Why Optimization Isn’t the Answer (and How to Make the Most of the Four Thousand Weeks We Have) | with Oliver Burkeman

Zack Arnold

So Oliver, first of all, I want to thank you profusely for giving me and my audience what is the most sacred resource of all, which is your time. Where I want to start is not necessarily talking about that you were on the podcast, but I want to talk about when you were on this podcast. So we're going to go back a couple of years ago to when your previous book, 4000 weeks first came out, and I think in the span of maybe a week or two, a bunch of people said, Zack, have you heard of this book? 4000 weeks? You have to read 4000 weeks. And to be honest, my response was another book about time management and productivity. The reason I say that is because I was so burned out on time management and productivity. It was a core part of my brand. I was reading all the books, I was talking to all the experts, and I started questioning, like, there's got to be more than this. There's got to be something that I'm missing, because all the things that productivity and time management and the Pomodoro Technique were promising were not coming true. So I thought, all right, I'll get the book, I'll put it on my to read soon pile. And I just happened to be sitting one night with a stack of books next to me, and I said, you know, maybe I'll just check this thing out. And I read it in two settings. I never, ever do that, but I think I read it for like, an hour and a half, two hours, until I just couldn't stay awake anymore. Then I woke up the next morning and I read the whole thing, and you essentially planted the seed of inception, this question in my mind, saying, Is there a better way to be doing all of this? And where that seed started to germinate was then questioning everything that I was doing with my brand. So to quote Adam Grant, who was kind enough to actually mutually introduce us and make this possible, I can't say it better than he did, which is that 4000 weeks is the most important book ever written about time management. I cannot emphasize that enough, so here's why that brings us to talking about when we are recording this podcast. I feverishly currently said, Oh my god, I have got to reach out. I have to email Oliver. And I emailed you to ask you to ask you to be on the podcast, and if you don't mind, I'm gonna actually read your response, which is very difficult. And you said, I generally love doing things like this, but at the moment, with a new book in the works, I've been obliged to start heeding my own advice about dealing with human finitude a bit more strictly. By the way, really appreciate that you practice what you preach, which means saying no to even the things that would be, as in this case, genuinely worthwhile in meaningful uses of my time. And at the moment, I was like, oh my god, I can't believe I can't make this happen, but having been patient, I'm so glad that you graciously said no then, and you are kind enough to say yes today, because the way that I approach everything has completely changed. Change because of your book. So that's my very long winded way of saying, Thank you for being on the show today. Oliver,

Oliver Burkeman

it's a pleasure. I'm, yeah, I'm, I'm always startled by almost any evidence that these ideas have really resonated with with people. And it's great. It's wonderful.

Zack Arnold

So, so here's where, here's where I would like to begin. There are so many things that I want to talk about. I probably need 390 minute sessions to talk about each of your three books. But of all the sentences and all the books, this is the one where I literally had to drop the book and say, Damn. And it was in your latest book, meditations for mortals, and you said, Perhaps you've tethered your self esteem to the most crazy making standard of all realizing your potential. Ouch like that one hit hard, because my former brand name was literally Optimize Yourself, and the hero banner of my home page, the call to action was unlock your creative potential. So where I want to begin is just completely dismantling everything that I believed about self optimization and unlocking our hidden potential, which really leads into why I've completely rebranded my entire company. So let's just tear all of this apart. Oh,

Oliver Burkeman

you want me to do the tearing apart. I mean, I

Zack Arnold

want you to tear it all apart, because I know that you question the idea of optimization.

Oliver Burkeman

So the first thing to be absolutely clear about, and I think it is obvious from the books, and I don't think I'll be telling you anything you don't know, but like is, I am coming at all of this as someone who has, like, totally struggle with all this stuff and been as committed on some subconscious level to, you know, optimizing myself and maximizing my potential all the rest of it as Anybody right? I think that's often the way with the stuff that interests you the most that you want to write about it. I'm sure this is true for people in the audience, right? It's like, it's not the stuff that you find easy, it's the stuff that you struggle with. So I'm certainly not coming at this from some sort of position of having always been wonderfully serene and and reconciled to to reality or something. But I do think that, yeah, I mean, we can talk about optimization as much as you like, because this whole idea, I think, and I'm not the only person saying this, but is really, it's sort of seductive in a dangerous way, for a certain kind of person that I am, and I strongly suspect that you are, and many people are right, and it's, it's, it's seductive, because we it feels like it holds the answer for finally, feeling in control of of life and of reality, and then the potential, but then the quote that you, that you read out then, I mean, this is something that goes back a very long way with me. I think I was very fortunate not to be raised by parents who are like, you know, if you don't get straight A's, then we're like, kicking out of the house or anything. It was much more kind of, no, you just gotta, like, you know, do your best and like, do everything be everything that you can be. But of course, I managed to take that as an incredibly um stress, stressful exhortation as well. Because, like, when can you ever say you've realized your potential? Like, when? When is it enough? When do you get to, like, relax a little bit you never can. At least if you're desperately trying to get straight A's in everything you do or make the most money that you can, like, at least, this has hard metrics associated with it. Potential is one of those ideas that, if for various different reasons that we can discuss, you're sort of set up to torment yourself, to criticize yourself, you're always going to have more fuel for criticizing yourself because, like, you're never going to realize your potential or know that you have anyway.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and that, too, has been my discovery over the years, where from what I understand you two were very much how do I achieve inbox zero? And there I'm going to get things done, and I'm going to organize all my tasks and my priorities, and I'm going to do the Pomodoro. And it was all about, I first want to build a system, then I want to refine the system, then I want to optimize the system. Oh, the system isn't leading to the results that I want. There must be a better system. So I'm going to read the next book or read the next article or buy the next app. And I know that kind of your origin story leading to the work that you write about is that you two were trapped in that efficiency trap. Yeah,

Oliver Burkeman

yeah. No, absolutely. And it is. It's characterized by that sense that, yeah, either it's the next book you pick up in an airport that's finally going to have the way of doing it, or the next ancient philosophy you discover, or or and slash, or it's like that you're going to finally bring to bear on this whole process, just like a little bit more self discipline than you've ever shown, ever in the history of your life, like you're going to be, you're going to be just a little extra drive and and that's going to and that's going to nail it. And I think that's very seductive. But I guess one of the arguments that I'm making through everything I write is that what would that is one form. There are lots of other forms, but that is one. And popular form of the ways in which we kind of resist acknowledging the reality of what it means to be finite, what it means to be limited. It's that sort of promise that we might be able to escape for terms and conditions of being a human which is why you're never there, right? It's always coming. It's always soon, because for it to be real would be to sort of violate what it is to be human. And I guess my challenge, the thing I'm always trying to do, is to explain why this is good news and why it's associated with getting more meaningful stuff done in life. And it is not at all a recipe for kind of saying, Ah, screw it, then I can't do the things I thought I was trying to do, so I might as well just give up and do nothing.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and I know that you've alluded to before, where it can be very depressing for people to hear you're never getting it all done. Sorry, it's just not going to happen, right? Yeah, there is

Oliver Burkeman

this sort of, there is a defeat you have to go through. And I think a lot of different philosophies recognize this, right? There is a sort of a there is a defeat that you have to go through, but it's a particular kind of defeat. It's one that leads to feeling more empowered, more relaxed, being more effective in the world as a result of having accepted this, this reality. So it's not at all the defeat of kind of resignation or despair. It's the defeat of sort of falling back down to earth with a bump and like, Okay, once you're back on Earth, that's where you can put one foot in front of the other and do an awful lot of cool and meaningful stuff. And

Zack Arnold

I want to definitely talk a little bit later in the conversation to better define what is meaningful stuff for me, because you, you and I, we talk very much about the idea of finding meaning and purpose in our work, making sure that our time is in alignment with our values. So we're going to a little bit later, get a little bit deeper into how do we actually define that? How do we build a life around these things? Maybe not necessarily the perfect systems, but find some way to make sure our time is in alignment with our values. But I want to stick with this idea and go a little bit deeper of the, you know, everything being very finite and literally accepting that there are a lot of things that are just impossible, which, by the way, very difficult for me to accept those things, not the way that I've been wired or brought up. But there was a story that really resonated with me where you shared. You told the story about a Zed master, and you said that her teaching style, she would say that her intent was not to lighten the burden of the student, but it was to make it so heavy they have to put it down. That really hit me. So let's break that down a little bit further, and what that actually means to just have such a burden that you say, I'm never going to be able to approach that. And that's a good thing, not a bad thing.

