265 - Time, productivity, and purpose: insights from Four Thousand Weeks | Oliver Burkeman

this desire for control over time manifests as a desire for control over the future for as a antidote to worry and uh as well as being a sort of productivity geek and all the rest of it I'm certainly a sort of inveterate Warrior about the future and I write in the book about the ways in which a lot of worry and kind of obsessive planning can be understood as an attempt to kind of from the standpoint of the present kind of thrower straight jacket over the future right to feel like you've got it under your control you know what's coming when in fact another of the aspects of our being finite human beings is like what's been called like our total vulnerability to events right Anything could happen at any moment to anyone that's just the way it you know it is to be uh human hey everyone welcome to the drive podcast I'm your host Peter attia Oliver thank you so much for making time to speak uh in your evening uh it's I've been looking forward to this for for quite a quite a quite a while as I was saying earlier when we spoke um your book is is is one of these four books that kind of fits into I don't know call it like books about the quality of one's life that have more to do with the way you live than some of the more physiological and biochemical things that I tend to think of commonly uh of course so so in addition to your book people have not only heard me talk about these books but interview the authors Ryan holiday with respect to his book Stillness is the key Bill Perkins the die with zero and Arthur Brooks from strength to strength so to be able to sit here and speak with you today is really exciting because it sort of puts a bow on these on these four uh books and and um it's a it's a book I've enjoyed several times now and I still am not convinced I fully understand it so I'm really looking forward to speaking oh thank you I'm really really happy to be here I'm looking forward to getting into it absolutely when I read the book there was a lot I could relate to because um I'm definitely a productivity geek uh I probably have been as long as I can remember I've always kept lists I love pens and journals and I love to organize and um even at a young age and you know growing up it was clear that there is almost pathological consequences to this because if things were not done there would be emotional consequences um so tell me a little bit about your experience in this Arena it sounds like this is something that came naturally to you as well uh that sounds alarmingly similar to me uh as a as a young adult anyway I don't know about as a kid but um certainly feeling very very motivated not realizing at the time obviously that it wasn't just the normal way to try to get your homework done and get your college assignments in on on time but but this real sense that there must be a way of kind of getting on top of my time and structuring my time that would enable me to sort of yeah deal with everything that was thrown at me not have to make difficult decisions and fail to implicate certain people who are making demands and not have to make any choices about which direction I was going in because I would be so I would be so efficient that I would that I would do it all and you get well in my experience anyway I don't know about yours you you get to this place where you often feel very nearly like you're you're there right you feel like it might only be a month or two of really disciplined work before you're going to be at the the sun lit Uplands of uh effortless productivity but instead you end up sort of making fresh starts every you know introducing a new system downloading a new app buying a new notebook every year every every month thought or two um so yeah that was that was definitely me and then I got into a position professionally where I could write about a lot of this stuff and continue to sort of go deep into it and I think this book is probably what came from sort of exhausting that right realizing that I'd got to the I tried like a hundred different productivity systems and they hadn't given me the emotional thing I was seeking so maybe there was a problem with the the question I was asking rather than that I just hadn't found the the right solution yeah there's a line in there you you throw away and I don't remember who it's attributed to but it's um effectively we we teach what we most need to learn something to that effect right yes Richard Buck I think Jonathan Livingston Seagull um yeah and not only that in terms of where the book came from but even in terms of the book itself right it's like it's a whole bunch of advice that I needed to hear and still need to hear so it's always a little bit funny to me or awkward when I run into people who assume that the book describes the sort of daily state of Serenity in which I actually live my life because I I don't and I certainly you know I totally still struggle with with all of this stuff but that's what makes it interesting I think to to to me um it's not it's not interesting to to write about to try to Grapple with things that that come easily to you so this question of like how you Orient yourself inside time in a in a finite life I I you know it's endlessly fascinating to me but I certainly don't feel like I've resolved it or you said something a second ago that I think is very important especially for someone who hasn't read the book um I think for those of us who have read it it makes a lot of sense and it's um and I'm going to paraphrase you but you you basically said you all of this productivity all of these hacks didn't give you what you were looking for emotionally and again someone who didn't read the book that's a bit counter-intuitive because the whole purpose of productivity is not some emotional thing it's to get more stuff done right it's to you know be more efficient but I think you're tying it back to something that is much deeper at our root as individuals that really comes down to time and our view of time and whether we consciously think about finitude or not subconsciously we are all aware of it at all times so let's talk a little bit about that and maybe um well we can do it in any way that you find it helpful but I I think that the way you write about it through the lens of evolution is quite helpful and how we go from you know an era when we didn't keep time through the Industrial Revolution when all of a sudden timekeeping became essential yeah yeah no I think that historical lens is really uh Illuminating on some level it's my working hypothesis my working thesis that that everyone has always struggled with being finite we are these sort of unique creatures as humans who are both fully material animals and at the same time can can think about and know about the fact that we're going to that