Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris How To Be Sanely Productive | Oliver Burkeman About this episode The liberation that comes from realizing that you're never going to get everything done.
Oliver Burkeman https://www.oliverburkeman.com/ is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling Four Thousand Weeks https://www.amazon.com/Four-Thousand-Weeks-Management-Mortals/dp/B08XZY5ZF7/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=0y1Dj&content-id=amzn1.sym.bc3ba8d1-5076-4ab7-9ba8-a5c6211e002d&pf_rd_p=bc3ba8d1-5076-4ab7-9ba8-a5c6211e002d&pf_rd_r=141-9976842-2413604&pd_rd_wg=pQeMZ&pd_rd_r=e4bad266-d31b-428a-a936-28fd66e6a0a7&ref_=aufs_ap_sc_dsk, The Antidote https://www.amazon.com/Antidote-Happiness-People-Positive-Thinking/dp/0865478015, and most recently, Meditations for Mortals https://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Mortals-Embrace-Limitations-Counts/dp/0374611998. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Psychologies and New Philosopher. He has a devoted following for his writing on productivity, mortality, the power of limits, and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment.
Oliver is one of many great teachers featured on Waking Up, a top-notch meditation app with amazing teachers and a ton of courses for all levels. If you subscribe via this link: wakingup.com/tenpercent http://wakingup.com/tenpercent, you'll get a 30-day free trial—and you'll be supporting the 10% Happier team, too. Full and partial scholarships are available.
In this episode we talk about:
What the term "imperfectionism" means The illusion of reaching a point where "everything's done" Why there's liberation in seeing how finite we are Why small, imperfect actions are more valuable than perfect plans Why overplanning is a kind of avoidance How to make decisions The importance of finishing things Who you should develop a taste for problems Why effort doesn't always equal value Why we need to stop protecting other people's feelings And the paradox of mattering immensely and not at all
Related Episodes:
The Power of Negative Thinking https://radiopublic.com/ten-percent-happier-with-dan-harr-WwE9m8/s1!37090 Time Management for Mortals https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/time-management-for-mortals-oliver-burkeman/id1087147821?i=1000563580927
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Transcript 13,715 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Dan Harris? It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:19 Dan Harris? Hello, everybody. How we doing? I think the biggest lie I regularly tell myself is that I will finally be satisfied. I'll finally be able to relax when I get to the end of my to-do list. But I never get to the end of my to-do list. There's always more shit to do. My guest today is here to move me and you out of a state of miserable productivity to a state of sane productivity. His argument is that there is enormous liberation to be had in admitting defeat, in conceding the obvious, that we're never going to get everything done. Only then, he says, can we truly prioritize.
1:02 Dan Harris? Oliver Burkeman is making his third appearance on the show today. He's the author of two incredibly popular books on productivity, both written with one key fact in mind, a fact that most productivity experts conveniently ignore, the fact that we're all going to die. The first of Oliver's books is called 4,000 Weeks. His latest is called Meditations for Mortals. In this conversation, we talk about what his term imperfectionism means, the illusion of reaching a point where everything's done, why there's liberation in seeing how finite you are, how to figure out what really matters, given your finite nature, why small imperfect actions are more valuable than perfect plans,
1:47 Dan Harris? why overplanning is a kind of avoidance, how to actually make decisions, and the importance of finishing things, which is interesting, how you should develop a taste for problems, also interesting, why effort doesn't always equal value. Why you need to allow other people to have their problems. In other words, to let go of excessive responsibility for protecting other people and their feelings. And the paradox, and this is a really interesting paradox, the paradox of mattering immensely and not at all. Just to say, Oliver has some excellent audio courses on productivity for mortals available over on the Waking Up app. I'm a huge fan of the Waking Up app, which is run by my close friend, Sam Harris.
2:32 Dan Harris? The app has basic meditation instruction from Sam, also lots of specific meditation courses from a variety of teachers, and life skills courses, such as the productivity courses from Oliver. Oh, and there's now also a four-part series on the Eightfold Path, a foundational Buddhist list, the Eightfold Path. That course features the great meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, in conversation with both me and Sam. It is eight hours of just a tsunami of wisdom, but also lots of laughs. It's fun to have three really good friends sitting around talking about the Dharma, and it comes with guided meditations from Joseph himself. Now that I no longer have my own app, I've launched, you may have noticed, two projects simultaneously.
3:17 Dan Harris? I have my Substack community, which is a huge priority for me, and thank you if you've signed up. Meanwhile, for those of you who want a full-on app experience, which I can't yet provide, please check out Waking Up. Let me just say, I know there's been a lot of change around here, some of it's confusing. There is zero pressure to take any action on any of these things. My main priority will be making this podcast awesome and also making my burgeoning Substack community as great as it can be. However, for those of you who want a full meditation app experience, I heartily recommend Waking Up. And you can sign up for the app at wakingup.com/tenpercent. That's T-E-N-P-E-R-C-E-N-T, wakingup.com/tenpercent.
4:01 Dan Harris? I will put a link in the show notes. Just so you know, if you buy a subscription via that URL, you will get a 30-day free trial and you Will be supporting me and my team as well because we will get a portion of the proceeds from any of the subscriptions generated through that link. And just to say, if money is an issue, Sam offers scholarships. That's the same policy that I have over on danharris.com. If you can't afford it, we'll give it to you. All right, enough throat clearing. We'll get started with Oliver Berkman right after this.
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5:04 Speaker 02 How do I recover from a friendship breakup? How come there's nowhere to hang out anymore? Why do I feel lonely when I can communicate with anyone and everyone through my phone? These are the questions that you're not alone in asking. And that's where our new podcast, Cornerpiece, comes in to start small on life's biggest questions. I'm Taha, and with my friends Sabrina and Melissa, we're going to explore life's ungooglable questions on this new podcast with TED. Come hang out with us on Cornerpiece, with new episodes every other Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
5:38 Dan Harris? Oliver Burkeman, welcome back to the show.
5:41 Speaker 03 Thanks so much for having me back on.
5:43 Dan Harris? It's a pleasure. Congratulations on your latest book. Let me just dive in on the subject of your new book because it's so interesting and really hits home for me in many ways. Just on a high level, what is imperfectionism?
5:59 Speaker 03 I think imperfectionism is just my umbrella term. You know, you've got to have a proprietary concept, right? I think it's my umbrella term for that orientation towards life. That kind of starts from the perspective of accepting our limitations, right? It's like, instead of constantly struggling to get everything done or feel completely certain about where the future is headed, all the rest of it. What if you began from the understanding that there would always be too much to do? That we would never be able to be confident about what the future held? That we would never be able to be confident about understanding fully the other people in our lives, you know? All these different ways in which we're limited.
6:39 Speaker 03 How could that be a starting point for a sort of active and immersed and calm life instead of the way we usually handle things?
6:48 Dan Harris? A couple of things are coming to mind as I listen to you talk about your proprietary heuristic, if I'm even using that fancy word correctly. The first thing is that I had even before preparing for this interview, and perhaps under the influence of our past interviews, I had been thinking recently about what is perhaps the biggest lie I tell myself, which is that I'm going to achieve a state of everything's done, everything in its right place, and then I will feel fine.
7:19 Speaker 03 Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that that is a kind of perfectionism, right? I should also have said, I think a lot of people think about perfectionism in a very narrow way as just being about wanting to produce perfect work. But all these ideas that the time is coming when we can finally say our lives are in working order and we can sit back and relax, be on cruise control, all the people pleasing, the way we try to make sure everyone's happy with us at all times, I think they can all be seen as forms of perfectionism. So I suppose that's what imperfectionism is pushing back against. But yeah, I totally share that illusory fantasy, yeah.
