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- [00:00]
Phil Agnew
Okay. Hello. It is Monday 14th April at 2.23pm and I am about to stare at a painting for three hours straight. I can't look at my phone, I can't check my emails. I can't do anything really, except stare at this painting. I do have a bottle of water with me. I do have a notepad where I can take notes and I can zoom in on this painting if I want to take a bit of a closer look. I'm just looking at it on my computer screen, but other than that, I can't do anything. I just have to sit here for three hours and stare at this painting. Let's see how I get on. Angel City Football Club didn't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident. They did, with a little help from HubSpot. When they started, data was housed across multiple systems. But HubSpot unified their website, their email marketing and their fan experience in one platform. This allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days. The results were nearly as good as the results happening on the pitch. They saw 350 new signups a week and a 300% database growth in just two years. If you want to grow like Angel City Football club, then visit HubSpot.com to hear how HubSpot can help you grow better. Now, this probably seems like a pretty bizarre activity. Why would I stare at a painting for three hours? Well, to explain, I need to introduce today's guest.
- [01:47]
Oliver Berkman
My name is Oliver Berkman. I'm the author of the books 4000 Weeks and Meditations for Mortals.
- [01:54]
Phil Agnew
In the book 4000 Weeks, Oliver shares that he once stared at a painting for three hours. I asked him why I did this.
- [02:03]
Oliver Berkman
Because it is an exercise that is recommended by an art historian at Harvard University called Jennifer Roberts. And I went to interview her. And then I also did this exercise at an art museum that's part of Harvard University. The reason that she recommends it is she argues, and I strongly agree, that we have so accelerated as a society and our sort of speed of thinking about things and trying to process tasks and information. Everything has so accelerated that sometimes we actually need to kind of very deliberately and consciously slow down the processes of what we're doing, and in this case the pro, that what I was doing was trying to really see a painting instead of just glance at it and conclude that I had thereby seen it.
- [02:47]
Phil Agnew
Just five minutes into my own staring experiments, I started to struggle. So I'm just five minutes in to my three hour Marathon of staring at this photo, I must say I'm already a little bit bored. Worried about having to look at it for another two hours and 55 minutes. But I realized at the start, I didn't even explain what. What painting I'm looking at. So this is a Picasso. It's his 1937 piece, Guernica. I really don't know much about art or really even about this piece. I know it's to do with the bombing of Guernica, which. Which also happened in 1937, and that's about it. I know it's a big painting, so there's. I picked it because I thought there'd be lots to look at. Five minutes in, I realized maybe I've looked at it all already. I'm also a bit gutted that it's. It's black and white. I. I think I probably should have picked something with colour. But I. Anyway, famously, quite a depressing painting as well. So I'm hoping I feel okay after three hours. Although really, I imagine boredom will be more an issue than my mood or emotion. So, yeah, that's what I'm looking at. Five minutes in, I can zoom. I haven't done that yet, but I probably will, I guess, zoom in on the picture to have a closer look at things in a bit. But for now I'll just keep on staring.
- [04:14]
Oliver Berkman
And of course, the whole point, as Jennifer Roberts will say, is that three hours is a horrendously long time. Right. It's a sort of outrageous affront to think that you're going to do this. You're going to sit down on a little bench and you can take a few notes as part of. The. Part of the rules. But basically you're just looking at this one painting and it was sort of agony for the first hour or so because. Well, I would say it's because the control that I like to have over what I'm doing in my life was taken away from me. Right. I just had to be there if I was going to fulfill this exercise.
- [04:44]
Phil Agnew
Well, I certainly experienced the agony Oliver mentioned. So I'm about 45 minutes in and, oh, this is really quite difficult. I've enjoyed looking at the painting and I feel like I've seen quite a lot over the past 45 minutes. But I think I'm a bit overwhelmed by the idea of continuing to do this for another 2 hours, 15 minutes. I just don't think there's anything left for me to see.
- [05:14]
Oliver Berkman
But the. But the payoff, the reward of doing that, of going through that first deeply unpleasant hour really was, as I write, in 4,000 weeks. You know, it just really was literally seeing new things in this Degas painting. I don't mean metaphorically kind of having new ideas about it. I mean, apparently there were figures and lines and things going on in this painting that I literally hadn't seen in the first 45 minutes of looking at it. So it was a. A very illuminating experience in that respect.
