Time and how we use it
We’ve been fans of Oliver Burkeman’s work for many years, and so it was a privilege to spend an hour in his company recently.
It was also great to be back in the saddle on the Friday Fireside after an extended hiatus and feel the warmth from those that joined us live (one of the reasons we love Crowdcast) with comments like these:
“Thanks so much for this talk — it’s been brilliant.”
Diane Hutchinson“Thank you! Wonderful conversation.”
Kieran Morris“So good as ever! Taking away few pearls of wisdom.”
Liliana Ashton
Watch this episode
Here are some takeaways from our conversation:
1. You don’t need to be original with your ideas
Just point people to what’s in their line of vision. Oliver points out that human finitude isn’t a new concept, the important thing is he’s showing us something that we’ve probably understood on some level and are curious about. Ultimately he sees our role as creators as sharing experiences of being in the same boat, rather than hitting on some breakthrough innovation in how we do it.
2. You don’t need to talk to everyone
We talked about Kevin Kelly’s concept of 1000 True Fans, and how we don’t need millions of followers or a completely unique take on things to be a blockbuster success, but rather attract a small group of people that love us for what we say or do. Oliver encouraged us to ‘say things in a specific way that is true to you and you will find the small number of people around the planet that are on the same wavelength and want more of that’. It can be a miniscule number in the scheme of things, but big enough to make it all worth doing and to bring about real change.
3. You don’t need to solve people’s problems definitively with your ideas
What you can do is get better and more eloquent at sharing the journey and bring people into your lived experience. Oliver talked about the famous 1960s writer and speaker Alan Watts who called himself a ‘spiritual entertainer’ and said words to the effect of “This is the point of view I enjoy and other people seem to enjoy sharing this point of view with me.”. Your philosophy and world view may well resonate with people more than anything you do to solve their problems specifically.
4. Embrace the finitude of life
Oliver said he enjoys “spending more of life in this mental space of coming to terms with finitude and being OK with our imperfections, and acknowledging that stuff does not mean resignation or mediocrity. It’s actually the basis for doing cool, exciting, and interesting things in life.” He sees kindling this in others as where his work is.
5. You can’t do it all, so stop trying to
“The shift from ‘it’s hard to get everything done / achieve everything I want to’ to ‘it’s impossible’ can be liberating.” Oliver spent years experimenting with different time management techniques as part of his Guardian column, and in his words, he ‘got to the bottom of the barrel’ before he realised it was futile.
6. Doubt is the only solid ground
Oliver says that, as paradoxical as it sounds, this idea from Zen Buddhism has some weight to it. ‘Fully opening to exactly what our situation is and what we can’t control is the only security worth a name’.
7. Choose growth over fear
If you’re at a fork in the road in your life or career, don’t ask ‘what will make me happy?’, but rather this prompt from Jungian psychotherapist James Hollis: ‘does the path I’m about to embark on enlarge or diminish me?’ This typically helps us discriminate between the kinds of unpleasant challenges that are a necessary part of growth versus those that are bad for us in the long term.
8. Everybody is winging it all the time
Oliver said: “Other people’s sense of confident certainty about where they’re heading is mainly an act or an illusion of some kind. And that feeling unready for doing the thing that you’re doing is a universal situation. And I find that belief very consoling, but also empowering because it means that if I feel unready to do something, that’s not a good reason not to do it”
9. Choose sanity now rather than later
If there is some value that you want to express in your life, or peace of mind you’re seeking, you have to decide to express it now, and then work on deepening it — rather than buckling down and telling yourself that with enough stress and hard work it will be coming in a month or year. If part of your goal is to write everyday or go on a walk everyday, then start doing those things today (exceptions aside), not later when you think the time will magically appear. If you don’t you’ll be reinforcing this psychological pattern that fulfilment and peace of mind is always in the future, not here and now.
So there it is.
Life is painfully, excruciatingly short — I’ll be lucky if I have 2000 weeks left. Because of this, we only have limited bandwidth. And doubt is certain.
The good news? You don’t need to be for everyone, solve their problems, or even be original.
You just need to be true to yourself and your ideas and show others the way.
And anyway, everyone is winging it, so stop worrying and choose sanity now.
Now that’s a life worth living.
Notes
Thanks to Oliver for his time. For more on his work visit www.oliverburkeman.com
If you’d like to better explore your relationship to time and how you use it, then we’re now recruiting for the next tribe of our Vision 20/20 program.
