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are you doing a few things every day that your ancestors would have done what 250 000 years ago oliver berkman he's a
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journalist a writer and one of the greatest thinkers i've had the pleasure of sitting with here on this podcast
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people talk all the time about the importance of learning to say no right there's a subtext there they think what that means is if you just learn to say no to all the stuff you don't want to do
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you can spend your time doing stuff you do want to do way harder than that you have to say no to things that you do want to do we are
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wired for racing through things all of us who are sort of moving at this speed need to experiment a little bit with
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like what it feels like to just slow down to the speed that things take any action that actually brings things
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into the world involves a confrontation with your limitations getting through that discomfort to what lies on the
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other side is so empowering without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the diary of a ceo i hope
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nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself
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as a journalist um i was quite surprised to read some of the articles you'd written and the
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subject matter wasn't necessarily like always about the news or what's going on or it wasn't gossipy it was quite
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i don't know existential and deep and about regret and life and happiness and these kinds of things why did the desire
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to talk about and to write and research those topics come from a new that's a good question i mean i think
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early early when i was a journalist i was doing whatever i needed to do and a lot of that was kind of news
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more newsy but i've always wanted to try to bring into that kind of daily context
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these big serious ideas and i think it's just because
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i'm fascinated by them and i think i'm fascinated by them because i on some level struggle with them right i mean i
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don't think anyone if they're honest writes about happiness who is just
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completely happy all the time because then that topic is boring to that person i think i'm probably a pretty anxious
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person going back less so now uh having spent years kind of
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therapising myself in public in in the in columns and books but um that sense that you sort of need to find
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some secret to address your own issues and also when it comes to sort of productivity and time
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management and all those topics it's like maybe if i could find the system that
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would put me in total control of my time then maybe i wouldn't need to feel worried about the future and you know
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things like that we're all just sort of revealing our deepest uh issues in the things we choose to
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focus on and write about you alluded to it a little bit there but you said you know one of the books you wrote was
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called the antidote happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking interesting title what was the
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inspiration but i mean you said struggling with unhappiness was was i mean by the time i wrote that i was sort
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of i'd given all these things a lot of thought i'd written this column for the guardian for quite a few years and i sort of noticed this pattern emerging
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in the in the approaches and the philosophies that really seemed to do something for me and to sort of um lift
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my spirits help me navigate the world a bit more more calmly and effectively and they were not
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uh what i call in that book positive thinking right they were not fill your mind with upbeat thoughts and
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set incredibly ambitious goals and try to push yourself relentlessly towards achieving them it was actually
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much more to do with being open to negative stuff and being willing to feel
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anxiety and security uncertainty and the potential for failure and all those things
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it's actually a much more resilient way to um to be in the world i think plus it i
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guess it's kind of it's the contribution that i can make to the world of self-help and things like
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that is to bring my kind of pessimistic slightly sardonic i don't know british northern i don't know where
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this comes from culturally really but like of a of a field like the self-help
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industry like just so much of this is rubbish and at the same time
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the topic that this is ultimately about is really important and you can't just dismiss it completely so um what would
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you say are some of the big sort of central misconceptions about how to become happy or
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what is it that fundamentally makes us unhappy i sat here with moe gowda who wrote a book about happiness um
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the happiness equation and he talks a lot about expectation management when your expectations are too high and if
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your expectations go unmet then we're unhappy um and you know in a lot of your writings you talk about
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being a bit more aware that any lack of productivity or hardship or struggle isn't a sign of our
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inadequacy as humans it's very much the nature of earth yeah full life i guess
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i mean yeah in terms of misconceptions i think that the sort of fundamental one that i was writing about in that earlier
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book is is the idea that happiness is best achieved by aiming for happiness you know that setting out in your life to
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get happy is there's something amiss with this notion right happiness is the kind of thing
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that seems to arise as a byproduct of certain kinds of meaningful activity but
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if you make it the sort of goal of your life you can sort of bear down on it too much and then it
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sort of goes away the book on some level is about um
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turning your attention away from happiness and finding happiness that way through sort of the pursuit of reality right through engaging in
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meaningful activities and we can talk about what meaningful means i suppose but but not but not sort of what will
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make me feel better or best as the as the as the sort of navigation aid
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that you use in life and then happiness coming as a as a sort of a secondary effect of that i think you know
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the the the sort of crassus kind of positive thinking fails just because the human mind
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does not work like that if what if you decide that you're always going to fill your mind with positive upbeat optimistic thoughts
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then every negative thought that creeps in is like a new failure and something to feel stressed about and something to try to stamp out
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and uh that's just sort of not true to the situation of like who we are which is a
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big mixture of all sorts of feelings so if we're not aiming for happiness then
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and we're aiming for kind of demeaning meaningful activities in the process what are those what have you come to
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learn are the meaningful activities that end up creating the byproduct of
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happiness i mean it's the question and i don't think i've like come to the final answer
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in in any of this but um i think meaning it's it's a really
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fascinating idea because i think people know in a sort of intuitive way whether what
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they're doing is meaningful there's a question that i write about that comes from a psychotherapist called james hollis whose work has been really uh um
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had a real big impact on me which is to ask of a choice or of a life path that you might be on whether it's enlarging
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you or diminishing you and i don't think this language works for everybody but for me it's like oh okay
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you can tell that there are times when life is not enjoyable but it's about growth what you're doing
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it's like it's good that you're doing it and it's meaningful that you're doing it and then there are times when life might be perfectly fun
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but if you really stop and think about it it's like it's missing the point somehow i think one the sort of an acute
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example of this that most people will have experience of is if like a friend or a relation of yours
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is going through a crisis and you're helping them out in some way you're there to just as some company or i i
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recall one example when some friends of mine were going through a really awful thing and i was like literally like doing the dry cleaning for them right it
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was just like they just needed help in this kind of way and you have that feeling of like i'm in the right place here this is
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there isn't something else i ought to be doing now doesn't mean it's fun because the whole situation is awful doesn't
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mean it's in great activity because doing someone's dry cleaning is not necessarily a great activity but but you