- [05:46]
Phil Agnew
I hoped it would be an illuminating experience because Oliver had really sold it to me.
- [05:51]
Oliver Berkman
I mean, I think there's a bunch of different ways of looking at it. Yes, I really advise this. Obviously in the book I'm using it to illustrate something broader, goes beyond art doesn't require you necessarily to do things at such a sort of extraordinarily slow pace. But, you know, one of those things is, is that more value is. Is obtained from the experience. So, you know, had it been my goal, because I was studying for an art history PhD or something, to. To understand this painting in real depth, I would have understood it in a way that I wouldn't have done if I hadn't slowed down. And then the other way of thinking about this is I discovered that it didn't kill me to have to just stop there and wait and let this work of art take the time that it took to be experienced. I think there's something that goes on that's really interesting when we're. Maybe it's not art, maybe it's reading, maybe it's trying to figure out some business challenge or something. There's a real sense that if you went slow and you let things happen and you. You let thoughts take the time they take and you let the reading take the time or whatever it is. Not just that this might not be competitively advantageous or you might lose time to use further things, but this real sense of, like, intolerability, just a sort of really emotional, almost physiological thing that we don't like about reality not moving at the speed we've decided it needs to run, basically. And it's very, very useful to really drive home to yourself in a first person way that you can tolerate this unpleasantness and come out the other end of it.
- [07:32]
Phil Agnew
But one and a half hours into my experience, I don't think I agreed with Oliver. Well, I'm halfway. It is an hour and a half in and yeah, God, this is very hard. And I'm honestly starting to question how valuable I'm finding it. I felt like for the first section, I really was seeing a lot more in the image and learning a bit more about it. But I'm now just getting so bored and I feel like I've seen everything. But despite those misgivings, I did believe Oliver's general point. He argues that spending time and effort on something will make us value it more. For art students, staring at a painting for three hours will make them appreciate the art far more. And by the same logic, for business professionals, focusing on a problem solely for three hours should help us develop pain better solutions. I believed Oliver's point because of an interesting 2013 study called Extreme Rituals Promote Prosocially. The study took place in Mauritius during the Hindu festival of Thaipusam. The festivities began at dawn. Devotees of the Hindu God Lord Subrahmanyam gathered outside a temple in a neighborhood known as Little India. The researchers wanted to see if the effort and pain the worshippers put into their ritual affected the amount they would then donate to a local temple. The researchers studied two types of worshippers those who took part in low ordeal rituals so this is a group of worshippers who only sang and prayed. Hindus believe Lord Subramanyam is the universal granter of wishes. Devotees take part to ask a favor or give thanks for one granted and a group who experienced a high ordeal ritual. So this is a very intense ritual where the participants pierce their skin with needles and hooks, carry these heavy structures and walk barefoot uphill for over four hours. Many participants pierced their faces and bodies with skewers. Others paid homage by lancing their skins with steel hooks. Some pulled chariots with hooks embedded in their backs. Those who watched the low ordeal singing group gave just 80 rupees as a donation, while those who watched the high ordeal rituals gave 65% more. 132 rupees on average. Observing pain and effort made people value the ritual more and donate more. But it didn't just affect people who observed the ritual. Those worshippers who actually took part in the high ordeal ritual, well, they gave considerably more than those who only took part in a low ordeal ritual. In fact, those who took part in a high ordeal ritual so performing the piercing and the barefoot hikes, they donated twice as much as those in the low ordeal group. Experiencing pain increased their donation. Spending time and effort on something will make us value it more, whether it's a four hour barefoot pilgrimage or three hours spent staring at a painting. But just knowing that investing time in something might help us value it more, well, that won't solve our problems. We still have to decide what to spend our time on, and that's not.
- [10:52]
Oliver Berkman
Easy on the one hand, it's so obvious there's just too much to read, too many things to listen to, too many articles coming your way online that seem like they'd be really important for you to make sure you looked at. And on the other hand, it's not. You know, it's a little bit of a first world problem, isn't it? It's like if you read a bit less than you think you should, you're probably going to be okay. It's not one of the most painful kinds of sacrifices to have to make.