7:58 Dan Harris? I agree with your use of perfectionism and by extension imperfectionism here. So I'm not quibbling with that at all, but it's like this sense that we can get everything arranged just so, like an immaculate equipoise of some sort, and like, then we can just eat ice cream.
8:17 Speaker 03 Right, yeah, or to put it in a different way, I guess, but then we could finally feel like we'd earned our right to exist on the planet. We could feel like we'd done what we needed to do in order to deem ourselves to be okay.
8:31 Dan Harris? Right.
8:31 Speaker 03 And yes, and then eat ice cream.
8:33 Dan Harris? Right, right. So there is some sort of okayness out there, but I have to work my ass off and scramble and scramble and scramble to get to it. And it's always receding further and further into the horizon line. Whereas you're saying, okay, no, no, no, let's start with the understanding and the acceptance that things are messy. I'm never going to get everything done. And they're always going to be messy. And I'm always going to have a long to do list. And can I just move forward calmly and sanely from that acceptance of what seems to be like an inarguable reality?
9:09 Speaker 03 Yeah. And I think the something about the way you put it then, like, I really like, because I do think it's important to say that I think this is incredibly empowering, right? I think there's a tendency maybe to sort of hear people talking about how limited we are and think that what we're talking about here is settling for a life of mediocrity or lowering your standards or something like that. And it really isn't. I mean, certainly in my personal experience, it was when I began to let up on this fantasy that the perfect time of everything being in full working order was ever coming. It was precisely then that I was able to plunge more wholeheartedly into doing some meaningful and interesting and enjoyable things right now. Because for as long as that time is still coming, I
9:54 Speaker 03 mean, I think this is the psychological agenda that we're pursuing, right? As long as that time is still coming, you don't quite have to participate as fully as you might in your present life. You don't have to sort of experience the intensity and often negativity of like really showing up because you can just tell yourself subconsciously, this isn't the real thing yet, but it kind of is.
10:16 Dan Harris? Let me just dig in on that. If you've got this mentality that it's all pregame until you get your shit together. Baked into that attitude is a kind of unhealthy detachment from the full glory of life.
10:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think that that's right. The glory encompassing lots of unpleasantness as well. But I proceed on the assumption that we don't just do things for completely irrational, stupid reasons. That feeling, which is a feeling of control is coming later, that we lack the control and security and firm ground beneath our feet that we think we need. But we have some kind of a plan to get it, which involves finding a new productivity system or a new spiritual discipline or just summoning more self-discipline than you've ever shown any prior date in your entire life. But now it's going to change. That you're en route to that control in the future is a nice illusion to have on some level. I mean, it's bad because it drains your ability to participate in life, but it has this payoff,
11:16 Speaker 03 which is this feeling that, okay, I might feel vulnerable and out of control now, but that's all going to change.
11:22 Dan Harris? So very practically, I know a lot of the book is very practical, but and we'll dive into some of the precepts in the book in a second, although your ensuing answer after this question may touch on some of them. But very practically, when you say that it was empowering to admit that you were never going to fully have your shit together and proceeding from that admission and acceptance helped you actually be more engaged and more effective, interestingly, what did that look like?
11:51 Speaker 03 Well, I mean, I think that what I used to do, so I started my sort of career as a, well, first of as a sort of junior newspaper researcher and then as a newspaper writer. And it wasn't that I didn't produce things. I did. I produced a lot of things in a sort of intensely deadline-driven environment. I know you're very familiar with deadline-driven environments, but it was agony because I was constantly telling myself that after the next deadline, right? That was when I was going to take a deep breath, figure out how to do this thing, stop just like eating junk and not seeing my friends and not taking any exercise while I worked. I was going to figure out how to integrate all this stuff, but it was always coming next.
12:31 Speaker 03 On one hand, it wasn't that I was unproductive, but I was sort of miserably productive. And then in another sense, it wasn't productivity on the most important things. Because in that mindset, I would never spend the time that I needed to sort of work on the thing that wasn't urgent but was important and could really make a difference to my career or to maybe even to the world somehow. I would never dedicate energy and attention to that thing because that thing needed someone who was, knew what they were doing. That thing needed lots of time and not to have any other deadlines pressing down on me and not to be in a situation of felt chaos. So I don't want to say that I sort of did nothing before this realization began to dawn, but I didn't enjoy what I did as much as I could have done.
13:15 Speaker 03 And I think I sort of systematically postponed the things that mattered. It comes so naturally to me to talk about this in the context of work, but I think I can see the same pattern in my life and other people's in relationships and psychological growth in general and parenting and all the rest of it.
13:32 Dan Harris? Just to put a fine point on that, you were productive. You had a kind of, I like you use the term, you were miserably productive. And then you, at some point, accepted that I'm just not going to be able to do everything on my list, also on culture's list of things that I should be doing. But what does that look like now in terms of getting your work done, but also seeing your friends and exercising and eating well? Did you just decide I'm not gonna, I'm just not gonna do some of these things? Or did easing up allow you to do all of them?
14:06 Speaker 03 I mean firstly, it's a slow process, right? It's a, this is gradual, not sudden enlightenment, if it's enlightenment, which I guess it isn't, but gradual growth rather than a totally sudden transformation. But it's kind of, the answer to your question is both, right? On, on the one hand, it's being willing to let certain things go, to accept that some thing that feels like an obligation, because someone might get mad at me if I didn't do it, maybe needs to be deprioritized and maybe I need to pay the price of risking that they'll get mad at me. There are contexts where you can't do that if you want to keep your job and there are contexts where you can do it and you just have to sort of bear the consequence. But the other thing is that if you get to the place where you're a bit more willing
14:49 Speaker 03 to spend your time on the things that you really care about the most, instead of postponing them all to this moment of perfect security and control and knowing what you're doing later on, you do just feel the pressures of time and of being finite less acutely because you know that you're using at least some of your time in the day to do something that you want to be doing. So if I get a bit of time in the day to work on a book and I have some of the time in the day to hang out with my son, I could be miles away from anything like perfection in how I'm using my time, but because I'm not just systematically putting all the good stuff into the future while I deal with stuff that I just want
15:31 Speaker 03 to get out of the way, already there's a sort of calmer relationship with time and finitude, I would say.
15:40 Dan Harris? That's really helpful. You use finitude, mortality as a way to help you prioritize like what actually matters and proceed from there. There are many more things to say about how to operationalize your insight and that's why you wrote this book. So let me dive into the book. It's called Meditations for Mortals and it's kind of divided up into four weeks. You can read it in one go or you can kind of read, you know, a little bite sized section once a day over the course of four weeks. It's kind of dealer's choice in that regard, but each of the days kind of has a very helpful, interesting concept. Each week is organized around an overall idea and then each day has a pretty user-friendly,
16:25 Dan Harris? operationalizable, practical concept. And so I'm just picking a few of them for each week and was gonna walk through them. Was all of the foregoing accurate and does the plan sound good to you?