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know that you're in the right place and i think that we can hope to have that feeling about quite a lot of the sort of work and
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other things that we do in in non-crisis moments so that's how i kind of think about that this is a good use of this
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day of your very limited time on the planet one of the things that i view that seems to be
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pretty correct um when i'm trying to figure out what is meaningful it makes me gives me that feeling of like fulfillment that i'm in
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the right place as you describe it is when i look back at like the human struggle over thousands of years and
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really what made us survive it tends to be the case that i feel best when i'm
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doing the things that are kind of in line with how my ancestors lived right so i mean on one hand you could
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say eating certain things and drinking and sleeping but then as we kind of
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described it there which is like banding together and collaborating ultimately that's central to how why we're here and
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so it's conceivable that our ancestors might have left that message in my genetic code to say stephen not only are you going to struggle forward but you're
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going to do it together yeah and so when you helped your friend with their dry cleaning that was a really human
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historically like human act of banding together and support um but i i feel like we've kind of lost
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track of those fundamental human things if that makes sense and whenever we do them now which is like helping
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each other you know eating stuff that's grown from the ground the over stimulation of dig like digital
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items and screens in our lives loneliness these are all callings to kind of get back to our tribe and in
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fact i i'm coming to learn despite what the happiness industry sells you it actually might be really really
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fundamentally simple in a in a way which is trying to be more human yeah yeah i've heard yeah that's such a
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good point i've heard somebody express this as like you should ask are you doing a few things every day
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that your ancestors would have done what 250 000 years ago exercise right
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being together in our tribes right being outdoors outdoors right the studies and being outdoors are really startling and i
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think the problem is so many of us now i mean uh writers are the sort of ultimate example but but but so many of us you for sure
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like we're doing what we're mainly doing with our days is manipulating symbols in one way or another right images words
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ideas all day long like and and a lot of these things are so new
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like writing is is incredibly modern invention on the evolutionary uh time
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scale let alone podcasting and um this is a sort of very low grade productivity
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idea that i've written about and i think is really important is to to try to think about anything you're doing in
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terms of physical actions and physical next actions and so one thing i do when i'm writing for example is i sort of set
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goals that are to do with creating physical documents right i'm going to do this i'm going to write this i'm going
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to print it out and it's going to have something on my desk the hole in my hands that i did today it's very easy to get lost in that in that world that
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doesn't have like hard edges that doesn't have a physicality in it and it's very alluring
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because it feels kind of you feel sort of god-like in that world if you spend all day sort of with your
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head mainly occupying cyberspace or the metaverse but but yeah you miss out on that essentially human
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stuff that you're talking about and in your new book you talk a lot about kind of stripping back a lot of this [ __ ]
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that has consumed our lives and the complexity and these narratives which have been kind of sold by the happiness and efficiency and procrastination
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industry let's call it um your new book 4000 weeks time and how to use it which i found
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incredibly important i think that's the best way to describe it so i really want to go through a couple of the points in the book that i
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i found compelling and that i wanted to ask you questions on the first is chapter one which was the limit of um
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the limit embracing life um and you talk about this concept of embracing our limits what did you mean
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by that seems to me and it's certainly my experience but i think it is more universal than just like my my issues
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seems to me that a lot of what we do uh the way we behave in the world and
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the way we try to manage our time especially it's all really based around trying to avoid
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confronting something about our situation it's a kind of an emotional avoidance it's to avoid feeling what it is like to
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be who we are which is finite human beings right four thousand weeks the title refers to the approximate length of uh
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average lifespan in the west um which is terrifying by the way this is terrifying yeah yeah i love that
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i thought the risky decision i realized in hindsight to give the book this title because it might just cause people to
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like run away from the bookshop and not buy the book but anyway the um so we're very finite in our amount of
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time we're obviously finite on the daily level of the amount of time we have but also finite in how much control we can
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exert over it right you nobody knows what's happening in the very next moment you can you can take actions to increase
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the likelihood that what you want is going to happen but we're all totally sort of vulnerable to events and to
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every to every moment it's increasingly impossible to have sort of complete knowledge about anything that you're
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doing or any sphere in which you're acting and then you know relationships just inherently involve you know
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romantic relationships but all relationships it just inherently involves this kind of
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vulnerability to other people and and things they might do to hurt you or think bad things that might happen to
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them that would cause you to suffer and so we're in this kind of very very
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limited situation and the i guess the main argument in my book is that like if we
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followed through the ramifications of that we would use our time in a in a somewhat different way
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and actually i think a more relaxing way i don't think it's a kind of recipe for stress although the title is probably a recipe for stress but um
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in productivity for example the quest to try to do everything to become like limitlessly optimized so that you can
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handle all your incoming email you can pursue all your ambitions and business ventures you can meet all the
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obligations you feel from your family and friends or from society and do it all that's trying to become unlimited right that's trying to become limitless
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um and we there are lots of other examples of this where i think what we're really doing is
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is just trying to avoid feeling our finitude and some people want to say well isn't it great to believe that we're limitless
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because then you can like do astonishing things and i want to say no i think the kind of limitation i'm
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talking about confronting it and feeling it and living into it is actually the precondition of
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doing the the most sort of extraordinary things with a life because
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you get to kind of give up on this impossible quest to fit yourself to every expectation that
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the world might have one in which you can only fail right and just focus on doing that right yeah inadequate yeah
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and and the sort of great inventors and the great entrepreneurs of today and the great sort of historical
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figures like all these people they didn't they did things that people thought were previously thought were impossible yeah
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but they didn't um they very very deliberately understood that using their
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time the way they wanted to use it meant sacrifices um it meant neglecting things that would
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be completely good things to do right i'm sure you know what i'm talking about here right i mean it's like you there
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are 25 things you could do it's not that only one of them is any good like
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24 of them are good but even so most of them are gonna have to you're gonna have to be able to withstand the anxiety of
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just neglecting most of them in order to focus on and fundamentally you believe which i also completely
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agree with which is in fact why i have this sand timer here which i just picked off my desk before we started recording
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you believe that um people do go through life not almost i don't for me it's like not
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realizing slash not believing that they will die it's almost like humans aren't able to understand the concept of
