#840 - Oliver Burkeman - 8 Unexpected Lessons To Be Less Hard On Yourself

30:46Yeah, I think there are, I tell you what there are, because I don't want to be a person who just says, like, oh no, it's just sort of years of, years of slow progress, there's nothing you can do about it. But I think there are ways that you can navigate day to day, like frameworks or kind of questions. And I've written in the past, I think we may have even spoken in the past about the one from James Hollis about whether a life choice enlarges or diminishes you. You know, if you're facing some choice, it's like, well, if I went down that avenue, I don't know if I'd enjoy it. I don't know if it'd be painful, but I can intuitively connect to the sense of whether it will be an enlarging direction or not.

31:20That can be very useful. And then, also, maybe this is a little bit broad brush, but it's almost the case that if some practice or some way of thinking makes you feel incredibly sort of uncomfortable and especially if it makes you cringe that this is probably something that you need. So for me and I think for many people and maybe for people, the audience for this, the whole field of like self -compassion and being kinder to yourself is that. It makes you want to just sort of like, I do not want to read more about how I'm supposed to be kind of sort of like, but actually that's sort of a sign that maybe it is that.

32:11So you know, So anyone who has remained following this conversation after I said the phrase self -compassion, we did out the people who are so who cringe at it so much that they won't even move forward. Then you get to the point of like, oh yeah, probably the reaction I have to that idea about being kinder to myself is quite a useful sign that there's something valid. Yes, yes. So getting into the new book, I've picked out some of my favorite lessons, one of which I think relates to what you were just talking about. The reverse golden rule on not being your worst enemy.

32:53Yeah, and I begin each of these little chapters just quickly. The structure of the book is that it's sort of 28 short chapters divided into four weeks with the kind of invitation that you read one the day. Obviously I can't control how people read the book and I don't think you have to, but read them one per day. But that's the idea. And so, and each one begins with a quotation from someone else that really made a powerful impact on me. And that one, or not being your own worst enemy, begins with this quotation from Adam Phillips, the psychoanalyst who makes this very, vivid point that if you, for many of us anyway, if you met at a party, the person who is like in your head berating you half the time, shouting at you to do more work harder or like criticizing the results of what you do that sort of inner, inner critic voice.

33:55like if you met that person socially, like you would just think they were damaged, right? You wouldn't give them that you wouldn't take seriously. Somebody who comes up to somebody else at a party and just starts ranting at them in that way is they're the problem. But, and he says more very interesting things. But we sort of accept that level of criticism of ourselves in a way that But we wouldn't even, you know, you wouldn't show to, it's impossible to think of sort of addressing your friends in the way that I think a lot of us either verbally or it's almost sort of implicit and unconscious, like address ourselves.

34:38And so what I love about this idea of the reverse golden rule which comes from the philosopher Iddo Landau, and it's just the idea that you should not treat yourself in ways that you wouldn't treat other people.

34:53What I really like about this is that it's a very palatable form of self -compassion for those of us who want to sort of vomit when we hear the phrase. It's not this idea which you come across in certain social media contexts and elsewhere of kind of treating yourself as this kind of uniquely wonderful and special person who requires both your own and the world's care and stroking. It's none of that. It's just saying, like, you value friendship, right? You're a good friend to people. You like to think yourself as good friend to people. It's good that people are good friends with each other. Like, don't just randomly exclude yourself from that basic ethic with which you go through life.

35:44If kind of be decent to yourself as well. When it comes to taking a clear, I'd look at how much you've achieved in a given day or the standards of something that you've done or how, whether you did your best to navigate some interpersonal thing, even if it didn't work out as well as it could have done. You know what I mean? Just that sort of, it's just that basic sense of like bring the way you treat yourself up to the level that you're already treated to the B. Yes, the minimum bar that you should have for everyone else. Yeah, there's something inescapable and stark about realizing that you treat yourself worse than you treat people that aren't yourself.

36:27And even if you were born with an identical twin or you and your mother lived to be, lived to the same year together and you spend all of your time together or so and so forth, there is nobody that you're going to have as intimate of a relationship with as yourself. And you're just, yeah, this in capability that the insecure overachievers among us have to just be fucking kind to ourselves, to give ourselves a break, to be able to see us see the actions that we took with a bit of equanimity, a bit of rationality, God. I mean, forget even the emotions getting into it, just simply not being irrational always in the direction of negativity and chastising.