16:36 Speaker 03 It does. Let me just say, like, interject and add a little bit. This was really important to me in this book, but like, this structure. Again, yes, nobody is obliged to read one of the short chapters each day for four weeks, but I wanted to have that option because I have just found, both in writing stuff, but also in consuming writing and attempting to grow psychologically in various ways and follow various techniques, that I really need something that can sort of fold itself into my daily life as it is, rather than be one of these things that's like, okay, this is a great system, but I'm gonna need to get clear of everything and have several weeks to put it into practice. I think this speaks to formal meditation, meditation as well. I'm not using the word meditations in this title in that sense has
17:22 Speaker 03 caused a bit of confusion already, but I'm talking about sort of phrases and ideas to ponder. But I think there's something really important that was part of my goal here in having things that could just sort of seep in to your daily life as it is now with the overwhelm and the lack of time and maybe make a little bit of a difference there. Instead of like, here's my complicated system and you'd better have a lot of time on your hands if you want to implement it.
17:48 Dan Harris? Right, right. Yes. And there are books, we've both looked at them, that do require throwing everything to the wayside, every, all the ways you've worked and starting again with some complex Byzantine system and that, this is not that. So duly noted. All right. So the first week is dedicated to the theme of being finite, which we've covered a little bit, but there's always more to say about mortality. It's just like the thing you need to be reminded of all the time. So let me just start with day one, which is chapter one. And the title is, It's Worse Than You Think. Can you elaborate on that?
18:26 Speaker 03 Yeah, I just like this idea because if I can communicate what I mean here, the flavor of what I mean, it kind of sets us up for all the rest of it. I think that there is nothing more sort of liberating and energizing than to understand certain ways in which the human condition is worse than we think it is. And that's obviously intended to be. Funny in a way, but I think it's really true. If you think to pick the obvious example of busyness and overwhelm. If you go through your life, thinking that getting on top of all the things, meeting all the obligations is really, really difficult. Then that makes life into a huge struggle. But if you go one step further and realize the sense in which it's completely impossible.
19:08 Speaker 03 That's kind of not so much of a struggle anymore because then it's like, oh, okay. All I can do is to pick what seem like the most important ones. However, you're going to define that and focus on those. Just one more example of the same idea. Imposter syndrome. If you think that the problem is that everyone else knows how to do their job or be a parent or whatever. And you don't yet, then you're going to feel like it takes an awful lot of energy and discipline and experience and learning so you can get up to their level. But if you go one step further and realize that like everybody's just kind of winging it all the time. And some are just more confident in their facade than other people. Again, the pressure's off and you can sort of show up more fully for things now and
19:52 Speaker 03 take bold actions now and launch new projects now instead of waiting for that time. So I think there's this kind of pattern in a lot of what I write about, which is actually the sort of liberation of seeing just how finite we are.
20:07 Dan Harris? I love that concept. And yet we all, we also have to and want to do things, which is why day two addresses that. It's called kayaks and super yachts. What do you mean by those terms?
20:21 Speaker 03 This is just a sort of image that always helped me. And I wanted to try to communicate, which is that I think that one sort of analogy for looking at what it is to be human is to be in a little one person kayak on a river. You don't know exactly what's coming next. You don't know when the, the white water or the still parts are going to come. All you can really do is navigate as best you can in the moment and try to move forward that way. It's kind of vulnerable. It could get very scary, but it's also really kind of exhilarating and alive. And you can feel the spray of the water on your face and all the rest of it. Whereas I think that a lot of what we would like and what sort of some maybe bad self-help encourages us to pursue
21:04 Speaker 03 is what I describe as being in a super yacht. Slightly tests the limits of my experience of what it's like to be the captain of a super yacht. I do not have detailed nautical experience in this regard, but I'm talking about being up on the third story of bridge of an extraordinarily large vessel in a sort of air-conditioned area where you program your destination into a computer and you sort of sit back and you're in control. You're above it all and you get to just let the plans work themselves out and you get to just sort of hang out and look forward to your destination. You feel totally confident that you're getting there. That's not what human life is about, but I think it's often what we wish human life was about.
21:46 Speaker 03 So I'm sort of encouraging people to sort of accept that they're already and always in the kayak, rather than engaging in too much of this fantasy of super yacht life.
21:57 Dan Harris? And this has practical ramifications, as I understand it. You write about how small, imperfect actions are more valuable than perfect plans.
22:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think this is one of the most obvious ways in which this makes a difference. And I've had to learn this the hard way and I'm still learning it, I think. But anything that you actually do towards a meaningful project, a meaningful activity in your life, however stumbling it might be, however incompetently you might do it, however little confidence you have that you'll come back and do it the next day or the next day or the next. That's just got to still be immeasurably more valuable than all the kind of hypothetical plans for. Massive life transformations that you're going to achieve. And I think one place that that trips people up is in the idea of sort of cultivating good habits.
22:48 Speaker 03 Obviously, I don't really think that it's bad to have good habits, but it can be really unhelpful to sort of decide to yourself, okay, now I'm going to become the kind of person who journals every day or indeed meditates for a very long period every day or anything else, because then you're turning it into this huge undertaking that stretches off into the future that you're sort of not okay until you've embedded it. And for all sorts of reasons that will be familiar to you and others, these are just sort of liable to cause you to not become the kind of person who does any of those things. Whereas the moment you can just say like, okay, the only thing I can control is whether or not I sit down for 10 minutes today
23:32 Speaker 03 and do what I think meditation is or what I think is useful journaling or paying more attention to my kids or whatever, whatever your goal is, that's the only way that it becomes concrete. But it requires a giving up of control, whereas the sort of life transformation thing is an attempt to impose control and say like, from now on, I'm going to be a different kind of person. So that's more super yacht and just doing it with no guarantee of what's coming next is is more kayak to maybe overstretch my analogy here.
24:04 Dan Harris? I'm fine with the analogy, doesn't feel
24:06 Speaker 03 Good, good.
24:07 Dan Harris? To use another analogy, doesn't feel like you're beating a dead horse.
24:10 Speaker 03 Beating a dead horse with a kayak.
24:12 Dan Harris? Yeah, exactly.
24:15 Dan Harris? So we're getting increasingly violent in this conversation. I'll move on to another of the days. You say something in this on day two that really struck me that perfectionism and overplanning, because you're not saying we shouldn't do any planning, but overplanning, these are kinds of avoidance. Can you pick up on that?
24:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, I think all these, what you might call pathologies of seeking control, seeking security are kinds of avoidance because they're ways of sort of saying, well, look, life feels out of control or confusing or bewildering or upsetting now, but I'm engaging in the the activity that will get me to the place where that's no longer true. So yeah, planning is a great example. If you're using planning to sort of try to bring the future under control by thinking through all the things that could happen and figuring out how to respond to them all and getting your schedule absolutely precise, stretching off months and months into the future. The payoff to that is to feel in the moment, again, like, okay, you may not know what's going on in the world right now, but you're going to be
25:19 Speaker 03 okay later. All sorts of reasons why this is not how it goes. Firstly, because things happen that you can't control. Secondly, because however far ahead into the future you plan, there's always like another bit of future that you've got to plan after that. So it's sort of in it's baked in that you'll never get closure acting like that. And yeah, it's a sort of an attempt to cross every possible bridge you could cross before you get to it. And that can't work. You're just fantasizing. Well, it's just one example. I come from a family of people who sort of want the full schedule for their vacation to be planned down to the hour several months in advance. My father denies this, but of
25:59 Speaker 03 course he would. So and so that's the one that's very close to my heart, understanding how it doesn't actually assuage the anxiety it's meant to assuage. It sort of exacerbates it. But this crops up in a million different other ways.
26:12 Dan Harris? Okay, so jumping around here because I want to be able to get as deep into the book as I can in whatever time we have here. Day six stuck out to me. The title is You Can't Care About Everything. Can you hold forth?
26:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, so I think this is a really interesting dimension of productivity gone wrong and optimization gone wrong and the quest for control gone wrong because we don't think about it so much. It's not so obvious, but I think that for a lot of us, there is this feeling that like we ought to be doing something or at least caring about everything that's going on in the world at the time in history when it really feels like we're sort of living through history with a with a capital H. But it's pretty easy to see that if you come up with 10 ideas for businesses you want to launch, you're going to have to pick one or two, or if you have 50,000 emails in your inbox, you're going to have to come up with some method that doesn't involve getting through them all the next couple of days.
27:10 Speaker 03 I think it's a little harder to see that actually your ability to meaningfully respond to any given crisis in the world, any given instance of suffering is also going to depend on your willingness to kind of neglect other ones, especially at a time like this that feels there's so many sort of multi-dimensional unfolding things to feel stressed or anxious about. And I think we overlook the way that the news media environment these days is basically a sort of a, it's problematic in all sorts of ways, but one of them is that sort of demand that you treat every new development or every cause as the most important one. And it goes against the grain for anyone who feels sort of broadly well-meaning in
27:51 Speaker 03 life to say, well, I'm not going to dedicate brain space to this issue or that issue because I'm going to focus on this one for my charitable donations or my volunteering work or something. I think we have to do it, otherwise all we're doing is sort of emoting in a dissipated way over an enormous amount of awfulness.
28:12 Dan Harris? Right, I remember in college, back when we used to read physical newspapers and magazines.
28:19 Dan Harris? I would read Newsweek a lot. This was in 1992, 93. So the, there was a recession on and there was a presidential campaign that Bill Clinton won and then came into office. And I followed that pretty closely and I followed some of the aftermath of events in the, in the Middle East after the first Gulf War. But I never paid close attention to the situation in the disintegrating Yugoslavia, which is now today, 30 years later, several different countries. And at that time was a huge story as Yugoslavia was coming apart and there was a war in Bosnia. And I followed it vaguely, but I didn't follow it too closely. And I would sometimes feel guilty about turning those pages, but I just wasn't that interested in that.
29:04 Dan Harris? What you're saying is you shouldn't feel guilty. There's only a number of stories in the world at any given time you can really kind of zoom in on.
29:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, one of the questions is to do with which things you pay attention to. The other is to do with how, how you understand your own capacity to do something about it, right? I think that when our sort of horizons are set too broadly, precisely because we feel very strongly about something and our hearts go out to the people involved or we're terrified by what the story represents, that can actually be really sort of disempowering because you're trying to sort of engage with it at that level that is beyond individual, limited human, right? This is why people say, and they're completely correct, to say that action is the antidote to despair, that it is really difficult to feel hopeless about any area of national
29:54 Speaker 03 or international life if you just sort of do some small thing to address yourself to it. One of the problems, of course, is that the sort of social media landscape encourages us to think that emoting or expressing our condemnation and all these other things are a form of doing. And yet, very swiftly, we realize that they leave us feeling more powerless than before because they don't have any effect. It's about picking your battles, not feeling guilty about letting go of certain things and recognizing, yeah, if you spend 10 minutes of the day doing something that makes the world a better place and the rest of the day watching TV shows and eating potato chips, that's more effective, that's being a better citizen than the person who spends the whole
30:38 Speaker 03 day expressing how bad they feel about the things on social media, for example.
30:44 Dan Harris? Yes. Typing in all caps on Twitter.
30:50 Dan Harris? Coming up, Oliver Burkeman talks about how to actually make decisions, the importance of finishing things, why you should develop a taste for problems, and why effort doesn't always equal value.
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31:42 Dan Harris? Let's jump to Week 2, which is about taking action. So, Day 8, the first day in Week 2 for anybody who's not good at math. It's entitled "Decision Hunting." What does that mean?
31:54 Speaker 03 It was clear when I put this book together, I was going to have to really go deep on this question of deciding, because I think in some ways, being willing to make, take decisions is the sort of ultimate expression of what it is to be finite, right? It's to decide to do some things and not others, to decide to move forward with some project when you're roughly happy with where you're at with it, instead of holding out for perfection. And I've found that one really useful framing here is to stop thinking about decisions, as we usually do, I think, as things that just come along. You're ambling through your life, and then suddenly, oh, you've got to decide. Life presents you with a decision. It could be a big decision about a career move. It could be a little decision.
32:36 Speaker 03 And think instead about decisions as things to go looking for. Obvious example, if I'm stuck on some sort of creative project...
32:45 Speaker 03 And it just feels all sort of gloopy and directionless and I don't know what to do. The answer almost always is to find some decision in the morass that I could take and take it. So easy example I give in the book is like, if you're trying to do something that involves launching something on online, you want to launch a website of some kind, just choosing which provider you're going to use and committing to that. That's a decision. It's a tiny decision. It's not an important decision in the scheme of things, but it's just a tiny, real example of what we're doing all the time in life, which is whether we are conscious of it or not, which is choosing one path over thousands of alternative paths. I think you can apply this in relationships, you can apply this in any area of life.
33:27 Speaker 03 It's not about making a grand gesture or making a big change to your life. It's about just going looking for something that would close off some options. I think that's always the way to get forward motion when you feel stuck.
33:41 Dan Harris? There are two nuggets of wisdom that are popping up into my head as you talk and I'll say them both to you and see if they land. The first is from Daniel Goleman. His friends know him as Danny. Danny wrote Emotional Intelligence, that's probably what he's best known for. And he's an old friend and I was talking to him once about his writing process and he said, I always just do the easy stuff first. That really landed for me. And then the, another line that I heard recently from Ellen Langer, the Harvard psychologist, who says, don't worry about making the right decision, make whatever decision you make right.
34:18 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, I love both of those. The first one speaks a little bit more to the chapter in this book about sort of allowing things to be easy and being willing to not assume that if something's worth doing, it must be really hard and grueling. And the one from Ellen Langer, absolutely, it's the deciding that matters more than it is what you decide, at least very often in life. Maybe one can come up with exceptions, but it is that sort of, it's what is represented by the idea of saying. I could take one of 10 paths here, but I can only take one and I commit to taking that one. Obviously, got obvious uses in terms of whether to enter into a long-term
35:01 Speaker 03 relationship or whether to become a parent and all sorts of things. But it really has a lot of use on a much more sort of micro level of which of the six tasks on my to-do list will I do now? Or which opening shall I use for this chapter of the two or three that I can think of? It's the willingness to say, I will choose that gets you on your way and that turns out the best work or the best experience is in the end, I'm pretty sure, rather than hanging back to make the exact right decision.
35:30 Dan Harris? I was talking recently to a friend of mine. He and I are in a sangha together, a little Buddhist group, three people in the group that we go on retreats together. And anyway, I was spending time with my friend Stephane, and he's a very experienced manager. He's the president of quite a large company and has been an executive for a long time. And he was talking to me about one of the things he's learned in the course of his business career is that people are genuinely and generally afraid to make decisions. But he's taught himself not to be. He just decides with the caveat that he's willing to undecided and make a different decision and course correct if his decision, the first decision, was a dumb one.
36:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's so great. And I mean, the other thing that puts me in mind of is like, you can work up to this, right? This is not all about suddenly from nowhere summoning the strength of character to like, quit a job or move cities or completely change. Like, it helps to do this on the level of what you're cooking for dinner. And then you can sort of work from there because even though the consequences could be very different, the basic move, which is like, I have to let go of some possibilities here. It's the same move.