Oliver Burkeman

Yeah, me too. I mean in terms of the effect of that, of that phrase, this is, was Hoon juke Kennet, who was a British born female Zen master, died a bunch of years ago now, but of modern times. And I mean, you can interpret these words as so often with Zen Buddhism, you can interpret them in 100 ways. So I'll just start with, like, my primary interpretation. This is not about sort of driving yourself to hit rock bottom or total burnout. This is a shift in perspective, right? It's understanding how heavy, impossibly heavy the burden of what you're trying to do is, is actually the way to liberation. And so you could, you could analogize this. You could say that all this optimization, all the sort of cult of personal optimization, is attempts at burden lightning, right? It's an attempt at saying, like, okay, there are all these things I want to do, or that I feel I have to do, or that I ways in which I need to fix myself, on and on and on, and it's a very heavy burden. So my job has got to be to find the systems and the philosophy and the approach that lightens that burden and makes it doable and carryable through life, or, like, up the mountain of life if we're going to really get into this, this analogy, and the alternative is to see that, in fact, these burdens are, that these that these things are not very, very difficult challenges that you've got to, like, really fight your way to Achieving, but they're kind of impossible from the get go, that the idea that you're going to get on top of all the things that feel important to do, or all the things that people are going to seek to make you feel obliged to do, the idea that you're going to fix every issue that you have and completely leave your past psychology behind. The idea that you're going to get to this place of perfect control, perfect knowledge, perfect all the rest of it, like when you can see that that's not, in fact, very, very difficult, but worse than very, very difficult, impossible, that's a very liberating shift. That is the shift that I think of as seeing that the burden is so heavy you've just got to put it down if you're going to carry on and and. Finding, then, of course, that you can move forward with a spring in your step because you're no longer carrying a heavy burden. The risk of this analogy is it makes it seem like what we're talking about here is like a sudden enlightenment where everything is different from one day to the next, and it hasn't been how it is for me, and I don't think it needs to be, but, but that basic move of saying like, No, I'm going to face my reality more consciously, more fully. I'm going to accept the idea that things are kind of worse than I think, in a way, and realize that this changes the the game in a very positive way. There's this great writer who I'm always quoting now Sasha Chapin, who, um, has a quote in the book. He has this idea that, like, he talks about how he used to sort of dream of being a celebrated novelist, and it wasn't working out. He didn't he wasn't someone who was ever going to be the kind of celebrated novelist that he wanted to be. And that sort of dream you sort of allow that dream to crash, and it's then that you can do what he calls playing in the ruins, right? It's then that you can really get stuck into life, because you're just like, okay, all these ideas of how things should be put those aside, like, what have we got here, and what cool things could I do with what we've got here, in terms of my talents, my resources, my available time, it's just a far, far more vibrant and empowering way to relate to life than to be constantly feeling that you haven't, quite yet figured out how to carry your way through life perfectly. It's

Zack Arnold

funny because it wouldn't have occurred to me to talk about this otherwise, but this brought up a very distinct story where I think this exhibits this point, you tell me if I'm wrong. For those that have been listening or following me for a long time, they've heard many of the sordid, crazy stories in my journey to become both a Spartan racer and an American Ninja Warrior. Have spent years doing very difficult physical challenges. And when I look at the obstacles, for anybody that's not familiar with American Ninja Warrior, just look it up on YouTube. Like these things are massive, like you're swinging 15 feet above water, 10 feet in the air, like it's it's a lot, right? And what I always found it was whenever I was training an obstacle, and I even had the opportunity to run parts of the course twice, and also train on the obstacles on the show. PS, for those looking for the clips online, I suck at Ninja Warrior have not been on the television show yet, but to talk about this idea of it being so impossible, when I would look at an obstacle and I thought, I think maybe I can do that, I would get so anxious and nervous, like, oh my god, like I might fall but then I would look at other obstacles and like, I can't do that. That's crazy. There was no anxiety at all. There were no nerves. And I wouldn't even be worried about it, because I would say there is no realm of reality in which I am capable of doing what that obstacle is asking of me. Therefore I just completely release it. It was the ones that were in that realm of difficulty. Of this is hard, but I think if I really apply myself. I can do it. That's when I felt the nerves. So is this similar to this idea of, like, just the burden being so heavy that you're like, This is impossible. I can put it down and not worry about

Oliver Burkeman

it. It is, I think, that it's and it brings up something else that I think is really useful. Because, like, yeah, I can imagine an objection, and and I write about this actually like being raised in people's minds about like that basically says, well, but surely, by striving for the things that seem out of reach, like that's how we do the coolest stuff in life. And so I do think it's important to sort of get nuancey about what we mean by impossible, right? If something is literally beyond your any conceivable physical resources. That's one example, quantity of stuff, right? You know, if your, if your goal is to sort of answer an ever expanding number of emails, well, that's just like that goes in in a day, right? Like clear an inbox that is getting bigger every single day, every day, that's obviously on a path to to failure. None of this, and I can go into more detail about this, but none of this needs to sort of turn into the idea that we're not reaching incredibly ambitiously and far. In fact, especially when it comes to kind of optimization and productivity stuff, it's when we let go of this impossible goal of being on top of everything and feeling ready about everything, and handling every single thing that crosses our path like that's when you get the resources to do the things that really, that really count. The main effect of trying to do everything, or be completely ready to do things, or all the rest of it will be to sort of hold you back and cause you to sort of parallel, be paralyzed, not not taking the actions that you could take. But so, yeah, I like the distinction there between the flatly impossible and the the things that are a big reach.

Zack Arnold

What What this leads to next is, one of my favorite things about your latest book, meditations for mortals, is that you don't have. Index. You have an index of afflictions, and like this is, this is genius and we there's no way we have any time to list them or go through them all. But there are a few that will lightly touch on throughout the course of this entire conversation, or at least, I hope we do. But the ones that really resonated with me the most, that I think would resonate with our audience, are busyness, perfectionism, imposter syndrome and fear of the future. And the one that I want to dig into first is very relevant to this idea of something being impossible versus it's doable, but I've got to optimize myself to achieve it. Is this idea of imposter syndrome. So it kind of goes along with what you just said, of well, if by assuming something is impossible. Does that mean? Well, I'm just giving up. Or, even worse, I'm saying, Who am I to think? I'm the kind of person that can do this thing, right? So let's say, for example, that Thomas Edison said, well, it is so impossible for me to think that I could be the one that invents the light bulb or Einstein to say, well, I could never be the person that discovers the theory of relativity. How do we start to figure out the difference between this is something that we should strive towards, versus impossible, outside of my realm of resources knowledge, or otherwise? Because it feels like it's a very slippery slope. Yeah,