37:09Yeah, I see it, I feel it viscerally. So moving on to the next one, it's worse than you think on the liberation of defeat and you've got this Eugene Gendlin quote, what is true is already so owning up to it, doesn't make it worse, not being open about it, doesn't make it go away and because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true for they are already enduring it.

37:44That quote still gives me goosebumps. You can't say that by your own writing, can you? But I think you can say it about writing that... You quoting somebody else in your writing. Yeah, yeah. I think this comes near the beginning and that idea that there's something incredibly liberating about seeing the sense in which your situation is worse than you thought it was. I think that's really a kind of organizing principle of the book. And understanding the sense in which that's actually empowering, not just that it's relaxing, but that it's empowering as well. So, you know, I'm talking there about, to give the productivity example.

38:25If you think of your the challenge of getting on top of all your to -dos and achieving all your goals on a very tight schedule, if you think of that as incredibly difficult, then that makes life very agonizing and unpleasant and a constant slog towards an imagined future moment of fulfillment. But if you You see that it's actually completely impossible because there's an infinite amount of stuff effectively that you could do and you're not going to be able to do an infinite amount. That shift from very, very difficult to completely impossible is actually very powerful and positive, I think, because you suddenly see like, oh, okay, there's no point trying to get my arms around all of this.

39:13It's going to be a huge distraction from what I could be doing, which is pouring my finite time and attention into the things that are going to make the biggest difference. And then I sort of take that same idea, like it's worse than you think and that's good news, to lots of other areas like, you know, if you're in a software imposter syndrome, you might think it's really the big problem is that you've got to spend years getting much, much better at what you do before you'll finally feel like you know what you're doing in most situations. Actually, it's worse than that, which is like most people don't really know what they're doing in most situations, especially if they're doing new, interesting, innovative things, almost by definition.

39:54So actually, you can give up the quest to feel like you know exactly what you're doing. And as a result, you can get on with doing the things you were postponing until you until you knew what you were doing. And then just one more example in there is like relationship troubles. I think people are very prone to thinking during sort of rocky patches in relationships and things like that, that they're either in the wrong relationship or like they've got to do tons of work on themselves to get over their issues. And like, obviously that might be true. I am not saying nobody should ever leave relationship, but it's also true that if you're going to be in a long -term commitment with another person, then you are just going to push each other's buttons and not ever fully understand how the other person sees the world.

40:44These are just sort of built in limitations of being human. So it's worse than the idea that it's just your problem. And that again is liberating because it's like, oh, okay, I was tormenting myself with this expectation that people get to this point of total control or, you know, confidence in understanding of everything that's happening. I don't need to tell that myself with that anymore. I can actually dive into this experience here and there. Too much information on the art of reading and he's not reading. I think this is probably a challenge that a lot of people deal with.

41:35It's really funny to me that at an earlier point in the history of the internet people thought that the whole sort of problem of there being too much stuff that you wanted to consume or read or know or learn would go away because we get really, really good at filtering just the stuff that we were most interested in. And we have got really, really good at filtering the stuff we're most interested in. When social media is working well, that's what it does. And there are all sorts of discovery mechanisms on Amazon and everywhere else that bring you the stuff that you want. It doesn't make information overload go away because the supply is infinite.

42:16So now you've just got a pure fire hose of things that you really want to read. instead of a whole lot of dross around the edges. So the problem if anything is worse. And I'm making the point there that the only way to relate to this is to understand those information flows as rivers not buckets, right? By which I mean rivers of stuff that flow by you and from which you pick a few things that look interesting, you let the rest go by without feeling guilty, as opposed to buckets like you've got to empty it, right? That if you've sent 50 articles to your read later app, then your job is to process every single one of them until the inbox is clear, which I feel, and it's funny, because I sort of, for years, I've kind of teased my dad and sometimes other people in that generation for seeming to think that like if there's a magazine or a newspaper in the house, like they've got some sort of moral obligation to read every page to check if there's anything they, and I was always just like, why are you doing that?

43:24It's just that's just some sort of weird sunk cost bias that says what I paid for the newspaper. So now I've got to look at every page. But that's exactly what we end up doing with. Meanwhile, you've got an obligation to a completely free pocket or InstaPaper read later this. Exactly. No, exactly. Into which far more material can... Frictional, frictionalously be shunted than confitting the pages of a newspaper. And I think related to that, mentioned also in that section, and it's your mention of space repetition brought this up from me a bit earlier. It's like, there's a huge... There's a very, very widespread idea now, it seems to me, on the and social media basically that you should want to try to retain everything that you read or that the ideal would be that you could remember all the things that you consume.