36:46 Dan Harris? Yes. Yes. Day nine is entitled Finish Things. Say more, please.
36:54 Speaker 03 This was a big revelation for me. We, again, maybe this is more like a certain kind of person that I am. I have a tendency to drag through life a whole lot of semi-finished, unfinished projects, things that you felt excited about when you began them, or things that you should have just dispensed with, but couldn't quite bring yourself to. And the thought of finishing them, the thought of getting, of sort of switching to a spirit of finishing things where your method of working or of acting is to sort of pick something, do it, and see it through to completion, then move on to the next one, feels like that would be exhausting. But as a coach, I quote in the book, Steve Chandler points
37:36 Speaker 03 out really vividly, it's the opposite, right? It brings energy. There's something about closing things up that's on your plate that, because it entails sort of falling in line with the truth about reality, which is that we can only really do one thing at a time, and we're moving sequentially through our lives, there's something about that that sort of puts the wind beneath your wings. Couple of quick caveats, right? Obviously, I don't mean that you can start and finish an enormous project before moving on to the next one. You're not going to say like, move house and then do nothing else in your life until you've succeeded in moving house. It's about what you should do is come up with some very small manageable chunk and do that and finish that. And secondly, abandoning
38:20 Speaker 03 things is a form of finishing. I don't think you have to sort of get to the end of every book you start, or get to the end of every project you begin, but you do have to be a bit conscious about saying, okay, I am now leaving this aside and giving up on this. It's that sort of strange but very understandable tendency to want to sort of keep 25 things on the boil. There's something very deep going on about the idea that if you have all these different things on the boil, you, you must have the capacity to do them. It makes you important. You must be going to live long enough to finish them. You know what I mean? There's something quite appealing about that feeling of having too many things on the go at once, and something that takes a little bit of will on some level to actually
39:05 Speaker 03 take yourself through them sequentially and start finishing them.
39:10 Dan Harris? There's so much in there. And I'll just say personally, one of the very accurate critiques that have been leveled against me is that I'm overcommitted.
39:20 Speaker 03 Right.
39:21 Dan Harris? And people have asked me, you know, why do you commission so many projects? Why do you agree to do so many things? And I think part of it is, I love coming up with ideas. And it's intoxicating to come up with an idea and then make it a reality. But I also think part of it on a deeper level that I'm not even entirely conscious of may be exactly what you just said, which is that it somehow is a form of immortality. I've got all this shit going, I can't die.
39:51 Speaker 03 Right. Yes, it makes you feel indispensable. I think I'm similar. I think it's important. I'm sure you're better at it than you were. And I'm, I would imagine that you are, and I think I'm better at this than I was. That's always the comparison that needs to be made. But to this day, right, the lure of sort of taking something else on is the lure of like, really mattering and having the bandwidth to do it and being able to show that you can do it and all these things, even having someone sort of impatiently waiting for you to get back to an email from them, although it, on balance, is bad for your professional reputation, I assume, in most cases. You matter. You can't deny that you matter to that person.
40:38 Dan Harris? All right, this is something for me to chew on. But let me, let me keep going through the, through the book here. I'm going to skip to day 12, which is called Rules That Serve Life. And in this, you talk about this concept of daily-ish, which I stole from somebody at a public event I was, I was involved with, but you seem to have found some resonance in it yourself.
41:03 Speaker 03 Yeah, so I'm writing there about this general sense that a certain kind of person, I think it's lots of us, I think it's historically been me, is looking for the the protocol, the set of rules, the the system that would just make everything run smoothly once and for all. And it's almost like a deal, right? It's like, I'll agree to follow these rules obediently to the letter. In return, the system will somehow live life on my behalf. I won't quite have to take responsibility for every moment. It'll just be a sort of an automatic process that just works because I'm following the rules. And what happens then, I think, is that very swiftly, you're effectively serving the rules. They're not helping you
41:43 Speaker 03 as a way to achieve the things you want to achieve in your life. They turn into a thing that you have to follow. And at the extreme end, I suppose, that's what a lot of cult-type organizations are. But I think many of us who don't fall prey to that still do this. Why I was so taken with this idea of meditating or doing anything else dailyish is because, like, this is a real form of discipline, right? The dailyish is not synonymous with just do it whenever you like, or whenever it seems easy to do it. You know that if you've resolved to pursue some habit dailyish, and you do it twice a week, that you did not do it dailyish. But you know also that maybe in very busy times, four times a week might
42:26 Speaker 03 get to count. You know that five or six certainly does. And that level of kind of give is a good example of taking a rule. In that case, the rule is, I am going to meditate or whatever else, dailyish. And it's a tool that you're using to bring yourself more fully into life. Instead of deciding that you're going to absolutely consistently rigidly meditate every single day, then of course, you know, the moment you fall off the wagon, it's a much bigger disaster. You can never achieve any kind of sense of rest in that process, because the question is always whether you're going to do it again tomorrow, and so on, and so on. So yeah, that's why I love dailyish. Thank you. And thank you to whoever originated it.
43:07 Dan Harris? I was having a conversation once with my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who I am constantly stealing stuff from, although I think I do give him credit. But I'm constantly, constantly, he's just a, he's just boiling over with wisdom, and I'm just taking it all the time. And I was expressing some cheapishness about that to him. And he was like, We're part of a lineage of thieves.
43:36 Dan Harris? Who do you think I'm getting all this stuff from? You know, older people than me. Yeah, nothing but encouragement on my side. Day 14. This is so counterintuitive and interesting. Develop a taste for problems.
43:54 Speaker 03 I think we seem to live, a lot of us, with this idea that there is going to come a time in the future when we finally don't have problems, right? When we finally got our lives running in such a way that problems don't arise. The shame of this is that obviously it means that any problem you do face in your life is kind of doubly problematic because firstly, there's like whatever you're trying to deal with, the interpersonal issue at work or the creative difficulty in the thing you're writing, whatever it might be. And then there's this sort of fact that the problem exists at all. I think this is just one manifestation of what we've been talking about, right? This idea that this age of peace and plenty is coming later when you figure out how to get there.
44:39 Speaker 03 And the idea of developing a taste for having problems is just the invitation to see that this time is never coming. If anything, I think you can expect certain kinds of problem to get worse the older you get in life. And also that in the deepest sense, you wouldn't want a life without problems. Important caveat, of course, there are many specific kinds of problems that you wouldn't wish on anybody and many that I'm privileged not to have experienced, et cetera, et cetera. But the sheer fact of having things, puzzles in life that you need to work out, address yourself to, like if you didn't have those, if you were at the stage where you could just sit back and eat ice cream, that would be no life. That would be, there'll be nothing absorbing at all.
45:22 Speaker 03 So I quote a friend in there who found herself thinking that if only she didn't have all these problems she was dealing with in her job, she could really do her job well. And then the realization dawning that, no, the problems were the job. The problems were why she had the job. If there were none of these problems, then the steps in the job could possibly be sort of, you know, automated or outsourced or conducted by artificial intelligence.
45:45 Speaker 03 The real human thing that we are here to do on some level is to solve problems. So I think that's what I mean by developing a taste for it, seeing that like there's something really relishable about that.
45:58 Dan Harris? I had a guest on a couple of months ago, David Ross Maron, who's the head of the Center for Anxiety at Harvard, I think. Every time I talk about him, I always think that the Center for Anxiety sounds like such a fun place.