- [11:18]
Phil Agnew
And yet this stresses us out. I feel stressed by the sheer number of books on my to read list, including the number of books I've tentatively started but never finished. This sort of thing makes me feel like a bit of a failure. But Oliver has shared an analogy that encouraged me to think of my to read list differently.
- [11:35]
Oliver Berkman
So the analogy that you mention is I talk about looking at your viewing your to read pile or digital queue of documents or articles to read later as a river rather than a bucket. In other words, not as something that fills up and then it's your job to empty it by going through everything that's in it, but just as something that flows past you or around you, whatever. And all you should ever be aiming to do is to is to pluck a few things from the flow that strike you for whatever intuitive reasons as the most important ones or the enriching or absorbing ones, focus on those and not feel guilty about all the ones that are going to flow past you at the same time. As I write in the book. You know, there was a time in the history of the Internet when people thought, well, are we going to get so much better filters for all this information that this problem is going to go away? Because instead of being deluged every time you open a social media site or your email or something, you're only going to get shown the things that you really care about because it's going to know you.
- [12:35]
Phil Agnew
Clay Shirky, an optimist technology thought leader, predicted a few years back that information overload was a problem that algorithms would soon solve. Solve. He called it a filter failure. He said your ever growing list of books and articles and TV shows and YouTube videos to watch and read, well, all of that will be solved by a sophisticated filter. But things didn't quite work out that way.
- [12:59]
Oliver Berkman
One of the most obvious points against that is that if the supply is basically infinite, then all that happens when you have better filters is you just get even better, purer, overwhelming supplies of things that you feel like you need to read. So I'm just really struck by this. Whenever you sort of explore a new social media network, I was poking around on substack notes the last few weeks and some algorithm has been learning about me. Suddenly, like every newsletter that comes up, it's like, oh, I really have to read this post. This is not going to stop. This is not going to get better by my getting better at filtering things. It's going to get better by my reconciling myself to the fact that I can only get to look at a few of them.
- [13:44]
Phil Agnew
Filters won't help us cope with information overload. That's obvious. And yet some people claim that AI will help. Some predict that AI will help you pick the perfect business textbook to boost your growth or the perfect mindfulness course to help you meditate. But Oliver's not so sure, Right?
- [14:01]
Oliver Berkman
And that same dynamic with AI, I mean, you know, putting aside the sort of AI will eradicate humanity kind of argument, the argument that says it's going to free us up as well because it's going to handle all the tasks that, that we don't want to do or that machines can do, and it's going to lead to us having much more time to do things that only humans can do. Of course that's not what's going to happen. Of course that that new time is going to fill up the pressure for you to do more and more and more of whatever it is that you uniquely, as a human can do in order to stay competitive is going to ratchet up and, you know, various aspects of AI may be terrific or terrible, but the idea that they're going to get us to the point of sort of handling infinity, which is basically escaping the human condition, is I confidently predict, not going to happen.
- [14:49]
Phil Agnew
Oliver can confidently predict this because similar time saving technology promises just like this have been made throughout history.
- [14:58]
Oliver Berkman
You see this same dynamic and yeah, the one you refer to, this great work by Ruth Cowan, the historian who showed that when households started to get labor saving devices, right, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, it didn't actually reduce the house workload of the people, mainly the women, housewives or domestic servants who were using them, because the social expectation of how clean and tidy your house should be just rose to offset it, right? So once you can keep all your rugs completely dust free or your husband's shirts well ironed every single day, because you've got the technology now, you feel you have to.
- [15:38]
Phil Agnew
In his book, Oliver shares the famous quote, work expands. So as to fill the time available for its completion. The English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote that in 1955, coining what is now known as Parkinson's Law. But Oliver writes how this law doesn't just apply to work.
- [15:58]
Oliver Berkman
It's exactly like when they widen congested roads, put an extra lane in a congested road so that there's more space, and then more people use that route, and then all the congestion returns to what it was before. The same thing. You see it occurring over and over and again. It's not an argument against washing machines. It's a recognition that if we're going to find meaning in life, we're going to have the opportunity to do more of the things that bring meaning to our lives. It's not going to come through efficiency or optimization yet.
- [16:32]
Phil Agnew
It's hard. We are pushed to be more efficient in our jobs and our bosses want us to be more optimised. And Oliver says that's why the more promotions we receive, the worse all this.