44:32And it interacts interestingly with the whole sort of personal knowledge management and note -taking and stuff, which I think there's lots of really useful and interesting stuff being explored in that area, but there is also this kind of weird obsessive control idea. People who get a little bit too into like, you know, Zettle Customs and, you know, I don't know what that is. Yeah, oh, right. Oh, this, you know, this whole world, I'm sure you're aware of the world in general, right? Of people sort of using different note taking apps of city and external brain type thing. Right, right, right. And yeah, exactly.

45:08And like, that's a great thing, and I try to do it myself, but there's a way of doing that. That becomes this kind of attempt to, like, own, almost kind of like eat, you know, at all the knowledge that you're exposed to. And so another point that I'm making in keeping with the sort of rivers and buckets ideas there is that, like, that's not the primary point of reading. I'm all for people taking notes about really interesting things that leap out of them. But you're the benefit of reading, say, a really good book is not to sort of squirrel it all away for some later moment of use, which is the same old problem of postponing everything to the future.

45:54It's because if it's a good book, it will change you a little bit in the activity of reading it. And actually that's something I've tried to sort of guard against in this book. The tendency that I know myself and therefore I suspect in my readers to want to be like, okay, I'm into this. It's a really good system. I'm going to take very detailed notes on every page and then like a certain point in the future I'm going to execute on it all. And I really wanted to try to pull the rug out from under that at every opportunity and be like, no, just do some tiny little thing differently in the next hour and a half, you know.

46:35I think that's much more powerful than the long run than any number of hypothetical plans for radical change. So true. I think about, you know, you'll be episode 840 maybe on the show and I would guess that at the very least there is one to two pieces of advice per episode, perhaps many, many more on some of the more tactical ones. And who the fuck is able to do that? Who is it? Who is able to apply 2000 pieces of advice to their life? And, you know, I recently, especially, I found myself getting caught up as a bit busier this year as being the busiest I've ever had. And I've forgotten some of the lessons that I previously taught myself, which is a particular circle of hell that you can descend into where you've forgotten a lesson that you needed and you don't need to discover something new to fix it, you need to rediscover the thing that you already tried and then stopped doing.

47:36And Tim Ferris has this idea called the good shit sticks and I think it's the best way to remember what you learn. If it's the sort of thing when reading that forces you to get your phone out and take a photo of it and send it to a friend and go, oh my God, dude, I can't believe that. There you go. Like that's it. So you just raise the bar for activation energy or whatever so that only the things that really hit home are the ones. And it means that it's, I think that the way that I read sometimes what I'm not reading mindfully is I read as if it's my obligation to keep a hold of the information that's in whatever I'm reading.

48:23Whereas it's not. It is the obligation of the thing that you're reading to make it worthwhile for you to keep a hold of it. It's the other way. It should be the job of the book or the article or the podcast to make you go, I need to pause that. I need to stop and sort of look at the sky for a little bit and reflect on what that means to me and working from that frame that it's on the content to do that to me, liberates you because there's no way that you can do that wrongly. There is no way that you can't do that correctly. I think that's really well put and I think yeah, absolutely. It's almost as if when you take a note, the note taking is not to try to preserve the thing mainly.

49:08It's almost more just like a, it's just some sort of physiological thing that you've got to do because the point was so powerful like me. It's got to, there's something, something's got to sort of come any in that way. Also, there's a writer who I called Sasha Chapin who I think is brilliant and who I quote in the book as well who, although I don't think I quote him saying this, he's got a great newsletter on Substack who makes the point that, you know, if you're reading If you're trying to take notes on something, in such a way as to record everything that the author meant to say, or you're trying to take notes on it because you think it is some sort of duty towards consuming all the interests, all the facts that are there or something like that, you're imposing some frame onto it other than your natural spontaneous response.

50:08And so, you know, what I'd say about that is like, it's not, you have no obligation to the author of a book you read, right? It's like, they may have wanted to convey a certain set of things, but they will be conveying a certain set of things that land with you and it's those that... Yeah, that's a really good point that different people will take different things away from the same piece of content or the same book or the same article. And again, assuming that this thing is meant for you, it should be actually a enjoyable process for you to go through a bunch of podcasts or documentaries or whatever and not have to get your note -taking thing out.