46:13 Speaker 03 I've known plenty of people at Harvard who seem to make it the Center for Anxiety.
46:17 Dan Harris? Yeah, exactly. When actually it's the Humanities Department. So David says that he thinks one of the major sort of well springs for our current anxiety epidemic, especially among young people, is that we grownups have created a world for the young people, but also for ourselves, that is too free of friction, where anything you want from an order on Amazon to a ride, to a date, to, you know, the most obscure piece of information is available with a swipe. And that is creating this allergy to discomfort, which leads to anxiety, because no matter
47:00 Dan Harris? how frictionless we make modern life, everybody's still going to die and get sick, and we're therefore not as equipped to handle these inevitable vexations.
47:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, I really like that way of putting it. I mean, we're talking on the one hand here, aren't we, about denial of mortality that probably is sort of completely timeless and universal and baked into being human, but then all the ways in which the technological culture that we're living in now kind of exacerbates that, also in the ways that it sort of makes it far harder to tolerate when you do run into friction. The easier it is to find out about what's happening thousands of miles away on your phone, or conduct purchases from the comfort of your home, the worse it is to then be stuck in a traffic jam, or...
47:49 Speaker 03 Not have the person you're in a relationship with see eye to eye with you or something that you could imagine, I don't know if it's been found in studies or anything, but you could certainly imagine that that frictionlessness makes the friction of reality harder to bear. And yes, right, even if all it does is boost this illusion of our being kind of gods in some way over our realities, then that is just going to make the, any reminder or any awareness that we're not, that we're human, more anxiety inducing than it was before. It's a really interesting question, the history of anxiety. I'm interested not only in like, you know, what's happened in the last 20 years, the last 10 years, but like, what was this like in the 1500s, when there was on some level
48:33 Speaker 03 an awful lot more to be anxious about?
48:35 Dan Harris? Hmm. All right. Let me move to week three, which is all about letting go. So there are seven days or essays on this theme. And day 15, day one of week three, may seem like a somewhat of a contradiction or a non sequitur, given what we've just been talking about. What if this were easy? Now, you did reference this earlier, but what do you mean by what if this were easy?
49:02 Speaker 03 I mean that it is incredibly tempting to fall into the trap of thinking that if something's worth doing, it's going to be hard, that if you are going to pull it off, then it's going to take everything you've got and that's going to be an unpleasant experience. Many of us were raised in such a way that the thought that something that is important that you need to do could just be quite easy to do, feels very sort of subversive. It feels dangerous to think somehow, to have that level of trust in yourself. And yet, again and again, this idea of being willing to let something be easy, that's Elizabeth Gilbert's phrasing, I think. It's a revelation because you find firstly, that a lot of things that you were sort of
49:45 Speaker 03 bracing yourself against or getting ready to be, to find very unpleasant, were not unpleasant at all.
49:51 Speaker 03 And secondly, and this is a little harder to express, but even things that aren't easy can be easy. Let me try to explain what I mean. Even things that are sort of objectively distressing or difficult or challenging or that take everything you've got, they're not helped by going into them with this kind of furrowed brow approach that says, I'm really going to have to fight to make this work. There's no good reason to sort of go into life in the brace position in that sense, sort of assuming that things are going to about to be really hard and bad and so much of the time they don't need to be. But again, yes, such a hard question to ask because it seems somehow illicit or legitimate.
50:34 Dan Harris? Many of these entries in the book dig up or dredge up memories for me. Then that's been happening throughout this conversation. And here we go with another one, which may be on point or not, or maybe useful or maybe self indulgent. I don't know. But there was a period of time in my twenties where I had started my career as a TV news reporter, which I loved, but I also had it in my head that I should go to business school. And I went through all this whole rigmarole of like applying to business schools and taking the GMAT. And my parents, who really were my consigliaries throughout much of my life, which I know makes me rare in that I'm somebody who likes his parents, but I remember them saying to me, like, dude,
51:15 Dan Harris? you're not great at math. You love what you do in television. And we think you're kind of taking for granted that you've already kind of found what you want to do because you have this story that you need this big, grand struggle around getting through business school. The good news or the bad news is I didn't get in anyway. So I ended up having a great career as a TV news anchor, which I loved. Anyway, does that seem at all relevant to the point you're trying to make here about letting things be easy?
51:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think it does. I was talking more about like an individual challenge that you're kind of going to do one way or the other. But there you're talking about the idea that a path through life should be like this too, on some level, right? That if you're not doing something difficult and proving that you can do it, or you're not doing something that you think is socially The done thing to do, no matter how grueling it is for you that you're not living life properly. And it's especially striking, given that the career on which you embarked for real and excelled in is one that huge numbers of the population would kill to have, right? It's not like you had to settle for something that lacked all glamour, interest or immuneration. That really speaks to how powerful that thought
52:30 Speaker 03 about business school must have
52:32 Dan Harris? Yeah.
52:33 Speaker 03 Been. I have a, not the same story, but similar one about sort of dropping out of a PhD in political theory, because I suddenly realized that I was, not suddenly, but I realized that I was pursuing it in order to become the kind of academic who does a lot of journalism. And it was just like, why not just do journalism?
52:51 Dan Harris? Exactly.
52:53 Dan Harris? Coming up, Oliver talks about why we need to let go of the excessive taking of responsibility for other people's feelings, how to figure out what really matters, given our finite nature, and the paradox of mattering immensely and not at all.
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53:47 Dan Harris? Just to reset, we're in week three of the four weeks that make up your new book, Meditations for Mortals. And just to restate, this is not about meditation, as many listeners to this show know it. These are more like meditations or like contemplations, thoughts on various aspects of life. And so day 18 in week three is allow other people their problems. Please say more.
54:17 Speaker 03 Well, this is about people pleasing, really. This is about the form of perfectionism, the form of seeking control that is about wanting to know that everybody around you is happy with you, or just happy in general, depending on the flavour that it takes. I quote one author on Twitter saying something like, you know, "Hey, guys, I found the solution to my anxiety. All I need is for everyone I know to tell me that they're not mad at me every 15 minutes forever." Sarah Gailey, I think, to give proper credit there. I think some version of that is incredibly widespread. The point I want to make in that section is it's not, I'm not one of these people who says, "Just ignore other people's emotions. You have no responsibility for how other people feel.
55:00 Speaker 03 Just barrel through life with no respect for that." Not at all. But I do want to say that other people's emotions are just one more part of your reality to be weighed in the balance, right? They're not this kind of force majeure, right? Where as soon as somebody's cross with you, then all, everything's out the window. You've got to just focus on making sure they're not cross with you. It's like, no, there are certain times when delaying the response to an email at the risk of someone's impatience is the right thing to do. There are certain times when it's the wrong thing to do. There are certain times when backing out of a project that somebody was really banking on you're doing would be against all your values. And there are certain times when it would be the healthiest way to manage your limited energy.
55:42 Speaker 03 And so there's a quote at the beginning of, earlier on in the book, from Sheldon Kopp, the late psychotherapist, who said, "You're free to do whatever you like, you need only face the consequences." Which I think is an incredibly powerful thought if you go deep into it. And it certainly applies to other people's emotions, too. And I guess just finally on this topic, or not finally, but the only other thing I want to say first, is that you don't even help other people by sort of doing what we call People pleasing, right? Because you end up not committing or backing out of things for fear of disappointing people. You end up kind of, they know, they can sense that you're just sort of trying to make yourself feel better about everyone and trying to placate
56:24 Speaker 03 everybody. It's not actually a sort of decent way to deal with people. And I mentioned there, you know, a Guardian editor who incredibly early in my career at The Guardian, when I'd, she'd been waiting all day for me to tell her whether I could take on a particular assignment because I wasn't sure I had the bandwidth, but I also didn't want to disappoint her. And when I finally said no, she said, it's usually just a lot better for everybody. If you can't do something, if you just say no right away. She was so kind about it. And it was such an extraordinary piece of wisdom. It's like, no, like, the thing that will mess people around is constantly trying to please them beyond your capacities, not doing things that might not be exactly what they wanted.
