naturally to end up in this place, week four, showing up. The idea that like, what all this is for, the destination of this, to the extent that there is a destination, because it's always an endless unfolding process.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  But that destination is just like being more here for your life. Like ultimately, I feel like what unifies all those things that you said in the exercise that you spoke about, that you would want to be able to look back at from your deathbed. What unifies them all is that like, you were really here and present. It's a very strange idea to put into words, but yeah, that you were really alive for your life. So I guess that's where this four-week journey reaches its conclusion.

• 53:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I kind of feel so far, although there are more we could cover, I think we've spoken about this idea of being finite. Okay. So, I mean, I love the book. It's so good.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 53:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  I have written down lots of chapter things that I wanted to talk about. We won't get through them all. Actually, you know, I'm going to just, before we get to week two, I just want to mention something there that I think really relates to one of your key messages about doing what counts, you know, focusing on what really matters. And it also maybe clashes with some of our ideas of productivity. So, okay, so I host this podcast, okay? I know many other podcast hosts these days. Podcasting is obviously blowing up and there's millions around the world now.

• 54:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  And most podcasts of the size of this one tend to have researchers. So they have researchers who will go through the books and go through that person's work and then present the host with some research notes. And the host may do a bit as well, but a lot of the prep is done for them. Yeah. Because it's time efficient. Okay. Well, there may be other reasons as well, but one of the reasons is because you can be more productive. You can get more things done because you're not to spend a day researching the guest. Someone could do that for you. So you could do other things, get more emails done or whatever it might be.

• 54:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I had this realization a few years ago because I've never had a researcher and you know, I was starting to think, you know, God, everyone seems to have a researcher. Not everyone, you know, my friend, Rich Roll, who runs a podcast, he doesn't have a researcher either. And I thought, it's kind of interesting. Even if a researcher would save me time, what if I don't want the time saved? Yeah. And I know it sounds maybe perhaps a bit of a throwaway comment, but it was a real profound realization for me where I thought, actually, that's one of my favorite parts of my week is preparing for my guest. I love it. I literally love it.

• 55:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  A, I happen to believe it makes the conversations better anyway because you're more invested. But even if it didn't, I just love it. So the question I often ask myself is, how would you like your experience of life to be? Yeah, let's imagine you've got some crack hot researcher who could present you everything. Well, I wouldn't have watched some of your videos yesterday. I wouldn't have read pretty much the entirety of Meditations for Mortals.

• 56:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  My life would be less good had someone done that for me.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  So it's almost the anti-product, it's almost anti-productivity hack to do it myself. But I'm like, no, damn it, I want to do it myself.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  But you know. No, totally. And I think this illustrates a really, really important point, which is that if you just follow the doctrine of optimization and you let yourself go along with the cultural currents towards optimization, then all else being equal, you will optimize out of your life precisely the things that make it worth living. Now, that doesn't mean that there's not some other things that, you know, you want to, you want to have other people do and that your position enables you to have other people do in that, in that ecosystem of producing a, producing a podcast. But it's like, it's such a gift to realize, oh, I was, I was on track to optimize away something that, and I think we do this to ourselves as a, as a wider culture, right?

• 57:01Speaker 00

  I wrote in 4,000 weeks about how a lot of convenience culture has left us sort of feeling, I think a lot of people resonate with this notion, right? Like, it's much easier to, often what's easiest to do is not what is most enjoyable for, for us as a matter of experience. So it's easiest to like, get food delivered with an app and not have to talk to anyone and not have to go out and find the food yourself or not have to cook a meal from ingredients that you bought. It's easiest to stay home and watch stuff on TV when you could have met some people and watched it at a movie theater, right? There's always this kind of tension between what's, what's the sort of smoothest life and what's the life that we want to live that we value the most in hindsight. And this seems like a good example of it, right?

• 57:46Speaker 00

  Effort, you could, I'm sure that despite the fact that you love reading the, the books of the people that come on this podcast, there have been weeks when if you could just wish it away and save the time, you would have taken it. But actually, there's something really useful about saying to ourselves, like, no.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  I don't want to smooth my life out in this way.

• 58:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  Because smoothness is not my ultimate goal here. Maybe smoothness in certain areas of life.

• 58:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly. It's about intentionality, isn't it? It's about really, it's like, goes about you're free to do whatever you like. You need only to face the consequences, right? You can, you know, obviously we're talking about through the lens of a podcast, but you can apply this to anything. You've got infinite ways that you can do these things.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 58:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  But all of them come with a cost.

• 58:30Speaker 00

  And the ironic part, which I'm sure you have experienced, is that like the more success you are fortunate to enjoy in the world, in a certain sense, the worse it gets. Obviously, in a certain sense, privilege that comes with success is fantastic and not to be sniffed at. But like, I'm guessing that where you are now, like the opportunities that come your way are harder to choose between because more of them are good and enticing. So it's fascinating. It's like everybody who is human is faced by this, is faced with this situation. And becoming very successful or becoming super wealthy or becoming famous or whatever, doesn't solve the problem because the problem is called the human condition.

• 59:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, exactly. Be careful what you wish for, right? Because it may actually come true. And then you're, you know, it's a great point. And again, you know, some people may be thinking, yeah, okay, nice. You guys have got nice problems. You get invited to nice things because you're successful authors. But the point you're making is not that. The point you're making is that that applies to everyone on some level.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  Right. And they are, they have a nice, they definitely have a nicer feeling to them, the problems, when it's, when, you know, knowing where the next meal is coming from is not part of the calculation.

• 59:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  And we have to acknowledge that.

• 59:45Speaker 00

  Right. But there's still problems in this fundamental way that we've been tracking through this conversation, which is that they are tough choices about finite time. And in certain ways, they can be tougher because the things that you have to let go of are more obviously things that would have been great to do.

• 1:00:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  And a mate of mine is a filmmaker, right? And his dream is always to be in Hollywood. Make feature films, but he's now got himself a regular gig. Just filming, you know, locally to his house where he's got predictable ish hours, no travel. And I remember having a chat with him a few years ago about it. Where he speaks this, this acknowledgement of you can't do everything, you know? If he had gone to Hollywood and done the job of what he perceives Hollywood directors do and the busyness and all the things that come along with that. Perhaps he wouldn't have the quality family life that he does have. Right. Right. I feel a lot of your work is about bringing the

• 1:00:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  is making the invisible visible, right? Yeah. It's, it's, it's the unmeasurables, you know, it's that, you know, I think about this concept of unmeasurables a lot that, you know, we, we, society is skewed now towards the things that we can easily measure. Like your follower count or your income or your downloads, right? But, you know, the, the gold in life comes from the unmeasurables. The sort of thing, you know, the quality of your relationships, you know? Do your kids like you and want to spend time with you, right? You know, if you, if you want to have a partner and you're lucky enough to have a partner, do you have a good relationship with them, you know? Is that something that's worthy, you know? There's no scorecard for those things. Right.