50:52And you go, okay, look at that. I was just able to enjoy it for what it was. Now, Obviously, there can be a world in which you watch it, take nothing from a practical standpoint away from it, and also it was crap. So that's a bad situation to be in. But yeah, I really, really think the good shit sticks don't expect. If you can just do one thing, it's not the take your way, it's not the notes that you've got written down, it's what's the thing that's so apt for you that you can't not do it. And you think, okay, I'm just going to try and do that thing because one tactic that you try and implement is better than 50 that sat in the arse end of Anki that you're never going to like.

51:37It's totally true. And on the podcast front, it's like I've even caught myself and I do this with books as well, and I'm getting better at it. Like literally not listening to something that I really want to listen to or read something that I really want to read because I feel like, you know, that's something I'm going to want to really like take notes on and focus on. And then you just end up listening to some people arguing about politics or something because it's sort of whatever, well, I mean, that might be your thing, but if it isn't your thing, you know, it's like a second tier experience from the one that you actually wanted because the one which makes some...

52:24Yeah, which makes no sense. Similarly, you can't care about everything on staying sane when the world's a mess. And William James quotes says, the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

52:41I wanted to speak in this section to people who do feel that, you know, they have some responsibility to the world that is in wrapped in so many different crises and seeing so many images of so much suffering all the time. Part and I sort of rescue, I want to sort of salvage that instinct from, you know, there's definitely a kind of a all sorts of like wild overreach of what gets called activism these days that I'm as critical of as anybody, but you know, that basic idea that actually maybe we do have a bit of a duty to be good citizens in a certain way. And if you buy that, I think you have to sort of face the fact that in the attention economy as we live in it now and the way that we, the environment that we live in,

53:42you've got to, I mean, at the point I'm trying to make, I guess, is that if you, if you're the kind of person who feels like you ought to care about anything outside of your own immediate life, you're going to be asked to care about everything, maximally, all the time. Every campaign group, every media organization is incentivized, even if they're very honorable in how they operate. They're still incentivized to present what they are campaigning for as the most important thing in the world, the only thing that you should give any attention to. I think that even, I think we've got ourselves into a lot of quite a tangle with all sorts of things, climate, COVID, lots of things where like, I want to say that these are incredibly serious real crises that then get into this kind of hyperbole machine that the attention economy is and everyone gets sorted into like maximal panic or denying that it's an issue at all.

54:41Because again, you know, there's just, you're going to be able to care about absolutely everything and some people just get tired of that and disconnect or get hostile and other people just drive themselves into a sort of frenzy. And so I'm really just making the argument in that section for the idea that it is okay and in fact necessary to sort of pick your battles and to disconnect from an awful lot of what's going on in the world at large, not because it doesn't matter, but precisely because if you're going to make any kind of difference, you have to be willing to choose one or two things that you're going to focus on.

55:22I quote there a great blog post from David Cain who runs the blog Reptitude, who sort of has this image of like public concern being like something that is sort of distributed, like raindrops over thousands and thousands and thousands of little buckets. And like what would happen the buckets being the different causes we could care about? Like what would happen if we just said like this issue is going to be the concern of these several thousand people? This issue is going to, I mean it's a hypothetical, but like what if we concentrated our available compassion for things like that and tried to actually make a difference instead of this very performative, very despair -inducing, kind of vague attempt to appear like we're caring about everything.

56:15Let the future be the future on crossing bridges when you come to them. I think one of the most fundamental ways in which we're limited, even though it's harder to see, is the way we're sort of temporarily limited to right now. And we spend, and I think any kind of worry and anxiety is basically an attempt to exert some control over what happens in the future, which in that sense you can't really do. Obviously you can do things that make it more or less likely that the future will go well for you. And that challenge of like, oh, I can't control that I will be up to dealing with the things that happen in the future.

57:07I think that's an incredibly powerful shift. There's a quote I have there from Marcus Aurelius which is something along the lines of you know you shouldn't be disturbed by the future because you'll meet it with the same resources and skills and talents that you that you have that you meet the present with. If you were incapable of dealing with the things that life throws at you without dying, you would presently be dead, right? So clearly, you do have it in you to give up that kind of anxious reaching after total certainty about what's going to happen later. Yeah, I definitely think about that as well.