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infinity and they're also not able to understand the concept of finality right the fact that we will i will come to an
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end so we don't live in such a way we don't live with such a belief and if you look at a lot of the decisions i make
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you would assert that i'm living like i think i'm going to live forever right because my my misprioritization of
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things that actually clearly matter more and this kind of constant difference of happiness to the future i will be happy
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when right and then we live in you know because one of the things i say and i say this on my live show is i say to the audience that
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if you think about it probably about 90 of this audience are currently living in a way in which a
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previous self of them told themselves if they got here they would be happy right yes but their current self is saying
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not now we'll be happy when so deferring it going into the future yeah so people don't live like they know they're gonna
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die essentially right and i think you know something that's important to say about that is like i think that that
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that mindset i've i've seen it called and i refer to in the book is like when i finally mindset right it's like when
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something happens then the moment of truth is going to come and after that life is going to be fulfilling and easy but not yet i mean it's obviously as you
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say it's totally like drains the meaning out of life in the present but it serves again it serves this purpose of
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avoidance right because if you're always storing up fulfillment for the future
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you don't have to acknowledge the fact that like this is it life isn't a dress rehearsal like you've got to do things
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now if you're ever going to do them there's a great quote from john maynard keynes the economist that i
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use in there about how people who live in this mindset and he's talking about pretty much everyone really um they're
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trying to secure for their actions i won't get this exactly right they're trying to secure for their actions of spurious and delusive immortality by
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always pushing them into the future right so the man who thinks like this keynes writes uh doesn't doesn't love
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his cat but only his cat's kittens and not really their kittens but the kittens kittens and so on forever right and so
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the downside is that you never get to enjoy and value and find fulfillment in life now but the
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upside is it sort of helps you feel like you might be going to live forever it's kind of useful to be putting things off
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because it it it helps this act of denial that we're all engaged in it also means that we
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continue as humans to struggle forward right we continue to take on struggle whether it's challenge or ambition we
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continue to be ambitious and then i go well maybe that's also what allowed our ancestors to give give birth to us
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because if our ancestors weren't trying to build a better tomorrow and kind of deferring gratitude to the to
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the empire that they were trying to build then maybe we wouldn't be here so is it a human
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thing to also kind of defer our happiness to the future i think it must be and really is and i think we are sort
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of goal seeking organisms i think it's hugely compounded by
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the culture in which we live in the economic system in which we live and i think it's sort of gone uh into warp speed in a way that
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we could step back from but i also think that it's not about giving up goals right
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it's not about stopping trying to achieve things in the future it's about it's about not investing the whole value
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of what you're doing in those in those future outcomes you can't build anything a
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relationship business creative work you can't do it unless you are partly focused on on where you're on
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where you're going but you don't have to be exclusively focused on where you're going and i would say you probably
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shouldn't be exclusively focused on where you're going because it will damage the product that you're creating as well so
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you might fall into the efficiency trap as you call it which is chapter two right you get you get completely fixated
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on valuing the the present only in terms of how it um is going to help uh uh
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create the the future thing and then you find what happens is that actually you get further and further
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away from achieving that thing because you in trying to make yourself more efficient in trying to sort of
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process more and more tasks to get closer to your goal you make yourself more efficient and
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then more and more tasks like flood in to fill the excess capacity and this is parkinson's law and a whole lot of other
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kind of it goes by a whole lot of names but it's this idea that um yeah if you if all you do is make
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yourself more efficient then you'll just be dealing with a greater incoming volume of things and
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inbox zero i felt was the perfect example of that in your book where the better you get at sending emails and replying fast in fact the more replies
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you get and people come to know you as having a reputation of he emails back quickly which is going to get even more
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emails and then the challenge of getting to inbox zero becomes increasingly harder and then you find yourself
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drowning yeah absolutely right and it's just when you spell it out like that it's like of course and so you know i remember when i
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was um a young journalist sort of feeling overwhelmed by the number of articles i was being asked to write so you get
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really really better at writing them really fast and you get a reputation for being able to
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write quite a long complicated article in a short amount of time like who's the editor going to ask when the next one
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comes up right i mean and you know i got a lot of benefit from being the person that the editor asked but it certainly didn't make me less busy yeah i think i
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have that a bit with my pa at the moment she i've got a reputation with her being able to do
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50 meetings a day right so my calendar is now 50 meetings a day and we've actually forgotten about the concept of
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like i need to eat at some point so like there's no i looked at my calendar the other day she's superb and
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in fact she does exactly what i've always done to do so she's not at fault here i am but i looked at my calendar
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the other day and i was with her in the car and i go isn't it funny it's like every minute of the next 14 hours is
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scheduled but i but there's no space for lunch or just like sending a voice in it to my girlfriend
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right so i've kind of like misprioritized my life but again it's because i've i've con i've i've not
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fought back against that by being successful at being efficient i've you know brought more efficiency into my
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life and taken away things that give me meaning like connecting with my girlfriend or my mother or my family or you know those
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passions and and i think yeah i mean i'd be interested to know if this resonates with you for me when i've got into that
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kind of groove that place where you're sort of pursuing efficiency at the expense of everything else for me
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anyway part of what's going on is was always to do with self-worth right it's this idea that you've got to get to this
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point where you are this optimal and this efficient and productive that you
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wouldn't really be justifying your existence on the planet somehow if you if you if you didn't do all these things
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and so i think lots and lots of people who sort of accomplish stuff are driven to accomplish stuff because
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they feel like they need to accomplish stuff like it's not okay if they if they don't uh accomplish stuff and so
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that is a kind of never-ending treadmill as well because um
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like why are you going to decide that any particular given level of output or accomplishment is the one where you can
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where you can relax and i think one of the things i'm always at pains to try to get across talking about this
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book is that um this is meant to be a relaxing message right i think this is a liberating
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message that can be like a weight off your shoulders because if you if you see that what you were doing was
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trying to do an impossible amount in order to feel like okay about yourself on some deep
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buried level well if you really begin to internalize that it's impossible
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then it can't be what you need to do in order to feel okay about yourself maybe you're okay already and then the things
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that you do in the world are kind of extra and then i think you know the message of our being finite the message
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of our of our being limited is not so now you've got to like squeeze value out of every moment and