Oliver Burkeman

so I mean my way of thinking, tell me if this answers your question, but my way of thinking about imposter syndrome is that it is this sort of inner demand that you feel ready and qualified, and if you sort of give in to imposter syndrome and say, I'm never going to feel ready and qualified, then yes, indeed, you would not launch yourself at things that you otherwise might have done. But the sense in which I think we need to sort of accept defeat when it comes to imposter syndrome is in seeing that actually this challenge of feeling completely ready for something new, feeling like you're qualified to make your contribution, when you see that that's never coming, that actually you are never going to feel like the kind of person who is absolutely confident of their ability To do pull off whatever great thing it is. And then, in fact, all the people around you who you think you were hoping to feel like one day, who are so confident to know what they're doing, actually are also on the inside winging it when you go, when you undergo that shift from like, this is really hard challenge to like, oh, readiness is not going to be something that I that I ever perfectly feel that can be the reason to act now, right? Because it's this kind of, it's this idea that I think is so powerful, of like you might as well, or in the lovely American phrase that I migrated, here goes nothing, right? It's like, it's like, it lowers the stakes when you realize that you're not going to get to this internal feeling before you act, it says to you, well, like, might as well act now. So I think that if you really go deep into imposter syndrome and you start to realize that, like, yeah, you are an imposter, and so is everyone else, and there's no The very fact that you're trying to do something new to you, or enter a new life chapter, or whatever it is, the very fact of that is going to mean that you won't feel like you know what you're doing, or at least, won't fully know that you feel like you know what you're doing. That's the reason to just like act now anyway, because you no longer need to postpone it to the time when you've got, you know, everything lined up and it's and it's all feeling perfect, because that is never going to happen. Yeah,

Zack Arnold

and that's something that I talk about with my students all the time. And I'm thinking of a student in one of my mastermind groups where in and it's so funny that you're talking about this idea of climbing the mountain. We literally use that as an analogy for let's, let's define the mountain in our lives that's worth climbing, and rather than it's all about objectives and metrics and optimization, it's who do I want to become as I'm climbing them out, what kind of a person do I want to strive to become in this process, in this journey? And somebody had said, Well, the word that I want to define me at the top of the summit is fearless. And I said, that doesn't exist. What if, instead of being fearless, you were just somebody that was more courageous, meaning, you haven't eliminated imposter syndrome, you haven't eliminated these fears. You've just been willing to face them, knowing that you still feel like an imposter, knowing that you're not ready yet.

Oliver Burkeman

Yeah, no, absolutely. And that is the that, that's the thing, right? It's not, it's not, first of all, perfecting yourself and then acting. It's, it's acting precisely because you understand that human perfection isn't, isn't a thing that happens, and therefore there's no need to wait for it to to come along first. Yeah,

Zack Arnold

so I think we, I hope we've beaten to death and made it very clear to anybody that's a long time listener, why I made the decision to rebrand and no longer be about self optimization, and instead just be about the journey and being more courageous and facing our fears and our failures, and otherwise, there's another core message of really, not just one of your books, but kind of all of your books. And what I love, by the way, as a side note, is you take such a contrarian perspective to everything. Like just a quick example for anybody that's watching, I'm holding up one of your earlier book, earlier books, the antidote. And it literally. Says happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking. I'm like, this is a book for me, right? And one of the contrarian points of view that you take is exactly the same thing that I say all the time, which is literally that work life balance is not only a myth, work life balance is bullshit. So let's talk about work life balance. What are your thoughts? Let's discuss

Oliver Burkeman

my thoughts about work life balance. Are that this is optimization culture under a slightly different disguise, right? It's this, this idea that feels so like a lovely thing that you ought to be able to have. But when you think about what the demand for work life balance is, it usually comes down to something like, I want to be 100% perfect in my work, and also 100% present and perfect in my time outside the work, outside work. And, you know, percentages don't end up working like that. It's, it's a sort of subtle form of demand to be perfect that it goes under the it implies that it's not right, because it's like, well, you know, you're not going to spend all day, every day at work. You're going to, you know, you're not going to work 15 hour days, you're going to, you're going to make that sacrifice. But actually, the sacrifice you're making is in fate, is in the service of this kind of perfect life that will forever be out of reach. I think that. I mean, I'm not the first person to say this at all, but far from trying to kind of force our real lives to fit this rather vague conceptual box of work life balance, we would do much better to think about this as a sort of seasonal thing through life that imbalances of Different kinds of the right way to strike the balance whenever at different points. I don't think there's anything wrong with an ambitious 2223 year old giving huge proportions of their waking life to their work. I don't think there's anything wrong with someone who's just become a parent finding any way to do the minimum basic possible at work for a year or two or three, while they deal with with that new chapter in life. And it's like it's a good example, and this is in the new book, but it's a good example of whether the rules that we come up with for how we organize our lives, and the standards we hold them to, whether they serve us or whether we serve the rules. And if you tell yourself that there ought to be some specific amount of time every single day or every single week that you're spending at work and not at work, then you're just sort of arbitrarily making yourself the servant of a rule that might not be the way for you at this stage, at this season, to show it most effectively? Yeah,

Zack Arnold

I've been on a quest now for years, trying to come up with a better term or a better way to explain this. And I have, I have one that I want to pitch to you in a couple of minutes. And the fear of I spent all this time coming up with a new theory, and Oliver is going to tear it to shreds, and he's going to be right. But there was a term that you mentioned in 4000 weeks that I that was, again, just kind of one of those, like bookstoppers, like whoa. Like this is such an interesting way to look at it, and it's kind of what you've already detailed. But I want to go even deeper into it and naming it, which is strategic imbalance. Because to me, one of the things about work life balance that doesn't work is, if you think of it like a scale. Everything has to be balanced, which if you're going to look at it from a mathematical perspective, 40 hours at work, 40 hours at home, 40 hours of sleep, whatever that math is. But number one, life never works that way. And number two is that even what you would consider a valuable use of your time and alignment with your values. So I want you want to go even a little bit deeper into your thoughts on strategic imbalance, then I want to very, very cautiously pitch what I think my alternative is to work life balance.

Oliver Burkeman

Yeah. I mean, I think you get the idea of strategic imbalance completely, right. I think, you know, obviously, on some level, that idea still implies the idea that there is some sort of perfect balance that it would be nice to have. It still has this problem of sort of putting a line between work and life in a way that doesn't represent a lot of people's experience of of their work. But it, yeah, I mean it. I think that the thing that I'm coming back to again and again recently is just the sort of seasonality of this idea, right? The idea that you don't need to tell yourself that however you are setting up your life now, or have you want to set up your life now, has to be the same now every day until, like, you retire or die. There's nothing wrong with saying this is the year, or this is the month of focusing on this thing, and later it will be this other thing. I find this a helpful thing to remember when it comes to parenting, because I feel like I'm very deeply committed to being sort of properly present with my son. But if I tell myself that it's like, it's bad for that every trip I take, or every day I do decide to or and I. Able to work, you know, long hours, that I'm somehow failing that, like there's a no win situation, because I also feel like I want to do that, and I want you so when I can think of it as like, Well, okay, this isn't the most attentive fatherhood three or four day period or week or month, but that's okay, because the next one can be right, and things can shift and change. That's a much. It requires quite a lot of trust. You know, you have to trust yourself that you're not just going to completely forget about your most important life priorities, but like you don't anyway, I want to hear your theory.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, so my theory is, and I wouldn't say it's a theory so much as a loose hypothesis, but I've really been thinking to myself for years, what is it that people are really asking? When people say, I want work life balance, that's not really what they want. They just think that's what they want, because that's the colloquial definition. And culturally, the expectation is, once you've got it all figured out, you've achieved work life balance, right? And this idea of strategic imbalance really hit me, because the way that I look at it is that it's really all about the trends, right? We you talk to this idea about not necessarily doing something daily, where you, like, literally ripped apart this whole Seinfeld theory of productivity, and you got to make those x's and don't break the chain, and even Seinfeld's like, where did that come from? I don't know. Everybody's talking about it. It's just a throwaway, right? So, having said all of that, I think at least what I'm working towards, what I'm trying to help my students work towards, is better work life integration, where you're integrating the things that you love about your work. Your work has meaning and purpose, but you're also in alignment with your values. As far as I want to be a present father, I want to be a present friend, whatever that might be. And once you have, once you've defined those values, it's about the trends, right? More often than not on a daily ish basis, do I feel like I'm a present father more often than not on a daily ish basis, do I feel like I'm applying myself and spending my time creating things that I think are valuable and have impact on others? And it's about how on the calendar and with your values, you integrate your work and your life. So work life integration is what I've been working towards. So now please feel free to to tear apart anything you'd like. No,