57:49Well, that was what hit me with the reality just doesn't need your help to operate it. Insight, which is, does this sense that by worrying, we somehow get to extend out temporally into the future and kind of, it gives us a sense of a degree of control over what's going to happen. Wait, if I just worry enough, yeah, right, then that thing can't come to passer, it'll come to pass in a different way. There's this, you know, we even get in your totally fucking hysterical moments when you're laid awake in bed, one in the morning or whatever, and you can't sleep. You almost even start to think about stuff like, well, because I know, or because I'm thinking about the fact that it might happen, there's no way that it could happen, because all of the things that I think about that happen don't actually end up coming to pass it.

58:46Always the things that you don't see that get you. So by thinking about the thing, you're like, what do you, this is a divination class. Am I like going to start drawing tarot cards in a desperate attempt to control the future? What's going on here? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's amazing. There's a range from, no, absolutely. There's a, this lovely phrase from Robert Soltzman, who's another spiritual writer who says that, you know, all sorts of what we do and a lot of spirituality, I think he would say as well, is ultimately an attempt to distract ourselves from the fact that we suffer from what he calls total vulnerability to events.

59:25This idea that essentially literally anything consistent with the laws of physics could happen in the very next moment to you or to anybody, always. And we're always engaging in certain kinds of kind of irritable psychological activity to make that not be the case, but it always is the case. My wife has this incredibly vivid memory that has always, I think, it might be more to me than to her at this point, but of being a teenager growing up in Baltimore, having had a childhood where she was really steeped in going to the movies and just really sort of into cinema and film. and walking across a bridge, I don't know, just in the middle of the day, sometime in Baltimore, and suddenly realizing that if something absolutely terrible were to happen to her or to somebody close to her, it wouldn't come with, like, foreshadowing music, like in the movie, so that you could sort of good yourself and get ready for it.

1:00:31Just that, you know that kind of realization, it's like, obviously you know it intellectually, but then you, oh, yeah, I've kind of been assuming I'd get some warning and actually like, that's not how it works. You know what I think about? I'm always trying to find ways to offer that. I think about similar, even more McCarbley, how many people have died being surprised? That's every, that's, you know, someone ends up in a a random unfortunate passerby catches a stray bullet in a shootout between two gangs or something like that. They've never been shot before, maybe they've never heard a gun go off before and they look down to go, I've been, and then, you know, they die in surprise.

1:01:19I wonder how many millions and millions of people that last sense was, oh, surely not. like, you know, I mean, like exasperation. It's not like this. Surely. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, um, yeah, I mean, it's, it's just, on some level, it's just completely unacceptable to us, right? But that's how it is. And on no, on no level, am I saying I'm completely at peace with it, but it's really useful to, to see, uh, to see what's going on there. I have to say, just in the macabre, topic you're reminding me of slightly different point, but it's clearly related when I was working as a journalist years and years ago, I was I was one of many people in London reporting on the 777 The the the tube and bus bombings and I remember in a follow -up piece I did about that coming across this this idea that some of the people involved in the rescue operation some of the

1:02:28senior medical people said that if you it's pretty likely that at least most of the people who died on that day never knew anything was wrong. But you know at least I mean maybe not everyone I don't know about the details of the different of the different deaths but you know it would be possible to just be going along and then it's lights out and actually that being some slight form of solace on the part of their relatives and friends, but like that sort of even, that's sort of narrowing down even taking away that moment of surprise is just like, we're here and then we're not here, yeah. Extraordinary.

1:03:13Finish things on the magic of completion and Sarah Manguso. When my husband does the dishes, he always leaves some platter in the sink, some surface unwiped. I tried to correct the behaviour until I remembered that if I finish everything in my work in progress folder, I'm afraid I'll die. I love that line.

1:03:38Yeah, this is just a slightly more tactical productivity -ish day in the book, because it's just this idea that like, there's an extraordinary kind of power in finishing things. There's a kind of energy that comes from completing things, even though you wouldn't kind of think that's how it would go. You'd think that like slogging to the end of something would deplete your energy. And so I'm really making the case for finishing things, but also specifically for kind of conceiving of your working life, your working day as a sequence of like finishings.