• 1:01:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I, I honestly feel that's why that write your own happy ending exercise has helped me so much. And also living five minutes from where I grew up. Right. Really help, has really helped me as my public profile has grown. I'm still in the same town where I grew up. I'm five minutes away from mum, you know, I see her pretty much every day.

• 1:01:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  And that's a choice. That's, you know, it's interesting, you know, we're recording this just pre the summer. And it was Father's Day a couple of weekends ago. And I was on the move and I thought I'm going to share a post on Instagram. So I'd literally found a photo of me and my, the first photo I could see where you couldn't see my kids faces. Cause I never share faces on, on social media. And I thought, and I wrote, I just wrote a post in the moment about, what does being a father mean to me?

• 1:02:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  And what are the, what are the things I hope to not teach my kids? Cause I'm even skeptical that you can actually teach your kids anything now. Like, you know, sort of showcase.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Or, you know, I don't know what the right word is, but what are the things I value as a father? And the things I hope to do and showcase them that are important. I'd put a list of things that you might expect people to say, being kind, how you treat people, but things like, you know, how integrity is more important than money. But then what came to mind is I, I sort of shared that caring for my mother, their grandmother, is not another thing to fit into a busy life, but an inherent part of a meaningful life. And it's interesting, that's what really people resonate with the most. And it, and I never articulated that before or thought about it. Well, yeah, you know what? You're damn right it is, you know, I, I could not do that.

• 1:03:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  And in inverted commas, do more things with work and have more in inverted commas, success. But if I, for me personally, how I value my life, how I was brought up, looking after my family is one of the most important things to me. So no amount of success is worth me not being able to do that.

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  No, completely. I think that's, that's so well put. And it's like, you said before about making the invisible visible. I often think about that in terms of making unconscious things conscious, usually in terms of negative stuff. So it's like, you can, like, you know, you can go through the day making choices. You're doing that anyway. You can either do it consciously or unconsciously. You can either be aware of the limitations of your time, or you can be unaware of them. You can't not have them. You can, you can just know whether you're relating to them, why, in a conscious way. But as you point out, like, it's also to do with becoming conscious of the things that like you have decided to have in your life because they, they matter to you.

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  And then feeling much less bad about all the things that you could in principle be doing instead, because you've, you've found that, that those kind of end values, as it were, right? You're not, and you're, and you're in less danger then of the means becoming the ends, which is what happens otherwise, right? People just like think that doing more and more and more stuff is important, or getting more and more money is important, regardless of what's happening to that money. Freeing up time, like even that is kind of not a very useful thing unless you're freeing it up for something that you want to free it up for. So again and again, it's like, well, why?

• 1:04:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I think once you've got that in place, you're well on the way. Okay, so week one, being finite, seven chapters, seven, I was gonna say lessons, but you probably would urge me to not use the word lessons, but seven things to think about. Meditations. Meditations, seven meditations. Okay, week two, there's seven meditations on taking action. Let's just cover one of them before we move on to week three. Rules that serve life, doing things daily-ish. I think this is great. What is daily-ish and why is it so useful?

• 1:05:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker, everyone around you seems to be coming down with something, and suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling, and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals. And one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years. And one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it contains, for example, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports a healthy immune system. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous improvement

• 1:06:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering a free AG1 flavour sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavours, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 and free gifts for first time subscribers. All you have to do is head to drinkag1.com/livemore to claim this offer before it ends.

• 1:07:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker, everyone around you seems to be coming down with something and suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals and one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years and one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it contains, for example, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports a healthy immune system. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous

• 1:07:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  improvement and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering a free AG1 flavour sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavours, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers. All you have to do is head to drinkag1.com/livemore to claim this offer before it ends.

• 1:08:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  So dailyish is a word that I got from Dan Harris, the meditation teacher and podcaster, although I think he has told me that he got it from someone else as well. So we're not doing a good job of getting this to its final attribution. And he uses that as a guideline for, as an answer to the question, how often should you meditate, meaning, you know, formal meditation, which this book isn't really about. The title may be a bit misleading, my book, I mean. But he is, he teaches formal, following the breath and he said, you know, people want to know, how often should I do it? Do I really have to do it daily? And it's like, well, you should do it dailyish. And what I love about the idea of dailyish is that it's very gentle and flexible, right? The idea of doing anything dailyish, reading the chapters of this book dailyish for a month.

• 1:09:28Speaker 00

  Exercising, journaling, whatever it is you're trying to do as a habit. It doesn't mean just do it when you feel like it, right? It's not just like, ah, forget it. Like, like the moment you don't want to do it, you don't have to do it. We all have a fairly strong sense of what counts as, as doing something dailyish. Like, five or six days a week is clearly dailyish. And in busy times, maybe four days a week is going to count as dailyish. But if you only do something two days a week, you're not going to fool yourself that that's dailyish, right? So we get past all these detailed questions of exactly how often should you be doing something? But you're still putting a sort of gentle kind of pressure on yourself to, to make sure you, you do it. And I think this is one example. That chapter is, is about the idea of rules that serve life.

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  I think it's really easy, especially in this space of health habits, personal development, all the rest of it. It's really easy to think that there exists some set of rules that if you could only find them, and then you promise to follow them completely obediently, that will be it. Your struggles will be over. The rules would effectively sort of live your life for you. And you would be like the servant of the rules. And people fall into this all the time, right? Now, from now on, this three times a week, this, this morning routine, this set of supplements, whatever, whatever, whatever. And it's not that it's bad to have rules. It's that you've put yourself in a power relationship with those rules, which sort of expects the rules to, to sort you out.

• 1:10:55Speaker 00

  And then you have to be completely sort of obedient to those rules. And I wanted to explore this notion, which I think goes a long way back, including to sort of Christian monastic traditions, among many others, of rules that really matter, but they're there for you. They're there for the things that you want to achieve, right? The important thing is not that you meditate every single day, or even that you exercise every single day. The important thing is your peace of mind or your physical health. And then what rules serve that? And what level of attachment to those rules is helpful for them to actually be a sustainable part of your, of your life?

• 1:11:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's beautiful. And, and I think this concept of dailyish really takes us away from this black and white thinking, which massively leads, comes from perfectionism. And it's interesting, you know, I was. I was watching some of your interviews yesterday and the lead up to you coming to the studio today. And in one of the interviews I saw, you were asked about non-negotiables. And it's a very common interview podcast question. What are your non-negotiables? And I, you know, I have no issue with people asking that. I understand why they ask that. And it's the sort of thing that I would have thought about a few years ago.