Oliver Burkeman

I like it. And integration of in any context is almost never the wrong answer, right? I mean, this is that this is a great way of thinking about psychology and sort of psychotherapy as well, that we are not trying to sort of overcome one part of our personality with another, but actually to integrate, that's the where the word sort of comes, for me, most, most readily. But I think, no, I think it's, I think that's great. And I think one of the ways you could conceptualize that is that you're just sort of zooming out a little bit right on temporarily, speaking from the level of the day or the single day to, you know, over a rolling span of two or three weeks or something, am I sort of hitting a lot of these notes that are important to me in life. And, you know, I'm always a big fan of any kind of approach like this, that it still has a lot of direction and velocity and even discipline in it, but it isn't brittle discipline. It isn't the kind where the obsessive thing is that you have to do something on a specific schedule, and you beat yourself up if you don't, and you fall off the wagon and then don't do the thing for six months because you're so annoyed with yourself. It's that sort of much more sustainable idea of like, yeah, actually, every day I do, or pretty much every day I do need to take this overall attitude to life and bring this kind of spirit to life, but like that might manifest radically differently from one day to the next, and sometimes it involves taking time for myself, and sometimes it involves going all out on work, and sometimes it involves being really, really focusing on, on on family stuff. You know, it's, it's always a challenge, because you have to sort of integrate that with everyone else's rhythms in a family or in a workplace or whatever it might be. But I really like that way of looking at it. I'm not going to rip it apart at all. Oh,

Zack Arnold

good. I feel much better, because I can only imagine the conversation we would have had about the Optimize Yourself brand, had you kindly accepted my request two years ago, rather than denying it. So very glad again that we we had this conversation when we did, and kind of diving deeper into this idea of work life integration and what that actually looks like on a daily, a weekly, a monthly basis. This is where I really want to come to one of the core ideas of your new book. And it's even hard for me to say this word out loud, imperfectionism, because I am a recovering perfectionist, through and through and through. And when you just mentioned, well, you know, if you have a really regimented, structured day, you know exactly what you're going to do, and you miss one thing and you beat yourself up for it. That's not necessarily just former me. That's kind of still me, still trying to figure out how to be okay with being imperfect, and I say recovering, because I'm never going to be recovered, but I would never call myself a perfectionist anymore. And this idea that you share about the kayak versus the super yacht, literally, it. Like, emotionally, it hit me. I'm like, oh, teeth. I don't, I don't know if I can be a kayaker. That scares me. So talk to me a little bit more about this idea of the kayak versus the super yacht. Yeah, well, and

Oliver Burkeman

me too, by the way, absolutely recovering perfectionist. I don't want to make a, I don't want to make, like, an insulting or tasteless parallel between things like perfectionism and productivity obsession and like substance abuse, but there is this idea that comes from, like, the 12 step tradition, that in like, in some sense, you're always that thing, and in another sense, you're you're free of it. I think that's a very powerful it's a very powerful thought. So, yeah, I'm always going to be a productivity geek and the perfectionist. In some sense, it's not that I'm sort of eradicating that part of me. It's that I'm reacting to it in a in a different way, and trying to be friendly to it as well, right? Not trying to sort of kick it to the curb, but but no longer being dictated to by it. So, yeah, imperfectionism. I mean, really, you know, to put it in a facetious way, this is just my sort of proprietary label, right? You've got to have a name for the concept that you're that you're advancing, and this is, this is my name for it. I think it's worth saying that it. But I'm, I'm targeting a definition of perfectionism in in the book that is probably broader than than conventionally. So I am talking about perfectionism as wanting to produce perfect creative work, but I'm also thinking of, you know, people pleasing as a form of perfectionism, wanting to exert perfect control over how everyone else is feeling, or be perfectly reassured that nobody's mad at you or anything like that. I think you can even think of like compulsive worry about the future as a kind of perfectionism. It's a sort of constantly replenishing desire to feel perfectly secure about what is coming down the pike. And so imperfectionism is really just a way of encapsulating the approach to life that takes the opposite view that starts from the idea that there will always be too much to do, that you're never going to have full knowledge of the future, or even full understanding of, like, what's going on in your world or with other people in the present, that you're always going to feel like something of an imposter. So it really sort of asks us, I think, to Yeah, metabolize, on some level, that, that feeling, and it is, it is unpleasant. I mean that the vulnerability, I can talk about kayaks and super yachts, if you want, but like there is an acceptance of vulnerability that is required here, a kind of unclenching of all the ways in which we sort of brace ourselves against them, against reality. And I'm, yeah, I'm totally a work in progress when it comes to this as well, but it's so obviously the right way forward, not just because it leads to, you know, you're gentle with yourself and life is saner and more peaceful, but because you can actually just do more good stuff then, because you're no longer postponing your full investment of energy or commitment to things until the point at which you've you've got in the position where you can do them more perfectly, which is never coming.

Zack Arnold

So I want to dig even deeper into these two different approaches, the kayak and the super yacht. And the way, I'll let you go deeper into this. But the simplest version is that if you're looking at how you're managing your time, your priorities, your To Do, list, your email, right? I very much. Am a super yacht captain, right? I've got the dashboard in front of me. Here's the calendar, here's the time blocks. They're color coded. I know how they align with the projects that I want to do. I have specific times that I want to make sure that I manage email, Slack, etc, etc. And then there's the guy in the kayak that's just kind of floating along, and the curtain hits him, and he floats here, and he floats there. And, like, I don't even know how to become a kayaker, and I have a it's not just the fear of being in the kayak and PS, I actually have a literal fear of, like, being in open water in a kayak, because I've experienced it before. That's another story for another podcast. But proverbially, the idea of managing my life as a kayaker and not a super yacht captain, that kind of terrifies me. So let