1:04:31And changing finishing from being something that you maybe do every few months on some big project to something that you're doing sort of throughout the day, defining endpoints intermedia endpoints, obviously, for big projects and taking things to completion. And I use this word, deliverable, working in daily deliverables and deliverables through the day, precisely because it's so linked in, right? I mean, it's just like it's such a sort of sort of soulless corporate idea that takes all the drama out of something to say. I want the deliverable here, what's the deliverable here, what's the deliverable here?

1:05:11And it's actually a really, especially for creative work, and it's a very powerful way to think about things because it's almost like you're falling in line with what it really means to be finite, which is that we are always doing one thing at a time in sequence anyway, whether we like it or not, and by sort of pushing yourself to get to a completion point. Even if it's completing 50 words, not completing the chapter or whatever it is, I think that's a really powerful way to think about productivity. Treating yourself like a CNC machine that's doing a 3D etching into a piece of steel or something like that will be done at the end of this.

1:05:48Well this will be completed at the end of this. It reminds me of your idea of a Dunlest which we spoke about last time. And me and my friend George, we went on the road for about a full month across America. And we came up with the idea of a well done list, which was a build off the back of yours. Originally his name for it, I can't remember it fully, but his name for it was the case of the defense in the prosecution against the 10 ,000 year -old Amygdala or something. And I was like, why don't we just call it a well done list? All of us got this cool idea. But it was basically that at the end of the day, you would be able to look back and think about the things that you'd done well.

1:06:34What went well today? Not just like the gratitude thing, because with the gratitude thing, it always ends up being really fruity and fluffy and kind of unannounced. I had a great walk and I looked at the sky and I'm grateful for the fact I've got my health and I'm grateful for whatever. The well -done list was something a little bit different to me and it was... I managed to remain cordial today during a difficult meeting despite the fact that I was tired. Like that's a well done, that's something that's really well done and it takes into account where you were at the time and I'm not convinced that that would sit in, the way that you'd write that in a gratitude journal would be, I kept my cool in it and it's always sort of prosocial and something else.

1:07:18The well done list feels a lot more kind of personal to me. But anyway, I am no, and I really like the way you described it then anyway was just like yeah, it really Interact it really connects to where you were at right so you can be like in bed sick or Wake up on the wrong side of bed and you can still within that context do that Life the life you got given today Well, yeah, well done. Yeah exactly rules that serve life on doing things daily ish I'm talking here about the idea that it's very easy as we've spoken about to let the sort of productivity rules and rules for how you want to run your life become the things that you're kind of looking for for your salvation, not things that you're using as tools to help you enjoy life and accomplish things that matter to you, but as things that you then sort of are enslaved to.

1:08:13It's that very familiar feeling for many of us, I think, of setting up the exciting new schedule system or time boxing system, whatever, and then two days later being like, well, I have to do this. This is so heavy and depressive. I don't want to have to do this. I want to be free. And so I give some examples of rules that I think lend themselves to that more or serving life kind of frame. And one of them is this idea from Dan Harris, the meditation teacher. I think he maybe would resist being called a meditation teacher, anyway, podcaster,

1:08:56who suggests that the right frequency for a meditation practice is daily -ish. He applied lots of other things as well. It doesn't mean just do when you feel like it. it's not completely self -indulgent. It's this idea of like, I'm going to be consistent, but I'm not going to be obsessively consistent in a sort of brittle way that causes the causes a more spirals up and spirals down. Right. And you know, everyone knows that if you did something five days out of seven, you did it daily -ish, and if you did it two days out of seven, you didn't do it daily -ish. But there are certain times in life that maybe three would count for, you know, you know, you know, you know when you're fooling yourself and you know when it's a kind of reasonable thing.

1:09:45And that enables you to actually, I think some of the ways consistency gets talked about these days is, is unhelpful because it implies a sort of rigid consistency that breaks very easily. My favorite is actually from James in atomic habits. And I think it's the best takeaway. It's an absolute sleeper of an insight that no one really ever talks about, allow I keep on trying to fly the flag for it. And his rule is never missed two days in a row. And I think that just as a general rule, never missing two days in a row, stops one missed habit becoming a new habit, right? One day is a missed habit, two days is the start of a new habit.

1:10:34I even used it in reverse to reintroduce caffeine. I did a huge amount of time without caffeine and wanted to keep the sensitivity because it meant that I could have just a teeny tiny amount of caffeine and get a big boost out of it. I didn't want to lose that. So I set myself a rule of I only have caffeine one day. I can't ever have it two days in a row, which meant that if I didn't have it yesterday, than I could have it today. But if I had it today, I knew I couldn't have it tomorrow. And it created this sort of artificial scarcity that made me think about my caffeine is so much more mindfully.