• 1:12:14Speaker 00

  I'm wondering what I said now, right?

• 1:12:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I can't remember what you said now, actually.

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  No, please, please carry on.

• 1:12:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  But the point was is that I don't think non-negotiables exist. I think it's a mirage. Everything's negotiable.

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like, everything is. You can't promise or guarantee you're going to mend say every day. Some days, I don't know, your mum might be ill and in hospital. And frankly, you don't have time.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:12:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, everything is changeable depending on the circumstance. I could say a non-negotiable is being kind and not using violence. Well, it kind of is. But if someone was threatening my two children, I might change my viewpoint on that, right? So I think even embedded in the question of a non-negotiable is perfectionist thinking.

• 1:13:00Speaker 00

  Right. Because the only actual non-negotiable is our imperfectionism and our limitation.

• 1:13:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, exactly. So anyway, daily ish, I think, is brilliant and hopefully helpful for people who are maybe struggling with health habits. Okay, well, what if you did it daily-ish as opposed to every day? Let's get into week three, letting go, because there's just, well, all of them, frankly, I could, we could, I actually believe that you could do a whole podcast on just one of these 28 meditations, right? Because they're really deep, thought-provoking ideas that have resonance and relevance for all of us. What I really like in week three, letting go, the chapter entitled, what if this was

• 1:13:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  easy? The false allure of effort. Can you speak a little bit to this chapter and why it was so important for you to write?

• 1:13:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. And we're definitely in the terrain here of the things that I've sort of struggled with myself the most, or that I'm more recently understood compared to some of the earlier weeks of the, of the book.

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  I think that there is a very natural tendency that many of us have. It's partly to do with the culture that we live in. It's definitely to do with the way we're raised. Maybe it's to do with religious traditions as well sometimes. To feel like if anything's worth doing, it's going to be pretty high effort, right? If you go through the day and you don't put in an awful lot of effort, then you're kind of not being a full, adequate human being who gets to feel good about themselves. And obviously, there's some truth in that idea, right? Life calls for effort in certain cases and you have to sort of put it in and it makes it worth living. We were talking about you putting in the effort of reading the books of your podcast guests as an example of effort that you find rewarding.

• 1:14:55Speaker 00

  But it's really easy to get to a point where you think, you sort of approach life braced for everything that you're trying to do to be like some kind of fight. And it's like, oh, no, like this project really matters. And therefore, you know, you assume it's going to be really hard. Or you just sort of go through the whole of your day, sort of, yeah, with this kind of expectation that you're going to have to fight your way through it. And that you're not going to get to enjoy it. And that you're not going to get to choose to do things that you like because like, that's not what life is about. You're postponing enjoyment for later. Right, right, right. And just this incredible power of this idea, which has been articulated by many different people. There's famous quotes from Tim Ferriss and Elizabeth Gilbert to this effect,

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  but many other people as well. Just the radicalism of asking yourself like, what if, what if this were, what if this were easy? What if this thing I'm about to, or what if, what would this look like if this were easy? I think is Tim's version of it. And it's such a sort of weirdly subversive question for a certain kind of person that I am, that kind of person, like historically, right? That sort of. Like, like, what would actually happen if you did the things, some of the things today that you feel like doing? And is it really the case that you can't do that? There are limitations to it, of course, created by our situation in life.

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  But would I, if I just did some things that I wanted to do, would I, would I just definitely choose being a layabout and sitting on the sofa and eating crisps like, and like wasting my life? Or maybe I can trust myself a little bit more than that, you know? Maybe I can sort of take a subtly different attitude. And I, I write at one point in that chapter, I think, about an author called Julia Rogers Hammerick, who has this idea of choosing easy world. And it's this idea that felt, struck me as just so new agey when I first came across it, like, oh, I don't want to go into this kind of terrain.

• 1:17:00Speaker 00

  But she has this idea that, you know, she writes about when she, the moment that she realized that you could sort of, you could just sort of choose to address a challenge in life in easy world instead of in difficult world. And she doesn't mean, I don't think, like persuading yourself that bad things aren't happening, or trying to sort of force yourself to think that something painful is not painful. It's that actually, you either have to choose to sort of take the attitude that everything's against you, or you can choose to take the attitude that everything is at least potentially for, for you and working in your favor. And then the great thing about this is that even difficult experiences can be approached

• 1:17:38Speaker 00

  with a kind of ease, with a kind of readiness to have them go more smoothly than you were naturally, or you were previously assuming. Have I made that clear?

• 1:17:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's kind of interesting that, you know, as you were just finishing there, we know that when, I don't know, when, when people run at their fastest, they're not trying to go at their fastest. There isn't, of course, it's not completely effortless, right? They're clearly expending energy and effort, but there is an effortless quality to it, where they're, they're not trying all out, they're just, they're flowing. I think it's an important idea, because my kids, I think, are a little older than your son.

• 1:18:29Speaker 00

  Right, he's eight.

• 1:18:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  He's eight. My, my kids are 15 and 12.

• 1:18:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  And this idea that things have to be hard, I think, gets subconsciously instilled by by many parts of society, but schools. Right? Because I'm watching it going, yeah, but it doesn't need to be. Right? It doesn't need to be difficult. It doesn't. Not everything in life needs to be hard. And I realized a few years ago that I had to artificially create internal stress by way of, let's say, a deadline or other or other things to make myself do stuff. So I had to create this sense that it was hard. I'm up against it. And now I'm going to do it. And and I've bit by bit started to change my relationship with difficulty.

• 1:19:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  And actually, you can do some things that do feel effortless to a certain degree.

• 1:19:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And you certainly don't need to make them harder than they than they inherently are. I think it's in that chapter that I write about a friend of mine, the meditation teacher Susan Piver, who wrote this blog. She's written lots of things, and I imagine she gets sick of the fact that I only always talk about this one blog post, but it made such a difference to me. Its title was Getting Things Done by Not Being Mean to Yourself. And she writes about how she used to try to govern herself very strictly by schedules for what she was going to do with her day and with her work, and how fruitful and liberating it was to ask, like, what do I feel like doing today? And to realize, you know, obviously, people are in different situations. We have differing degrees of autonomy over how our workdays unfold,

• 1:20:07Speaker 00

  but very many of us have at least some capacity to ask that question like, well, of the things on my plate, what do I what do I feel like doing right now? And discovering again and again that basically she ended up that proceeding through life that way, she did end up doing pretty much all of the things that she'd been beating herself up to do. Right? You don't actually want to be the kind of person who never pays your bills or who never keeps promises commitments to friends or to who never cares for your physical health. It's just so much more motivating and freeing to do it in a context where you're not like presenting it to yourself as a sort of a terrible trial that you've got to get through before happiness is allowed to be yours.