Oliver Burkeman

me tell let me see if this helps. I mean, again, I'm just agreeing like this is who I, to some extent, AM, and certainly have been in my approaches. I am not suggesting with that analogy that you should sort of surrender your position of control over your world and your work and just sort of go through life in a more aimless way and approach it all. And Cal Newport has that wonderful phrase that he's he refers to like people who don't plan their days, you just sort of open up your email and rock and roll. You always, he always says that. And I'm like, Yeah, I'm not proposing that you just rock and roll your way through the day. I'm suggesting that that to be human is to be in the kayak already. I'm suggesting that's how things are, not like how you might want to be. Yeah. I'm suggesting that you might want to become more conscious of it and not flinch from it so much, if that's something that you do, but, but it's like it, it's already true that we don't have the control over our lives that we think we do. It's already true that, like, just on the level of the day, right? Things that you didn't plan, interruptions, your own moods, frankly, in my experience, can really, really affect those things. And there is this sort of deep, it's almost like a spiritual point, I suppose, right, this deep understanding that's open to us that like that is the vulnerable, exposed, uncertain, insecure situation in which we all are as humans, you can still totally have quite a strict approach to planning your day. Once you've internalized a little bit that realization, you can still do time blocking. You can still have like, you know, the whole systems of task management and all the rest of it, but you'll be doing it in a different way. You'll be sort of holding these things more loosely, using them as tools to help you navigate the day. You won't any longer be sort of pursuing them with this kind of white knuckle sense that, like you've got to stay in control, because if you lost control, it would all go to hell. You're sort of knowing that you're not in control. And sure, some people's personality then prompts them to want to use quite detailed organizational systems for for living in this in this way. And I'm one of them, to be frank. You know, I like my lists and my task management apps and all the rest of it. But something really changed for me when I realized that I had been sort of looking to them for a kind of salvation. It's almost like a religious thing, right? It's like, it's like the cult of productivity. This is gonna save my soul, right? This is gonna, this is gonna make me okay and an adequate person, and it's going to make me doing all the things I need to do to feel good about myself. And it's going to mean that I don't have to feel emotionally vulnerable or worried about anything unexpected happening. And when I, when I went through, I'm still going through it, but when I went through some of the process of of seeing that truth, you know, on the other side of that change totally fine to use the Pomodoro Technique, if that's a useful way of giving some structure to your day, but you're no or the whatever technique, but you're no longer like clinging to it as a way of, kind of denying the reality of of of our situation. And by the way, I don't think that the reason to face the reality of our situation is just because, like, it's good to face the truth. Maybe it is, but it it, it leads to a very different experience of life. It's much easier to then take some pleasure and be interested in and engrossed in the moment, the present moment itself, because one of the big, big pitfalls of that kind of productivity techniques as a salvation right, is that it there's something about that that intrinsically places the meaning of life like off in the future, when you finally got on top of everything, when everything is running so smoothly that you have no problems and everything is trouble free. And of course, that's never now, so it's always later. It's always later. And you end up living what people have called like, you know, a provisional life. You end up not being quite fully here. And once you realize, like, Oh no, life is I'm never going to get the kind of control I seek. I'm never going to be certain about anything or fully understand anything like that's fine, then you can still be quite productivity geekish about how you organize your day. No problem at all. But you're doing it in a fundamentally different way, I would argue.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, I love the way that you put that, and that's very, very helpful for me. Because what I'm trying to find, I'm always, I'm very much a centrist. I'm always kind of trying to see both sides of the equation, both perspectives. Probably one of the reasons that I resonate, or why Adam Grant's work resonates with me so much, is I'm always trying to rethink the way that I'm seeing things. And what I feared about the kayak approach is that, well, I'm in the kayak, and I'm just kind of going where the waves take me, and then all of a sudden, it's 10 years later, and I say, How the hell did I end up here? Right? Because I have so many of my students that come to me right around midlife, mid career, where they say, I just said, I'll do anything. Then I took this gig, then I took this dig, then I took that gig, and all of a sudden I'm doing work that isn't even remotely fulfilling to me whatsoever. How did I end up here? That's my fear. But then the alternate fear of being the super yacht captain is being so regimented, this is exactly where I'm going that you miss all the scenery along the way. You don't get to experience the waves you go. Don't get to experience the things that are really what life is, right? Because it's always about here's what's on the map and here's the future, right,

Oliver Burkeman

right? I think that's a great three well put and the concrete, one concrete way that you can. Think about this in terms of goal setting and life design and all the rest of it. Again. This may not work for everyone, the perspective is what matters, not the technique, but but for me, it's become very, very useful part of my sort of approach to these things, to have a to have a pretty clear vision of where I want to be going in my work. Say, so there's nothing aimless about that. Like I've got a fairly well articulated, like paragraph about where I would like my, you know, my work, my writing, my business, to be in a few years time. But then for me, the problem comes with all those systems that say, Well, okay, you turn that vision into an annual goals, and then monthly goals, and then weekly then weekly goals, and then daily goals, and then you just have to carry them out. And at that point, I'm like, this is awful, like to me, all the life has gone from it then and again might not be for everybody, but, but I find that if I've got that sort of clear place that I'm navigating towards, and then a lot more spontaneity and intuitive direction in terms of how at, you know, 1045, on a Monday morning, I'm actually moving towards that that feels to me like a nice balance and a sort of balance that is realistic about the kind of influence we can exert over our lives. And you know, if you want to extend the metaphor probably too far, like you can be kayaking to a place, there's nothing wrong with that. It's like, it's not no one's suggesting that you have no idea where the where the river leads. It's just that you're also taking a different approach to, like, how you get there and how present you are to the experience of getting there, versus being completely distracted by thoughts of the destination.

Zack Arnold

It makes me feel much better to know that you set goals, because there's a part of me that's thinking, Man does, does Oliver just like, not even have, like, a clear goal that he's working towards? And now I've got all these, you know, the goals set up. And here's the seven year, the five year, the three year, the one year. And it sounds like you have a very similar exercise that I do, which is essentially, it's what I would call, like a one page goal manifesto, right? Like, here's here's the where it is that I want to go in the near future, whether that's in the year, whether that's in two or three years, but it's not, here's the quarterly revenue goal, and here, like XYZ, all these things, these check boxes. It's more like an example for mine is that I want to be in a place where my podcast and my educational business can create a reliable and sustainable source of income, so that I can be present for my family, so that I can help creatives find meaning and purpose in their work. So I can be a more consistent person, a more decisive person, like just kind of working towards this vision, as opposed to it's $573,212 by the end of quarter three, right, right. It sounds like you have something relatively similar. Yeah.

Oliver Burkeman

I mean, I'm always evolving it. But yes, I think you're right. I mean, the thing that I would add is, what I have found more and more useful in my own life for this kind of thing is to remember to ask myself whether what I'm doing kind of feels alive to me. This is a vague language, but I can't really think of a better way of putting it. So you know, what I found for me is that having a kind of inspiring sense of what I'm doing this stuff for is makes it feel very alive to me, turning it effectively into a set of marching orders that I've got to follow day by day. Takes the life away from it for me, and that leads nowhere good, because then life just becomes a question of trying to get all this stuff out of the way to get to the real moment in the future. Now, one thing that follows from that is there may well be people for whom specific sums of money as goals. Does make them feel alive, right? I mean, I don't necessarily want to criticize that. I can think of some versions of it that might you might want to criticize, but like, it's really again, about whether these systems are serving you, or whether you are putting yourself in a situation where you end up serving the system. And in a lot of conventional writing and personal productivity, writing about goal setting, there's just sort of no, there's there's no recognition of this. There's this idea that, like, you get yourself excited about your way you're headed, then, of course, you're just going to want to turn it into a set of steps to kind of trudge through for the next year or five years, and like, I've just never been able to to do that. So I think it's, it's important to ask that question about, like, Is this helping me show up and feel vibrant about life, or is it actually doing the opposite and kind of deadening it all somehow? This

Zack Arnold

reminds me of a study that I heard about relatively recently that I'm going to paraphrase it, and I might even rip it the shreds, because I haven't really dug too deeply into it, but my understanding is this study has now been replicated many times and studied over the decades. Are you aware of the study of what happens to people when you blindfold them and you ask them to walk in a straight line?

Oliver Burkeman

It's ringing a vague Bell, but I. I don't know what happens. So

Zack Arnold

again, I can't quote the, you know, the first person that did it, I'm, you know, I'm not the Adam Grant of the world where I can just say, well, happened in this study this year? Here's what their findings were, right? He's amazing at doing that. But basically the gist of it is that, well, let me ask you this, what do you think happens when you blindfold somebody and you ask them to walk in a straight line, imagine they're, you know, they're on one end of the football field or the pitch in your world, right? You ask them to go to to walk to the other goal line, you blindfold them. What do you think happens? I

Oliver Burkeman

feel kind of torn between responding that there'll be a sort of, I kind of feel, if I was doing that, I would end up, I would have felt like I was walking dead ahead, but the sort of slight misdirection would have compounded to the point where I was where I was many yards off. But maybe you're going to tell me that people are amazing at work walking in perfect straight lines where they're blindfolded. Oh,

Zack Arnold

actually, it's totally the opposite. Not only do they walk off the line, we walk in circles. We literally walk in a circle, and by and large, end up roughly where we started, which is why whenever somebody get lost in the fog or the snow or in a storm or in the forest, they're like this is where we started, because we think we're walking in a straight line. We walk in circles, right? And to my understanding, scientists cannot figure out why, but they have definitively proven through countless different variables that this is what happens, which is why I think it's so important that we have a destination, that we have a North Star. But again, using this idea of the kayak versus the super yacht, it's it's loosely defined enough that we can ride the waves in between, but not be completely and totally adrift. And the reason that I bring this up is I talk about the difference all the time between being efficient and being effective, and most people don't know the difference. How would you define the differences between being efficient versus being effective?