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go base jumping every weekend or something otherwise have you really lived it's much more like okay oh great
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the pressure's off i can't do an impossible amount i can only do a few of the things that
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seem like they matter so all i need to do is choose for now which ones seem the most
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important and focus on them and give my energy to them and it's much more doable i can
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completely relate to that attachment of efficiency to self-worth it felt so it felt like you were calling me out
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and the other thing i have which i just realized as you were saying was because i've become successful in the
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eyes of society quote unquote i'm now also trying to live up to my own external reputation that people have of
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me people say oh steve you're you never sleep you're so you work so hard
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so when i have days where i don't work really hard and i clearly just achieved nothing that day
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i'm like haunted by the my almost my reputation right which is largely false
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my reputation that i don't sleep and that i'm working all the time and that i'm super productive and that i'm
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organized and i don't procrastinate i'll tell you now it is a load of [ __ ] i
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some days i do like a lot of a lot of days i do way less than the people around me right but i
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have this so but i do have those moments now where if i have like an unproductive day
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or i've like slept until midday for whatever reason which happens a lot by the way or i've procrastinated which
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happens every day or i'm really unproductive i go you're not being steve bartlett you're you're a fella you're letting down your
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reputation right you're a fraud you are a fraud i get that a lot that feeling of like it doesn't like [ __ ]
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me but that feeling of oh i if i look at today and i look at the reputation of stephen butler i am a fraud
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um it's fascinating i think it must be it's a lot it's a lot worse with a high public profile but i do think it's kind
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of almost a universal trait that a lot of people have a lot of people who are sort of
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well thinking back we've talked before about like b i was just a sort of your garden variety high achiever at school
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right like the kid getting the a grades or whatever and and and a lot of people in that situation
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have what is called in psychology probably know like they have a fixed mindset rather than a growth mindset right so one of the consequences of this
00:25:59
is every time you do well it's not something to be happy about because you did well it's like something to feel pressure about because now
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that's the bar that you've got to reach next time and it's like you know it's suddenly your your success has become
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this um this standard that you've now got to meet every single time in the future and that is like
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it's it's it's a agonizing way to to live usually that's people thinking
00:26:25
that their inner critic demands it or their parents demand it obviously the bigger your audience the more you you
00:26:30
can fall into thinking that like there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who who demand it but of course that also gives you the power to
00:26:37
do something very helpful and liberating for those people when you break the fourth wall or
00:26:43
whatever and point out that it isn't like that yeah yeah the other one i always get is the morning routine people will send me on instagram like what
00:26:49
steve can you tell us your morning routine yeah i can almost imagine them at home like sending the dm and being sat there with their notepad ready for
00:26:55
my response and i'm like honestly i sometimes i get out but at 11. sometimes i don't sleep so i end up
00:27:01
getting i bet at one sometimes you know i'll get out six there's no green juice for me there's no yoga there's no
00:27:08
continual meditation or run or whatever right it's a sloppy mess the whole process the whole process of me waking
00:27:14
up is a really sloppy mess i'm trying to improve i bring people here that talk about morning routines it still doesn't seem to work but um but despite of that yeah i'm
00:27:22
happy my businesses have gone well i've managed to achieve my ambitions despite of my total imperfection in most key
00:27:28
areas that the happiness industry would assert because they need to sell you complex things or else why would you buy
00:27:34
if if the truth is that you're going to be imperfect and that's okay maybe i'm okay you said that if
00:27:40
that's the truth it's hard to sell you it but that's the truth as i know it and that's why i enjoy these conversations one thing i did talk about there was
00:27:45
procrastination and this is a topic where which i think honestly plagues people into feeling
00:27:51
like they are inadequate yeah if i make a video on my instagram about procrastination it will outperform everything relationships perform the
00:27:57
best okay number two right is anything with the title progress maybe i'll title this video about procrastination and
00:28:03
it'll do really well yeah why do people procrastinate well they watch those videos presumably while they should be getting on with
00:28:09
their getting on with the working questions right that's that's that's probably going to subscribe procrastination videos are really
00:28:14
popular one level there's lots of different reasons fear of failure fear of success fear of all sorts of different things but but at the deep
00:28:21
level i make the argument anyway you don't want to feel what it feels like to be
00:28:28
limited and imperfect and so if you hold on to a project if you keep it in your mind in the world of fantasy
00:28:34
it can stay perfect it can be later that you're going to do this great thing any action that actually brings things
00:28:40
into the world involves a confrontation with your limitations maybe you're not going to have the talent for it maybe it's not
00:28:46
going to be well received maybe it's going to be too complicated if i'm trying to write a chapter of a book like the stakes are high for me because
00:28:53
i want it to go well but i don't know that it is going to go well i want it to be well received but i don't know that
00:28:59
it will be well received so much nicer to just spend that time doing something kind of
00:29:06
pointless and you know scrolling around or whatever because yeah because i don't have to have
00:29:12
confront my limitations and what i want to try to convey in that topic in in in
00:29:17
this book anyway i think is to say look bringing anything into the world
00:29:24
studying for any um qualification doing any kind of creative work like
00:29:30
launching any kind of business like it the the imperfection is guaranteed like you definitely aren't going to get to
00:29:36
bring it into the world in in exactly in tune with your fantasy and everyone is
00:29:42
in the same boat and this is completely unavoidable and baked in [Music]
00:29:47
so you might as well do it right because it's like people i think people they get caught up in themselves they think well i'm going to make fool of myself or i'm
00:29:54
going to let myself down or i'm going to let my friends or my parents down but it's like no the imperfection
00:30:00
the fact that it will stumble and not be everything you dreamed it could have been that ship has sailed like that's just
00:30:07
for everyone so now can we just move forward and do our imperfect things and lots of them will turn out to be
00:30:12
uh you know fantastic things but they will all be imperfect because because that's
00:30:18
what it is to to bring things into the world as a human being knowing that having written a
00:30:24
chapter in your book called becoming a better procrastinator do you still procrastinate
00:30:31
yes um i've always i always feel like my my point about that i get asked this
00:30:36
question and i'm always like look you got to compare me with who i was before not with this perfect person because i
00:30:41
am not that perfect person but i am a lot better at it than i was um [Music]
00:30:47
yeah and what where i stumble on that is not so much anymore
00:30:53
with the idea that it's got to be like perfect standard because if you spend a few years as a journalist you get that
00:31:00
sort of beating out of you right because like deadlines come deadlines come you just got to send the thing in and you stop thinking after a while that you're
00:31:08
that your glorious prose has got to be perfect you can't let it out of your sight until it's perfect because it's
00:31:14
just never how it works where i still run into trouble is that i do feel this
00:31:20
urge to feel in control of all the things that are going on in my life and all things going on in my
00:31:25
work so it's very tempting for me to say um
00:31:30
you know i've got to write that really important thing or i've got to think through this really important thing but first i'm going to
00:31:36
make sure that all my inboxes are under control and then i'm going better do all that admin about finances that
00:31:42
i'd left that i'd left and i better sort of and then you before you know it it's like better like rearrange my desk so
00:31:48
that all the all the pens are straightened up whatever displacement activities things that make me feel
00:31:54
more in control of my world but actually don't move the things that i care about
00:32:00
forward the most and i'm getting better on that too but that's the thing that's where the the struggle is
00:32:05
for me i will definitely spend like long periods of time getting my ducks in a row and clearing
00:32:12
the decks and i write in the book about how you've really got to try and fight this urge to clear the decks because they will never be clear right so you've
00:32:18
got to you've got to just get on with things but uh but yeah work in progress for sure that's a very
00:32:24
honest answer and i'm glad to hear that you and me both quick one for many years people have
00:32:29
been asking for a coffee flavored huel and quite recently he'll release the
00:32:35
iced coffee caramel flavor of their um ready-to-drink heels and i've just become hooked on it over the last couple
00:32:41
of weeks i've been on a really interesting journey with huel which i've described and talked about a little bit on this podcast i started with the berry
00:32:47
ready to drinks then i moved over to the protein salted caramel because it's 100 calories and it gives you all of your
00:32:52
essential vitamins and minerals but also gives you the 20 odd grams of protein you need and now i'm balanced between
00:32:58
them both i drink mostly the banana flavor ready to drink i've got really into the iced coffee caramel um flavor
00:33:05
of heels ready to drink and now i'm drinking that as well as the protein make sure you try the new ready to drink
00:33:10
flavors that the caramel flavor is amazing the new banana flavor as well is amazing and obviously as i said the iced
00:33:17
coffee caramel flavor has been a real smash here so check it out let me know what you think on social media i see all
00:33:23
of your tags and instagram posts and tweets about you back to the podcast in that chapter about procrastination