• 1:20:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I think when you wrote about her, I can't find the bit now, it was she had this really.

• 1:20:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Elaborate morning routine, didn't she? This much meditation, this much journaling, this much that, this much. And I think it's a great example to use because I suspect there will be people listening who have perhaps tried that approach before. Maybe for some people it works because of course it can do for some people. But for some people, what I found often happens is that they they kind of think that there's some sort of flaw within them. That, God, I'm trying, I'm doing the meditation journaling thing, I'm doing the breath eats, but I can't stick to it. I'm not getting what I thought I would get out of it. And you write this in that chapter, which I think really speaks to this, okay? When I fail to take action on the things I care about, the reason is sometimes that I lack the time or couldn't summon the willpower.

• 1:21:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  But it's at least as likely to be because I spooked myself with visions of the perfect result I thought I needed to achieve, or assumptions about the difficulties involved, thereby blocking action that would otherwise have flowed naturally. I think you have just summed up there, Oliver, why so many people struggle to make their health habits stick. I don't think it's because they don't have the right information or the right knowledge, or they need to learn about a new technique. I really don't. I think there's something in that. We have, in some ways, a disordered relationship with that behavior, with that habit, what we think it should feel like or what it should give us.

• 1:22:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  I really think you're on something with that.

• 1:22:28Speaker 00

  I'm really glad to hear it. And I think there's, I mean, the thing that that makes me want to say is, like, even the very idea of a habit can get in the way sometimes. And I do mention this at a different point in the book, right? Like, if you're someone who's got into that psychological tangle with habits, it can be really interesting to ask like, well, you know, would you be willing to just go for a brisk, go for one brisk walk today? Would you be willing to go to the gym, go for a swim, whatever it is that you do and enjoy doing and are capable physically of doing? Like, could you just do that today? Not, could you do it for 10 minutes every day for the rest of your life? Not even daily-ish, but like, could you just do it once?

• 1:23:12Speaker 00

  Like, and just let yourself go and do it?

• 1:23:16Speaker 00

  Because I think that it's so easy to think like, well, this is a difficult thing. It's gonna have huge rewards for me. I'm gonna feel like a million dollars once I've really got into the swing of it. So it's a long term project, better dig in, better buckle down and like, and it's especially harmful for those of us who've had like so much success with this approach in life. Like I got, I got great exam results because I was really good at like the patient work of endlessly working on schoolwork. And it's like, I'm not saying that was a bad thing at the time. It served me well in lots of ways, but like, there's a bad message in there, which is like, if something's gonna be worth doing, it's gonna take a long time and be hard and pretty unpleasant as you go. And actually, the moment that you just go for the swim or do whatever the thing is that, that, that you are willing to do,

• 1:24:01Speaker 00

  the moment you do it once, you're doing it. Like you're there. The bridge has been crossed.

• 1:24:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  There's two things I'm thinking a lot about at the moment, which I think speaks to this, which is first of all about goals.

• 1:24:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm starting to come to the conclusion, or the current viewpoints at least, because it's an endless journey. It may change again, but I, I really do think that for many people, dare I say, most of us, goals are a problem. And the reason I say that is because a goal by definition

• 1:24:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  is somewhere in the future. And I think the way that we've been spoken to about goals in, in this Western culture at least, is that it's this thing that I work up to and then I achieve. But the problem is, and I've, I've faced this on in numerous occasion, which is why I'm coming to this belief. It's a,

• 1:25:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  it goes back to these habits. You're, you're, you're meditating because you've heard it's gonna help me with anxiety and depression, and it's gonna help me with focus. Okay.

• 1:25:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  But we really want to get to the point where we're doing it just because we like doing it, right? Not for what it's going to give us. And then the problem with goals is, or a potential problem, I should say, with goals. Because I don't think it's a problem for everyone, is that there's so much focus on the goal that, okay, so what? Let's say you achieve that goal.

• 1:25:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  What next? What do you do the following morning? When the last two years, you've been working up to that goal. You see this with Olympic athletes all the time, where the morning after the Olympic race, they don't know what to do themselves. The last four years was about that one 10-second race. What the hell did you do the following morning? How is there a reason to get up? But I see this at my local park run, you know, where we're so focused on the goal of a time. Well, let's say you work hard and you get that time. So what? What happens the next day?

• 1:26:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:26:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  So where I'm sort of landing at the moment on goals is they're useful as a sort of compass, or a...

• 1:26:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like a directing point to go, yeah, to help you then put into practice some behaviours. But just sort of loosely hold the goal. Don't hold too tight, because, you know, be careful what you wish for. What happens if you do reach that goal? What's next?

• 1:26:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that way of, I mean, I was thinking, before you said compass, I was thinking like, the point is here that they can be things to navigate by. And so a good goal, or I would say even more, maybe like a sort of good vision for your ideal expression of life, that doesn't necessarily have to have like metrics in it, is very useful because it helps you make decisions in the present.

• 1:26:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly.

• 1:26:55Speaker 00

  And it helps you decide what to do this afternoon. I think that is a much, yeah, the problems that you outline with the traditional approach, I think, are really true, and I've certainly experienced them in my own life as well. I think it's a subtle thing, because there's a chapter, I mean, it's later in the book, so I guess I'm speaking out of turn.

• 1:27:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  You can go to week four, it's fine, we don't have to go sequentially.

• 1:27:17Speaker 00

  This idea, we sort of started with it, the whole conversation with it in a way, this idea of starting from sanity, right? Which is this phrase that I use to, is one way of expressing this notion of like, you decide who you want to be in the world, and then you sort of... Go through life from that place, starting right now, as opposed to something that you're trying to get to in the future. And I think goals and visions can be incredibly useful. That is what it is to use a goal as a navigational aid, right? You can certainly have a particular target that you hope in a few years' time you're at. But in the meantime, the reason that that's useful is to ask, like, how could I show up in the spirit of that today? As opposed to, I have to put aside all my happiness and enjoyment because later is

• 1:28:02Speaker 00

  when I'm going to do that. And especially when it comes to sort of money and prestige and status goals, we all know from all the research, it doesn't work that way. You just get, you just get accustomed to the quality of life that you're building, or the status, or whatever it is, and then you just need the next one, and the next one, and the next one. So you don't actually come to rest in happiness in 10 years' time anyway. You might as well start trying to express that.