Oliver Burkeman

I feel like I do know this, although you may have a radically different definition. But to me, to me, efficiency is inherently always towards some predefined goal. And effectiveness asks the question of what that goal would be, right? So it's possible to be very, very efficient at doing completely pointless activities, or morally bad activities, or anything, right? I mean, to process more output in the same amount of time, in other words, to become more efficient. And as I would understand it is, is sort of outcome neutral, right? It's a way of, it's a way of. It's something that can become its own goal, right, efficiency for its own sake. But that sort of completely forgets why you're doing it. And effectiveness has the why sort of built in. I don't know, you probably express it much more. No,

Zack Arnold

I think that's great. I think that we're just going to be adding on to each other's definitions, because there is no right or wrong answer to this. It's just my perspective versus your perspective versus others. But we're very much in alignment where I think most of what we've talked about as far as productivity, time management, maybe not goal setting so much. But the thing that you and I think, rejected, is this idea that efficiency or busyness actually equals importance, right, right? And I'm doing all the things like Inbox Zero is incredibly efficient, but what's the fucking point? It's not effective if it's not moving you towards goals that matter and your time is in alignment with your values. So I feel that so much of the productivity, the goal setting, the personal development world at large, is talking about efficiency. And what I'm not saying is efficiency is a bad thing, but efficiency is downstream from effectiveness. Right? Effectiveness is I know why I'm doing this. I know what it's working towards. I know the kind of person it's helping me become, or the kind of father or mother or whatever it is. Once I know I'm effective, now let's bring in efficiency. And I feel like the world's got it backwards, and busyness is what's making me important and giving me purpose.

Oliver Burkeman

Yeah, I think that's all. I completely agree with all of that. And I think that part of the reason that we fall into that trap and that confusion, and the one that sort of resonates with my specific interest, is there is this feeling that we are, that we feel overwhelmed, we feel out of control, we feel like we're not doing things we want to do. And the feeling the illusion, is that we can efficiency our way out of that problem, right? If you could only do more and more things, then, by definition, it seems like you would be able to do all the things that you feel overwhelmed by. You'll be able to launch all the projects you feel you're neglecting. You'll be able to make time for all the people you want to make time for. And my argument basically, is just that the space of sort of the supply of incoming demands, ambitions, worthwhile things to do that we are, that that efficiency is acting upon is, to all intents and purposes, infinite, and so if you get more and more efficient at making your way through an infinite supply of something, all that happens is you get more scattered and spread your attention more thinly and feel more stressed. But you certainly don't get to the end of the supply because it's because it's infinite. So it holds out this lure of like, you know, if you. Really got another step of efficiency down the line, you would finally be there. But in fact, you'll never be there. And and in fact, you make things worse, because you get this phenomenon where the newly efficient system attracts more inputs, more quickly than it, than it otherwise than otherwise would. As they say, the reward for good time management is more work. And so the only way you're going to get to the kind of peace of mind, or sense of being in command of things that you that you feel like, that you want, is is by bringing in effectiveness. Is by saying, well, here's why I'm doing these things. Here's the things I'm willing to sacrifice, the people I'm willing to disappoint, the balls I'm willing to drop, and then sure, by all means, do the ones you continue to want to focus on as efficiently as as possible. And for all of us, that's going to involve some kind of tedious household chores and emails we'd rather not receive, but, but as you say, it's downstream of having decided what the hell you're doing any of this for, although I also want to add, I don't think you need to think that that means, first of all, I will perfectly clarify my life purpose, and then I will, and then I will put it into practice that can absolutely be evolving and changing. It's just the basic orientation of your life right towards like, Okay, this is my current best sense of why I'm doing all of this. And then I make my decisions on the basis of that. I don't think it means you have to have nailed that once and for all,

Zack Arnold

and I'm so glad that you created that distinction, because the perfectionist in me said, Okay, well, then I'm going to stop doing everything until I define my purpose, right? When I know what my reason is for being, what is my life task, before I figure that out and it's perfect, I'm not going to do anything right now, other than stare at the wall and journal, right? Because you're not going to get anything done ever like and you're just going to be frozen in the sense of, well, until you know exactly why I'm doing it, how I can be 100% effective? Well, then what is the point of anything? Right? Right?

Oliver Burkeman

And I've been there completely. And so, yeah, I think that is why I find it so useful. Like I have a journaling practice. I am revisiting these big questions very regularly, but not in the spirit of, first of all, sorting them out and then acting. And it's why, to the extent that I manage to make this way of life real in my life, it's, it's very much a sort of practice, first action, first kind of, kind of approach, right? So it's like, on a given day, if I'm lucky, I might get 40 minutes first thing in the morning to write about things like, why I'm doing any of this. And then I will make sure on again, on a good day, that the thing I'm really focusing on between, say, you know, 830 and 1130 start of the day is something that I intuitively know is, you know, part of the important stuff. But that's about as far as I go in terms of any kind of certainty that I'm navigating this thing correctly, and I almost always it goes wrong when I get too excited and suck. Okay, great. Well, I've got that on my about under my belt. So now let me institute this kind of perfect system of of of goals. And that, I think, is, again, you know, you can, you can extend the kayak analogy here and say, you know, there's real navigation to be done, there's real kind of, there's real work to be done, and decisions to be made. It's just that they are not the kind of decisions that go along with being completely in control of the process.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, it's going to take me probably the rest of my life to be okay with not being in control of the process, but very much a work in progress. What I want to go even a little bit deeper into now is you and I, very much again, are in alignment about this idea of we want our work to mean something be in alignment with our values, make sure that we're working towards purpose. But what I found with a lot of the students that I work with is that we have been so conditioned by the industrial revolution to define ourselves as widgets in somebody else's assembly line, that when they get to this point of actualization of, Wow, there are actually things that I want to work towards. The work that I'm doing doesn't necessarily have the meaning that I thought it did. And I would say, well, we want to, we want to be more effective with with your time. We want to make sure that your time is in alignment with your values. And the response is, I don't know what they are. I don't know what my my calling is, right? So I want to go even deeper into this idea of a life task and figuring out what matters, because this is really at the heart of what you're talking about in your latest book.

Oliver Burkeman

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And again, it's another area where the sort of siren voice of perfectionism could really, could really get in the way by saying that, like, Okay, I got to figure out exactly what my life task or life tasks are. I'm using this in the way that it sort of appears in the work of Carl Jung and Jungian literature. There's another. A related meaning in the work of Alfred Adler. And I'm sure some people in the audience will have read that book the courage to be disliked, which is an unpacking of Adlerian psychology. They sort of go together a bit. But Carl Jung, I think, or in my interpretation anyway, is referring to life tasks, as the things that your life is kind of asking of you to do right now. And there's a story that I recount that he tells in his autobiography about when he was 12 years old, I think, and he'd been skipping school for many months for sort of unclear, semi medical reasons. He kept having sort of strange fainting fits, and no one knew what was going on, so he was just at home, and he remembers overhearing his father in the garden telling a friend, like, I'm really worried now, like I've lost all my money, and if the young Carl can't make something of his life, what on earth is to become of him? And he talks about being Thunderstruck by this moment and just realizing that now it was the time that he had to get down to studying like that was the thing he had to do. And he says, I got up, went to my father's study, got down the Latin grammar books, and from then on, I was a diligent student. And his fainting fits vanished as well. And he's, he's, um, I don't think he's saying that you should buckle down and work hard like at all costs. He's saying that like at that moment for him, regardless of what he thought he might want, or what values might have been instilled in him, or what you know, other people might want, it was clear that sort of reality was speaking to him, and it was like, Okay, now you've had this phase, and now this is the phase that is arising now, and this is what you what you need to do. And I just think it's a really useful way of, sort of getting unstuck, but also connecting to values in the way that you're you're talking about right, to just sort of ask, What? What is my life asking of me in this situation, the answer might be something that looks a lot like, you know, caring for other people or fulfilling other people's agendas, but it's only going to be that if, if that really is the right thing for you to be doing at that time. It's not going to be that if actually the right thing for you to be doing now is to be making a bold move and maybe leaving a secure employment for something more that's ultimately more important for you. And what I really like about this idea of like, what's the life task here, is that it's a lot better, I think, than certain ideas of like, Destiny and calling that infect a lot of the self help literature, because, as Jung points out, right, a life task is probably going to be difficult. So it's not going to be something that feels easy for you, almost by definition, but it is going to be doable. It's going to be something that you in your position, in your life, can actually do. I think there's definitely a problem that you run into of people sort of coming to the conclusion that their their destiny is to, like, make movies, but they don't have 100 bucks in the bank, so they can't get the stuff they need. Or their destiny is to raise a family, but they're unable to have kids. So like, so get into all these awful situations where you feel like your destiny is something that your life doesn't permit. And Jung is saying, No, your the life task that you will face now is going to be something that you can do. So it might be getting the money together to buy lots of equipment to become a move and like it could be that absolutely but it's going to be something that you can do right now and here. And I think that is an incredibly powerful framing if you're feeling sort of disconnected from values like, what, what does my life want? Really, that, that it really wants, but that, what is that reality is asking of me, but that is doable in this situation in which I find myself,