00:33:29
you talk a lot about focus as well in this idea of avoiding your middling priorities
00:33:34
which i thought was really good advice so could you talk a little bit about the importance of avoiding middling
00:33:40
priorities certainly the the the story that dramatizes this is this idea that
00:33:46
some people may have heard about it's attributed to warren buffett but i think probably it didn't come from warren buffett people often just take wise
00:33:52
sayings and say that warren buffett will do that with me christ
00:33:57
it's warren buffett buddha and confucius so hopefully you know he's about you as well right yes right right right but he
00:34:04
is supposed buffett is supposed to been asked like how do you decide what to prioritize in life and to have replied that you should
00:34:10
make a list of your top 25 goals in life and order them numerically from 1 to 25
00:34:17
and then take the top five on that list and really focus on them in your life and take the next 20 and avoid them like
00:34:24
the plague because they are the ones that you care about enough to let them distract you
00:34:31
from the from the top five but not the ones that you're that are easy to let go of because you don't really care
00:34:37
about them right they belong in this middle zone whether or not that exercise is a useful
00:34:42
exercise the the principle here i think is that you have to sort of be especially wary of of
00:34:50
claims on your attention and your time that do matter a bit
00:34:55
but just not as much as the things that you care about the most it's very easy to um people talk all the time about the
00:35:02
importance of learning to say no right but people often i think in the there's a subtext there they think what that
00:35:07
means is if you just learn to say no to all the stuff you don't want to do you can spend your time doing stuff you do want to do
00:35:13
but i quote actually elizabeth gilbert the writer in the book saying like no it's way harder than that you have to say no to things that you do want to do
00:35:20
because there are more things that matter than you have time for so middling
00:35:25
priorities are you know that friendship that yeah it's fine you
00:35:30
know it's nice when you meet up with that person but it's not neither of you getting that much out of it and it's taking another hour away
00:35:37
from i don't know your partner your child your best friend you know definitely
00:35:42
sort of work projects that sort of yeah you can do them you could handle
00:35:49
that it might make you a little bit of money or you know whatever but it's just not it's not the number one thing takes
00:35:54
quite a lot to resist those because they are they're not unimportant they're just not
00:35:59
important enough and it feels like um more is more but as the phrase goes in
00:36:05
this context less is more you i i've observed that in my life anyway if you if you want to be successful in business
00:36:12
then focusing on one as opposed to having three startups is much more much better but some people will brag about
00:36:18
how many businesses they run or how many things they do as if they believe that that makes them more more valuable
00:36:23
they'll brag about how many friends they have as opposed to the quality of them and it tends to be the case that that phrase less is more is is true in the
00:36:29
sense of focusing on less things gives you much more meaning and depth in life and that's ultimately what's what matters
00:36:36
yeah and actually i think it's probably the way to accomplish more things as well right it's it's um
00:36:42
so one thing that i've found i i can't talk on the level of businesses launched but
00:36:47
only on the level of uh you know articles and books written is the degree to which i can do things sequentially
00:36:54
and train myself to do one big thing at a time and wait till it's finished before you move to the next one takes a
00:37:00
lot takes kind of guts to do it because it feels better to have a finger in every part once but
00:37:06
to the extent that i can do that to that extent i get more of those things done um
00:37:11
because you make most of them wait you focus on one you do it and then it's finished and
00:37:18
then you bring the next one in and you do that um it's so tempting to sort of dissipate
00:37:23
your energies because i think it makes you feel we're back to the same idea right makes you feel limitless it makes you feel like
00:37:29
you can wrap your arms around the whole world stops people in the case of my work it stops people pestering you
00:37:35
because like where's that thing you said you'd do and it's very nice to live in that world of
00:37:40
um of sort of multitasking and multi-projects but it's not the most effective way to
00:37:45
get the things done yeah i i'm struggling with that i think for sure and
00:37:51
i think i think as well when you've got um when you've got more opportunities
00:37:58
like i get a lot of a lot of people sending me a lot of things to do these days a lot of things that i could do it becomes an even greater and more
00:38:05
important skill to master so the amount of like we had one day last week where they're like every
00:38:10
journalist across these multiple newspapers wants to speak to you about this i made this donation and there's part of me that goes oh yeah
00:38:17
that's you know i'll do all of these tv things that day but then of course it comes at the cost of something else and
00:38:23
we and we never really focus on the cost right it seems like yeah and that's kind of the curse i have in my mind sometimes
00:38:29
is i'm too focused on the benefit of doing the thing as if you know which is basically the premise
00:38:34
of your book that like as if my time was unlimited yeah but yeah you know it's like i was i remember
00:38:40
reading about this thing which has weirdly stayed in my mind for many years this idea that they believe humans can
00:38:47
only juggle a certain amount of balls because of the physics of a ball going up and then the speed in which one could
00:38:52
possibly move so they think it's 14 and nobody's been able to break the world record ever
00:38:57
is that the record the 14 balls no one's ever been able to juggle more than 14 balls and and that record has held
00:39:03
because of the physics of the balls going up and the way that they would collide if you made it 15 and that made me think there is a physical limitation
00:39:10
to the amount of balls we can physically juggle as humans and the balls you pick up come at the expense of the ones you
00:39:16
don't yeah and that's i've tried to keep remember that that i have to pick my 14 balls in life hopefully not [ __ ] 14 i
00:39:22
can probably do two but i have to pick my balls in life and realize that every one i pick is at the expense of another
00:39:27
and even looking at you know i write in my book i really love waffles but i also like want to have a six pack
00:39:33
i can only pick one you know right right really you know that's a metaphor but like i have to choose which
00:39:38
one's important and it's the same with cheating some people might like having sex but they also might like having a
00:39:44
relationship and you have to realize that if you want to be in a faithful relationship it comes at the cost of something and um
00:39:51
right no and i think that you know we yes we spend so much effort trying to avoid thinking about costs or trying to
00:39:56
avoid incurring them but again there's something
00:40:02
freeing about seeing that you are always incurring costs that every decision to spend an hour doing anything is the
00:40:07
decision to not spend it doing other things that you know every path you choose you're you're
00:40:14
declining to choose all these other paths it's painful because it means that like
00:40:20
loss is built in to living a human life but it's also
00:40:26
like it's so unavoidable like there's nothing that can be done about that that's just built into being finite so in a way like
00:40:32
we can relax about that actually if there wasn't cost though things wouldn't be special like right yes forever
00:40:37
if i could have the best of both worlds then the one i choose wouldn't have it you know scarcity adds value they say so
00:40:44
totally and i mean there's been there's there's like philosophical work going back on like would you actually want to
00:40:49
be immortal uh if you could no and i agree yeah i don't think you would because i think as i uh
00:40:54
writes in the book like if you were immortal the answer to the question should i do x with my day today would
00:41:02
always just be who cares like because if you didn't do it today you could do it on any number of other
00:41:07
days to the uh stretching off into infinity so i think absolutely uh it's not pleasant to
00:41:14
confront our finichu but life would have no meaning if it went if it didn't stop you
00:41:20
write about watermelons in your book oh yeah chapter five is about the watermelon problem
00:41:26
the famous buzzfeed watermelon this was like what five years ago now two journalists from buzzfeed put rubber
00:41:32
bands around the watermelon and they just kept adding rubber bands uh things like 600 and something rubber bands before the watermelon just
00:41:38
exploded that was the end of the facebook live
00:41:43
but the point that i'm using it to make is that you know millions of people watch that
00:41:49
and i'm not like i don't think there's anything terrible with spending
00:41:54
an hour of your life watching people put rubber bands around a watermelon but but they didn't choose to watch it that's a
00:42:00
it's a very clear example of the way in which especially in the sort of attention economy that we live in now
00:42:05
your attention is incredibly important because what you pay attention to just is your life right what over the
00:42:11
course of your life whatever you paid attention to it's just it's just what your life was
00:42:18
and yet it's very easily uh hijackable um
00:42:23
and and you know nobody who ended up watching that that hour got up that
00:42:29
morning thinking um what i'd really like to do today is uh spend an hour put it watching people put
00:42:35
rubber bands around a watermelon so it's just really the the question of distraction the question of how we
00:42:40
steward our attention and again if you want a break in the middle of the day and someone's doing some stunt involving
00:42:46
a watermelon fine right but but just bringing consciousness to that fact that
00:42:52
when we pay attention to things we are paying very literally with little chunks of our of our life have
00:42:58
you found any practical ways to make yourself less distracted by such compelling videos
00:43:04
there's really two parts to this i think one is especially in the modern era right one is
00:43:10
the source of the distraction so definitely like i don't have social media on my phone i do that on a
00:43:17
i do that on a laptop exclusively um [Music] i've i've sort of have a sort of ever
00:43:24
shifting and never never perfectly observed set of personal rules about like when i will turn to my email and
00:43:30
when i will turn to the internet and when i will be trying to be sort of offline and focused on
00:43:36
on writing and thinking but the other side of it i think is
00:43:41
is the distractibility not just the sort of not the things that are reaching out to grab our attention but the fact that we
00:43:47
kind of go along willingly with this stuff and again you know it's just my one thesis but i think the reason that
00:43:53
we're doing that is because it's much more comfortable than focusing on hard stuff focusing on hard stuff is is
00:44:01
is unpleasant sometimes because it brings us into contact with our limitations and then distraction is much nicer thing to do uh
00:44:10
with that time because it doesn't so really a big part of this for me and it's been definitely a slow gradual
00:44:15
thing it's not a sort of uh one clever trick or something is just to expect
00:44:21
a certain amount of discomfort in things that matter right just to sort of just to expect that
00:44:28
writing i keep using this example because it's personal to me but like that it's like it feels difficult uh cal newport
00:44:36