• 1:28:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  So what if you do achieve your dreams? Then what? You know, basically, when you're kicking it down the road into somewhere in the future. That is a great chat to how to start from sanity. And you say striving towards sanity versus operating from sanity. It's a subtle difference, isn't there?

• 1:28:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's, that's exactly what we're speaking about, right? It's not taking the question of what you want your life to feel like as something that you have to strive towards, very often by doing the exact opposite, right? So you maybe you want a very restful life. So first of all, you've got to work incredibly hard to get to the rest. But taking it as the sort of place from which you come. There's an author I quote in the book, Richie Norton.

• 1:29:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I've got it. It's brilliant.

• 1:29:10Speaker 00

  Right. It says, like, it's a two-step process.

• 1:29:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:12Speaker 00

  Number one, decide who you want to be. Number two, act from that identity immediately. And

• 1:29:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love that.

• 1:29:21Speaker 00

  It doesn't mean, like,

• 1:29:24Speaker 00

  If who you want to be is like a sort of super high energy sports person, but you're right now completely sedentary and in a lot of pain or something. It doesn't mean force yourself to pretend to be someone you're not. It means like, what would the person who you are now do today? If you're acting from the identity that you want to manifest in the world. So for that person, it might be some very gentle movement. I mean, I'm on your territory, talking about physical advice here. But like, you know, if you want to be a novelist, it's not about sort of telling yourself that in the next week, you've got to have the novel written or going around talking about. It's just like, what would that person who I am now, living from that identity do today? And you know, it might be a few words of the novel.

• 1:30:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I love that, you know, that two part process. Decide who you want to be and then to act from that identity immediately. I happen to enjoy journaling and I've seen journaling be very helpful for many people. And I ask myself three questions every morning. Let me rephrase that. Most mornings.

• 1:30:27Speaker 00

  Most mornings.

• 1:30:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  And the third one is, which quality do I want to showcase to the world today? And I also have three questions in the evening, but they sort of piggyback off each other. So that question is about, I would say about Richie Norton's question one. Decide who it is you want to be, right? So often it will be, I want to be kind. I want to show the world the quality of compassion. I want to show the world the quality of patience, right? For me, it will be one of those things. I want to show the world the quality of integrity today. You know, whatever's top of mind for me or I feel I could do with a nice reminder of at that particular moment in time. And why I find it so powerful is because just by writing it in my journal

• 1:31:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  while I'm drinking a fresh pot of coffee, doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to showcase that quality. But I would say it makes it more likely because I've been a bit intentional that morning.

• 1:31:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  So if later on in the day, I'm tempted to be a bit short with someone or react, I'm just that little bit more likely to go, ah, you would get, hey, okay. Showcase the quality of compassion. And then one of the two of the evening questions are. Well, what went well today and what can I do differently tomorrow? What I, what can I do differently tomorrow is, you know, getting away from this perfectionist tendency, the acknowledgement there is that, yeah, even though I put that intention in the morning, it doesn't mean I'm a hundred percent perfect human who can do that all the time. So what I, what I can do differently tomorrow might be, oh, I kind of, I wanted to be really patient today, but at 5pm, that last email really bothered me and I reacted.

• 1:32:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Tomorrow, I'm going to try again and see if I can showcase the quality of patience, which I, I, I love simple things like that, which in a very gentle way, in a non-beating up way, helps guide us. Because then you start to show up more and more, that's what I found myself and with patients who I recommended this to in the past, is that they, you actually, little by little, start to change who you are in the present. And so those goals that you were looking for, so that, you know, you, you become a nicer, a calmer, more like the person you want to be. And your behavior is actually that you're trying so hard to do and you, you're struggling to,

• 1:32:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  they follow suit as a natural consequence of you showing up as that person.

• 1:33:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that, yeah, there's something very, very deep about this idea of what an intention is, right? Because you've spoken about it rightly, I think, as if it's something quite gentle. And yet I think it might be more potent

• 1:33:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:16Speaker 00

  than a lot of kind of other, more sort of willpower-based approaches to change and transformation. Because you're planting it there and yes, sure, it may not flower the way you wanted it to today, depending on circumstances, but it's really there in a way that just sort of having it as a far-off vision as the kind of person you want to be, or turning it into tasks that you're going to sort of grind through is not going to, to be, well, it's the very opposite to something that I've definitely fallen into, still do sometimes, which is, you know, if you think about the times when you have been a jerk to other people or impatient or, you know, Or truculent and not done things that you should have done or whatever it is.

• 1:34:02Speaker 00

  For me, anyway, it's not, I mean, I don't think it's because I am an unpleasant person. It's because I've got these goals that feel to me very pro-social, very generous and very good for the world. They're not just all about my own indulgence and gratification. And like, everyone else is getting in the way of my attempts to achieve them. And so I'm snap at them or I failed to respond to their email or something. And so I'm in this ironic situation where precisely because I want to do good things, I'm showing up as a the opposite of that person. And the intentional approach, the way that you're talking about it here, that sort of

• 1:34:40Speaker 00

  gets around that. That says like, my actual tasks for today, the part of me that wants the list of things I need to do or ways I need to be like, is to manifest this thing. You're much less likely doing, taking the approach you talk about to end up like

• 1:34:57Speaker 00

  snapping at people because you're too busy trying to build a world where you're compassionate and patient, which is so ironic and ridiculous. But we do it all the time.

• 1:35:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I think about this too, the lens of behaviors, right? So all the, you know, I really don't like the word good, you know, healthy behaviors and unhealthy behaviors anymore. You know, it's a bit like time. You spend time and it has a consequence. You engage in certain behaviors, there are consequences. If you like the consequences, you might want to repeat them. If you don't like the consequences, you might want to think about changing them. But that internal conflict, I think that many of us have when we we're not really acting or showing up in the world as, as the people we really want to be and we know ourselves to be. That internal conflict is often what leads to the sugar and the booze. And the doubt, for me, a lot of the time, they're downstream consequences from an inner conflict.

• 1:35:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:35:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  And once you can sort of bring that into more alignment, I do find, I found this myself, I've seen it with patients, you know, you're, you're actually starting to change your behaviors without actually trying so hard, you know, because you're not, you're not trying to do a behavior in conflict with a person you know you are being.

• 1:36:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which I think is destined for failure.

• 1:36:08Speaker 00

  And then you have to do things to take yourself out of your head because it's an uncomfortable dissonance.