Zack Arnold

given that we talked a little bit about how you set goals loosely defined, but you have this paragraph help me better understand. One, what do you feel is your life task? And two, how did you create the space to figure out what it was?

Oliver Burkeman

Well, I this may be me sort of adapting Jung, but I'm quite clear in my own mind and in what I've written. I think that, like I don't think that I have I don't think of myself as having a life task. I think maybe I'm just so scared of the perfectionistic urge to kind of spend six months defining it. But I I'm thinking more as more of this as being from a sort of moment to moment thing and a life, stage to life, stage thing, right? Because I definitely feel, for example, that there have been phases of my life where some version of kind of going it alone was the challenge that I needed to face. Space in terms of my work, especially right, was sort of uprooting myself from certain comfortable, collective contexts. But I definitely also feel now like actually relationship is where the challenges are for me, and I mean that both in the sense of personal, family life, but also in work, you know, not becoming isolated in and totally solitary in the way that I in the way that I work, because there's so much to be gained from from the alternative. So I'm just saying that by way of explaining that this is also sort of navigational. It isn't just one thing or another that said if I were to just look at my creative work right now, for example, I have a fairly clear sense of the aspects of this that really matter to me the most, writing books, writing newsletters, sharing these ideas in conversation, and then some other things that I maybe do that are helpful and support that work, but they're not sort of where it's at. You wouldn't want that to overtake the the central hubs of it. And I guess, you know, I'm sort of blathering now. I'm rambling, but you know, I have a sense of the basic sense of the message that I want to try to convey, constantly evolving. Otherwise it will be very boring to me. But you know, this idea of sort of relaxing and unclenching into this human reality in which we find ourselves, not kind of trying to avoid this or optimize ourselves away from it, and this has all sorts of ramifications for how we think about the role of technology in our lives and AI and all the rest of it. Anyway. Where do I find the space? I mean, I get up on a good day, 45 minutes before anyone else in my house gets up and write in a notebook, I have fallen into the trap of thinking like I've got to take some time, like I've got to take a week away to figure this out. And there's nothing wrong with taking a week away, but there's something wrong with taking a week away and setting your standards for what you're going to do with it so high that you end up more miserable. So I definitely, I think there's something very strong in me that always is, knows that I need time alone, so I end up claiming it by hook or by crook, even if it involves sort of, you know, annoying members of my family to do it. I think that is where, that is the closest thing I get to an answer to like, how I find the space?

Zack Arnold

Sure. Okay, so then what I'm trying to get a clear sense of is the level of intentionality behind how you've gotten to where you are. And it sounds like there was an intentionality of there is a message that I want to share. There are certain beliefs that I believe can be helpful to others. I want to write about them, but it wasn't an intentionality five years ago. By this date, I'm going to be a New York Times best selling author. I'm going to sell this many copies, and I am going to literally change everybody, though, in the entire world's perspective, about the fallacy of productivity and optimization. And I'm going to make sure everybody knows there must be a better way. There was, there was an intentionality of I have a message. I want to share, the way that I align my time with my values. Am I moving towards sharing that message?

Oliver Burkeman

Yes, I think that's well put. I certainly didn't have any of those goals. I'm not necessarily, as I've said before in this conversation, like I'm not necessarily condemning anyone who does have them. If that really sort of makes them feel alive. For me, those kinds of goals make me feel like, you know, they just really enhance the sense of deficit, the sense of like, well, I'm not where I need to get to before I can, before I can, sort of fully be myself. So, yeah, I think that's true. Somebody pointed out to me the other day when they were asking me about my sort of early career, that even though I think of myself as quite a sort of risk averse, cautious person, I have sort of again and again, from the very beginning of my career, taken made choices sometimes quite sort of risky in a in some, you know, some sense of the word risky, in order to always be having the opportunity to write. So I think for me that looking back on my life to this point, I can see that I'm always like, you know, turning things down that might lead to totally interesting life paths, but they're not going to involve the opportunity to to write and so, which is funny, because quite often I don't really enjoy writing, but I think it does keep me extremely sane. And, or put it sorry, I should say, makes me a lot saner than I otherwise would be, and, and so that also, you know, in the rear view mirror that has the sense of a of a navigational direction, it didn't feel. So much that way, consciously, but yeah, I want to be able to spend my big chunk of most days exploring things that I think are really powerful and important and then communicating them to other people. Yeah, that would be a I would sign up to that.

Zack Arnold

I love it. That's a great way to put that, and I think that's a great segue to the final thing that I wanted to touch upon before we end today, is that a lot of what we're talking about requires accepting really hard truths about what we are or are not capable of, about who we are, the things that we can versus can't accomplish. And there's there's a couple of things about that acceptance that I just want to dive into a little bit before we wrap up today. The first one is that it can be liberating to accept the fact that, yep, this is what I'm capable of. I have very limited, uh, possibilities. I've only got 4000 weeks to live, etc, etc. But along that, along with that, I would presume, also comes a certain sense of grief. It's the acceptance of there are things that were really important to me, I'm never going to get to them. So how do we deal with acceptance leading to some form of grief if we do really accept this idea that we are mortal? PS, for anybody that didn't know, no, we're all going to die. So when that Acceptance comes, have you yourself experienced or have you talked to anybody else, then that experiences the grief of there are things that are really important to me that I now have to accept are never going to happen.