who wrote the book deep work and digital minimalism who's very good on this has this argument that like what people call writer's block that's
00:44:43
just the feeling of writing right because it's a hard thing to do and sometimes you might get into flow great
00:44:48
but most of the time it's probably going to be a question of like it's like a little bit hard and the
00:44:53
analogy that people always use is with weightlifting right i mean you don't expect if it's you don't expect that to
00:45:00
feel non-non-uncomfortable not that i have great experience of it but like you don't
00:45:07
there are certain areas where things where sort of growth involves discomfort and we're okay with
00:45:12
that and then there are other areas often involving cognitive activities where we we're
00:45:17
somehow deeply offended that it feels a bit difficult to do it but no it does the other thing that i always think is
00:45:22
extraordinarily difficult is really listening to another person right it never really gets super easy that i
00:45:27
think especially in relationships right to sort of to really concentrate on what someone is saying and not just to be
00:45:33
thinking oh but then when when they're finished this is what i'm going to say it's it takes effort and if you're
00:45:40
if if your response to that feeling of effort is like i can't feel effort it must be easy then it's going to be much
00:45:46
more tempting to just be like checking your phone when you should be listening or something so just a bit of a
00:45:51
willingness to experience mild discomfort i think it's kind of a superpower
00:45:57
yeah and obviously there's a lot of social narratives that kind of point to it as being a failure like you're right even the phrase
00:46:03
writer's block the word block doesn't feel like very natural it feels like there's
00:46:09
something that must be got a disorder right yeah yeah yeah yeah and a lot it's so funny because you said at the start of this
00:46:15
some of these new inventions are really holding us back like words and vocabulary like there's so many of
00:46:20
them even i talk a lot about in my book the idea of finding your passion there's so many like
00:46:27
things um hidden within that phrase first you have to go in search of it because of the word find
00:46:33
so people go they go off in search of this thing that they think they can find
00:46:38
it alludes to the fact that it's singular because the word passion is singular so i'm looking for a easter egg
00:46:44
somewhere which i need to go and search and find and if i don't find it that i'm a failure and much of the the messages i
00:46:50
get in my dm's as i've said before are kids that are feeling inadequate and
00:46:55
like they're a failure because they haven't found their passion when if you say well maybe maybe it's not something that you have to go in search of
00:47:00
necessarily maybe there's more than one yep it can be a really liberating thing and i think words generally are really
00:47:05
constrained and they cause people a ton of like are you in love my mom comes home i'm you know i'm dating someone she
00:47:12
goes is it love immediately after my brain scrambles around trying to figure out what i feel is the same as the
00:47:17
definition that she feels because i said i loved peanut butter but this is different yeah it's like and that for and also if it gets a binary response
00:47:24
yes or no yeah makes you so self-conscious that you can't actually give yourself to the experience that's
00:47:29
reminding me of um when i became a father like literally
00:47:36
95 of people who i interacted with who were parents themselves already would would say um
00:47:41
oh you should you should really savor these early months with a newborn baby it's so special you should really savor
00:47:47
it and this is true it is incredibly special you should savor it but all it did to me was have me
00:47:53
thinking like oh my goodness am i am i savoring this in the right way am i and then of course you're certainly not savoring it in that
00:47:59
time because you're just like lost in your head and it's like this yeah absolutely it's just it's
00:48:05
another it's another example of it right yeah yeah and i guess the antidote is to liberate yourself from
00:48:10
the expectation of like words and phrases and expect social expectations that you
00:48:16
should feel and act a certain way and be able to answer certain questions yeah or just to understand that like you
00:48:22
know yeah things are complicated and you only they sort of congeal over time and you
00:48:28
sometimes you only understand things in the rearview mirror and uh you just sort of have to navigate intuitively you
00:48:34
probably do know when you're in a relationship you don't know if it's love you probably do know
00:48:41
if it feels like it's got forward motion or if it feels terribly stagnant or if it feel
00:48:48
you know you can you can sort of intuit these things even if you can't slot these them into these kind of rigid categories yeah
00:48:56
i i might get this quite wrong but when you're talking about c cognitive behavioral therapy and in fact we can
00:49:02
achieve a form of which may be better than cognitive behavioral therapy of that therapy with like self-analysis in
00:49:08
various ways and for me this podcast and the diary that i had to keep originally when it first started to do it and also
00:49:14
this obligation i have to make content for the world has been one of the greatest forms of like therapy i've ever
00:49:21
encountered um and i i always i think it's like one of the unappreciated ways to
00:49:28
arrive at self-awareness overcome your own [ __ ] and yeah which is which is having to write
00:49:34
yeah to think and having to try and find the truth in your own experience yeah can you relate to that no totally and i
00:49:40
for me i mean there's lots of research about how writing down your personal problems for example is incredibly like
00:49:46
journaling it works and it's proven to work um it's not necessarily because you
00:49:51
come up with solutions although that can happen it's because you end up you sort of have to take this third person stance
00:49:57
on your own mental contents and you have to do that for sure if you're trying to package it in some form that other people can um
00:50:06
can benefit from or can understand so writing for an audience is absolutely an example of that um
00:50:12
there's something incredibly powerful in seeing your issues your interests whatever from the
00:50:18
perspective of another person i think it's related to that thing about how so often in life
00:50:24
you know our friends can see what what we need to do or what what's needed in our lives a bit
00:50:30
more clearly than than we can because you sort of um [Music] you can't see the wood from the for the
00:50:36
trees inside your own head but but they can be like no very obviously you need to do this and then this yeah so it's a
00:50:42
little bit of that uh of that effect as well and how you can always give better advice than you live by no absolutely
00:50:48
tell me about it
00:50:53
um the consequences of having this highly efficient productivity focused life
00:50:59
you see it in people you were talking earlier about the the great innovators of the world that manage to focus on a set of priorities but when you ask these
00:51:05
people if they're happy like elon musk if he's happy no i know but he thinks elon musk is happy
00:51:11
no and i think he said in the rogan interview that you wouldn't like to be me you wouldn't like to write ahead um
00:51:17
but we still seem to pursue that over what we think will make us
00:51:23
happy any well what where what what will clearly make us happy anyway i think that uh all of us
00:51:31
have something inside us that we're sort of here this doesn't sound too supernatural
00:51:37
that we're sort of here to express and to to put out into the world i think the
00:51:44
it gets complicated because some people i don't want to accuse elon musk of this but
00:51:51
i think it's probably very often true of certain kind of very driven people it's not just that they're sort of
00:51:57
trying to bring their gift into the world it's an odd and not necessarily helpful way of trying to sort out
00:52:02
certain like psychological issues they have so they feel that they have to achieve a certain amount because
00:52:07
they were not um you know given sufficient unconditional love by their parents so they need it from the world or they
00:52:13
feel that um yeah they need to justify their existence in in some way
00:52:19
and then it gets hard to know when to stop it gets hard to tell the difference between success and things that are
00:52:24
truly bringing you happiness but at the same time right you don't want to it's important to
00:52:31
to not suggest i think that the the ideal is to be
00:52:36
for everyone is to be so completely chilled out that all you would want to do is lie in a hammock on a on a beach
00:52:41
and sort of not create things in in one way or another that might be appropriate for for some
00:52:48
people but there is this fear when i talk about this stuff and write about this stuff of like oh wouldn't it lead you to just think well
00:52:54
why do anything you know what wouldn't it all just lead us to be sort of nihilists in that way um uh and i don't
00:53:01
think so for that reason but i also think uh like let's cross that bridge when we come to it we're already we're all so
00:53:07
driven and so sort of um trying to get more and more and more done but there's not a huge risk yet of us becoming so
00:53:15
zen about all these things that we kind of stop achieving entirely i i pondered
00:53:20
that a lot in my life um this idea that because one of the things you said earlier was maybe i'm okay this kind of
00:53:26
realization that maybe i am already enough yeah maybe none of these goals are going to increase my
00:53:32
value maybe even if i become a multi-millionaire steve bartlett is just going to be worth one steve bartlett still
00:53:38
um i had i pondered that for when i became a millionaire right when i
00:53:43
was my company listed on the stock market and i thought well this doesn't feel any different in fact the anti-climax makes
00:53:48
me feel pretty bad like the expectation that i was going to feel you know like i was more worthy that the
00:53:55
the anti-climax of that has had made me feel worse and then
00:54:00
asking myself the question well if i am already enough then what's the point in striving for more and my conclusive my
00:54:06
conclusion on all of this ponderance was that realizing that i'm enough is actually
00:54:11
the foundation for like real ambition and the minute when i was when i was insecure enough to believe that money or
00:54:17
a lamborghini might make me more i was striving for things that weren't my real ambitions they were social ambitions and
00:54:23
the minute you realize you're enough and that lamborghini isn't going to do it then you start re re-planning your
00:54:29
ambitions and go you know what i actually love doing is piano right hanging out with my niece right so that
00:54:34
that feeling that that i am enough is the foundation for real ambition
00:54:39
totally yeah no i think that's a great that's such a good way of putting it i mean i the way i've sometimes thought about this is like
00:54:47
sort of ambition and achievement and creation they don't have to be the thing you're doing the thing that you need to
00:54:54
do in order to get somewhere they can be the thing you do just to express yes the fact that it's great to be here and you
00:54:59
they're great to have these skills and these opportunities um [Music] i'm not religious but there is a this
00:55:06
idea in christianity that i keep running up against now because people contact me and say have you thought about this
00:55:12
because it's clearly related this notion of this notion of uh grace that that like you don't you can't
00:55:19
justify yourself by your works in the world right you can't sort of achieve salvation by what you do
00:55:27
but you also don't in this model anyway you don't need to achieve it either because you're already justified in the
00:55:32
eyes of god if you're a religious person and so the reason that you do things like this from the reason that you then
00:55:38