• 1:36:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I'm very much fascinated by root causes of everything. What is the root cause of your behaviors? And I think your books very much speak to Well, one big root cause of many of our struggles, health, happiness, productivity, meaningful life, whatever it is you want, come from this kind of, these perfectionist beliefs that we have. And so that's upstream. We have this perfection, we have a belief that time is infinite and that actually we can get everything done because what social media tells us and you know, I can do that and that and that and have a good marriage and see my kids and be crushing at work. Well,

• 1:36:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  wait a minute. Well, what if you reexamine that root cause belief, which your books are helping us reexamine, then you change that, you'll naturally have a ripple effect when things below that are going to start to change. Did that, did that fully make sense?

• 1:37:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think it does. And I think it did. And I think that that sort of, and it, for me, it's, and I think for a lot of people, that perfectionism is it's sort of a perfectionism that you've got to achieve in order to feel like you earned your right to exist, basically. Like, it's got that very sort of moral self-worth element to it. And so then, yes, the failure to do that, the failure to have life match up in that way is, is a painful thing that you need to find ways to, to, to, to not feel. So I, yeah, I think it's true. It reminds me also of the, just very briefly, the chapter called, Don't Stand in Generosity's Way, which is, draws on the work of the Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein. And it, it speaks to this idea that like, it's really hard to make yourself into a better person.

• 1:37:55Speaker 00

  Lots of people think they need to be a kinder person or a better person than they are. And that sets up all sorts of internal conflicts and issues. But Joseph Goldstein says he has this personal practice that when he feels a generous impulse arise, it's, his practice is to try to act on it immediately. So he's saying, no, I'm going to make myself a better person. I'm going to get better at recognizing when I'm already naturally being compassionate or nice or kind and just make sure that I follow through with sending the email or making the donation or whatever it is. And I think so often, I've definitely had this experience, right? I feel like, Oh yeah, I'd love to sort of, I'd, I'd, I'd love to sort of reach out to that person and tell them how much they appreciated their work.

• 1:38:39Speaker 00

  Or I'd, I'd love to make a donation to that good cause because it really, you know, reaches me in my heart. It's not that I'm a mean guy who doesn't want to do those things. It's that I'm really busy. I want to do those things really well when I have lots of time and energy and focus.

• 1:38:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Perfection, perfection.

• 1:38:55Speaker 00

  Or I want to make sure that I'm giving the right donation to the right organisation that's got a really good effectiveness rating. And then just, it just never happens because this life gets in the way. And so I really, it's another example of this, right? This, this lovely idea of Joseph Goldstein's practice, which is just like, you don't need to summon up more kind thoughts. You just need to spot when they're happening and get a little bit better at just doing the thing that's behind them.

• 1:39:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's, that's beautiful and that's kind of in some ways real mindfulness, isn't it? That's like the art of being present and noticing what's going on in you and around you.

• 1:39:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's kind of, I guess, one way that we can think about mindfulness.

• 1:39:35Speaker 00

  Definitely.

• 1:39:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Just be aware of that and then act on it. Not, oh, I'll, you know, I'll research the latest charity later.

• 1:39:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:39:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Running, you know, if you want to run, just start running. Don't wait until you've found the perfect running shoe or the perfect running outfit. It's like, no, no, you've got the urge now.

• 1:39:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Do it now.

• 1:39:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  When you've got the urge.

• 1:39:54Speaker 00

  And by the same mindfulness, with the same mindfulness, you can not act on a sort of angry thought that you think you're going to regret later, right? So you can send the lovely emails and not send the mean emails. You can go running and not necessarily engage in the sort of unhealthy habits so easily. Just because like you already have the motivation to be that person.

• 1:40:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, exactly. I wanted to go to the interruption chat set. It's one of my, it's one of my favourite chats in the book, actually. I, for some reason, I, I just, I just love it. And it was when you, we were talking about that journaling exercise and you were sort of saying when you can, not you, one could be short with someone. Because we're trying to do something else that we deem more important and in that.

• 1:40:39Speaker 00

  Although me as well many times, but anyway, yeah, carry on.

• 1:40:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  But in that, you, you sort of very openly share, you know, sometimes what goes through your mind if your son comes in to see you at the school. When you're trying to, I don't know. Work between four and five, or whatever it might be. Can you just explain that? Because I think there's such a deep, simple, but a very deep concept behind interruptions.

• 1:41:01Speaker 00

  Yes, I think there is a tendency that we have. I mean, part of the tendency I'm tracking all the way through the book is we want to have lots more control over our lives and we think that having more control over ourselves and our lives is the path to freedom and peace of mind and all the good things. And I'm partly questioning that. And one of the ways we do that, when it comes to our time, is we sort of set ourselves these schedules, these very strong decisions about what we're going to use a portion of time for. And as a result, we actually end up creating a lot of the interruption problem. Like, of course, there are all sorts of things that happen unexpectedly all the time. Whether that is defined as an interruption or not is at least partly up to ourselves. So the example that I give is, you know, if it's one of the days of the week when I'm

• 1:41:44Speaker 00

  working from home, I'm not doing school pickup, so my son and my wife are somewhere else in the, in the house. And if he bursts into the room to tell me excitedly about something that, that happened to him at school today. Now, there are contexts. If I'm right in the middle of recording a podcast or doing a live radio interview or something where like, that's higher up on the problem scale. But if I'm just sitting there and the only problem is that I had defined that part of the day as being for deep focus, and then it becomes a problem that this otherwise totally wonderful thing that life is supposed to be about, which is moments of connection with your nearest and dearest, if that's only a problem because of the sort of overlay

• 1:42:28Speaker 00

  that I'd put on my day in an attempt to get control over it, then I think, you know, again, in a gentle way, without beating myself up, I can suggest that maybe I've taken a wrong turn there in how I'm, in how I'm thinking about my, my time. There's also a lovely, there's a Dutch Zen monk called Paul Lumen, who I quoted a few points in this book, and he has this lovely observation about this as well, which is like, even if you do need to get back to focused work at that time, because maybe you do need to like, make that interaction as short as you can to meet a deadline. Like, that's okay. That, it's not saying you should just let anyone interrupt you, even, even for lovely reasons. But even when you do need to get back to that work, the way that works most smoothly in the flow of reality is to stop.

• 1:43:14Speaker 00

  Put down what you're doing, look the other person in the eyes, see them for real, and say, this sounds really wonderful, actually, I'm gonna need to talk to you about it in a little while. That person feels seen, they go off, you know, and this can work not only in a lovely interaction with your son, but with like some really irritating coworker in the office or something, right? It's not actually gonna help to try not to be interrupted and keep control. It's actually like, okay.

• 1:43:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:40Speaker 00

  This is what the unfolding of time has brought for me. I don't have to be a doormat and just go with it for the next hour and a half, but I do have to like respond to what's really happening. And then, as Lumen's points out, that is much, everyone leaves happier in that situation. It's much smoother way.