1:11:07I'm aware this is like the most autistic thing that I could come up with. I was like, it works for you. Yeah, look, I'm now back to being a large sort of caffeine degenerate, but even when I want to dial it back down, you know, if someone is fully caffeine -pilled, just don't do it two days in a row, I think, is really as a nice. I don't take caffeine pills actually because that's just that's what we did at universities and it's the least enjoyable way. I know you meant. I know you meant. Yeah. The least enjoyable way. Three hours on finding focus in the chaos. This is this idea that I've I think in some circles become known for I think that if you're doing the kind of work that gets called knowledge work.

1:11:56If you're doing anything creative, anything that involves deep thinking, it's actually a really good strategy not to aim to do more than about four hours of that in the course of a day. If you look back, Alex Pang has written brilliantly about this in his book, Rest, look back at all the routines and daily rituals of so many authors and artists and scholars and scientists through history. It's extraordinary how often three or four hours was how much they demanded of themselves of kind of deep, deep focus.

1:12:35And I've found this to be true from experience as well and there's certain research to suggest, you know, it's not just purely cherry picking anecdotes to suggest that there's something about that kind of amount of time, not necessarily all in one go, but in a 24 hour period. What I really like about this is on the one hand, it emphasizes the importance of protecting time for that kind of thing, but on the other hand, it doesn't get into this idea of trying to protect 12 hours a day for it. These kind of things that I think rarely work for people. So what I'm advising there is that if you have the autonomy over your time, it's a really good idea to kind of, on the one hand, really be serious about ring fencing that amount of time, to be undisturbed, undistracted, not to have meetings, to be at a time of the day when your energy levels are high, but then also to kind of not try too hard to protect or structure the rest of the time in a way that will only cause frustration and will sort of deny you the kind of serendipitous encounters that come from being interrupted and disturbable.

1:13:47So it's that sort of, what's the word, I guess, binary approach. Yes. There's this time, but I'm not going to worry about making the other time like that. And I think that's a really powerful way to make progress in creative work. I think I spoke about this with you last time that there was no problem that I've ever encountered in my life until I really, really started to think mindfully about it where I didn't just assume that the solution was work harder. Like I just always thought, well it more, right, or more focused or more intensely or better, as opposed to, you know, I've really, I say, this year's been just so obscenely busy and this week is the first week that I've thought of where I've had a little bit more downtime.

1:14:40And I was late in the sauna earlier on. I went to the sauna place, obscene the early this morning. And I thought this is so nice. I'm coming up with all of these ideas. And I'm just allowing, I don't know, this weird sort of exhaust fumes from my brain to just sleep. Like, when you go to sleep, there's these toxins in your brain and it clears them away. I think that's the reason we need to sleep. And lying in the sauna was like a waking version of that. Or I just evidently had loads of bullshit thoughts that just needed to get up and they could percolate and then they'd, they're away. And then here's another one and that's a way.

1:15:18Oh, actually, you know, that's something that's interesting and so on and so forth. But yeah, I think that the most bizarre thing about this is to anybody that scoffs, only three hours of deep work a day, how much deep work do you get done most days? because if I get three hours of deep work on a single task done in a day, it is an absolute triple A gold medal outlier. No, absolutely. And if you want to start with 90 minutes or an hour, I think you'll even then most people will be amazing themselves. If you can do that, daily -ish for a very short while, the cumulative benefit to clear, and on some level, Well, that's not an original point, right?

1:16:02Do stuff, keep going back to it, don't do too much. But I think the point I'm trying to drive home is like, there's no reason to see it as a shame that you didn't do seven, eight, nine hours, right? It's like, actually that's part of this process. They both belong in the day, the time when you're really focusing and shutting the world out and the time when you're not doing that. Yeah, it's the, it's the reason why so much of the progress that I made from whatever sort of total toddler I was in my 20s to fall on adult infant I've become in my 30s was through a really aggressive morning routine.