do stuff in the world is is again it's just like yeah it's it's for the it's an act of like
00:55:45
glorification or worship right or for as we were saying like just expressing the fact that it's great to be able to
00:55:51
do these things and like hey you could never been born you know you so it's not a reason to not do
00:55:57
things it's that it's that you're not doing them to try to justify yourself in the eyes of the world
00:56:02
or if you're religious you know be in the eyes of god whatever but it doesn't mean you don't do things it
00:56:08
just means you do them from a different motivation which is like hey i get to do these things that's great you know i i
00:56:13
feel like these existential thinkers are somewhat tortured so yes yeah do you relate to that
00:56:20
oh sure i mean i think you know um there's a philosopher
00:56:25
uh who died recently brian mcgee who um talks about the distinction between
00:56:31
people who sort of have philosophical problems and don't and what he means is that like from the age of like five he can
00:56:36
remember lying on a in a field looking up at the sky and thinking like well it can't
00:56:42
it can't be that the universe stops somewhere but it also can't be that it goes on forever
00:56:48
like what and and yeah and saying that there are people who are sort of troubled by these things in some
00:56:53
real personal way and then there are people who are not troubled by those things and they have
00:57:00
i mean they may be very intelligent and deep people but they don't have these kind of like hold on like what what what's it all
00:57:07
about like was it anyway i'm i'm one of the people who does and it sounds like you are too uh but yeah there would be
00:57:13
something nice to not to not be perhaps in your book you say that we're addicted to the speed of life
00:57:21
is that true and why is that an addiction i'm i'm talking there about
00:57:26
the sort of acceleration of the culture the fact that everything you know moves so fast that we're able to do so
00:57:34
many things so much more quickly travel communicate uh cook food you know then we than we once
00:57:41
could and how and why that like it's a if you stop and think about it it's really weird that all that technology
00:57:48
and all that acceleration has not left us feeling um more relaxed and chilled out right because it saves time
00:57:54
um the world that has 747s in it and microwaves in it and the
00:58:00
internet in it or by right to feel much calmer because it's all this time is say but of
00:58:07
course it doesn't have that effect like it does have has that effect on nobody um it makes everybody feel
00:58:12
more impatient and rushed um and i think that the reason that the the frame of addiction makes
00:58:19
sense i'm drawing on the work of a therapist called stephanie brown who's who was herself
00:58:24
an alcoholic got sober with aa then started being a therapist to in
00:58:31
silicon valley to various people in the sort of first.com boom around to like 2000's
00:58:36
and and seeing in them this trait in their addiction to urge what she called their addiction to urgency their
00:58:42
addiction to speed that reminded her very much of of her youthful experiences as an alcoholic
00:58:48
namely that you're sort of life speeds up you feel overwhelmed you think that going faster it has got to be
00:58:54
the solution right if you go even faster then you can cope with all this rush of incoming information incoming
00:59:00
opportunities whatever it is um so you go faster but then you find that actually
00:59:05
that's just increased the the speed of everything and now you need to go faster still and it's a sort of it's a spiral
00:59:10
and you crash there's controversy about talking about addiction whether it should be kept as a sort of strictly
00:59:16
kind of medical idea but i think that's really it resonates with me because i feel like
00:59:23
it's very tempting in this in this world that feels like there's so much stuff to stay on top of and it moves at such
00:59:29
tempo there is this notion that like the only solution is for you to go even faster than it is to be able to encompass all of that and this is this
00:59:36
is not going to work uh because you are never going to be able to you
00:59:41
know there is an infinite supply right there's an effectively infinite number of emails you could receive
00:59:46
demands your boss could make opportunities you could pursue businesses you could stop whatever
00:59:52
so getting faster at going through an infinite supply you don't get to the end of that because it's infinite so stephanie brown's
00:59:59
advice to her clients and i think it's it's it's very useful is that
01:00:05
all of us who are sort of moving at this speed need to experiment a little bit with like what it feels like to just
01:00:12
slow down to the speed that things take and say you know what i'm i'm if i'm going to read this novel
01:00:18
and it takes my time and it takes i need to look read slowly and focus i'm
01:00:24
just going to like yeah it's not going to feel great at first right because we are wired for racing through things
01:00:31
and it doesn't feel great at first but but it is a path to a much deeper kind of engagement
01:00:37
with the world one of the things i do in the book is i write about um this exercise that i did that
01:00:43
is recommended by an art historian at harvard university who i went to interview who she has all her students choose a painting and go and look at it
01:00:50
for three hours like sit on a little bench whatever and just look at that painting for three
01:00:56
hours take notes if you want but you're not allowed to get up and she knows it's like it's
01:01:03
completely insane for almost anybody today to envisage doing something like that for for three hours
01:01:08
but that's why she that's why she suggests it and you know for the first hour it's incredibly uncomfortable
01:01:14
because you're not in charge anymore you can't race through the day in the way that you were accustomed to
01:01:20
doing but it is so useful because getting through that discomfort to what
01:01:26
lies on the other side is is so empowering i think patience is really a kind of a superpower in the
01:01:33
modern in the modern world and in the context of the painting what happens is you literally see things in the painting
01:01:39
that you haven't seen in the first 45 minutes i mean it's it's bizarre in the context of
01:01:45
work creative work business i think it's more just that like when everyone is racing as fast as
01:01:50
they are today there's actually real power in being able to resist that and let
01:01:56
things take the time they take and think about something for a few more days if that's what it takes like you actually can
01:02:03
have more success that way as well as feel less like a headless chicken is there a role of impatience though is
01:02:09
there a role somewhere in life for impatience it depends how you define it right so in
01:02:15
the book i'm talking about in patients as wanting things to go faster than you can have them go so then i'd say like no
01:02:20
there's never any even if you're sort of um
01:02:26
driving somebody to the hospital because they're going into labor or something right i mean it's like you should do that really fast you
01:02:32
should be urgent you should you should prioritize that and you should you know go as you should drive as fast as is
01:02:38
practical but even then it's probably not worth feeling frustrated that
01:02:43
you're stuck in traffic or something right i mean it's so if impatience is that kind of
01:02:49
frustration at the fact that you have limited control over how fast the world goes how
01:02:56
fast something happens then no i mean it's it's just wild right we now are much more impatient like if a web page
01:03:03
takes five seconds to load like you can feel it it's ridiculous but if somebody says yeah i'll put that
01:03:08
stuff in the mail and you'll get it in three days you're like that's fine right it says okay all right the mail
01:03:20
the faster things get the more offensive it is when they still only take a few seconds like when there's a few seconds
01:03:25
delay um if we're using the word in another way to mean uh
01:03:31
having a sort of hunger for things to change in your life or change in society you know you're not
01:03:37
not willing to sort of sit around and be a be a doormat while things
01:03:43
when you could change things then sure uh i think that's a different kind of impatience and i'm sure it has a role
01:03:49
quick one as many of you know i've been trying to make my life a little bit more sustainable as it relates to energy ever
01:03:54
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01:03:59
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01:04:06
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01:04:41
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01:04:46
changer for a product and one that i'm going to be installing in my home soon in your book you talk about embracing radical incrementalism
01:04:53
what does that mean for you this is the idea that there are contexts
01:04:58
where um really being willing to make progress on the basis of little and
01:05:05
often right kind of gradual progress to do a tiny bit at a time
01:05:10
and not kind of binging on the things you're trying to achieve can be
01:05:15
really powerful um again i'm sorry to keep coming back to writing as an example but the the work that i'm
01:05:21
drawing on there from a psychologist called robert boyce who studied um academics who write and figured trying
01:05:27
to figure out like who are the ones who actually get a ton of papers published and a ton of books written and who are the ones who get mired in um
01:05:34
like procrastination and paralysis and he found that the really productive people in that sphere were the ones who
01:05:40
made writing a um a modest part of their daily life right it occupied like a
01:05:47
couple of hours maybe as opposed to the ones who made it into this huge thing that then became very intimidating and
01:05:53
they got all sorts of like psychodramas going on with it because it was something they were willing to
01:05:58
sort of do for a little bit leave aside come back to and i think this applies to especially applies to
01:06:05
anything that is like brain work but i think it applies to pretty much all all kinds of endeavor right there's often a
01:06:11
huge benefit in being willing to say well i'm going to work on this
01:06:16
for a tiny amount of time today and i'm going to stop even if i'm on a roll right when my time is up i'm going to
01:06:22
stop and then i'm going to come back it makes it something that you can sustain day after day after days if you do the
01:06:29
opposite of incrementalism right if you give this if you give this sort of absolutely center stage in your life then if it goes well great if it doesn't
01:06:35
go well it becomes this kind of huge intimidating uh thing and i've found that you know if
01:06:42
i'm working on a book say really sort of almost embarrassingly small work days on it
01:06:50
regularly done day after day after day so much more productive like in terms of
01:06:55
the actual output deadlines though because when i wrote my book i think this the deadline of having to send to the publisher just hung over
01:07:01
me and was like forcing me to okay speak today you have to write three you know 3 000 words
01:07:08
yeah i think deadlines have their role right and i you know i would have got nowhere without deadlines in newspapers
01:07:14
because they sort of kept they sort of helped me sort of bust through perfectionism and stuff because it was just literally you know it's i did these
01:07:21
things on a i would write these kind of features for the guardian where i had to like um that the idea
01:07:27
came to me or was given to me at uh like 10 30 in the morning and 5 pm they needed a
01:07:32
two and a half thousand word researched article you just be like okay i've just got to do it
01:07:37
but um [Music] in a way i'm sort of training myself out
01:07:42
of that now and i think that just to make it it isn't a it's perfectly okay
01:07:48
and it's fine but but it but it isn't sustainable i think that you know that the
01:07:54
to really over the long haul be able to do something like like writing i've found requires
01:08:00
that i have acquired this ability for sort of dogged persistence rather than you know
01:08:07
cruising to the to the deadline another topic that people hate talking about or that at
01:08:12
least it seems to make people really uncomfortable and i sometimes i just bring up the conversation because i like to see
01:08:17
i find the the con i find the reaction to be really
01:08:23
i find the reaction to be really fascinating is this idea which you talk about which is that we need to embrace
01:08:28
our like relative irrelevance oh yeah in the world and when i say this to people
01:08:34
you can see it sometimes shattering something in them the idea that they don't matter in the grand scheme of the universe they
01:08:40
really don't matter what like why is what is the upside of embracing my own irrelevance this idea
01:08:46
and do i matter oliver depends what you mean by matter do i matter in this in the grand scheme of
01:08:52
the universe i don't really think any of us i think i mean i think i mean what i'm what i want
01:08:58
to say about this is if you adopt a cosmic time scale right if you love the history of like the
01:09:03
cosmos or even just the planet like no human life
01:09:09
uh or even anything that is done in a human life you know almost nothing will outlive us and the things that do
01:09:15
outlive us like you know people inventing great scientific breakthroughs or something
01:09:21
even then the the period that these have been relevant if you look at the cosmos
01:09:26
is still like a tiny blink of an eye um so i think there is a sort of inbuilt bias
01:09:33
that most of us have not not just the ones who are megalomaniacs but almost all of us to to think
01:09:40
sort of subliminally of history as having led up to like tower bit of history right and
01:09:46
then to think of the decisions that we take in the things that we're doing as fundamentally the most important things
01:09:52
that are going on in that bit of history and that's on some level we probably have to right just to sort of short to be able to like get up in the morning
01:09:59
it's not you can't think of yourself as this kind of tiny pimpric of light in the middle of eons of
01:10:05
darkness of the cosmos from the big bang to the you know to to when the universe
01:10:11
ends or whatever but actually you can really get bogged down in that you can really be like well you
01:10:17
can spend a long time mined an indecision about things because you've built the stakes up in your head
01:10:23
to an enormous degree you can really get sort of
01:10:30
depressed about whether you can really have an impact on things because it has to be something that lives for millennia
01:10:36
after you're gone or something and when you realize how little most of it's going to matter quite soon i some people
01:10:42
do go down that into like despair and horror but i think that is a reason to be like why not
01:10:48
take the risk like why not do the bold things it's like the stakes are a lot lower than you thought the universe
01:10:54
doesn't really care um you don't need to worry about whether you're fulfilling your
01:11:00
purpose that the universe had laid down for you because there kind of isn't one and that's actually it's liberating as i
01:11:06
keep saying it's a reason to it's a reason to sort of experimentally do the things that seem to you like the
01:11:12
the the the coolest things to do then what you can do is you can you can use a definition of
01:11:18
mattering according to which so much that we do matters right because
01:11:23
i think it's difficult for people to remember that like i don't know i don't want to use a
01:11:29
definition of a meaningful life that rules out some very mundane things like caring for
01:11:37
a sick relative cooking nutritious meals for your kids making your neighborhood a slightly more
01:11:42
beautiful place to live in like we don't want a definition of the meaning of meaningful lives that says none of those things are meaningful surely um
01:11:50
and so yeah i can imagine that it's an interesting issue for sort of people who
01:11:57
people who look up to you specifically for example thinking that thinking that it's actually like they've got to emulate you in order to be doing
01:12:02
something meaningful rather than be inspired by you which is different which is a different point right because
01:12:09
actually very very everyday mundane things
01:12:14
can be meaningful and it's quite possible that the most fulfilled people on the planet are precisely the ones you
01:12:19
never hear from because they're doing low profile things and then you know i have this theory
01:12:25
maybe it's maybe it's insulting to you this theory but i have this theory that like the more of a public profile someone has
01:12:32
and i have a modest one so it supplies to me too but like that's probably like to that degree
01:12:38
is like they're screwed up in some way because they have some problem with not being ordinary
01:12:47
and then you know the hollywood a-list those people are probably the most
01:12:54
no it is i mean it definitely begets more problems i i noticed that this week i had a journalist email me saying that
01:13:00
five years ago one of your ex-employees says your dog did a poop in the office and you didn't pick it up and i thought [ __ ] how
01:13:06
this is what my life has become genuinely and i i was like ponder i've been pondering it ever since i received
01:13:12
that email that now that like my life is of somewhat public interest it means everything every like
01:13:19
fault i might have made or didn't make um is now i'm now gonna be like scrutinized for and i'm now gonna have
01:13:25
to justify because if i don't then my life could be cancelled right which is a tough bar to
01:13:31
live by and one i wish i didn't have to live by to be honest but it is fascinating because
01:13:36
if i had said that you know our our own death and irrelevance could be a motivating force
01:13:43
it doesn't appear on the surface that that makes sense but i completely agree that my own fine like the finality of my
01:13:49
life and my own irrelevance are two things that liberate me from getting caught up in the idea that a comment on
01:13:54
instagram matters or how my hair is matters and that hopefully liberates me enough to go in the pursuit of things
01:14:00
that do provide me with my own subjective meaning in life so yeah and that help other people and lift other people up right it's not that when i
01:14:06
talk i talk in the book about cosmic insignificance and i sort of mean that right it's like from the perspective of the cosmos no it doesn't matter but that
01:14:13
doesn't mean that it doesn't matter it can matter to
01:14:18
people here today you know one of the things we do in this podcast a long-standing tradition is we ask
01:14:23
people who've just come in to leave a question for the next guest so the last guest leaves a question for the next guest
01:14:29
before i do that in the back of your book you you pun you leave the reader five questions for them to ponder i
01:14:35
wanted to ask you one of your own questions from the five that you left so i'm gonna go for question four in
01:14:42
which areas of your life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you're doing
01:14:54
yeah this is definitely one that speaks to me i mean obviously i obviously i put the questions in because they speak to
01:15:00
me but like this is this difficulty that i think we all have but i really have had with realizing that like on some level everyone is winging it
01:15:06
so it sort of speaks to imposter syndrome and things like that and and and and not feeling not launching into
01:15:13
things until you feel that you're that you're ready recently since the book was out
01:15:19
i've been giving more sort of talks and speeches than i ever have done in my life before and um
01:15:25
you know i've sort of been forced into not holding back on that because the invitations come in and i say yes to them and then it's like oh my god i got
01:15:31
to do this that is something where i feel perpetually un ready um
01:15:39
and if it was up to me i would uh
01:15:44
probably have left it you know some more i mean it was up to me but if i'd felt that it was up to me i would have left it some more years to sort of get really
01:15:51
good at doing that and uh uh you know and and i
01:15:56
and i'm not i'm not ready but it seems to be going okay um
01:16:02
i kind of evaded that question by by saying by by giving you an example of something where i'm not holding back
01:16:07
because i'm actually doing them but um i think that answer was really good does it count no it does it does count and i
01:16:14
it really speaks to because i also believe that had been of your own choice to get really good before you do it you
01:16:19
probably never would have done it right which is what most people it's like the trap of the mind that i will launch my
01:16:24
business when i have some time or i will launch it when i am i've learned something but we
01:16:30
never there's never a perfect time so unfortunately we're forced into picking an imperfect time yeah and now is always
01:16:36
an imperfect time so i always try and employ people on that basis to do the thing that they think the perfect day will enable um
01:16:43
now to ask you the question that our previous guest did leave
01:16:48
oh okay so i never read it until until i opened the book um they have good handwriting so i can
01:16:54
read this one do you do enough to keep learning
01:17:04
uh that's a very good question um no i
01:17:09
there are definitely i i i definitely aspire to make more space in my days for especially for reading
01:17:18
why uh [Music] because it gets squeezed out by
01:17:24
by doing things related to writing and books it actually gets hard to sort of
01:17:30
keep that section of of time for just sort of the exploration
01:17:36
of uh ideas in in that way on the other hand i
01:17:41
want to say that things like uh becoming a parent even things like
01:17:48
moving back from new york to the uk like there are certain ways in which you learn that are not like
01:17:54
book based learning and you just sort of are dragged forwards in your education whether you like it or not and i think
01:18:01
in those ways it's more a question of seeing what you're being taught and that you are learning than than
01:18:07
needing to make more time for learning that's an interesting question but also in your being pulled
01:18:12
into speaking more and all that yeah absolutely new skills that you have to sort of you're doing yeah no totally but
01:18:19
i it is but it is just the honest answer is it is something that i i don't feel sort of
01:18:25
satisfied about in terms of my the apportionment of my of my time what about stuff like this
01:18:31
and coming here today this is i love this kind of conversation and um and i think obviously you learn from it
01:18:37
completely um but uh so i think what i'm talking about is sort of
01:18:43
yeah i guess it is the i guess it is exposing myself to new avenues
01:18:49
of thinking that are not sort of jumping off from things that i've already thought about yeah i don't know yeah i
01:18:54
this kind of conversation is great well thank you and thank you for writing such a brilliant book one that i feel
01:19:00
like is going to liberate people from a lot of [ __ ] that's holding them back in many many ways from stress to anxiety
01:19:06
to feelings of inadequacy because we're trying to live up to a social expectation that is unachievable and i
01:19:11
think i know for a fact that based on the questions i get asked a lot in my dms that my audience should read this book
01:19:18
so i implore them to do so because also the way that you write is from such a nuanced human perspective which is um
01:19:26
avoiding the like cheap answers or the binary um answers to some of the big
01:19:32
questions about life productivity efficiency and everything that plagues us in the modern world so thank you for writing such a great book
01:19:38
thank you for your time as well and yeah it's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you thank you so much that's so kind of you to say i've really enjoyed it
01:19:44
thank you
01:19:52
oh
01:19:59
[Music]
01:20:08
bye