- [16:42]
Oliver Berkman
Feels in general, if you rise up the status ladder in your work, if things go well. So I'm not just talking about billionaires, I'm talking about us, right, People who, if things go well for you and you do better than you were doing five years ago, or you get a promotion compared to where you were five years ago, you can assume, all else being equal, that you will be at least as busy and maybe busier as a result of this, which, yeah, historically is kind of ridiculous, There are lots of reasons for this, and one of them is just, of course, that it's not just that you're busier, but that the fact of being finite and limited can in certain ways seem more painful or more onerous. Obviously, you have a nicer quality of life the more money you have, but you still sort of face finitude in a way that can be quite agonizing. Right? So in a very simple way, and, you know, even I've just encountered this a little bit in the last few years, if you do, if things go kind of well for you in your work, you end up getting a larger proportion of the opportunities that come your way feel really like you want to do them because they're really cool and interesting. There are very, very many downsides to having work that you don't consider meaningful or exciting. But one of the sort of strange upsides is that you're not going to feel particularly awful if you have to focus on A rather than B, when you didn't really care about B in the first place. There's also this phenomenon. It's the same kind of idea. It's all opportunity costs that we're talking about, right? There's this finding apparently that the very wealthy people are prone to enjoying vacation time less because they have a wider range of opportunities of how to use any given week of holiday so that you're spending the whole of your skiing vacation in clusters or something, you know, wondering whether you would have been, whether you would have enjoyed the safari instead. And if you've got no option of doing any of those, and your option is to, you know, drive a couple of hours to a nice campsite on a hill, you'll probably be really absorbed in the enjoyable experience of camping. So there are lots of strange ironies that result here from seemingly doing well in the, in the system that we've set up for ourselves as a society.
- [18:53]
Phil Agnew
As you become more important, you become busier. High status people tend to be more stressed and at the same time they might enjoy their time off less. We struggle to enjoy our weekend holiday in Brighton while it's raining because we know we could have taken a cheaper holiday to Spain. This is loosely connected to choice paralysis, the psychological phenomenon where we feel overwhelmed by choice.
- [19:14]
Oliver Berkman
I mean, maybe I'm an outlier in this regard, but I've certainly had the experience of going into kind of, I don't know, I'm thinking about like takeout food places and being more. When we lived in America and being so overwhelmed by the range of options that I'm entitled to as a customer of the place that I just sort of turn on my heel and leave because it feels like more overhead and bandwidth to have to participate in this example of consumerist abundance than if I was just offered cheese sandwich or ham sandwich.
- [19:46]
Phil Agnew
Two hours into my three hour stint staring at Picasso's Guernica, I started to appreciate my lack of choice. I had no option to look at my phone. I couldn't check my emails, I definitely couldn't read the news. I just had to stare. And that lack of choice made me start to appreciate the experience. The lack of choice, the simplicity of just having to stare made me enjoy it. One hour to go now. Been staring at the painting for two hours, I think. I wouldn't say I'm enjoying it, but it's getting a little bit easier. It's feeling kind of relaxed about it now. I definitely feel like I'll get through it, which is nice. Don't really have to worry about this being sort of too much. I feel like I know that I can cope with it, which is good. But there's a good chance that this slight enjoyment I was experiencing wouldn't last, because Oliver shared something shocking, something that people do when they're left alone with nothing to occupy their minds. And that's coming up after this quick break. The podcast I'd like to recommend today is Creators are Brands, hosted by Tom Boyd and of course brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Creators are Brands explores how storytellers are building brands online, from the mindsets they use to the tactics they apply, including some of the business troubles they get into. This podcast breaks down what's working so you can apply the tactics to your work. It's a fantastic show. So listen to Creators Are Brands wherever you get your podcasts. If you're anything like me, that period before you have to come up with an idea for a campaign is terrifying. You don't know what to do. You don't want to just rely on gut instinct. It's hard to think of a good idea, but there is a very interesting solution. It's GWI Spark, your free AI powered research assistant. GWI Spark gives you fresh insights on your target audience in seconds so you can get inspired, validate hunches, and build smarter campaigns backed by rock solid consumer data. Don't go into your next campaign blind. Use Spark for your next big idea. Sign up for free at Gwynne. That's GWI.com podcast at this point, I'd been staring at the painting for two hours and I had experienced a lot of boredom. My brain was pleading with me for stimulus and I was desperate for something, anything to do. And it reminded me of a study cited in Oliver's book.
- [22:25]
Oliver Berkman
But in the study in question, you know, people were left in a room with nothing to do except the opportunity to use a little machine to deliver harmless but painful electric shocks to themselves. And yes, a lot of people chose to shock themselves at least once or twice, I have to say. It's. It's most men and a large minority of women. So, you know, make of that what you will. But I think it does speak to this broader point, right? That is, there is something difficult and unpleasant about not being active, about stopping, about just being with your thoughts, being on your own, being with whatever experience you're undergoing at that moment. And the, the basic theory that I sort of pursue through my writing is that this is to do with control, really.
- [23:18]
Phil Agnew
Right.
- [23:19]
Oliver Berkman
What we, we, we say we want all sorts of things in life, but a lot of the Time. What we really want is a feeling of, of control in situations where you're locked in a room and told you can't do anything. That's a classic example, a very extreme example of having all control taken away from you. This is a very uneasy experience. And then one of the things you get by doing something as seemingly counterproductive as giving yourself an electric shock is like, at least you decided to do it right. At least you get to sort of experience that autonomy. There's obviously a huge amount of other psychological research about the crucial role of autonomy in psychological well being and the feeling that you're having an effect and making a difference. And I'm certainly not like against any of that. I think it's just really a useful, very useful skill when you find yourself in those situations, stuck in a traffic jam, waiting for other people to get back to you about things like it's a very useful skill to not have to kind of plunge into activity for the sake of activity, just to not feel the sense of having insufficient control over reality.
- [24:27]
Phil Agnew
We crave control. In a classic 1970s study, Judith Rodin from Yale University and Ellen Langer from Harvard studied people who have experienced a severe reduction in control. Specifically, they studied elderly people in a care home. Roden and Langer predicted that care home residents with more control would actually be happier. But to prove this, they needed to create a randomised controlled trial. Now, this is something that's easy to create in a lab, much harder to replicate in the real world, let alone in a care home. But fortunately for them, a nursing home in Connecticut agreed to let the researchers run their test. This nursing home had four floors with an equal number of residents on each floor. Roden and Langer randomly picked one of the floors to be the control floor floor and another of the floors to be the no control floor. The staff gathered the residents on the control floor and told them that they were now expected to take full responsibility of themselves. They were expected to make sure they had everything they required. They had to make their own plans on how to spend their time. And the residents were also given a potted green plant for their room, which was their sole responsibility. They needed to water. The other group on the no control floor were also gathered together. However, they were told that the staff would take fantastic care of them. They wouldn't need to lift a finger, all of their whims would be serviced and all of their plans would be prepared for them. They were also given a green potted plant, but they were told that the staff would water it. For them, there was no tangible difference between the residents reality on those two floors. A care home resident living on the no control floor could still of course, water her own plants and make her own plants. However, their perception of their agency was different. So did this feeling of control change the residents experience? Well, three weeks later, Rodin and Langer returned to assess the residents and they discovered that the individuals who had been encouraged to take more control of their environment were far happier. They participated in a far greater number of social activities, their mental alertness improved, and they seemed generally to be in far better spirits as well. Now, worrying that they were just measuring a short term boost, Rhoden and Langer returned 18 months later to assess the groups. Again the same results were found, except this time those on the control floor were also considerably healthier than those on the no control floor. Control is a vital component of a happy and healthy life. It's why we hate being stuck in traffic, left alone in a room with nothing to do, or forced to stare at a painting for three hours. So the solution, when we're inevitably placed in situations where we feel a loss of control, is to slow down and to wield our patience.
- [27:16]
Oliver Berkman
We tend to think historically of patience as a kind of a quite a sort of submissive virtue, right? It's the kind of thing that you tell people if you just want them to kind of keep quiet and not bother you while other people do other things, whatever. There's a strong argument to be made that in the modern world, when everything moves so fast, the ability to slow down and not be made uneasy by doing things at a slower pace is actually a form of control. So it's not submissive at all. It's actually a way of taking command of a situation. So I think in all sorts of contexts, if you can not join the restless hurry for a solution to some problem, or you can, you know, sit and wait for the time it takes to sort of read and deeply internalize a book. Or in a totally different domain, if you can sort of be with a toddler who you are the parent of without feeling like totally jumpy and needing to stare at your phone just to, just to get out of that claustrophobic situation, it will just serve you in all sorts of really sort of unexpected and interesting ways. So yeah, I think it is a sort of a. It's a modern superpower, I argue really, just because it's an ability to kind of not be carried along with the flow of society.
- [28:43]
Phil Agnew
With just half an hour left of my painting staring experience, I started to feel the same way. Well, it is five to five. I've only got half an hour left. And yeah, I mean this has been agonizing at times, but yeah, right now it's. It's fine, really. It's almost enjoyable. It feels kind of feel quite peaceful just looking at this painting. I'm spotting little things that I definitely didn't spot earlier. You know, just the fact that every, every animal or being in this space picture is looking to the left of the image, not the right. And there's someone on the right who's in agony, who's sort of being ignored in that way. And it's just a lot I think I missed. And the more I looked at it, the more I spotted, which is kind of surprising considering it's just a black and white picture which, you know, with not that much detail in. So yeah, I'm finding it okay at the moment. Half an hour to go and then we're done.
- [29:48]
Oliver Berkman
There was an interesting thing a few months ago. Now there's a whole spate of articles about people going on long haul plane rides and not watching the entertainment system at all or not listening to anything. And there was a piece in some magazine that completely unnecessarily used the deeply off putting concept of raw dogging in this context to mean like, you know, going on a three hour ride, a three hour plane trip and just sitting there. You know, it wasn't only planes, but that was the classic example, right? You go on a transatlantic trip and you don't like desperately try to distract yourself with the entertainment system. And it was really interesting because this was basically being put forward as some kind of macho thing, right? It was like it was an endurance accomplishment. It wasn't like, you know, what patience would have meant in Jane Austen's time, right? Kind of meekly retiring yourself from life. It was like, no, this was a bit the equivalent of competing in an Ironman or something. It was like the ability to just be with experience and not run away into distraction or stuff to take your mind off things. So I think that's an interesting sign of the times that this is becoming something that people sort of brag about.
- [31:03]
Phil Agnew
To finish our conversation, I wanted to ask Oliver for his advice. I'm convinced that patience really is a superpower. I believe that patience could help me retain control and feel a bit grounded and, and less stressed in this world of overwhelming choice. But I wanted to know how I could build patience, hopefully without raw dogging on a flight or staring at a Picasso for three hours. Straight. What's Oliver's advice for patients?
- [31:28]
Oliver Berkman
It's a question about expectations. And it doesn't only apply to patients, it applies to lots of these kind of limit embracing, but ultimately positive stances on the world that I try to write about. And that is essentially just not to expect it to feel great the moment you start doing it. Right. I think this applies to people who want to sort of step back from being online all the time. It applies to people who want to be better at paying attention and listening to other people. All sorts of different contexts. We kind of assume that if something is going to lead us to a life of more meaning and ultimately happiness, that the moment you start doing it's going to feel great. But of course, we're completely conditioned for the other way of being. And so if you, for example, want to read more things in a sort of close and focused way, and you finally decide to make half an hour to sit down and pick up a book you've been meaning to read, this is not going to feel great. At least for the first 10 minutes, maybe for the first, like few days that you're doing this.
- [32:27]
Phil Agnew
And that was definitely true for me. 30 minutes into my painting, stare off, I said this. Oh, this is really quite difficult.
- [32:36]
Oliver Berkman
If you can expect that, that's a real benefit, right? Because you can sort of see that restlessness coming and be like, oh, yes, right, this is what I'm, you know, reasonably expecting to happen. And you can stick with it, not in a kind of forcing way, but you can just gently be like, okay, yes, I see these unpleasant emotions and I choose to choose to carry on. Otherwise, like, the tiniest bit of discomfort, in my experience anyway, will send you off and like, cause you to abandon the whole thing. This is at the heart of a lot of digital distraction as well. I think some tiny little difficulty arises in the thing you're trying to write or the thing you're trying to think your way through. And if you're not developed, haven't got developed some level of awareness of what's happening, that's enough just to send you off to social media and then you're there for an hour and a half. It sounds like a very sort of pessimistic approach to life, but like, just not assuming that something that is a good thing to be doing good, part of your plans for your life will necessarily feel full of joy and ecstasy in the first 10 minutes of it is really powerful.