• 1:43:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Most stress, I've realized, and some people may push back at this, but I really do believe this, that most stress, not all stress, but most stress is internally generated within our minds by the way we're viewing situations. And I think that was a prime example, you know. On one level, what could be more lovely than your child wanting to see their father telling them about something that's happened?

• 1:44:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:44:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? What a lovely thing. It's only a problem because we thought I had to do this. And again, as you say, you acknowledge, you know, yes, there will be times, but, you know, creating, getting frustrated by that interruption that frankly, your son, I'm using that as an example, he's not a mind reader, like.

• 1:44:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:44:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  And he's a child.

• 1:44:42Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, absolutely, yeah.

• 1:44:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  They're not to know that. You could apply this to a partner who's interrupting or coming in when you're, when one is trying to work.

• 1:44:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:44:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  And, you know, some people, yeah, I'm trying to work at the moment, do you know I'm working, you know, it doesn't help you.

• 1:44:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:44:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because A, the interruption happens, B, that, that friction to it, that, that creates more internal stress. It's gonna make it much harder for you to get back to the work.

• 1:45:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  When it does need to happen, when you wanna get back to it.

• 1:45:10Speaker 00

  No, absolutely, absolutely. And also, yes, you don't even know that the interruption, like to call something interruption is to say that what should have happened is what was going to happen in your mind, and what did happen shouldn't have happened. And there are times that that's true, but they're all. Also times when it's like a wonderful serendipitous.

• 1:45:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:26Speaker 00

  Thing that is much better for everyone in the long run. And I do mention in that chapter, you know, that very famous moment. That sort of viral moment when the Robert Kelly.

• 1:45:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Of course.

• 1:45:37Speaker 00

  Career expert was very famously interrupted during Zoom by his kids. And then you see his wife in the background managing to sort of get them out of the room while this interview carries on. And he wrote a lovely little sort of reflective essay on the experience because he's become famous as that guy, right? I mean, so many people saw this.

• 1:45:57Speaker 00

  Obviously, on some level, that was something going wrong. But like it, everyone loved it. Like and when it happened before the pandemic, but when the pandemic came like it was a sort of a, it got circulated again as a sort of a touchstone of like what it's like trying to work as a family with all the kids in the, in the house at the same time. And like, he also writes about how he did pretty much think as he wrapped up that interview that he was never going to be booked on a major media thing again. And he's like, no, way more often now. He gets way more bookings, right? Because he's like, he's famous and everyone thinks it was kind of adorable.

• 1:46:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  So he should give his kids a cut.

• 1:46:36Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. So it's like, nothing bad came from that thing that you would always have. If he'd had the choice in advance, should I stop? I mean, like, do I want to make sure this doesn't happen or not? He would have chosen that it wouldn't happen. And all the things that came from it were good. And I think that is very, very common in our lives.

• 1:46:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Be careful what you wish for, you know? In that scenario, you know, be careful. You do that enough times, they're not going to come and interrupt you and tell you.

• 1:47:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:47:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  So it's, you know, honestly, you see this, it's like, it's all these cliches as you're a kid or a teenager, you hear all these, ah, time is short, it passes so quickly, the kids grow up. You think, yeah, yeah, whatever. Oh, man, you become a parent, you're like, oh, my God, these are, these are so true. I'm really feeling it at the moment as my kids are getting older, my son's 15. I'm like, oh.

• 1:47:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's not long till he's 18. Right. You know, how many summer holidays might we have left together as family? I don't know, hopefully lots. Yeah. But it really brings into that present day realisation, just for me at least, be careful what you wish for. Do you really want lots of unbroken time when no one's disrupting you? Yeah. Well, you know, you could be fully isolated and have that life. Yeah. Or you could go, well, maybe, you know, going back to your thing of trade offs. Mm hmm. Well, maybe a part of having a family and having children means that that is going to happen. Yeah. So maybe you have to accept that. And I understand that sometimes you're in a job where you can't do that. Right.

• 1:48:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  But having the humanity to explain it in the, um, in the right way is more helpful for that other person and, and yourself. And the truth is that, that interruption thing is a really big, I think this is why I like it so much is that a, a close friend of mine, a few years ago, found out that his, uh, one of, one of his children had a, had a brain tumour. Non malignant thankfully, but nonetheless a concern.

• 1:48:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  I remember him saying to me, since that moment, he never says no to that child. Now, anything can be taken to an extreme, right? So take that to an extreme and someone could be someone who's, who's completely spoilt. Right. Right, but I didn't take it. Can I have a 20th ice cream? Right, is that right? Yeah, yeah, but what, what, what do you, no, what are you really, as if, if, if, and I'm being careful not to use names. Right. If, um, he or she wants to do something or wants to throw a ball in the garden. Yeah. Or wants to go swimming or whatever it might be, his default has become yes.

• 1:49:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  And since he told me that, my default has become yes. Now, am I perfect? So, no, and, and of course, sometimes it's not appropriate. Right. But for me, it's been a really, it's, you know, it's, it's the, I guess in some ways, the, the realisation of mortality, even in a child, that reminds us of what is truly important in the present.

• 1:49:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And, and yes, I think that's so, that's so powerful. And it's, it's interesting, isn't it, to see that when we do say no, a lot of the time, sometimes there's the kind of no which is, that's not good for you and it's my role as your parent to try to steer you in healthy ways.

• 1:50:04Speaker 00

  Which can go wrong as well, because it's important to make your own decisions and all the rest of it. But, but, but there's also the no that says like, well, that is a good thing, but I just can't do it now. Like, we can't do it now because it's got to be later. And there's a beautiful line in a Tom Stoppard play, which I quote in 4,000 Weeks, which is in the context of child mortality as well. But like, you know, it's like, later is always too late. Like, and it's, and he's, he's talking about how, like, there's this other line in that same quote, which is that, you know, we treat children as if their purpose is to grow up into successful adults. And so we say yes or no to them on that basis. But actually, a child's purpose is to be a child. And later is always too late. Just this idea that like, you know, if you're going to do these things that matter in your

• 1:50:45Speaker 00

  life, at some point, you're going to have to do them in a, in a now. Right? And I think it's, it's, it's so easy to forget. It's then so easy to beat yourself up when you remember it. As like, oh no, from now on, I'm going to be perfect about this. That's also not where, where this is headed, right? But just like, just to let that back in is, is very powerful, I think.

• 1:51:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  I cannot finish this conversation without talking about scruffy hospitality. I think it's, I think I, I'd like to think I demonstrated a bit of that today, when you came to the house with the painters there and you having to come in through the back. But, but what is scruffy hospitality?