Oliver Burkeman

Yeah, I mean, I I've definitely spoken to people, and I definitely resonate with the feeling. I think for me, it's less about, oh, a whole form of life is is never going to be mine, and it's much more about, like, every single day is by some perfectionistic and rather, self hating standard is a failure, right? Because the because the standard of success is so is, is is so unmetable. But, yeah, no, I think grief, disappointment, whatever you want to call it, is a real part of this, and that's what makes it all so, so difficult. But I also think that for most people, most of the time, there's something really sort of, there's something really bitter sweet about this. The word that I find very helpful here is kind of poignancy, right? There's something, there's something sad about what it means to be a human pursuing the things that matter to you the most, focusing on the work and the relationships that matter to you the most, because of everything that has to be let go of. But it's the kind of sadness that somehow sort of brings you more into the experience of what you're doing. It adds sort of depth to life, and it's very closely related to the kind of poignancy that I also write about in the new book that Japanese culture always seems very, very good at encapsulating, which is like the poignancy of transience and of time passing and of everything being impermanent, that idea that there's actually a sort of added beauty to the world in knowing that things don't last forever and that you won't last forever to get to be part of them, and yeah, there's just a sort of willingness To accept the sort of poignant aspects of stepping fully into life just quickly makes me think of, you know, I'm we've got an eight year old son, and if you and we started the whole parenting business rather, relatively late in life. So a lot of our friends have grown or, you know, older teenagers. And something that people said to me, have said to me like every other day for years now, is like, Oh, they grew up so fast, you know, time passes so quickly before you know it is. And at first, my response to that internally, and it was some people's intention, I think, not others, to trigger this response, was like, Oh, right. So I've got to really, really savor these experiences so that I avoid ending up being one of the people who says that. And actually, you speak to some other people, and you get the sense of what the reality is, which is that it feels like Time flies really fast when you're parenting in another context as well. But like, that's just the way life is. And the fact that it's true does not mean that I've got a responsibility to try to eradicate that phenomenon from my own life and then spend all the days of my present time like berating myself for not savoring experience enough, right? It's another example of the way that, like, yeah, there's just kind of something sad about being alive. But the amazing thing, and Zen is very good on this tradition in general, on this idea in general, right? Is that the amazing thing is that the more you accept that, the less it's a problem, the less it's something that, like you wish weren't the case about you. About reality and the more it's just like part of what you're showing up for. Yeah, I'm

Zack Arnold

so glad that you brought that up. I never would have thought this would have been a topic that we got into. But I've experienced something very similar, where I've seen it on both ends of the spectrum, very much in the end of the spectrum of I'm working really, really hard and I'm missing it, right? Like I'm not there for it, and time is going by and I'm thinking, I'm not present. I'm not in alignment with my values, right? But then I've also been on the other end of the spectrum, where I am doing my best to savor it, I am doing my best to be present, and the time still fucking disappears, and it's still sad that my kids are growing up so quickly, right? And it's funny, because independent of this conversation or even reading these books, I had come to the realization of, it's just sad that my kids are growing up. It just is right, yeah, I'm not going to berate myself for the fact that I wasn't there for every single moment of it. And frankly, they're going to be, they would be talking about that with their therapist someday. Oh my god, right, yeah, yeah. So I've reached that point of, I really feel like I'm at the right level of presence. I'm at the right level of availability. I have a really healthy relationship with both my kids, and it's still fucking sad, and it's still going really, really fast, and there's nothing that I can do about it.

Oliver Burkeman

Yeah, right. And the problems, all the problems in the world, on some level, are caused by the people who can are least willing to feel those feelings, right, and who are sort of propelled through life by an attempt to to not feel the feelings of emptiness or sadness or disappointment and all the rest of it. And we all do it to some extent. So again, don't beat yourself up for that either. But, right? Yeah, only, only good things come from being able to feel into that a bit more than you already were doing,

Zack Arnold

yeah, well, the just to kind of bring this idea of acceptance to a close and close, this entire loop about this striving towards optimization, trying to fix ourselves, there was one other thought that, again, I keep saying this, but this happens many, many times with your books, where I literally just had to put put the book down and say, whoa. And this was something that was mentioned by psychotherapist Bruce Tift, and he said, Pick the trait that bothers you the most about yourself and then ask yourself what it would feel like to imagine that some version of it will probably dog you for the rest of your days. Meaning, this is just who you are. You're never going to be able to change it until the day that you die? So for me, the one that I thought of immediately is I've been told by many people, and it's an area of myself that I really am self conscious of, is that I really struggle to do one thing at a time. I'm interested in so many different things. I'm interested in productivity and mindset in psychology, and I'm interested in creativity and Hollywood storytelling. And everybody always says you just you got to focus your attention on one thing, and you got to move towards that goal. And my response is always no. But I always feel like in my quest for goal setting and productivity and building systems, I'm trying to work against my natural wiring, which is I just like a lot of different things, and I like doing a lot of different things at the same time. And having read that, I'm like, maybe this is one of those things that I just need to accept, that maybe there's, there's a superpower in here just as much as there is a kryptonite. So I'm curious about both your thoughts on this, and then also if you have a trait yourself that you're realizing this is one of the things that bothers me about me to something I'm never going to optimize or change.

Oliver Burkeman

So firstly, on what you talk about, I think, yeah, I mean, I love that. I'm I'm paraphrasing the bit you read was me paraphrasing Bruce tiff just he doesn't have to take the blame for any specific details of that. But I think that that that idea is incredibly powerful. Firstly, yes, because there can be a superpower in being more fully yourself. Secondly, also because of this paradox that in the famous quote from Carl Rogers, the curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change like once you accept, to use your example, that that that you're always going to be what some people think of as insufficiently focused. You know, it may actually be easier, then on a given day or for a given period of a year, to be more individually focused, because you're no longer like at war with yourself about it like this is who you are. And then when success on a given project requires you to put others aside for a while, it will be easier to do it, because you no longer feel like I've got to do this. Otherwise I don't get to exist as a human being. And then when it comes to myself, I mean, the sort of facetious answer quickly is like, I'm probably always going to be a productivity Geek on some level. And like, you know, I'm never going to not have my ears prick up when someone tells me about some new app that can, apparently, like, solve everything. And to be less facetious, because it's the underlying phenomenon beneath that. Kind of behavior, I guess, you know, a certain kind of certain level of anxiety that manifests in the desire to sort of control, really myself, not I don't think I'm very control of other people, but really to sort of get control over what I'm doing and how I'm spending my time that has its roots in the idea that something very terrible is going to happen if I if I don't do that. You know, I've made much progress here, but the progress on this issue, but the progress it feels like I've made, is the progress of kind of accepting, you know, it's a little bit like inside out or internal family systems therapy for people who know about this stuff, right? It's stuff, right? She's like, Oh, yeah, there's that. There's that little guy in inside the kind of community of my of my psychology. And, you know, I don't need to be identified with that part of me, but, but I am. But it's not very helpful to think of sort of eradicating it either. And then it's just like, that's, that's who you are. And it probably has some, it probably has some upsides. I probably wouldn't have done all the things I've done if I wasn't so far, if I wasn't motivated a little bit by by those things. So, you know, so be it. And then the crazy thing is, you're Freer as a result of the acceptance you thought that what you needed for freedom was to banish this thing, but actually all you needed to do was be willing to sort of keep it company and have it there in the mix and and be all right with it. Well,

Zack Arnold

I really appreciate the fact you were being vulnerable in literally saying I'm the guy that wrote 4000 weeks in meditations for mortals, and I'm always going to be a productivity geek at heart, like that's both the fact you were willing to share that I very much appreciate, and i There's no better talk

Oliver Burkeman

about you talk about nuking one's personal brand. It's no kidding, right? But

Zack Arnold

I think leaving with this idea of it's only when we accept who we are that we have the ability to change. I think that to me, if we're going to walk away with a mic drop, I just, I love leaving us where we are in this place today and again. Want to be very conscious of your time. I want to thank you first of all for politely declining me over two years ago, because I think this conversation was infinitely better and more fulfilling and more enriching having had it now, rather than two plus years ago, going through the journey that I did thanks largely, in part, to the inception, that seed that you planted, about looking at how I manage my time and my values differently. So again, cannot thank you enough for anybody that is listening that maybe is unaware of your work, where to find your books? Where's the one place that's the best to send people to let them dive deeper into everything that you've done. I always encourage

Oliver Burkeman

people to buy books and audio books, which are read by me, wherever you get, get your books, but also my website oliverburkeman.com has information about all of them, and my newsletter as well.

Zack Arnold

Well, once again, cannot thank you enough for giving me what is the most important resource that you have, which is your time and your attention and your presence, and you were fully and totally present. This was well worth the wait. I've had this interview in my mind for two and a half years. Exceeded expectations, and as a recovering perfectionist, I had a high expectation, so I cannot thank you enough. Oliver, thank you so much.

Oliver Burkeman

Thanks very much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai