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The Rich Roll Podcast
The Productivity Myth: Oliver Burkeman On Our Broken Relationship With Time, Embracing Our Limitations & Why More Isn’t Always Better
01:59:15
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- [00:01]
Rich Roll
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- [02:31]
Oliver Burkeman
Everyone feels like they've got too much to do, so you try to find ways to do more of it, which is either clever systems or extra self discipline. Kind of hold out this amazing promise with this device or with this system, you know you're going to be able to do more and more of it. You're constantly chasing it and you never get to the point of being able to do all the things. Of course we're pursuing long term goals. Of course there are things we're creating in the hopes that at a later point we reap the rewards in this way or that, but there's got to be some role for finding meaning in the doing of it. You start to feel that it's only if you kind of do enough stuff that you get to feel good about yourself. And ultimately that can't be the definition of a meaningful life.
- [03:23]
Rich Roll
One of the great illnesses of today's world is busyness without satisfaction. And by this I mean the proliferation of jobs and careers that fail to provide those who pursue and hold them with much social meaning beyond what they pay. Which according to Rucker Bregman, who I happen to have just recorded a podcast with today, 25% of people in modern economies. But this malady extends further than that to a broader crisis of meaning that undermines our ability to live our lives more meaningfully in the day to day, which is this epidemic that is fueling chronic states of anxiety, irritability, impatience, exhaustion, and just general discontentment. Now, I don't know about you, but I can certainly relate to this. And despite the fact that I derive tremendous meaning from what I do for a living, from my family, and from many things that I involve myself in outside the strictures of what anyone would reasonably consider work, I still find it difficult to just simply relax and enjoy this incredible life that I've built for myself. And because there's always way more to do than I can possibly get done, which leaves me more anxious, more distracted, more prone to lower emotions than is reasonable given my circumstances, which, you know, is confusing at times and tremendously confounding. So I was pretty enthusiastic about sitting down with today's guest because this is a conundrum that Oliver Berkman has spent a lot of time thinking deeply about, and also somebody who has devoted the better part of his attention to solving a solution that revolves around repairing our dysfunctional relationship with time. You may know Oliver Berkman as the productivity guy, a journalist and the author behind the landmark book 4000 Time Management for Mortals, which challenges conventional notions of efficiency. Oliver has written extensively for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal as well as the Guardian, and currently publishes a twice monthly in demand newsletter called the Imperfectionist, in which he shares insights on productiv mortality, the power of limits, and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment. Oliver's latest book is Meditations for Mortals, which outlines his philosophy of imperfection in the context of a four week plan designed to help us make better decisions within the demands and the time constraints of our lives so that we can live more fully. And the main idea here is that an accomplished, socially connected and fulfilling life is built by accepting rather than struggling against one's limitations, finitude and vulnerability. And so that's what we get into today, along with an array of all kinds of actionable tools to help you reframe your relationship with productivity and redirect your attention with devotion on what matters most. Well, I'm very excited to talk to you today. Thank you for coming all the way out here, Oliver, because I think your work, as I said to you before the podcast started, is just so vital. It gets at the heart of this dilemma, conundrum, disease, whatever you want to call it, that goes to the very center of what it means to inhabit a human body in the modern world. Really. You know, it's like this experience, this, this failed attempt that we're all making to manage our lives based upon this diluted understanding of how time works and what it means to live a meaningful life. And all it does is create this constant, perpetual state of anxiety, exhaustion, irritability, impatience, and general discontentment. And I would say, just from a personal standpoint, this is my biggest malfunction. I'm living a life well beyond anything I could have ever imagined for myself, and yet I struggle in my ability to enjoy it. I feel so burdened by responsibilities and my inability to keep up with the demands that are placed upon me. And of course, as you write about, like, I'm projecting some idealized future self who's going to be able to enjoy all of this, right? Well, my life is sort of passing by in the. In the interim. And I know that, you know, I'm not alone in this. And this is the dilemma, the core dilemma that you've essentially devoted your life to resolving for all of us, which is a tremendous act of public service.
- [08:00]
Oliver Burkeman
Thank you very much. Or not resolving, but. But sort of really living into the irresolvability of it. Maybe that's it.
- [08:08]
Rich Roll
Well, maybe we can start with our broken relationship with time as a theory of mind. I think so much of our human dysfunction really boils down to this misunderstanding of how time works and our relationship with it that drives our decision making and our behaviors and this general sense of discontentment.
- [08:29]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, a lot of it comes down to time. Or you can just say we live in time, right? It's the stuff of our lives. So anything that we're doing wrong that's increasing our suffering is going to manifest in that way. I guess one of the ways of seeing it is just this basic idea that time is something you have, right? That you're in a relationship to time. I think that's kind of the cause of all the problems in a way, because we start off with this idea that we've got this resource and we got to make the most use of it and we want to control how it unfolds. And there's something about all of that that is not true to the situation that we're actually in, which is that all you ever have is the actual moment that you're in. You don't really get to control. You can't put time aside for later. You have very, very partial control over how time unfolds, even in your own little corner of the world. And yeah, like time is gonna win the battle in the end, right? So I think we're constantly trying to do things to make ourselves feel like little gods over our time and not sort of. And I think it leads to all sorts of. I think that is the source of like all sorts of action problems, you know, procrastination, distraction, all the rest of it. A lot of it can be understood as ways of trying to feel less limited.
- [09:55]
Rich Roll
Fundamentally, we have an insane notion when it comes to what we think we're able to control and not control. We're much more prone to believe that we have a greater degree of control over our lives and external events than we do. And that's sort of at the foundational level. Right. And so with that sense of control that we're never able to quite master, we're constantly disappointed by our failed attempts to control external events and even our own emotions. This just seems to lead us towards a deeper desire to control rather than an honest appraisal of our lack of control and the natural uncertainty of the world that leads us to hold on even tighter rather than release the reins. Which is a central tenet of your message.
- [10:48]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, totally. I mean, just like a really obvious, simple example is like overwhelm, right? Everyone feels like they've got too much to do, or pretty much everyone. So you try to find ways to do more of it, which is either clever systems or extra self discipline or something. And you never get to the point of being able to do all the things by Definition, because the space of things that feel like they need doing is.
- [11:13]
Rich Roll
But we still believe it's possible.
- [11:15]
Oliver Burkeman
Basically infinite. Right. You're constantly chasing it. Technologies kind of hold out this amazing promise, right? That's like with this device or with this system, you're gonna be able to do more and more of it. But those technologies also bring us foments.
- [11:29]
Rich Roll
More of it, more and more of it to do. Remember the inbox zero movement for a while and all that did was precipitate a great deal of shame and guilt and a lack of self compassion.
- [11:42]
Oliver Burkeman
Right? No, I agree. Because it's kind of obvious when you think about it that if you start answering emails at a much quicker tempo than before in order to get through all your emails, you're going to get a lot more replies to your replies more quickly and then you're going to get a reputation in your organization for being really responsive on email. So more people are going to email you. And like the whole all else being equal, if you try to optimize yourself with respect to some effectively infinite stream of inputs, you're just going to get busier. You're not going to get that control that we feel we need. I sometimes think it's including in the book. I kind of think it's really interesting to make this comparison with like people from a long, long time ago. Like what it would have been like to live in medieval England or something and to just from the beginning have no thought that you could control whether war or famine or plague was gonna obliterate everything in your life like within a month. There's something very modern about the fact that we have all these technologies that kind of lead us to believe that it ought to be so we constantly feel like we're almost there. Like just one more productivity system or just six more months of getting my habits in order. And then I'll get to that bit where it's all plain sailing.
- [13:01]
Rich Roll
It's premised upon this idea that we should be productive. Productivity is good and our value is calibrated based upon our ability to be as productive as possible. And one of the things that you talk about is this idea that productivity is not a moral imperative. So tease that out a little bit.
- [13:22]
Oliver Burkeman
Well, right. I mean, it's just we are deeply conditioned, I think, by this ethos that doing lots of things is kind of an inherent good, like the doing of as many things as you can. And if you can get through more of the things, then that's somehow better and you should feel better about yourself. Just Stating it like that, it's obviously clear that. Right, obviously it depends on what the things are. There are plenty of people in the world who we might wish to do fewer of the things that they're doing. You know, it's like world would be a better place with certain people not doing the things that they're doing. And for ourselves we're in this constant kind of tangle where our self worth is totally wrapped up in this because you start to feel that it's only if you kind of do enough stuff that you get to feel good about yourself. There's no limit to the amount of stuff that is coming in to the, you know, the input side of this arrangement. Your outputs are very limited. So you're just in this kind of tangle the whole time. And like, yeah, ultimately that can't be the definition of a meaningful life that you like the number of things that you did. It's got to be something about what you did and whether you did it in a spirit of like showing up for it and presence while you were doing it. I think, you know, there's lots of reasons for this. It's capitalism and probably Protestantism in our histories and some other forces as well. But it just leads to this, it leads this way of measuring ourselves that is never going to lead us to conclude that we're okay and can take a breath.
- [15:00]
Rich Roll
Well, we so self identify with it. I mean, I just know in my own life, like I, you know, from as long as back as I can remember as a young child, like the bedtime storybook was the early bird gets the worm. You know, it's like this is so deeply embedded. And the way that I was raised is that, you know, productivity is a proxy for love and approval. And when you get hardwired at a young age with that Protestant work ethic and you go out into a materialist capitalist world that rewards you for that, where the incentive structure is such that, you know, it's. It's impossible to escape this idea that your ability to be productive to, to accomplish things and be validated for that is the meaning of life. Right. And we miss life in the midst of all of that. And it's only in the case of experiencing some kind of interrupting event or crisis that we are given the gift of recalibrating that equation.
- [16:03]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, I think that's really well put. I mean, I think the thing about it is also that I'm not against accomplishing lots of stuff, right. But we naturally, as part of this attempt to feel more in control of our lives than we really get to be as humans. I think we turn it into this battle where it's always like a deficit we're trying to fill. It's like if we do enough. I think a lot of people go around in this state that I call productivity debt. Right. There's this sense that you've got to do a huge amount by the end of the day or whatever just to feel like you're at baseline. Right. And there would be another way of.
- [16:40]
Rich Roll
You've earned your right to breathe air, right?
- [16:42]
Oliver Burkeman
Exactly. No, exactly. It's completely tangled up with self worth. And this is why some of the most sort of accomplished and successful and productive people seem to be so unhappy. Because I think, because actually they are more driven by those kind of demons than some people who might be less outwardly accomplished. Of course, you can. You can think of a different way of being productive and accomplishing lots of things, which is that you start from the baseline of feeling okay about yourself, and then it's fun. It's a fun way to engage in the world to like, accomplish things rather than not accomplish them. That's great.
- [17:15]
Rich Roll
Are there people who walk around the planet feeling good about themselves? Naturally.
- [17:19]
Oliver Burkeman
I'm not sure it comes easily to most of us, but I'm definitely closer to it than I was, I'll say that much.
- [17:25]
Rich Roll
I mean, what is the impetus to even approach this subject matter? Like, what was going on with you personally that led you in this direction?
- [17:36]
Oliver Burkeman
I mean, it happened gradually. And I wrote this column for the Guardian newspaper for many years where I was kind of testing out these kind of systems and methods of productivity and happiness tactics and all the rest of it. And I would have said back then, I think, that I was doing it out of journalistic interest. But of course, you're never doing anything out of purely professional motivation. It was an attempt to reckon with my own, I think, you know, a lot of anxiety. I was a huge ball of anxiety at university. That's when that really started to kick in for me for a bunch of different reasons. Some notion that I had to be working harder and harder and better and better. Yeah. Just in order to keep my head above water and as you say, to have your. Have my right. Right to exist. And so I think I was, at first unconsciously and then just fairly consciously, to be honest, using my public writing as a way to grapple with all of this stuff. And one of the interesting effects of that with the column was that it went on for long enough that I got to try out many, many of these supposedly silver bullets for living a calm and happy and accomplished life. And there's something very useful about getting to the point where you're like, I've done a hundred of these, right? And I haven't found the one. So maybe the problem here is not going to be solved by the 101st. Maybe the problem is the quest, right? Maybe there's a problem with looking for a silver bullet.
- [19:17]
Rich Roll
How would you articulate your global thesis on all of this?
- [19:22]
Oliver Burkeman
I guess I would say it's that we are very finite and limited as human beings in all sorts of ways. This is fundamental and definitional to what it is to be a human in time. We really hate this fact for a lot of reasons. So we do a lot of things, often masquerading as productivity techniques or habit change projects and projects of personal transformation. Mainly to make ourselves feel that that's not true. Mainly to sort of help us ignore the vulnerable and limiting and constraining truth of being a human. Sorry, this is a very long version of the thesis. And that actually by embracing and confronting and acknowledging those limitations, that that's actually. It's a little bit of a harder path, but it's the path to less anxiety and more calm. And it is actually the path to more meaningful productivity. It's not a path to passivity, it's a path to doing the right things.
- [20:24]
Rich Roll
Fundamentally, the premise is if you want to be a fully actualized human who is quote unquote productive in the healthiest way, and the healthiest definition of that word first, you have to accept reality. And my kind of on ramp into this is recovery from addiction like sobriety, and being introduced to these ideas like acceptance and surrender as a means of growth. And they're challenging ideas, right? You're confronting people with ideas that they associate with giving up or being weak, et cetera. But actually this is where all the strength happens. It takes courage to accept life on life's terms, to accept that we're going to die, that we only have a finite amount of time. And within that, in this Zen Cohen kind of way, how do we exert our self will while also relinquishing the parts of it that we don't have control over?
- [21:26]
Oliver Burkeman
And there are so many ideas. I'm not an expert, so I might need correction, but there are so many ideas from recovery at 12 step especially that seem to always be overlapping and contacting with the stuff.
- [21:38]
Rich Roll
I think it definitely comes in and out in all of your writing.
- [21:42]
Oliver Burkeman
So I mean, the things that I think of in that regard are firstly, on some level, the cliche, like the idea of hitting rock bottom. Right. The idea of sort of being forced to let go of your illusions in some way. And then secondly, that notion that what we're doing here, that the path to something active and getting traction on life and recovering a sense of agency and autonomy actually lies through a kind of defeat about how much power we really have in the situation. And I often feel like that notion that one is always an addict, but a sober addict or whatever has a lot of affinity with this idea of just sort of. Yeah. Falling into the truth of finitude. Letting go of the idea that you're ever going to somehow sort of lever your way out of the human condition and be in a new controlling position and as a result, somehow then getting purchase on life and then being able to put one foot in front of the other and make something.
- [22:49]
Rich Roll
Agency is found on the other side of acknowledging that you're never going to sort your life out.
- [22:53]
Oliver Burkeman
Yes.
- [22:54]
Rich Roll
Yeah. You keep disabusing people of that illusion.
- [22:57]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, no, exactly.
- [22:58]
Rich Roll
You know what I mean? I think we hide behind productivity and busyness and all of these things as a distraction or an avoidance tool.
- [23:09]
Oliver Burkeman
That.
- [23:09]
Rich Roll
Helps us keep these terrifying ideas like death and our insignificance in abeyance.
- [23:17]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the idea. One of the ways I try to encapsulate this is like, the idea that there's a lot of power in understanding the sense in which our situation is worse than we think it is. There's like, as long as you think that getting through all your to do lists is really difficult, that's a very sort of agonizing way to go through life. But if you can appreciate that it's in a certain sense impossible, then in that shift from really hard to impossible, there's a possibility of, like, relaxing into life. There's the Zen teacher G. Kennett, who I quote talking about how her method of teaching Zen students was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down. I just love that. That's just like. That's exactly the feeling that I'm going for here, that notion. Like, it's like, when you really see what it's like, you're not gonna waste all your time and effort trying to deny that it is what it's like. And then you've got that time free.
- [24:16]
Rich Roll
You have liberation in that. Yeah.
- [24:18]
Oliver Burkeman
You've got your energy and your focus is freed up to do something more possible.
- [24:23]
Rich Roll
The thing that I bump up against is I have a fair degree of self awareness around all of this. Like, you know, I've read your books and I am in 12 step recovery and I have this job where I get to sit across people like yourself who are very expert in this terrain. And yet every day I still wake up and I'm like, I don't have enough time. I don't know, how am I gonna do this. I'm burdened, I'm tired and I get grumpy and I just like mastering this is such a difficult feat. My self awareness is, as they say in recovery, availing me nothing.
- [24:59]
Oliver Burkeman
But don't you think that. But don't you. You see, I think about this too because I am not going to sit here and pretend that I don't wake up and feel like I haven't got enough time. And like this is. I resonate with that completely. I don't think this is just a sort of way to evade your point. Isn't it the case that imagining we could ever master this completely is just a recapitulation of the same mistake? I mean, I have taken a huge amount of solace myself from realizing that this journey through, like ways to handle being alive better is not going to end somewhere. Right? I mean, it is going to end at some point, but it's not going to end because I've found the solution. It's going to end because life is going to come to an end. So the idea that it's just an onward, hopefully like a deepening spiral rather than just going around in circles, but I think that's just, I think that's completely baked in to what we're talking about. I don't know. I find, for example, I do still feel overwhelmed and feel like I wish I had some way of getting through more stuff. But I sort of see through my own bullshit a bit in that sense, right? So I notice that I'm doing it.
- [26:17]
Rich Roll
But then you can beat yourself up for, you know, you of all people know better. Right? Is that the.
- [26:23]
Oliver Burkeman
Well, no, but you see, now it's like on a good day anyway, I kind of laugh affectionately at myself. I think this is a better response than you idiot. How come you're doing this? And then it's easier to let go of, right? I'm much less likely to spend days, weeks stewing in that kind of thing. But I don't think the desire to be less finite than one is. I'm not expecting that to ever go away or to have more control than one has I don't expect that to completely vanish. And actually sort of acknowledging that that's always going to be there, I feel like is part of this.
- [27:03]
Rich Roll
I want to tease out some of the core tenets in your work, many of which stem from 4,000 weeks, which is sort of your seminal work. And we're going to talk about meditations for mortals, which is really a means of practically applying these same ideas. Is that fair?
- [27:25]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, I think it is.
- [27:26]
Rich Roll
Explain this idea of a limit embracing life.
- [27:30]
Oliver Burkeman
This is really an attempt to encapsulate this whole idea of what would it mean to stop running so hard from these truths of our limitation and to embrace them a little bit more. To start from the position, you might say that there's just always going to be more to do than you would like. There's always going to be more you feel you'd like to do than you're going to be able to do, that you're never going to be able to be certain about what the future holds, that you're always going to be vulnerable to emotions that you and experiences that you might prefer to avoid. There's a spiritual teacher called Robert Saltzman who has this phrase that we suffer from total vulnerability to events, which I really like, the sort of bleakness of that phrasing. So the limit embracing life is like, well, okay, what if we started from this? I think what we find is that actually the more we accept those limitations, the more we can sort of feel into the truth of them and stop flinching psychologically from them. Actually the more calm, productive, enjoyable life becomes. Because now we're sort of dealing with what's here and what we can do. And there isn't so much energy going off into this act of emotional avoidance, which I think a lot of stuff, including a lot of conventional productivity advice. It's basically enabling a kind of pretense that like just over the next hill lies total domination of reality.
- [29:21]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I think that that is what lies beneath the constant striving, this driver's dilemma. I wear this bracelet. Are you familiar with Phil Stutts, the psychiatrist?
- [29:35]
Oliver Burkeman
Yes. The tools.
- [29:36]
Rich Roll
He gave me this and it says uncertainty, pain and hard work. And he's somebody who's treating all of these high achieving people who are hyper productive. Right. But are all miserable because they arrive at this apex position in life only to realize that life is still uncertain, that they're still experiencing pain and they still have to do hard work. And their denial of that is what drives the suffering. So your message is one of the acceptance, like this is reality. You're never going to outpace any of these things. You're never going to transcend them or overcome them. And in order to find some level, some degree of peace and find purchase with meaning in your life, let's first accept that all of these things, you know, everything's finite. You're never going to transcend these things. You're never going to figure out how to solve all of these problems. You're never going to complete your to do list or answer all of the emails. And that is the foundational, that's the foundation upon which you can start to begin to construct something new and different. So it's a deprogramming on some level.
- [30:45]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, yeah. I think of it as a kind of process of becoming disillusioned in the most positive, in the most positive sense of the term. Right. It's like the illusions fall away or at least the fog starts to lift. And I think the thing that's always been really important to me about this, probably because it's just my personality, I am quite an ambitious person. I do want to do loads of stuff in the world, is to emphasize that I really do think that where you get to if you move a bit further along this path is not towards passivity. Right. It's not like some people seem to worry that if you sort of think about these things too much, you might just give up and lie on the couch because what's the point in doing anything? But for me, it's always been the case that. But once you can let those kind of illusions of total control and absolute omnipotent hyper productivity, at least relax away from that a little bit, that's exactly when it becomes much easier to roll up your sleeves and get stuck into doing a few things, partly because you're no longer tortured by second guessing yourself about whether there are other things you ought to be doing instead. Because in a sense, there always will be. And so the solution to FOMO is that you're always missing out.
- [31:59]
Rich Roll
So there's no worry about fearing this is always happening. And in order to protect your yeses, you have to learn how to say no.
- [32:08]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, yeah. And you're always saying no, at least implicitly, all the time anyway. So all you're doing, I think an awful lot of what I'm writing about is it's not saying why don't you live differently? It's saying why don't you notice a bit more consciously how you always, inevitably are living? And one of those is that in every moment you're declining a million possibilities for how to spend your time. So might as well stop trying to pretend otherwise just to feel comfortable and start being able to make more conscious decisions about it.
- [32:41]
Rich Roll
One of the metaphors that you use to illustrate this is the one with the kayak and the superyacht.
- [32:48]
Oliver Burkeman
Yes, I love this. I mean, I have to say my personal knowledge of superyachts is sufficiently limited that I'm slightly a bit impressionistic. But I think we want, by default, we want to feel like being human is being the captain of a super yacht. Right? You're right up on the top of the air conditioned bridge or whatever. Again, I'm speculating and you're sort of programming your destination into the navigational computer. And these are the things I want, this is my destination I want in life. And then you sit back and the plan turns into reality and it's all very stately and controlled, whereas the reality is that we're just sort of in a little one person kayak, we're just like thrown into the river of time. Martin Heidegger, the philosopher, actually uses this word, thrown ness to talk about the situation in which we find ourselves. Here you didn't ask to be born, here you are, you're on the river of time. Being born forward. You do have some agency, right? Because when you're in a kayak you can steer and you can deal with what comes in each moment, but you can't, you're not in charge of the whole journey. You don't know whether there's white water rapids or tranquil waters around the next bend in the river. You're in this very, very sort of vulnerable but also very alive and exhilarating situation. And I think we spend a lot of time and pursue a lot of strategies under the guise of personal development and all sorts of other things that are really aimed at helping us continue to wrongly believe that we're in the superyacht. When actually the more you can sort of open to the truth that we're in the kayak, firstly, the better you can make real decisions about the real situation. And secondly, it feels more, it's more, it's intense, but it's more. But it's more authentic. It's ultimately a better way to show up for life.
- [34:43]
Rich Roll
It is a philosophy of imperfection, like acknowledging our innate imperfection as an antidote for our indecision, our attachment to somehow finding a way to be perfect in the way we show up in the world. And the analysis paralysis and the decision fatigue that we face every Single day. So talk a little bit more about what you mean when you talk about embracing imperfection.
- [35:13]
Oliver Burkeman
I mean. So first of all, we are totally in the territory here of things that I end up writing about and thinking about because I desperately need them myself. Right. I'm certainly a recovering perfectionist, which is the kind of, you know, people like to think. It's a sort of thing you say about yourself and it's kind of really a brag, right? It's like it's the thing you're supposed to say in job interviews, like, what's your worst fault? I'm just too much of a perfectionist. But I don't think there's anything good about it at all. I think it really is a stance on life that tries to insist that everything that's happening measure up to a fantasy in your mind that it never actually could measure up to. And if you're pursuing perfection in your work or your relationships or anything really, I think you're pretty much automatically going to be trying to gain more and more control over your situation, even at the cost of really making progress, diving into life, committing to relationships, producing art work, whatever it is. So, you know, I think I spent a very long time where, if you look at what I. I might have thought what I was doing was trying to become more productive and get more done, but what I was really doing was, you know, building systems for tracking your habits or something like that. That feels great because you're kind of seizing control of the reigns of your life. You're getting into the driver's seat. I don't know what a metaphor you want to use. And it feels like you're gaining control. Whereas to actually do the thing instead of make all these preparations requires. You need to be loosening your grip on the reins of life. You need to be just like, all right, I'm gonna write this page of my novel and have no guarantee that I'm going to get to the end of it or that anyone's going to like it, or I'm going to enter into this relationship that I think could be really wonderful, but I certainly don't know. And it's. Yeah, it's scary, right? You're sort of setting sail on or putting your boat onto the water and handing over control to some other power. Well, not handing it over because you never had it in the first place, but you know what I mean.
- [37:27]
Rich Roll
It does take a high degree of self belief. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know that thing where you think about someone that you haven't talked to in forever. And you tell yourself, you know, I should really reach out. And then you just, like, don't. And the longer that you wait, the heavier the phone feels and the harder it becomes until it's like this impossible lift. I know that feeling. I also know how to how November tends to amplify it. The days get dark early, we retreat indoors, and before you know it, we're just isolated without even realizing that it happened. The antidote to all of this is not complicated. It's connection. Reaching out, even when it feels awkward or vulnerable, which, honestly, is exactly what starting therapy feels like. There's this moment of resistance, like, am I doing this? But then you do it. And. And you're like, why did I wait so long to do this? This is where BetterHelp comes in. BetterHelp has served over 5 million people worldwide with more than 30,000 licensed therapists with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 based on over 1.7 million client reviews this month. Don't wait to reach out. Whether you're checking in on a friend or reaching out to a therapist yourself, BetterHelp makes it all so easy. Easy to take that first step. And right now, you guys, Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com richroll that's better h lp.com richroll the thing about health tracking is that we're now so inundated with data, most of which is surface level only, sourced from all different kinds of devices, all without actually understanding what's happening underneath. Sleep scores, step counts, heart rate. But what does it really mean? And what are we supposed to do with it? Well, WHOOP answers these questions by giving you a complete picture of your health, from how you sleep to how you recover to how you're aging. And now with WHOOP Advanced Labs, they're bringing together over 65 key biomarkers like cholesterol, vitamin D, and cortisol, with more than a hundred thousand daily health data points. When you schedule a lab test, you won't just get numbers. You'll get clarity on what's really happening inside your body, as well as next steps to improve your health. And what I love about all of this is that now, finally, everything I need to know about what is going on inside my body is consolidated in one single place, which allows WHOOP to provide me with the right guidance, which I need right now because due to my recent back surgery, let's just say I'm not exactly in peak condition. So getting a comprehensive picture, plus A plan on how to rebuild my body is pretty priceless. Every test is reviewed by a clinician. And instead of just raw results, you get a personalized plan that tells you exactly which habits, from sleep to supplements, are going to improve your specific markers. Go to join.whoop.com roll for one month free of Whoop. That's join.wH-O-Oop.com roll if in self confidence to embrace the truth of your imperfection. It's a weird kind of like twist of the mind. On some level you would think like someone who has a very high opinion of themself is a perfectionist. But. But actually, in order to produce your best work with confidence, you have to have a healthy relationship with imperfection. Like I'm just imagining you sitting down to write this latest book, coming off previous successes and feeling the pressure, the expectations. Is this going to live up to. I know what I'm capable of and now I have to do it again. And it's easy to cramp up in that way and then just be paralyzed and unable to write at all. And maybe you could talk a little bit about how you keep things loose in your own life so that you can open up the valve and let the best version of yourself flow.
- [41:39]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, no, and I did cramp up. I mean, at a certain point in this process. Cause I think that's very. Lots of people will be familiar with that dynamic. Right. You too. I'm sure that it's very difficult if you achieve something that you're proud of. It's very difficult for that not to just become the absolute minimum baseline that you've got to meet next time in order to.
- [41:59]
Rich Roll
Second album syndrome.
- [42:01]
Oliver Burkeman
Self respect. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I definitely did clamp up a bit just in the context of writing. What really shifted things for me was learning to do free writing, which is this kind of, you know, as, you know, practice where you just sort of set a timer and keep your fingers moving on the keys or keep your handwriting on the. Keep your handwriting. But you don't. You write regardless of whether you have something good to say. And this of course, doesn't then end up in the book. Cause that would be atrocious. So you're making a mess on the page. Really striking how difficult that was for me at first, even though I was talking about a text file on my computer that literally nobody was ever going to see. Right.
- [42:49]
Rich Roll
I mean, somebody might break into your computer and read it.
- [42:52]
Oliver Burkeman
It's just. I had to see it. And my inner critic was just like, Furious. But that was a very useful thing for sort of, you know, I think you can scaffold or whatever the word is. I'm looking for these kinds of. It doesn't have to be a huge leap of faith. It has to be like, what's the one thing I can do that feels uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable that I'm gonna die? And like, you know, I could look at that project of writing for 20 minutes and making a mess on the page and say, like, I really don't like this, but it isn't going to kill me.
- [43:26]
Rich Roll
But that can still go on your done list, right?
- [43:29]
Oliver Burkeman
Yes, if you keep a list. This is another thing that I'm really big into the idea of either as well as a to do list or instead keeping a list of things as you accomplish them, sort of satisfying accumulation of things that prove to yourself, right, yeah, I do have agency. I can decide to do these things. And that too. Got things, got things flowing again. In the writing context, the idea of.
- [43:54]
Rich Roll
The done list being as distinct from the to do list as a generative kind of process. It's additive. Like, you want to include things and you kind of engender self confidence by growing that done list as opposed to the growing to do list that never gets done and starts to make you feel bad.
- [44:13]
Oliver Burkeman
Right, right. And the to do list is always like your judgment of your. Of your productivity with a to do list is always in comparison to all the things left to do, which is like. And in general, comparing yourself to an infinite yardstick is a bad way to feel.
- [44:28]
Rich Roll
Well, there's also the thing where you make the to do list and there's something in the brain that sort of feels like you accomplished the task just because you wrote it on a list of something that you need to do, even though you never do it.
- [44:39]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, right. No, absolutely. Yeah. No, I mean, we. We play all sorts of tricks on ourselves to feel like that moment of control is coming soon. And one of the great things that some people find with done lists is that if you find yourself in a sort of really low motivational moment, right. A sort of really sort of in a rut with things, you can start off making a done list with things like tasks so low level that you wouldn't ever want to admit to anyone else that you'd put them on a done list, right. You can say, take, took shower, made coffee. Right. And even that little bit of consciousness of your own efficacy in the world can very quickly snowball so that you're back to being a functional yeah.
- [45:26]
Rich Roll
One of the things you talk about is the mystical energy that's produced by completion. Like just completing something, to use the word again is generative. Like it contributes energy to you where. Whereas perfectionism leads to incompleted things or delaying completion, that becomes an emotional drain.
- [45:54]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, right. And then yes, perfectionism is always holding out for more or trying to do more things. Multitasking, I think ultimately is an attempt to feel like you're more in control of all the projects than, than you really are. So completing things does take this kind of the same kind of anxiety tolerance or something that is in the background a lot what we're talking about here. I think you have to be like, I know there's lots of other things I on some level should be doing, but what I'm going to be doing is finishing this one, moving it off, going to the next one. And of course with a huge project, you're going to be talking about a sub section of it. I don't mean writing a book or redesigning a house as a single step, but the idea that you're deciding to take it on, to make all the other things wait, to bring this to completion and then to move it on to the next thing, as you say, you'd have thought that would take a lot more energy and stamina, but it Kindles releases it. And my sort of non scientific theory for why that should be is just that. But it's because we're sort of falling in line with reality at that point. We're fitting ourselves into the grooves of how time really works for us, which is that we do act sequentially. We're acting sequentially even when we think we're multitasking. Right. So we don't act in parallel like we wish.
- [47:21]
Rich Roll
One of the things that I constantly confront is trying to arrange my schedule in my life to create these moments and opportunities where like for example, I'm writing a book right now and you know, my life's already busy and I have this day gig. And so when I can block out some time to finally sit down and focus on this one thing, the stakes are suddenly very high because it's like, oh, I only have the, I have to make this much progress. You know, it goes, it brings up the perfectionism and the, and this, you know, constant sense that there isn't enough time. And of course that just, just creates constraint that's at cross purposes with you being able to do your best work. And then of course there's all the uninvited interruptions because life has A way of intervening on those moments despite your sense that you're controlling the universe and setting everything up to be perfect.
- [48:21]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, no, completely. And the high stakes thing really speaks to me. I think that's there is this phenomenon, isn't there, whereby the more success that we have in scheduling our time, right. So even as you get better at this, and as you also have the autonomy to make your life look like how you want, and so you implement that, somehow the worse it gets. That feeling that, like, I've got this 90 minutes for this thing and this is part of a, maybe part of a. A broader situation where success is not an antidote to any of this stuff. Because if anything, success just means that the things you're choosing between, it's more painful to say no to things because you're getting more interesting opportunities or. Right. There are 10 wonderful things you could be doing with that 90 minutes. And if you don't use it properly for the thing you've deemed it for, then it's more of a failure because of all the things you're missing out on. So, yeah, it's important to see that none of this is about finally reaching a place on the ladder of success where it goes away. It's, if anything, the opposite.
- [49:34]
Rich Roll
All of it is premised upon this investment that we're making in our future selves and this idealized version of what our life is gonna be like if we can just sit down and focus and be productive in what it is that we have to accomplish today. And one of the things that you talk about and one of the practices that you advocate for is this idea of like, stop being so kind to your future self. Like your life is happening right now. That's all we have. Like this, you know, on the subject of reality, accepting reality, like this present moment, this exchange that we're having, right. This is all that there is. And everything else is a narrative, it's a story that we've constructed and, and true productivity and everything that eludes us. Meaning, fulfillment, satisfaction, purpose, it's all available to us in stillness. And yet this is the one thing that we resist the most.
- [50:33]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, no, really, well put. I think there's something really intense about sort of being present, about accepting that, that like, this is real life. This is as real as any of your life is gonna get. There's something that feels kind of. Yeah, it feels unpleasantly vulnerable. And there's something self protective about the idea that, like, this is all just preparation for the time later on when I really step into my Own, which, you know, in my experience is it's one thing to believe that when you're 20 and as you move through the decades, you've kinda got to. It becomes less and less plausible that the moment of truth is still.
- [51:15]
Rich Roll
Well, life is great this way. We go to school and it's like, get good grades so you can get into this school and go to. It's like everything is based upon setting you up for the future. And so how do you then deprogram yourself from that hard wiring?
- [51:29]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think it really is for me anyway, it's just been a question of just very gently leading oneself back again and again to this truth. So the future you stuff is very interesting because of course there are people, right, who you might look at their lives and say, you need to spend a bit more, think a bit more about what this is going to mean for the future. And people who sort of live in a very sort of hedonistic way. But almost anybody who's interested in this stuff in the first place, right, who has an interest in personal development or anything, is I think is almost certainly going to be already perhaps too good at the deferring of gratification that as you say, we're cultural is culturally reinforced at every stage. And you can defer gratification too much. Like you definitely can put off the moment where you kind of claim happiness and enjoyment in life to a point where you're making a bad decision. Those marshmallow experiments, really famous, I mean they're, they're slightly contested now as well, but even if we take them at their word that, you know, it's a good skill to be able to resist one marshmallow until you get a second marshmallow. That logic doesn't continue indefinitely. There's no prizes for some point getting.
- [52:54]
Rich Roll
A thousand marshmallows, you get to actually enjoy your life.
- [52:57]
Oliver Burkeman
Exactly. Right, right.
- [52:59]
Rich Roll
One of the practices that I commit to is when I am in a, in a deep work session, whatever that is, you know, if, if my wife or one of my kids calls me, like I'm picking up the phone, even though I just, you know, it's just like, how dare, you know, like, don't they know this is like this? I only have like out of the entire week, I have this like three hour chunk of time. And like, really, you know, it's like, that's my disposition, right? But it's like, okay, no, like my daughter who's in Chicago in college calls me like I'm picking up the phone and I'm not vibing her for calling me. I'm like, tell me what's going on and I'll be on the phone for as long as she wants. Just that is a rule. And it's been a great lesson in another thing that you talk about, which is this notion that time is linear. Like time really isn't. Our experience of it is linear, but that's not, not the reality of time. In my experience, time is elastic. And when I prioritize or make space for these things that are important, like these values that are important to me by practicing them and allowing other things to get interfered on, my life is better, I'm happier. And all those things that I thought I was going to have time to complete, they get, get completed. I mean, that's my experience.
- [54:24]
Oliver Burkeman
No, it's weird, right?
- [54:25]
Rich Roll
Or like, I don't have time to drive across town and go to an AA meeting, but my primary purpose is to stay sober and help another alcoholic. And when I'm like, I don't have time, I have all these things, blah, blah, blah, and then I go and then I leave and then I'm just in a better state and I can manage all of these problems better and everything gets resolved. And so it's changed my relationship with time or my default relationship with how time operates in my life.
- [54:51]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, it's such a great point because I think that, I guess one of the ways of talking about the difference is it's that very sort of left brain control y I've set out what my time is going to be like and then any divergence from that is a problem versus the idea that there's a right time for certain things and it matters. What you feel like doing kind of does matter. Not necessarily that you should always indulge it, but it's like that's a real energy. And you don't want to have this kind of very intellectualized, cerebral schedule for your day that basically says if this feels like the wrong thing to do at this point, just ignore that feeling and try to stamp it out. Because obviously, yeah, there's wisdom coming from many more places than your caffeinated brain at 8 o'clock in the morning when you draw up the schedule for the day.
- [55:47]
Rich Roll
It's also a practice in embracing the fact that you can't control the universe in your life. This is life. And so you talk about intimate interruptions. You're not going to be able to control your environment, so everything works out the way that you want it to. And when these interruptions Happen. How can you just allow them to happen and appreciate them and accept them rather than be resentful or try to resist them?
- [56:18]
Oliver Burkeman
And the whole concept of an interruption, right. On some level assumes the premise that like, you know in advance, yeah, it's bad. What would be right for to happen in your time? There's a writer I quote in the book and I've been very inspired by a Dutch Zen monk called Paul Lumens who writes about sort of intersection of Zen and time and time management. And he makes this point, which is absolutely shown to be true in my personal experience that, that any interruption or quote, interruption, if you give it your full attention, either the kind that you talk about when your daughter calls, or even an interruption that is just annoying and you want to get rid of it. If you give your full attention to that interruption and either have a long conversation or you say to the person, I can't do this right now, but would it be possible for us to talk at a certain later time or whatever it is, instead of trying to kind of keep all your attention on what you were doing and just apportioning out a stingy little bit to this? It works better for you as well as for that person. Right? So, you know, if my nine year old son barges in in the middle of something, I was thinking I was going to be doing some deep focus. For in most times I will try very hard, like you, to sort of give full focus. But even if there are times when I do need to say this isn't, I can't actually do this right now because the more that I can like fully enter that moment, even if it's just for 30 seconds, the more satisfied he seems to be as well. Right. It's like everyone just feels a little bit better about that interaction. It's that attempt to say like, no, I'm gonna stay in control of the schedule, which means that you're not even gonna get 5% of my attention, just leaves a bad taste in everybody's mouth.
- [58:08]
Rich Roll
I often also look at these interruptions as little knocks from the universe. Like, like why is this interruption happening? Like this is a little more like woo woo or mystical. But like why? You know, okay, so this interruption is. What am I supposed to learn about this? Maybe it's just you're not in control of the world. Like, okay, that's a practice of humility, which is good, but sometimes it's about getting me out of my own self obsession. You know, that is definitely a problem for me. And I just had this experience you couch what I'm about to share as instead of trying to figure out what you want out of life, life is kind of telling you what it wants out of you. And by pursuing that, you can find whatever meaning eludes you. I was in New York City and this was going to be my big week to make progress on the book. And family crisis popped off and I had to go down to Washington D.C. and spend four or five days with my parents, attempting to get my mother into a memory care facility, which was tremendously inconvenient. You know, like this was supposed to be my time and don't you know who I think I am and all of that, right? And not what I wanted to do. But ultimately, of course, the right thing to do is to stop what you're doing and go down and be with your family and be of service to them in this moment of need. And to be able to show up and be present for that experience and walk through it without regard for how it was disrupting my life was such an incredible gift and I'll never forget it. So that's what life wanted from me. There's what I wanted and there's what life wanted. And by heeding that or following that, rather than resorting to resentment and this narrative about how your life is being upended or disrupted, that taught me life is happening right now. You have to done all these things in the world so that you can be available for these experiences. Because life is in session, like life is lifing all the time. And so much of productivity is about resisting that or denying it and trying to create this safe cocoon. And it's all just bullshit. It's like this crazy delusion that's driving our suffering.
- [60:31]
Oliver Burkeman
I completely agree. And the great thing as well about asking what life wants from you is in my experience anyway, it does still allow you to distinguish between something like the example you mentioned, which wasn't your plan for your time but was truly important. There's a third category of things, right? Which is like just becoming a doormat and doing whatever other people's agendas, just fulfilling other people's agendas. But actually this question allows you to filter those. It's very clear if you ask, what's reality asking of me right now? What does life want from me right now? Actually, I find myself able to sometimes precisely reconnect. What it actually wants me to do is throw my weight around a little bit right now. It actually does require me to say no to this person and maybe cause some disappointment or mild irritation. Because the thing that I'm doing is sufficiently dear to me. So it's a really great question for not getting too full of yourself, but also staying full enough of yourself, I suppose.
- [61:33]
Rich Roll
I mean, you conclude the book with that. It's this tension between I am infinitely capable and I'm also completely insignificant. That juxtaposition of those two conflicting ideas, the grist between those two, is where we find the answers.
- [61:53]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, right, Absolutely. I just agree. I won't repeat it.
- [62:00]
Rich Roll
Within this philosophy of imperfection, one of the really practical tools that you have is this idea of committing to something, quote unquote, like daily ish, as opposed to, you know, we're in this hustle porn culture. You know, it's all about, like, how hard can you work and sleepless nights and all of that. And streaks, like building streaks. And I believe in momentum. I think momentum is like a spiritual energy, but it also. There's a hardness to it that doesn't allow for human frailty, the human imperfection to raise its head.
- [62:42]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah. And I mean, I think this is totally consistent with a belief in momentum, by the way. Right. This idea of daily ish, which was a phrase I got from Dan Harris, the meditation podcaster, although as he points out to me, he got it from someone else too. So we're all just passing.
- [62:56]
Rich Roll
There are no new ideas. Exactly.
- [63:00]
Oliver Burkeman
This idea that committing to doing something daily ish to the person who's really fixated on streaks and absolute consistency. It sounds terribly self indulgent, but it really isn't. If you take it seriously. To do something daily ish, you know that if you do a habit like twice a week, you haven't done it daily ish. But there are very busy seasons in life where maybe four times would. Would get to count. Five is great and six is certainly Right. So you have this kind of blurry boundary between doing it and not doing it, which is really helpful and actually makes it more resilient in the face of the way that reality works. Cause momentum is one thing, but this idea of an absolutely sort of brittle, unbroken chain of things as a way to do it has all sorts of. Famously, people get. They fall off once and then don't go back to the thing for three months because they feel.
- [63:59]
Rich Roll
So it's good in the short term, bad in the long term. Because, yeah, once you lapse, then there's a whole cascade of like, well, I can't do it or I feel bad. Then you just. You break up with the whole enterprise altogether.
- [64:12]
Oliver Burkeman
Right. No, absolutely. And I think in many walks of life. Anyway, that skill of getting back on the horse whether or not you did it yesterday is actually a far more important skill, I think. Meditation. This book, although the new book has meditations in the title, it's not about formal sitting on a cushion meditation, but formal sitting on a cushion meditation is a really good kind of metaphor for a lot of this. Because the actual skill that most meditation teachers will teach you is precisely to notice when you've been distracted and come back to the breath or come back to the object of meditation. So you're not really succeeding if you never get distracted. The whole thing is the noticing and the coming back, the noticing and the coming back.
- [64:59]
Rich Roll
And it's impossible to not be distracted like a nanosecond after you had a fleeting experience with non distraction.
- [65:07]
Oliver Burkeman
Totally. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's the same idea, right? It's like if you're working on some creative pursuit, it's noticing that you failed to do it yesterday and nonetheless doing it today and coming back and back and back. I think it's just like. Yeah, I mean, the other analogy somebody used in conversation once was like, it's like weight training where you just like take the weight and put it up on a high shelf and just leave it there and then stand there for the rest of your workout. Like that's not the point. Right. The point is, is the repetition and getting back into it. Even though you may have faltered previously.
- [65:49]
Rich Roll
On the doing aspect of all of this, there is the going into the shit. You have to basically meet yourself and get some shit done in the midst of all of this. It's not all theory. There is hardscrabble practice in all of it. So talk a little bit about the daily, the nuts and bolts of trying to move your life forward within this construct.
- [66:18]
Oliver Burkeman
I guess the way I think about this, and it's part of how I've tried to structure the book as a kind of a course in these ideas, is that tools and techniques for me are very much downstream of principles and perspective shifts. So I'm trying to convey a certain orientation towards the world. And then off the back of that there are like a thousand ways of doing it that one can keep in the cupboard and take out when they're useful. So, you know, one of the ones that I write about that means a lot to me in day to day life is that when I'm feeling sort of stuck or don't know how to engage on some project that I'm working on, like going looking for a decision that I could take is a really helpful practice because that really sort of brings you into the finite space of the actual situation. Right? So it might be something very simple and low level, not some big decision. It might be just like, which platform am I going to publish this thing on? Or which of these three beginnings for this chapter am I going to go for? But the sort of push to make a choice among alternatives, cutting off certain paths, moving one step down any given path is really helpful. That kind of idea of going looking for some small but real decision in the morass of the material or the project is something.
- [67:53]
Rich Roll
The idea being to stack some small wins.
- [67:57]
Oliver Burkeman
Stack some small wins, absolutely. And also at the same time, commit to the truth that you're always making decisions or you're always choosing anyway. So I think where I go wrong and definitely have gone wrong for months at a time in my creative work is like, you think that you're trying to figure out the right way to go with something, but what you're really just sort of doing is hanging out in the space of indecision because it feels. It's got an illusory feeling of being in control. Right? Because the best way to feel in control of any project is, like, not to make progress, just hold everything in the behavior. And then you can just be like, when I do this and it gets finished, it's gonna be amazing. And I get to carry on feeling great about how great it's gonna be because I'm not actually stepping into the imperfect reality of it. So sort of gently leading myself by the hand and saying, like, okay, fine, but what's one thing you're gonna do right now that closes off? Alternatives, as I say, literally alternatives. Like, I've got three ways to open this chapter, so I'm gonna pick one, because then where that goes next is gonna be different as a result. And then so on and so on and so on.
- [69:10]
Rich Roll
What is the right way to think about procrastination?
- [69:13]
Oliver Burkeman
Well, I mean, in my book 4000 Weeks, I made this point that there's kind of a good form of procrastination. There's a sense in which we're always procrastinating anyway, on almost all the things except the one we're doing, because there are more things we could be doing than we are doing. So there's an argument for saying that. Actually, that kind of. That sense in which we're procrastinating all the time is one in which we should get better at procrastinating, not try and get rid of it. We should try and become wiser procrastinators choosing the thing, making some conscious decision to choose which thing we're going to move forward on while tolerating that kind of. Of anxiety or self criticism or whatever it is about all the things that you're not making progress on. So I think I want to reframe procrastination in that sense by saying like, yeah, we're almost always not making progress on almost everything. So let's get honest about what we want to choose for now and better at letting the other things stand by. The other kind of procrastination. Right. The kind where you do know what you want to make progress on but you're just not doing it. I think is almost always the same theme we've been discussing is almost always an attempt to sort of cling onto a feeling of control at the expense of making progress. So if I'm working on a book and I know that I care about it and I know that it's central to my intentions for my life and then I still find myself procrastinating, that's almost always because there's some feeling of, of too much vulnerability that goes along with actually it's fear.
- [70:48]
Rich Roll
Moving fear forward with it.
- [70:50]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah. Right.
- [70:51]
Rich Roll
So you clean the kitchen instead and do all those other things. Yeah, I think of it in two different ways. I think the productive side of procrastination is sometimes whether it's a big decision or some kind of problem you're trying to solve or confusion around something you're working on creatively, you need that background rumination and time and space to sort it out. Because sometimes going at it directly is not the best way. Like it gets solved passively like in the semi unconscious part of your brain while you're doing other things. So I think it's important to indulge that if that's the right word from time to time. As long as you have enough self awareness to know when, when that's what is required versus avoidance, fear or analysis paralysis or just wanting to know what the conclusion is going to be of any decision that you make, which is what we always want to feel safe and secure, but we're not allowed to know how it's going to work out. We have to make the decision. This is famously Dr. Ellen Langer who, who has been here, so professor of psychology at Harvard. She's like, stop worrying about making the right decision. Make the decision right. Like this impulse towards decisiveness that we seem to kind of lack in our hardwiring.
- [72:23]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, no Totally. And I think, yeah, it's a question for me anyway. It's often a question of kind of just playing a mental movie, a little bit of what it would feel like to be taking the action that I'm apparently not taking. And then you can get quite a lot of instant feedback about, like whether it really is that something is germinating and it's not the right time, or whether you are. Whether I am just trying to resist that slightly vulnerable feeling of sort of diving into it. I think it's really useful. I find it really useful to ask myself why things that I have been telling myself I'm about to do have never seemed to get around to for weeks or months on end. Like, there's always a reason that it's never usually that I'm just too busy. There's something that is being resisted. Paul Loomis writes about this. Again, sometimes it's just that you haven't thought through, you haven't figured out what the actual next literal action is. But other times it's because you expect it to bring up some emotion that you would rather not feel. I mean, this is the thing that amazes me. Time and again we will again, I will resist doing things for fear of feeling very, very low levels of difficulty or distress or embarrassment or awkwardness. It's not because I've got a terrible problem with my emotions and when I, when I take that action, I feel completely destroyed. It's just tiny little bits of discomfort are enough to be like, I'll do something else, you know, always.
- [74:00]
Rich Roll
Even though we know in that delay we're just creating more pain for ourselves.
- [74:05]
Oliver Burkeman
The hump is getting bigger as you neglect it. Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
- [74:09]
Rich Roll
I mean, you have very basic examples, like you were assigned an article at the Guardian and like, you know, it was too many words, too little time and you should have just said, no, I can't do this right now, or whatever. But, but the people pleasing, the rumination around it or whatever, and your editor finally just saying, well, if you can't do it, just tell me. No, it's like you're just creating more problems for everybody else by trying to manage the editor's emotions or trying to come off in a good way to your editor.
- [74:39]
Oliver Burkeman
Totally, yes. Right, absolutely. And to your earlier point, this is so sort of, it's so extraordinary, it's so extraordinarily self absorbed in a way. Right. I mean, people pleasing very often is this notion that this editor at the newspaper couldn't cope. And to this day, you know, I See what I'm doing. So it doesn't derail me as much. But to this day, like when I was pushing it with the deadline for this most recent book and I knew that my editor at the publisher wanted to receive it as soon as possible. Please. I would catch myself entertaining fantasies where, you know, this important person at a publishing house who works with lots and lots of writers in my mental fantasy was just doing nothing but pacing up and down his office all day. It's like, where is Oliver?
- [75:26]
Rich Roll
Where is Oliver?
- [75:27]
Oliver Burkeman
That loser? Where is he? And, you know, it's so. It's so self absorbed to think that we've got to structure our lives around not causing people distress, where then they've got their own problems.
- [75:40]
Rich Roll
We're all walking around, you know, under this idea that on some level we are the center of the universe and everything else, you know, is a mirage. And everyone around us is here to serve our agenda.
- [75:52]
Oliver Burkeman
Right, Right. Even when. Yeah. And sometimes that manifests as being a huge egomaniac. But it can manifest as being incredibly like retiring and people pleasing and shy and worried about what other people are feeling. But it has the same fundamental egocentric Right.
- [76:08]
Rich Roll
It took me a long time to realize that people pleasing is. Is really just a form of narcissism.
- [76:14]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah.
- [76:15]
Rich Roll
You know, masquerading as, like, I'm a good person.
- [76:18]
Oliver Burkeman
Right. Because you're making it your business to try to avoid anyone ever being mad at you. So it's all about you.
- [76:30]
Rich Roll
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- [81:06]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, I think there's a lot of that in it. I mean, I think. I suppose in terms of my own development evolution, I think of 4,000 weeks as being a book about much more, about the limited amount of time that we have and how you handle that, how one handles that. And then this book a bit more about control and specifically about kind of getting over the hump from knowing what. What you want to do to actually doing it, which requires the surrender of control. But, yeah, no, absolutely. I really wanted to try to maybe not solve, but address this problem that frustrates me with a lot of personal development books, right, which is that they either offer a big perspective shift and then what do you do with that, or they offer a whole bunch of steps that emerge from the writer having been on a long, interesting emotional journey. But these steps are just offered as a. If following the steps is gonna have the same effect. And so in the end, I resolved. I sort of landed on this idea of very short chapters that hopefully trigger a bit of a perspective shift, but in a cumulative way structured in a particular order. Because that has always worked for me, that kind of consistent, regular, but still quite gradual feeling my way into a new way of. Of being not necessarily one big lightning bolt, and certainly not just carry out these seven actions and everything's going to be okay.
- [82:32]
Rich Roll
We've all had that experience of trying to carry out those seven actions or break a bad habit, form a new habit, take advantage of some new productivity hack with maybe some degree of success, and then a lapse and then maybe banning it altogether. Whatever this is the human condition. And just noticing that, what does that tell us about the human condition? Because when I look at that or think about that, I think about the extent to which we're all, on some level, living out this story or series of stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, what we're capable of, that were baked into us from early childhood, that we've inherited from the way we were brought up, et cetera. And to really overcome those limitations or setbacks or our inability to kind of master a new habit or break a bad one, we have to deconstruct those stories and try to figure out how to tell new ones. And that begins on this Sort of acceptance, level of understanding. Like, these are just stories that we're walking around just convinced they're real, but they never are. So how do you think about that aspect of this?
- [83:50]
Oliver Burkeman
I think that's really true. I think a lot of the power is people talk about like telling different stories or rewriting stories. But I think an awful lot of the benefit just comes from seeing that stories is what they are. Right. And that sort of process of disidentifying from the agendas that we're raised with and understanding a little bit about what might be the ulterior motives behind them. I've often found that that's where the personal inner work comes.
- [84:24]
Rich Roll
Right.
- [84:24]
Oliver Burkeman
It's like, it's not so much that I then have to rigorously construct a different story, it's just understanding that like. Oh, right, yes. You get free of it in that moment. I have, like many, many people, I have a sort of morning pages practice. Right. It's the one thing I've found myself actually doing consistently for decades now. And I really think the main benefit of that is like, I write about the stuff that's bugging me or that I'm struggling with. And then by definition, in the process of writing about it, it's no longer.
- [84:55]
Rich Roll
You've purged yourself. Yeah, there's the thought for a couple hours.
- [84:58]
Oliver Burkeman
Definitely that is a part of it. But I'm more getting it. Like it's no longer the water I swim in, it's there on the page. I've got a third party relationship to it. And, you know, I might still believe it or be bothered by it, but I'm no longer just seeing through. It's not like, you know, glasses that I'm looking through. It's like I'm looking at the glasses instead. And there's a degree of freedom from.
- [85:27]
Rich Roll
It in that you can detach or disidentify with it.
- [85:31]
Oliver Burkeman
Right. And then maybe choose to follow some of its logic and maybe not, but have some choice in the message.
- [85:36]
Rich Roll
What do you say to the person who's listening to this or watching who's thinking? It must be nice, Oliver. You get to wake up and do your morning pages and write your books and that's all grand, but you don't understand my life, the complexity of my life. I've got two jobs and I'm a single parent. And this all sounds fantastic, but also quite privileged. I have burdens and obligations you can't imagine just to put food on the table. On some level, I appreciate that life is much harder for most people than it is for you or I. But on some level also this is at the heart of productivity. How do you manage a very difficult to manage life?
- [86:26]
Oliver Burkeman
No, I think it's a really good point. I think it is. Is fundamentally just like a different point as opposed to a contradictory point, right? That on the one hand there are all these forms of suffering that are relative, that some people suffer far more than others because of their socioeconomic good fortune or bad fortune and demographic and all sorts of things. And then there are these kind of timeless issues that affect us all in one way or another. So not being able to do everything, being finite, having to make tough choices with time, that's everybody. When you lay them over each other, then obviously, yes, you're going to get people whose terrible, difficult dilemma is which of three amazing business opportunities to pursue. And somebody else's terrible dilemma is whether they're going to keep their job or get to be a halfway present parent for their kid. It's a much more agonizing situation and it's definitely a harder thing, but it has the same structure and it's quite surprising how agonizing it can feel even to sort of address the more privileged versions of it. So I'm constantly running into this strange territory in what I write about where there are things I'm writing about where I think I'm making claims that are really easy for me to say in a certain way and also true, which is an awkward space to be in, right?
- [87:53]
Rich Roll
So.
- [87:54]
Oliver Burkeman
So definitely when I'm picking examples to give and illustrate things, I might pick one with more or coming from an example of more or lesser privilege. And I'm definitely very, very grateful for all the things I don't. The dilemmas I don't have to face in my life, but these are like deep existential human things that we all have to cope with. I guess one other thing you could say about that is that even when it feels like you've got no room for maneuver in your actual external life, like you don't have the autonomy to only do a certain number of hours work in the day or to spend more time doing something more creative or something, there's a real psychological benefit in seeing the truth of your situation, right? In not being in that movie, like in seeing that you're not in not collaborating with this societal ethos that if you just put a bit more self discipline in or organized your time better, you'd be able to do everything. Like if impossible tasks, if life is asking impossible things of you, it's really helpful to see that that's impossible and that all you can actually do is choose some of them. Even if it doesn't lead to any great transformations in what your life looks like from the outside. You have stepped back into your. Your power in an important way there. I think.
- [89:15]
Rich Roll
I think of your work as a bit of a Trojan horse. It's draped with everything the reader wants to see in the context of a how to self help book about productivity. Right. That's how you're bringing people in. But inside this Trojan horse is really a path towards self actualization. Like this is like how to live a better, more meaningful life. And as much as there are practical things to do and guidance and advice about decision making and how to be ultimately your most productive over the long haul of your life, it's really like I look at it as this devotional practice of honoring yourself in every moment. Like how can you make better decisions not to achieve some external goal, but so that you can be in greater alignment with your values? And how can you make sure that you're resting as just reverence for your physical body? And how can you be present enough so that you can serve the moment? These are all concepts that are kind of higher up the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Then how to be more productive so you can be better at your job and get a promotion.
- [90:38]
Oliver Burkeman
Yes, I think you're right. I think calling it a Trojan horse makes it look like it's been more strategic and deliberate than it has been. I think you're right that that's how it's ended up. But really that has resulted from my own journey as someone who's kind of really wanted those productivity techniques and really wanted that system and I don't know, had the. I don't know what the skill is, the perseverance or stubbornness or something to kind of not to keep being dissatisfied with not having found it. And then you get to the point where you see what it's really about. And I think the devotional idea is beautiful there because it really is this kind of. I keep coming back to the idea that ultimately it's not a set of techniques. It's definitely not something you can sort of install in your brain and then you're good to go. At the end of the book, I even point out that the subtitle of the book, the idea that you're gonna deal with this all in four weeks is kind of a bait and switch, but it's actually instead it's something that is really helpful to Sort of marinate in this kind of perspective.
- [91:42]
Rich Roll
It's a way of being.
- [91:43]
Oliver Burkeman
Right. Right. And to have. So the idea in the book is that you're gonna give it a few minutes, maybe every day for a month. But even in just how I experience it in my own life, it's like coming back to journaling about it, reading other books that are in a similar vein. Not with any sense that I'm finally going to find the technique that means I don't have to think about it anymore. Cause even that desire to get to the point where you don't really have to think about it is, like, antithetical to what I'm talking about here. Which is like, no, we're in it. This is it. It's always gonna be it.
- [92:12]
Rich Roll
Yeah. I mean, the whole notion of productivity on some level presumes the idea that you can control your life and. And your work is like, well, guess what? You can't. Sorry. Life is messy. It's always going to be uncertain. So everything you ever thought about, like, how you were going to be able to achieve that, like, toss that out the window. And here's a better way of being in relationship with yourself in the world that acknowledges the messiness and the uncertainty of everything. And only by doing that can we. Now, you know, this is what we started out talking about, like, find purchase and agency to exert yourself in the way that's going to best move your life in the direction of your aspirations.
- [92:57]
Oliver Burkeman
Totally. And this is why I was going to say, I think it is the path to agency, to use the word that seems to be on everybody's lips in personal development at the moment. But it's really good to have a word that means getting purchase on the world, making a difference, connecting to the world that doesn't come with this baggage of this idea that eventually you're going to get to the point where you have total purchase on the world or where you even understand perfectly what the hell's going on, or the other people that you're going on the journey through life with, but still have this idea that means, yeah, getting stuck in. Because otherwise the other place that can go sometimes is to the idea that this is a fault. In some spiritual literature, I would argue the idea is that if you really, really got a handle on what reality was like and accepted it and lived into it fully, you'd just sort of.
- [93:51]
Rich Roll
You would never do anything.
- [93:52]
Oliver Burkeman
You become a blank, crazy.
- [93:53]
Rich Roll
You would float around, meditate in a cave.
- [93:56]
Oliver Burkeman
Right? Right.
- [93:57]
Rich Roll
So to the person sitting in the corner office who is cracking the spine on your book thinking, well, this is just a guaranteed path towards resignation and mediocrity. Like, I have no interest in this. Like, what is your response to that?
- [94:12]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, my response is absolutely not right. Exactly. It's like I think that the quest for control, quest for a certain kind of total dominance over life keeps us from acting, at least acting on the things that move the needle the most. And that this form of acceptance is about. It's not accepting the way things are, that they have to stay like that. It's about accepting that the reality you're in is where you are. It's the reality that you're in. And of course then that's when you can see the situation that you're in and make the best decisions and change it in the ways that you want to change it the most. Like I said, I think a lot of that focus on ambition and on still being productive comes from I want there to be a way that I can be way less anxious in the world and also get stuff done and get stuff done, not because it's kind of plugging a gap until I can finally feel good about myself, but because it's an expression of it's a fun way to be alive, to create stuff and build stuff. So I really want there to be a way of squaring the circle. And that's what I'm trying to do.
- [95:27]
Rich Roll
One of the tools towards that end is this idea you have of asking yourself, what if it were easy? I think I first heard Tim Ferriss talking about that maybe it was with you, I don't remember. And I just remember thinking that's just an outlandish proposition. It's just like I can't imagine. Just take any project or whatever, like in my example, like writing a book or whatever, if I'm not just bleeding out at the end of it, then I just didn't work hard enough on it and it's not going to be as good, good. Like creative projects don't work that way. But the notion that it could be a different experience is deeply confronting to me because it brings up all of those presets around effort and achievement and striving, et cetera. And there is this indelible equation in my mind that my best work is inextricably tied to know my capacity for suffering.
- [96:32]
Oliver Burkeman
And in like in the people pleasing, I mean, me too, right? But like in the people pleasing, it's so weirdly self centered in a way, right. It centers you instead of the work, it says like what really matters at the end of this process is that I've totally, like, dragged myself over the coals and feel awful and exhausted as opposed to.
- [96:49]
Rich Roll
Because I won't feel satisfied or like, I really gave it my all unless I do that.
- [96:54]
Oliver Burkeman
Right. As opposed to.
- [96:55]
Rich Roll
Even if it doesn't matter that if it's making it better.
- [96:58]
Oliver Burkeman
Right, right. Whereas I think ultimately, when most of us are doing these kind of things, if we stopped and thought about it, we would want to produce the best work that we could produce. And if it happened to be not grueling to produce it, then that ought to be.
- [97:14]
Rich Roll
How is that possible?
- [97:15]
Oliver Burkeman
That ought to be great. Well, this is.
- [97:17]
Rich Roll
Why were you able to accomplish that in the writing of this book?
- [97:20]
Oliver Burkeman
Well, I'll tell you what, it certainly got more. More of it got produced the more that I remembered and understood the value of this, allowing it to be easy. So the Tim Ferriss version of this question is something like, yeah, what would this look like if it were easy? Elizabeth Gilbert has a really lovely idea of sort of having the courage to allow something to be easy. And that to what you're saying, right, it sounds like it's on some level scary to think, like, what if it doesn't involve drawing blood? And that doesn't mean that there aren't difficulties. Right. It doesn't mean it's not like some form of positive thinking where you're going into it saying, like, I insist that this is going to be incredibly simple or incredibly straightforward. It's more like you're like, I'm not going to start from the mental posture that this has got to be a fight. This is where I get a bit sort of impatient sometimes with approaches to creativity that are all about, like, you know, battling your way through resistance and just showing up and getting your ass in the chair and all this stuff. Like, I think it can have a role. But, you know, the metaphor that I've used somewhere I think is like, if you, like, barrel up to somebody in a bar looking for a fight who wasn't planning to have a fight, like, you'll turn it into a fight, right? You'll get a fight by sort of approaching reality that kind of, okay, like, let's do combat. And in fact, things just go more easily if you allow the possibility that they might go more easily. And, you know, it's. I'm not sure quite. I'm not sure that the semantics are quite clear here, but you can almost even difficult things you can approach with a spirit of ease. Right? Nobody's suggesting That a really difficult conversation in a business setting or a relationship setting or nobody's suggesting that like bad things happening to people you love is going to be easy in the sense of fun or anything. But you can sort of not go into it like muscularly braced for it to be horrible and find that actually that's the way to make it go more smoothly. Even if it's sad or stressful or awkward or. Or unpleasant in some way. It doesn't need to be like combat.
- [99:50]
Rich Roll
Meditation has been very helpful to me with respect to that issue because it helps you notice how insane you are.
- [100:00]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, right, totally.
- [100:02]
Rich Roll
And when you begin to realize you're just running all kinds of crazy bullshit in your head all the time, then you're able to see with a little bit more clarity that quite often, you know, I'll just speak for myself like I'm my own worst enemy, you know, because I'm running some tape without conscious awareness that I'm running it. And if I could just either stop the tape or get out of my own way.
- [100:29]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah.
- [100:29]
Rich Roll
And be in that state of allowing like, then stuff comes forth like, especially with anything creative, like, you know, I'm usually like, you know, the, the I'm like stopping the flow through my conscious urges. And if I can just relax into it and be in that space of allowing it percolates to the surface naturally. Yeah, I think that's very uncomfortable.
- [100:54]
Oliver Burkeman
Right? No, totally. And definitely the hardest part of this for me. And I write about this in the third week primarily of the four week structure. But the degree to which meaningful action is a question of. Of getting out of the way of letting the action happen, as opposed to needing to stand behind it and like push it forward is. Yeah. For a certain kind of person anyway, it's like much harder that part because it involves, you know, it's really where not trying to control everything becomes so salient. There's a Zen teacher called Kosho Uchiyama who has this line that is, I think I'm getting this right, says life completely unimpeded by anything manifests as pure activity. Which is this kind of amazing thought that actually the natural state of the world and us and reality is just to be creating and generating and doing things.
- [101:50]
Rich Roll
So I love that goes back to storytelling. We tell ourselves a story and then that ends up arresting what we're naturally. We would do naturally without it. Right?
- [102:00]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, no, totally.
- [102:01]
Rich Roll
We're impeding ourselves unnecessarily.
- [102:04]
Oliver Burkeman
Right. And at a very down to earth level. Right. You don't want to have an approach to organizing your day such that if you do happen at some point, speak for my own kind of example at 3:30pm in the afternoon, to suddenly decide, you know, what you want to do for some piece of writing. Like you don't want to have some rule that says, I always do my writing between half past seven and half past ten and morning, because that's the best time for me. If that then stops you just taking advantage of the forces that come together at some random drowsy afternoon spot.
- [102:37]
Rich Roll
Because you've constructed this rule in your head about how it's supposed to go.
- [102:41]
Oliver Burkeman
Right.
- [102:41]
Rich Roll
What you talk about when you talk about comfort zones and how actually what we sometimes think of as our comfort zone is actually creating all of this discomfort that we're not acknowledging.
- [102:53]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, right. So I mean, it's obviously like this kind of classic self help concept that we would just rather stay comfortable all the time instead of taking the risks of action and growth. And yet it's just a funny, it's a funny phrase because it's not comfortable to keep yourself back from action in this way. It's a way of avoiding the kind of potential spike of anxiety that comes with, know, making some bold move in the world. But it's not comfortable. It's like this sort of low level suffering. There's a translation of dukkha, the Buddhist word for suffering that as, not as suffering but as sort of unsatisfactoriness or bothersomeness was I saw once in a different, in some context. And it's like, yeah, that's what you can, that's what, what you resign yourself to if you're unwilling to take that risk of looking at things how they are and taking a step.
- [103:52]
Rich Roll
I think the book does a really good job of getting people acclimated to all of these tenets and ideas that you're talking about in a very low stakes environment. You're like, just what's the little thing that you can do today? Or what's the idea that you can challenge within yourself? Or you know, what happens if you sit there for three hours or just make sure you go into the shed. If all you're doing is looking around, you don't have to do anything. Like all of these very low lifts that introduce this way of being to somebody who is uncomfortable with them or for whom it's new in a way that's not intimidating. You're not like you're going to do this for 90 days and all of that kind of stuff.
- [104:34]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, that was important. To me, because first, for the reason that I think you're getting at, right? Which is that this is something that enables you to do it even if you're new to it and it feels threatening, but also because on a more philosophical level or something. Actually the really important moment is when you cross from not doing it at all to doing it at all. It's a much more important. I saw somebody somewhere on social media making this point the other day that writing one paragraph has more in common with writing a book than with having written nothing at all. Right.
- [105:09]
Rich Roll
Or going to a bunch of parties and talking about the book you're gonna write.
- [105:12]
Oliver Burkeman
Right, that too. Right. So yeah, the moment, like understanding that once you bring this way of being into reality, once you cross from, like, from nothing to anything, that is the really important crossing point. After that, it's just know, doing it some more.
- [105:30]
Rich Roll
But that's always been my experience. Like all of the, the sort of quote unquote, like bigger or larger things that I've, that I've done all started with, you know, an idea that like, was just a scribble or, or just some half baked, whatever, and a stab at something that, you know, if, if you were to deconstruct it or look at it now, you'd be like, well, this is nothing, you know? Right. But you seed that idea with tiny little actions and you do create momentum and you don't know where it's going, or maybe you don't even have an intention that it's going to go anywhere, but it takes root and then one thing leads to another and suddenly you're on a whole other trajectory with your life that you didn't anticipate.
- [106:11]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, right. Because it looks like nothing, but it's exactly not nothing. Right.
- [106:15]
Rich Roll
It's like the biggest thing, anything. Right.
- [106:17]
Oliver Burkeman
As opposed to nothing. It's funny, I sometimes get asked, I hope you weren't going to ask me this, I'm sure you would. But what's the one thing that people could do to put this into practice? Or something like that?
- [106:28]
Rich Roll
That's a favorite go to for the podcaster. Right.
- [106:32]
Oliver Burkeman
And my response has always been like, well, what that person asking that question wants is precisely like the safety rail, the handrail. Right. The practice that you do it every day and then you don't need to worry about. About life. It's going to be automatic. But actually it is precisely like the answer to that question is 10 minutes of the thing that you know you want to do and are not doing. Right. It's like the Specifics, I can't answer. But if there is something in your world that you know would lend more meaning and importance to what you're doing with your time and you haven't been doing it, like actually doing five minutes of that thing today, not preparing for it, not building a whole system for how you're going to do it every day, but just actually engaging in the thing. Yeah. As you say, however, in however small a way, it's everything.
- [107:25]
Rich Roll
And if you can't find five minutes to do that, then maybe it's not as important to you as you think it is.
- [107:34]
Oliver Burkeman
Right. If it really is the case that you can't get the time, then obviously you're choosing not to get the time for some reason. Yeah.
- [107:41]
Rich Roll
On that subject of what is the one thing this conjures in my mind? The world of self optimization that's out there, whether it's books or podcasts or just the culture. This idea that the way to move your life forward is to reduce very complicated ideas down to a certain point, certain set of steps that you practice religiously that are going to move your life forward or change your life. So what is your perspective on this optimization movement that you see if you just canvass the Internet?
- [108:24]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, I think that, I mean, I understand the appeal. Right. Because it is the purest form, in a way, of the promise of control. It's like, do these things and everything else follows because you're picking what matters and reorganizing your life according to those things. I mean, I've written about this quite a bit in the past, but I think the basic problem with optimization of any kind is that the question is always like, optimization for what?
- [108:51]
Rich Roll
For what?
- [108:52]
Oliver Burkeman
And if all you're doing is making yourself a better system for processing throughput. Right. Then all else being equal, you're just gonna be busier and probably make worse decisions about what to bring in to your realm because you think you can do all of it. So you end up focusing on all sorts of stuff that you didn't care about. I mean, it's hard for me not to look at a lot of this, including some of the extremes of the kind of longevity stuff as well.
- [109:22]
Rich Roll
I mean, that was my follow up, like health span extension. That is the extreme version of that.
- [109:27]
Oliver Burkeman
Right. And none of these things are inherently bad. Right? It's not inherently bad. To make your. Like, if it takes you an hour to find your clothes in the morning, you probably need some more efficiency in how your home is organized. Sure. What it's not going to do is get you to the point of total fulfillment in life by just continuing that logic through the rest of your life. And the same with healthspan. Like, I mean, yeah, I'm not going to sit here and say it's bad to do things that make you. You mean you have a longer, healthier, enjoyable life to live. But I've got to believe that in at least some people's cases, and I think sometimes some of the luminaries of the space have been quite honest about this as well. Right. That there is going on there, an attempt to sort of not literally intellectually live for it. Everyone knows life is finite, but to sort of feel oneself not. Not in the position of being on a glide path towards death. And that should not stop anybody from eating more nutritiously instead of less nutritiously. But it's like, what's it for? What it's for is hopefully that both the activity of doing it itself, ideally, and the energy and focus and extra time to which it might lead are opportunities to be more present in this finite life rather than part of some plan to achieve escape velocity. Yeah.
- [110:56]
Rich Roll
It's about what's driving it, what the motivation is. If your motivation behind healthspan extension, whether you're aware of it or not, is because you have this deep distaste for the idea that one day you might die, or just a discomfort with uncertainty or reckoning with your inability to be able to control externalities, like, that's a dysfunctional relationship. Right. Obviously we all want to live as long and be as vital in our lives as we possibly can. But why do we want that? So that we can experience the richness of what life has to offer. So if your focus on health span extension or any other kind of optimization protocol in your life is purely for the purpose of mastering the protocol, or. Yeah, because it sates some innate desire within you to feel like you're in control, then you're off the mark. You know, it's like these things are all great, but if your rules around, you know, sleep and nutrition are so strict that you no longer have friends and you're like, you, you know, you can't be in a relationship or you're unbendable in every regard, like you're missing the entire point of the whole thing. Thing.
- [112:18]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, no, totally. It's a question of knowing why you're doing it. And even then, right. You can, maybe your. Maybe your enjoyment is mastering certain protocols. Right? That's not a problem. But know that that's what you're doing and that it's taking away time from other things that you're choosing to neglect instead. Again, it's always about like becoming more conscious of what's going on rather than necessarily changing what one is doing.
- [112:45]
Rich Roll
If you had to choose one major misconception that people have around productivity in the context of living a meaningful life, is there one that comes top of mind?
- [112:58]
Oliver Burkeman
I mean, I guess it's just this notion of living for the future, right? I don't know that it's a misconception or if it's just a sort of way of an orientation towards life that we slip into all too easily. But it's that basic idea that in some way this moment right here is a bit provisional relative to the one that's coming later. And I still get flashes of this in myself, right? It's not, I'm not any. This is not anything that I'm absolutely perfect at, but it's this idea that the real reason that you're doing anything is for when it cashes out in a portion of life that's coming later. Of course we're pursuing long term goals. Of course there are things we're creating in the hopes that at a later point we reap the rewards in this way or that. But there's got to be some role for enjoying or finding meaning in the doing of it. And otherwise you end up in this place. There's this great quote that I used in 4,000 weeks from John Maynard Keynes, the Economist, where he talks about people being stuck in this mindset where, where the guy who's stuck in this mindset doesn't love his cat, but only the cat's kittens, and not really even the cat's kittens, but the kittens, kittens and like, so on. Forward forever. That's no way to live.
- [114:18]
Rich Roll
Is that one of the reasons why you have this practice of scruffy generosity, is that a way of like rooting your life in the present moment?
- [114:29]
Oliver Burkeman
I really think it is, yeah. Scruffy hospitality is this phrase that pastor from Anglican pastor from Tennessee called Chat King coined. And it's really just the whole idea of like bringing people into your home. It's not just about dinner parties, right? But that's where it started doing things in the world in a way where you're sort of like being open and honest about the kind of mess. So he and his, he, he talks about how he and his wife had this. They loved having people for dinner, but they had developed this like checklist of things that had to be put in place until everything was perfect so that the guests would be really impressed. And it ended up putting them off actually doing it because it's so much work. You'd never.
- [115:10]
Rich Roll
Because it was never clean enough. So then obviously no dinner parties.
- [115:13]
Oliver Burkeman
Right. Right. And so I'm deliberately making this conscious decision to be like, do you want to say to friends, like, do you want to come round the house? Is going to be how it is. We're going to cook things based on what's in the cupboard and discovering. And I have the same experience, I think, not just that it's okay and that people will forgive you for like, making a less impressive meal than you might have done, but that there's actually something actively positive and kind of better in a way about the connection that comes from letting these facades fall and just being like, you know, this is who I am and this is what my life is. I'm really interested in this. I don't know if this is resonates with you in your professional role, but I have the sense that people are just completely voracious online for behind the scenes stuff. They want to know how you put this podcast together as much as they want to know what happens once the podcast is happening. All that same idea. There's this great hunger for what's the reality? And I think there's just a desire to. There's a closeness and a sense of connection. It might be parasocial in the case of lots of Internet stuff, but when it comes to like inviting people around to your house, there's a real closeness that comes from, like, you know, this is how I am and you know that it's how you are too. You know, your house is in a mess too sometimes.
- [116:44]
Rich Roll
Right. So, like, we're giving you unvarnished reality. Like, let's get over it.
- [116:48]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, exactly.
- [116:49]
Rich Roll
Relaxing into that, like, it's an. It's. It's like being okay with yourself in all of your imperfections. And I think also just being okay with the uncertainty of everything. Like relaxing into that rather than looking at it as some kind of puzzle that you need to solve or code that you need to crack is such a pressure reliever.
- [117:14]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah.
- [117:14]
Rich Roll
That I think then allows you to be like, you can exhale and then you can sit down and you can like do your shit without being burdened by that. I love the anecdote that you shared about the dying rabbi. Do you know what I'm talking about?
- [117:31]
Oliver Burkeman
This is like a famous old Jewish joke. You want me to tell it?
- [117:34]
Rich Roll
Yeah.
- [117:36]
Oliver Burkeman
All right, so this is A joke where, like the celebrated rabbis on his deathbed and all his students are lined up in descending order of seniority. Next to him, a senior student closest. And he sort of opens his eyes one last time and shares his kind of final wisdom on the nature of reality. And he says, life is a river. And the senior student listens to this with great sort of devotion and turns to the next student, said. The rabbi says, life is a river. And it goes down the chain of students. The rabbi says, life is a river. The rabbi says, his life is a river. And then it gets to the youngest student, who's sort of too naive and doesn't realize how respectful you've got to be, and turns back to the student next to him, says, what does he mean, life is a river? So the question comes back and back and back up the chain until the senior student, absolutely terrified at the sort of disrespect that he's risking showing, says, I'm sorry, Rabbi, but what do you mean, life is a river? And the rabbi opens his eyes one last time and says, says, all right, so it's not a river.
- [118:42]
Rich Roll
And we are to make a make of this. What.
- [118:44]
Oliver Burkeman
What I think this is what. I think this plays with this joke is this idea that we're so convinced that we can sort of get a conceptual grip on what's going on, on what life is. And there's something actually deeply wise about being like, no, all right, whatever. Right. We're just. We're constantly. One of the ways in which we're constantly trying to feel in control is feel in conceptual control. Like, we know what's going on and we understand. And there's something very, very relaxing, again, about just sort of letting go into the doubt. Not that you shouldn't try to understand little bits of the stuff that you're working on or that is in your domain, but that sense being in a state of, like, bewilderment about how things work, about what makes other people tick. Myself, I find it really helpful in a relationship context not to think that there's gonna come a point where I fully understand what is going on in somebody else's head. And actually, I think if you did get to that point, it would not be a. It would lose something.
- [119:54]
Rich Roll
You wouldn't want it. You wouldn't want it. Yeah. So just embracing the mystery of it all.
- [120:00]
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah. And about the future as well. I always think. I find it so interesting to think sometimes about how, like, the most powerful people in the world, presidents, prime ministers, you know, the Pope, like, They're just in the same situation as me about the total uncertainty about what's happening tomorrow. I mean, they have certain greater powers to make certain things happen, but, like.
- [120:23]
Rich Roll
They'Re just firefighting all day long, and that's their job. Right. And so if they're marinating in the mystery, you're probably not gonna crack it. So relax and get on with it on some level. Right, Exactly. The aspiration for this book, what is it that you really want people to get out of it?
- [120:45]
Oliver Burkeman
I would hope that it helps people just, like, ease their way over this gap from having some thoughts about how they would like to show up in the world to actually doing those things. I wanted to try to create a book that was an active ingredient in this process as opposed to just being about this subject. There may be limits to how far a book can. Can ever do that, but I wanted it to be like a companion to putting one foot in front of the other in that way that, as we were discussing, is everything, even if it's just one step.
- [121:28]
Rich Roll
Well, I think you did a wonderful job. It really is an antidote to the universal suffering that we're all experiencing in the modern world, this prison that we've crafted around our lives. And you have figured out a way out. And like I said at the outset, like, it's a real act of public service. Just the fact alone that you decided to tackle this very difficult concept of productivity and meaning and how to make sense of our lives amidst our busy lives and didn't go the route of. Of reduction and instead really embraced, like, tackling all the complexity and the nuance of it, which is, like, no small feat. And it's. You know, the work you do is really beautiful, and I appreciate what you've done, and I hope you continue down this path.
- [122:27]
Oliver Burkeman
Thank you very much. Thank you for that. That's a very generous thing to say. Thank you.
- [122:30]
Rich Roll
Yeah. Cool. Is there any place other than to pick the books up that you want to point people?
- [122:37]
Oliver Burkeman
No, pick the books up or in audio read by me. And then my website, OliverBurkman.com has. You can sign up for my newsletter there.
- [122:46]
Rich Roll
Excellent. Thank you. And please come back.
- [122:49]
Oliver Burkeman
I'd love to.
- [122:50]
Rich Roll
Yeah. I so badly want to make you my accountability buddy.
- [122:54]
Oliver Burkeman
That'll be awesome.
- [122:55]
Rich Roll
Yeah. So anyway, to be continued.
- [122:57]
Oliver Burkeman
Thank you, Oliver. Cheers. Thanks so much. Peace.
- [123:06]
Rich Roll
All right, everybody, that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. I really do hope that you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today. Visit today's episode page@richroll.com where you will find the entire podcast archive as well as my books Finding Ultra, the Voicing Change series, and the Plant Power Way. If you'd like to see support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is free. Actually, all you got to do is subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review or drop a comment. Sharing your show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome as well and extremely helpful, so thank you in advance for that. In addition, I'd like to thank all of our amazing sponsors. Without him, this show just would not be possible. Possible or at least, you know, not free. To check out all their amazing product offerings and listener discounts, head to richroll.com sponsors and finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page@rich roll.com Today's show is produced and engineered by Jason Cameiolo along with Associate Producer Desmond Lowe. The video edition of the podcast was created by by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae, with assistance from our Creative Director Dan Drake, content management by Shana Savoy, copywriting by Ben Prior and of course, our theme music, as always, was created all the way back in 2012 by my stepsons Tyler and Trapper Pyatt, along with their cousin Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support and I'll see you back here soon. Peace Plants.