1:16:45I had this very obscenely, luxurious morning routine that was the best part of two hours long. And arguably included in the morning routine was lots of things that people would do later in the day. So you can call it what you want. But my compliance was really, really high. For years and years I'd get up, go for a walk for about 15 minutes, I'd come back and I'd sit down and I'd journal and then I do breath work, and then I do meditation with headspace or Sam Harris or Insight Time or something. And then I'd read and then I'd do Yin Yoga mobility and then I'd cook and prepare my food for the day and then I'd go about my day.

1:17:24And absolutely, you know, tell me that this guy doesn't have children without telling me that this guy doesn't have children. I'm aware. That's, you know, absolutely. That's the most bourgeois thing that I could have spoken about doing. It's not flying in a helicopter or getting a jet or going on a cruise. It's having this unnecessarily. Two and a half hours to our morning routine. That being said, the main lesson that I took away from that was I was doing lots of things that were quite high impact daily -ish for a very, very long amount of time with huge compliance. I would do that five or six days a week and I did that for four years or something.

1:18:08I've got a stack of journals like this just from how much I did and I never thought about myself as a journaler But you just realized when you when you accumulate this stuff over a long enough amount of time You look back and you go my god look at all of this stuff that I did and now as somebody that has For is giving himself the excuse that he doesn't have time to have that big of a morning routine on a morning All of the things or many of the things I loved about that and the byproducts of it are things I'm missing in my life And the answer is back there. There's that embarrassing thing about the answer that you already need is something not only that you know, but something you've done in the past.

1:18:41And then like, how are you? Yeah, so yeah. One of the things that I really appreciate about the way that you wrote this book, as a, like I say, an avid stan of your imperfectionist blog, was that you included some of my favorite posts that I'd read previously. And you can't hoard life, I think, is probably my favorite post. I was so glad that it got a feature in the new book. You can't hoard life on letting the moment pass. What does that mean to you? It's kind of embarrassing to admit that how easy it is, I think, to not enjoy life even when what's happening is on the surface completely enjoyable.

1:19:29the kind of thing that you always wanted to have in your life. Because of this idea that you've got to sort of really hold the experience or take ownership of it or something, it's this great insight in Buddhism, I think, right, that especially, lots of traditions, but especially Buddhism, that we make ourselves miserable not only by not having what we want or wanting things that we don't have, but by like trying to cling really hard to things that we do want and do have. And I give the example of being here in the North York Moors where we live now and just sort of having this experience early when we, earlier in the time we were here, of being out early on a winter morning with snow on the ground and like barn owl flying by drinking my coffee, pink sunrise in the distance, just absolutely my favourite kind of landscape and time of the morning and everything, you know, insert here whatever your personal one would be and catching myself thinking like, okay, this is the kind of experience I want to have.

1:20:33So firstly, I want to make sure I'm really enjoying it. And secondly, I want to make sure that whatever I'm doing in my life in my career is going to guarantee that I keep having this experience forever and ever and ever. And just all these different ways in which, yeah, we're trying to hoard life is the phrase that I've used there in a way that is completely opposed to enjoying it. And it comes back to this idea that I've sort of bumped into in different ways again and again in my work and in my life that you sort of have to be willing to in some sense of the word waste time in order to live fully.

1:21:11You have to be able to stand on the side of a hill and beautiful sunrise and winter and the north you're more and just be like Yeah, like let it go. It's like nice. It's not that valuable in some sense. In order to really be in it, otherwise you get into this whole attempt to acquire the experience for squirrelet away for what, for some future purpose, right? When you can sort of, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know why we want to what we think we're holding on to those things for except of course that yeah on some level It's sort of a bulwark against feels like a bulwark against having to about against being finite and against the fact that Every moment is just passing by and going forever.

1:22:00Yeah, I I know that Exactly this sort of sense that this is a peak experience and And in the moment of the thing that you're supposed to enjoy, you begin to lambast yourself for not having a life where there are so many of these things in it. And you're in a life that's in it, right? I mean, I don't know if I mentioned this in that. I don't think I mentioned the book I was with an old old school friend of mine who came up here and we went on a hike in the middle of the week of the day on a weekday. And I caught myself having the thought, I wish I had the kind of life where I could do this sort of thing.

1:22:34It's like, what's that about? That's wild. Yeah, it's it's important all of it. I love your work. I really do everyone should go and check out the new book Everyone should go and subscribe to your mailing list Why should they go? They want to keep up to date with what you're doing It's all at all of the Berkman dot com I love it all of them until next time. Thank you. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks Chris