- [33:40]
Phil Agnew
And I'm glad I sat through my challenge because despite periods of mind numbing, boredom I did eventually enjoy it. There you go. That's been three hours. It is now 5:25pm Three hours staring at a Picasso. Yeah. Genuinely a very interesting experience. It was agony at the start. Not mainly because it just felt difficult to stare at something, but because I was just so kind of overwhelmed by the amount of time I had left. It was hard to imagine, you know, what I was gonna do, how I was gonna get through just hours of nothingness. And then. And then as the hours whittled down, it just gets easier and easier. And it is. It was. And it is genuinely interesting to stare at a painting. You do learn stuff. You notice symmetries in styles, in terms of how he's. Picasso's drawing, certain elements and how he repeats those elements of the nostril of the bull in the same nostrils of the woman and the same eyes of the woman, the same nostrils of the horse. And you see these symmetries in the triangles and the flames versus the sort of triangles and the hands. And. Yeah, there's. I mean, it's a very abstract painting. And I don't know how much meaning you can draw from abstract paintings, but you start to see things that you. You definitely would never see if you were glancing at this in a gallery. And this is probably. I probably spent more time looking at this painting than every other painting I've ever looked at in my life combined. And I think I've learned a bit in that sense as well. Maybe not so much about art or about painting, but I think I've learned that you can, if you give anything your attention, I mean, it happens to have been a painting here. But I'm sure if I did the same for a meal I was eating or drink a cup of coffee I was drinking, or a building I was staring at, or, I don't know, a book I was reading, if I just gave the same amount of attention that I've given over the past three hours to anything, I think you would find it would bring you a lot more joy. Yeah. So it's been a good experience. One I'm not sure I'll rush to do again. I think I would like to do it in person. I'd now love to go as soon as this painting in person as well. What I would like to do in the future, though, is just to apply the same idea to different things. You know, with my meal tonight, really actually think about what I'm eating, give it attention, rather than spend half my time thinking or doing something else while trying to achieve something else as well. So yeah, what an experience. Three hours. Anyway, that's that. But of course this three hour stint staring at a Picasso didn't really change me. It taught me something. It forced me to be patient and helped me to understand what patience feels like. Yet it didn't turn me into some productivity enhanced Zen monk. I still check my phone far too often. I get distracted as much as before. I'm not fixed. I'm not a new man, but I maybe am slightly more well rounded. In the final paragraph of his book 4000 Hours, Oliver writes that the average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn't a reason for unremitting despair or for living in an anxiety filled panic about making the most of our limited time. It's a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible. The quest to become optimised, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, and a fully independent person that you're officially supposed to. And then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what's gloriously possible instead. That is all for today's episode of Nudge. A big, big thank you to Oliver Berkman for coming on the show. His new book, Meditation for Mortals is fantastic. It is superbly written and thoroughly thought provoking. I recommend both Meditation for mortals and 4000 hours to all of you listening. The links to both books are in the show notes. Now, some of you might be wondering if I really did look at a painting for three hours, it'd be easy to make that up, wouldn't it, on an audio only podcast. So to prove it, I have also created a YouTube video based on this episode with live footage from my three hour Picasso marathon. If you want to watch that, just search for nudge podcast on YouTube and you'll find a slightly shorter, perhaps more entertaining version of this episode. I do hope you like that as well. I should also say that if you've enjoyed today's episode, you are in luck because Oliver and I recorded a bonus episode as well. Well, for the bonus show, Oliver shares how social media kept him hooked and how he weaned himself off the platform. He explains that we shouldn't live inside the news cycle and advocates for people to worry less about global news and policies they can't control. He also advised me on how I could deal with social issues I care about and to be honest, I could listen to Oliver talk for hours on end. His points are fantastic. So if you've enjoyed today's show, I think you'll love the bonus episode to get access, just click the link in the show notes, enter your email and you'll be taken straight to the bonus episode. That is all from me. I hope you enjoyed today's show. If any of you do try the three hour Art Staring Challenge for yourself, please message me to let me know. Just connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm Phil Agnew on there. Send me a message. I'd love to know if you found it rewarding or just brain numbing. Thank you for listening. I'll be back next Monday for another episode of Nudge. Cheers.