57:06 Dan Harris? Another random thought dredged up by the foregoing. You ever see that movie Boogie Nights?
57:11 Speaker 03 Yes, very long time ago.
57:13 Dan Harris? Mark Wahlberg plays a porn star. And there's this funny little moment in the back half of the movie where he leaves porn and becomes, just decides to record music, awful music. And there's these hilarious scenes in the studio where he's making this terrible, like 80s parody of like 80s rock. He runs out of money and the studio manager is not going to give him the tapes. And he's threatening the studio manager, got his backup against the wall. He's like, I need these tapes. And the manager says, that's a YP, your problem. And I have weaponized that joke around the house many times. My son and wife hear me say it all the time. And so I'm not defending my facetious or semi facetious use of that
57:58 Dan Harris? joke. And there's something in there that may be wise, which is to recognize that you can be supportive of other people. Without taking on their problems as your own in a way that takes you beyond your capacities.
58:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. I think one very common thing that I have experienced of, for example, is like, somebody in my orbit will sort of develop some anxiety about something. And because anxiety is sort of my thing as well, I will be very sort of anxious sympathetically and feel that I sort of need to try to resolve the issue. And number one, for my own sake, I don't need to resolve the issue. Somebody else developing some anxiety in their mind is not a me problem. But secondly, if there's somebody that I care about and would like to be happier and would like to be freed from their anxiety, doesn't actually help for me to act on that anxiety. I think that's what leads to the sort of,
58:55 Speaker 03 there's a very sort of gendered cliche here about men always wanting to come up with solutions to their partner's problems. I think that's one example of that. Comes up in all sorts of contexts. People aren't helped by you taking on their anxiety and then trying to make it go away in yourself. That's not, it's not helpful.
59:09 Dan Harris? Brene Brown, who I have a lot of respect for, said she was on the show years ago and said something about her, sometimes she'll be talking to her kids about a problem of theirs and she'll say, "I can't fix it for you, but I can sit in the dark with you."
59:24 Speaker 03 Right.
59:24 Dan Harris? And that's what people want, a kind of accompaniment to be seen, validated, but not necessarily for you to mirror their anxiety and start scrambling alongside them necessarily.
59:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, I heard somebody, who was it? A child, a parenting writer the other day say, talk about the familiar cliche, "You're only as happy as your least happy child." And sort of saying, "Listen, that might be understandable, but that is not a goal to strive for, right? The goal to strive for is to be that kind of calm and helpful person in their lives, not to take on their suffering. That's not helpful. I think that can be quite disorienting and destabilizing, especially to young kids.
1:00:08 Dan Harris? Yes. Okay, week four. My apologies to week three, which we gave short shrift, but my eyes are on the clock here. Week four is, the theme is showing up. And Day 27 is a French title. I minored in French in college. Se fait par du monde. And I'm embarrassed to admit, I don't even know what that means. I can read the words.
1:00:30 Speaker 03 I mean, I think it's, as I understand it, and the origins of this phrase are a little bit mysterious, as I say in the book, but I think it's quoi de quoi. So it is possible that it's not grammatically perfect from the perspective of a French, French speaker. It might be different in that respect. But se fait par du monde, yeah, I think the basic idea here, a working, rough translation is, people did that. Regular people did that.
1:00:52 Dan Harris? Oh.
1:00:53 Speaker 03 And the idea here is just that this is an incredibly empowering way to think about the relationship between everything we've been discussing and ambition and vision. It's tempting sometimes to say, well, people have said it to me. In fact, you know, are you, are you just saying that like, we should never really strive to do amazing things? We should just sort of live quiet lives and, and not have big horizons to our ambitions? And I think that one of the counterpoints to that is saying, no, anything you see in the world, any, anything that isn't already part of the natural environment, right? This isn't true of the Rockies or the Grand Canyon or something, but anything, any business that has been launched, any social movement, any work of art, any relationship, anything you see that you think like, well, that's extraordinary.
1:01:37 Speaker 03 That was made by flawed, individual, finite humans, working together very often. No less subject to finitude and to limitation than you are. So I think that's a really sort of inspiring thing. Of course, it doesn't follow that any one of us can paint in Sistine Chapel or any one of us can write a play like Shakespeare. The point is just that there's no reason to assume that it shouldn't be you to do the thing that you're thinking of doing that seems like something only a very few people in the world could ever do.
1:02:12 Dan Harris? Yes, so that now that makes sense. Se fait is like, that was made. Par du monde is by people. So people did that. And as you say, people did that, and your people too.
1:02:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly. There's no more to it than that. It doesn't mean that I can do open heart surgery or fly a airliner, but it does mean that the kind of people who do that are people like me too, and that applies to everything. Yeah.
1:02:39 Dan Harris? Day twenty eight. What matters?
1:02:44 Speaker 03 You're just gonna leave it at that?
1:02:46 Dan Harris? I am.
1:02:48 Dan Harris? My perfectly imperfect question.
1:02:50 Speaker 03 Nice.
1:02:53 Speaker 03 You know, I felt I I have something more concrete to say in this in this chapter, but I felt I did also have to just address this thing that comes up a lot, which is that when you talk about building a meaningful life and how to do this. Sometimes what people want is the laundry list, right? They want to know like, what are the things that I should spend my life doing? And there's plenty of books and other media that cater to this. I sort of refuse to answer that question firstly, because I think any list is just, you know exactly what's on it, right? Rich social relationships, spending time in nature, making space for play, curiosity, you know, like, it's true, but it's kind of like, I don't want to hear that list again.
1:03:33 Speaker 03 Moreover, I don't think that's the problem. I don't think that most people, if anyone who's listened to this feels that they are not living as meaningfully or as vibrantly as they might be able to, I doubt that the problem is not being able to come up with an idea of what that might look like. It might feel like that sometimes, but I think by and large, the problem is the kind of obstacle that we've been talking about in this conversation. It's the the illusions of security or the need for security and all of or control or knowing what's going on. It's all these things that we throw up in our path from just sort of intuitively
1:04:12 Speaker 03 doing the kinds of things that make us feel more alive wherever we possibly can in our lives. So one of the things that I'm talking about there is just this idea of having some trust that you kind of know what you really want to be doing in your life, or that you will gradually get a dawning awareness of it, the more you can sort of step into life in the present. That said, there are sort of great ways to help navigate it. And I love that question from James Hollis that I mention all over the place, asking whether a certain path in life, certain choice enlarges me or diminishes me. That's such a great phrasing, because it gets around this question of what makes you happy, which is fraught with danger and delusion and just keys into that sense of like, oh, yeah,
1:04:54 Speaker 03 there are certain things that when I'm doing them, I know that it's I'm growing, I'm becoming more of who I am. And some of them might be unpleasant. And likewise, there are certain things that when I'm doing them, they're just sort of biding time or even growing smaller somehow. And some of those can be quite fun, but they're still not where the meaning is.