• 1:51:24Speaker 00

  Scruffy hospitality, this is a phrase that was coined by a, an Anglican priest in Tennessee called Jack King. And he had this experience where he and his wife like loved having people around to, to have dinner. He's written about this and gave a sermon about it, which sort of is where I first found out about this. He loved, they loved having people around for dinner, but they had sort of developed this checklist of all the ways in which the house had to be perfect before they could have people around for dinner.

• 1:51:55Speaker 00

  And how perfect the dinner had to be and well chosen and cooked and everything, but it became a barrier to actually wanting to have people around for dinner because it's just so much work. And so he recounts how they became dedicated instead to this idea of scruffy hospitality, which is saying like, okay, we're going to invite people around and the deal is going to be that you come and the house is the way the house is and we eat the stuff that we can cook from the cupboards, more or less. And we're sort of understanding in this moment that the connections that come from the hospitality are more important than the putting on of the facade. And the sort of deeper point

• 1:52:37Speaker 00

  here, and I've definitely experienced this in my own life, is that it's not just a question of saying, look, it's okay, don't worry, it's forgivable, like people are going to overlook the mess. It's that actually, when we show up in this more, and not just in dinner parties, obviously, right, but when we show up in life in this more unvarnished way, we're more willing to talk about or display flaws. It's better, right? A lot of the time, it causes people to connect much more with each other. So I write in that chapter about how, you know, I often had noticed, long before I came across this term scruffy hospitality, how like if we were having people around for dinner and I noticed that there were like crumbs under the fridge, or like unopened mail on the toaster

• 1:53:21Speaker 00

  for some reason, I'd be like, oh, my goodness, got to sort this out before people come around. But if I ever saw things like that, or worse, frankly, at places that I had been invited, I would never be offended. Like, I would never think like, this is outrageous, this person hasn't got it together. I would actually be kind of flattered that I was being given the sort of VIP pass to their real lives. I was like, oh, I must be this person's real friend.

• 1:53:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  So it's a bit like people pleasing, isn't it, in some ways, where people pleasing is, is kind of trying to change who we are so that people think of us in a certain way?

• 1:53:54Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's that notion that, it's that notion specifically that like you, you have to be perfect in how other people, people pleasing example is good because the point about people pleasing is it doesn't please other people, right? They find it really annoying. And there's a, there's a sense, there's a level of trying to make everything perfect in your presentation of yourself, or your home, or anything that actually causes a distance. Now, as I am aware, and have also been had emphasized to me by one or two readers since first writing about this, Firstly, there are plenty of people who really enjoy putting on a show when people come around for dinner, and I'm not trying to say that's bad. And secondly, this plays out, this is gendered, right? This plays out different ways. I think overall, women feel more pressure for the domestic spaces to be really sort of spotless. And there's

• 1:54:37Speaker 00

  a sort of like, well, it's easy for you to say as a man aspect to this, which I also take on board. But the underlying point is just that, like, thinking that things need to be presented a certain way that is different from who you really are before you can show up in the world, that's where the unnecessary self harshness comes from. If people like you as a person, they like you as a person, and they don't need you to always be pretending to be a different person. To just move it into a different domain quickly, there's research to show that when people are, there's been these kind of mentoring schemes to try to get people over imposter syndrome in academia, right? There was a whole, there was a whole

• 1:55:16Speaker 00

  set of schemes where young girl, young women academics were paired with older female academics. And the idea was that like, they'd get inspiration from the great success of these people, they wouldn't feel imposter syndrome anymore. And what the research has found was that actually, that just makes it a bit worse to be, to when you're put in a position, it can make it a bit worse, when you're put in a position where you're sort of looking at someone else's amazingness, and you're comparing yourself negatively. And that actually, when those people or people in that position started sharing about their own insecurities and failures and flaws, that was when the people who had imposter syndrome started to feel more empowered, because there was a connection that came through behind those facades, that was about how we are all human, we are all flawed and finite, and

• 1:55:59Speaker 00

  we are all in the same boat. And that's when you really get to feel a common bond.

• 1:56:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, Oliver, I love it. Honestly, 4000 Weeks and this new book, Meditations to Mortals, absolutely fantastic. Honestly, so, so helpful, so many insights. And we've honestly barely scratched the surface in this conversation. If what is in Meditations to Mortals, I think the format is also really, really clever, and very inviting for people. So I really appreciate that. Right at the end of this conversation, Oliver, I guess, mirroring how we started off.

• 1:56:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  For that person who is listening to us right now and feels that actually their life is out of control, they're knackered, they feel close to burnt out, they feel anxious. Given everything you've written about over the past years in your books, but also in your newsletter, what are your final words of wisdom to that individual?

• 1:57:10Speaker 00

  I mean, first of all, it is just to say that this is the most sort of fundamental, universal, human experience, especially these days, right? So there is, I hope that I can persuade the person in that situation at least not to make things worse by telling themselves that they shouldn't be feeling that way, that it's a sort of personal failure of discipline or character or not having found the right methods yet that have left them feeling that way. No, this is a very, very, very understandable and forgivable response to just the sheer fact of being human, especially today.

• 1:57:56Speaker 00

  But then I suppose to, it would be to suggest that this kind of set of awful feelings does have, in a sense, it's a portal to something, right? In a sense, it's an invitation to something very powerful. I've quoted in the book, and I keep quoting everywhere, the Zen master, Gyu Kennet, who used to say that her approach to teaching Zen students was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down. And I just love this, which is why I repeat it endlessly. But you can sort of see, can't you, I think, in like... Yes, the attempt to do it all is going to make you feel incredibly anxious and overwhelmed.

• 1:58:40Speaker 00

  Yes, the demands that are made on us and the things that feel like they're essential that we have to do them will leave us feeling wiped out. Like, it's not just true, it's like so true, but that is not a war that any of us is ever going to win. And it's in that realisation, that sort of relaxing into that situation, that you can then, I hope, begin to feel the first glimmers of a different kind of energy, which is like, okay, that's the way it is. So what would be something I could do with the next 20 minutes that would be one good way to spend 20 minutes of my life on the planet?

• 1:59:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, absolutely love it. Oliver, the new book is Meditations for Mortals, A Four Week Guide to Doing What Counts. Thank you very much for coming back on the show.

• 1:59:26Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you. This has been such a pleasure. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

• 1:59:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused

• 2:00:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatgeet.com/friday5. Now, if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I- I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics: happiness, food, stress, sleep, behaviour change and movement, weight loss and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out.

• 2:00:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks and as audiobooks, which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week and please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health.

• 2:01:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Making lifestyle changes is always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.