1:05:14 Dan Harris? Tell me if you think I'm thinking about this correctly. And we kind of hit it early on, but it seems in some ways like the punchline. I'm not totally convinced I'm correct on this, but if we start with the notion that we're gonna die and there's no way we can do everything. The natural and healthy conclusion from that is, all right, well, then we should really focus on what matters. What matters to us? That's a kind of sane, healthy productivity. And then you can get to the question, well, how do I figure out what matters to me? Well, it's in my bones in some way, but if I need some help seeing it, maybe the question is, does this enlarge me or diminish me? Does that feel like I might, am I directionally correct about where I'm going with this?
1:05:59 Speaker 03 You are directionally correct. The sort of elaboration I'd want to make is there will probably be too many things that feel like they matter as well. So it's not just a question of figuring out the things that matter and leaving all the rest aside. It's the question of picking a few of the things that matter. And there not being any perfect decision in that. I would say also, it's a question of asking this question very honestly about the situation you're in, right? There's always a kind of a pushback people want to make, which is like, well, what if you just do have to work two really uninspiring jobs to keep a roof over your head? And then the question is, well, first of all, be sure that you really have to, because there is a tendency that we have to tell ourselves we have to do things when we don't.
1:06:40 Speaker 03 But if that is the very best way to keep a roof over your head, or to raise a family, or to have a little bit of free time to read novels, if that is what is open to you, then that really sucks in many ways. But then that matters because it's the thing that is consistent with the reasons you're doing it are reasons ultimately that you that you care about. But with those provisos, yeah, no, absolutely. I think when you understand how finite we are.
1:07:08 Speaker 03 You would want to spend as much of your time as you can doing what matters. When you recognize that there's more that matters than you're going to have time for, that's quite relaxing because then you don't have to stress out about fitting in all the things that matter. That would just be the same problem with higher stakes and would not be any better. But when you really lean into how finite we are, it's a relief and a source of empowerment.
1:07:29 Dan Harris? And clarity, yes. And just to echo your proviso, there may be listeners who are in the car, listening to us between their two uninspiring jobs, saying, what the fuck, you guys, you know, like, you know, you're saying what what matters? I don't have that luxury. Well, you have identified what matters, which is supporting yourself and your family, and you're doing what you can as you, to the extent that you can see clearly, to meet it.
1:07:53 Speaker 03 Right. This is almost like a point from existentialist philosophy. You could give up those jobs and starve and let your kids starve. Like, you could, in a sense. Obviously, you're not going to do that. But in the not doing that, you are making an assertion about what you what you care about. Still, it's a bad thing that we live in a society where anyone has to make that choice. But given that you do, you're making a choice that matters.
1:08:18 Dan Harris? On the subject of mattering, and I believe in this section of the book, but if not in this section, some other section, you talk about a paradox as it pertains to the subject of mattering and what matters, that there's this paradox that we matter immensely and not at all within the grand scope of the universe. Maybe let's close on this if you've got some elaborations.
1:08:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, there's this famous story about the rabbi who kept two slips of paper in his pocket, one of them saying, I am dust and ashes, and the other one saying, for me, the world was created. And you just, you have to pick the slip of paper that you need at any given moment to offset whatever tendency you're going too far on. I think it's a paradox. It may just be two different views of the matter. It's so obvious, in a certain sense, that nothing any one human does is going to make much difference in the scheme of things. And if you think you've found an exception, like Steve Jobs, then just zoom out to the level of hundreds of thousands of years, and his contribution too will sort of vanish into insignificance. So you can never get to significance that
1:09:27 Speaker 03 way. On the other hand, on some level, we all know that
1:09:34 Speaker 03 Cooking a nutritious dinner for our kid is significant, that bringing a creative gift that you have out into the world is significant, that spending time volunteering in your local community, or climbing a mountain, that these things are meaningful. So we have to sort of live with that duality. And I just don't think we need to accept a definition of a meaningful life, or of mattering, that means that we'll only get to say we've had one if we do something that no human being could ever do. That's a sad way to do it. We might as well seek to use a definition of mattering and of the meaning of life that that enables us to find it in many different parts of every day.
1:10:15 Dan Harris? Beautiful. Well said. Good place to leave it. Let me just ask you my habitual final questions. One is, is there something you were hoping to get to that we didn't get to?
1:10:26 Speaker 03 No, I think we really, we really ran the gamut. No, that's great.
1:10:31 Dan Harris? Second question is, can you please shamelessly plug this book, your prior books, anything you're doing on social media? I know you've got some courses up on Sam Harris's Waking Up app. Talk about all of it, please.
1:10:44 Speaker 03 So my most recent book is called Meditations for Mortals. That's available in all the usual places and an audiobook read by me. But before that was 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. You can sign up for my newsletter at my website, oliverbergman.com. Yeah, that's enough to be going on with.
1:11:02 Dan Harris? Well, your first book, which you came on the show to talk about, and I'll put a link in the show notes. What was the name of that again?
1:11:09 Speaker 03 Well, before 4000 Weeks, I wrote a book called The Antidote.
1:11:12 Dan Harris? Yes, that one.
1:11:13 Speaker 03 Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking.
1:11:15 Dan Harris? Yes.
1:11:15 Speaker 03 I just wasn't going to reel off a whole list, you know.
1:11:17 Dan Harris? Yeah, well, that's not the spirit of the question I asked you, which was shameless,
1:11:22 Speaker 03 Right, yeah, more self-promotion, more self-promotion. Those are my things.
1:11:26 Dan Harris? I will put links in the show notes to all of Oliver's appearances on this show, each one associated with one of his three books. And also, just to say again, he's got these amazing courses available on Sam Harris's.
1:11:39 Speaker 03 On Waking Up, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, sorry, I should have mentioned that as well. Yeah, that's been enormous fun to do.
1:11:44 Dan Harris? Yes. So if you go to wakingup.com/10%, you can sign up for Waking Up. I'm a huge fan. And you can get even more of Oliver's wisdom. Great to see you, Oliver. Congratulations again on the new book. You're doing great stuff. Appreciate you.
1:11:58 Speaker 03 Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this conversation.
1:12:01 Dan Harris? Likewise.
1:12:06 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Oliver. Always love talking to him. Don't forget to check out Oliver's excellent productivity courses over on the Waking Up app. You can sign up at wakingup.com/tenpercent. That's T E N P E R C E N T. That's wakingup.com/tenpercent. I'll put a link in the show notes, as I mentioned at the top of the show. If you buy a subscription via that URL, you will get a 30-day free trial and you will be supporting me and my team as well. And as I said earlier, if money's an issue, don't worry about it. You can go to the Waking Up website and ask for a scholarship. That's the same policy I have over at danharris.com. If you can't afford it, we'll hook you up. Speaking of my Substack, that and this podcast will remain
1:12:50 Dan Harris? my top priorities, even as I experiment with this partnership with Sam, who I love. And over on Substack, if you're a paid subscriber, you get ad-free versions of this podcast, you get a cheat sheet for every episode, which comes with a summary of the key takeaways and a full transcript. And you get twice-monthly live video sessions with me, where I guide a meditation and take your questions. So I'm offering a lot of stuff. You are under no obligation to sign up for any of it. These are all just a bunch of experiments I'm running in the aftermath of having moved away from the app formerly known as 10% Happier. Any feedback you have for me, I'd love to hear it. You can send me a note through Substack
1:13:31 Dan Harris? or go to [email protected] and send some feedback there. Finally, thank you to everybody who works so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Podpeople. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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