we're going to die one day so we're in this kind of unique anguished situation uh but we haven't always had a had the kind of ideas about time that enable us to then try to use time management or productivity or planning or scheduling to try to you know engage in emotional avoidance of that scary issue of our finitude right so all the way back through the record of philosophy back to the ancient Greeks and Romans there are people grappling with the fact that there is death but it's only in a widespread way uh with maybe not the Industrial Revolution but running up to that and certainly Beyond after it that most people would were thinking I think about time as a resource right so it's not just the medium in which your life unfolds it's like this it's almost like there's you and there's time and it's your job somehow to try to handle time in the right way you feel like you have an adversarial relationship with time right most people feel either hounded by all the stuff they've got to do in the time available or some people might feel that there's not enough to fill their time with but all of these things kind of imply a relationship between you and your time which is actually quite an odd notion once you really start to think about it the idea that it should be something separate so I guess at the root of my argument is yeah the idea that most of the stress and the trouble and the anxiety and the lack of meaning and the things that we encounter in our relationship with time come from sort of pathological versions of this idea that it's something for us to try to use as well as we can or handle or manage or master and most of our deepest experiences as humans of of truly meaningful and fulfilling moments seem to involve a kind of Falling Away of those Concepts and are falling back into just presence in this one moment that we that we have of course you need to think about time as a resource in order to do all sorts of things that we do in in modern society but I think um a lot of the problems arise from thinking that that is all time is and that there is some place in the future we can get to where we have finally nailed our relationship with it does that make sense yeah it really does I mean I I think the idea that productivity is a trap is is very interesting the idea that it's a distraction from something else is even more interesting and the idea that it can never be fully attained is anybody who's tried uh is sadly true um we're not born this way I mean those of us that have kids clearly observe young children playing in a way that is untethered from time as a separate entity and yet somewhere along the way we become inculcated with and maybe it's to varying degrees you and I probably more than others um with this sense of time Mastery being important how and when do you think that transition occurs I mean my my assumption is that it occurs in all different ways at different stages and my son is six but I absolutely have seen some glimmers of you know his father's uh unhelpful attitudes to time so maybe it's passed on in the in in the in the genes or in sort of subtle ways that I can't clearly uh control so he sometimes gets into this place of wanting to be sort of uh wanting to know exactly what's happening over the next 24 48 72 hours um I think here it's most useful though just to just to look at the at a perspective that much kind of um Psychotherapy and depth psychology would would point to which is that you know in various different ways as we grow up and as we are raised even when we're raised by basically excellent parents there are things that are missing from our sense of things that give us less than a sort of completely comfortable secure sense of of self-worth um and of everything being absolutely fine in the world there are people who have this much more extremely than others but there's some something that you're trying to fill right by the time you're by the time you're a young adult there's something that isn't quite ideal there and I think that we use all sorts of things and obviously some people use substance abuse and all sorts of other things to to try to Grapple with these things that feel like they're missing and I think that productivity uh is especially you know people who for one reason or another have ended up with the idea that their that their value as people that they're um their right to exist on the planet or to feel that they are you know enough as human beings is somehow dependent on their on their output uh and on attaining certain certain levels of um accomplishment the people David Brooks calls insecure overachievers right um which is a uh I think a great phrase and sums it up well um I think they're the ones who are naturally drawn to this idea that they've really got to um uh try to double down on the Technologies of time control to try to get as efficient as they can and process as much as they can there are of course other people we know them right who for some reason are deeply psychologically invested in in not um accomplishing things in in making themselves feel that they're not part of that whole you know uh process of accomplishment of becoming sort of a a slacker in a very sort of proactive and deliberate way so I think in all sorts of different ways we're just trying to kind of we're just trying to sort of trying to plug in a in a in a LAX and um you know the problems with that are going to manifest in in different ways the the obvious problem with productivity as a way to get to that kind of state of peace of mind is just that there's a complete baked in mismatch between being a finite human being and uh existing in a world of effectively infinite possibilities right infinite emails you could answer infinite Ambitions you could have infinite places you could you could go if you're trying if your job if your self-worth is staked I'm trying to get your arms around all of that but it's actually uh an infinite quantity then that's just a that's just going to be a an unending struggle so what would you say to somebody who says no no it's different I I can actually do this like I can juggle these five projects and I can get my inbox to zero I just need a little more time like I'm right on the cusp of doing it um and if I just put my head down for the next six months like it's it's gonna be okay how would you explain to them that that's kind of a fallacy I mean there are two ways into that aren't there I feel like one is to say the the one of the greatest questions in terms of self-change and self-knowledge which is just um how's that working out for you so far you know um and I think to some extent these are kind of Revelations of the middle of life because you have to have uh you have to have tried this out for uh quite a while and you know if you're 20 telling yourself that the real part of life is still coming makes a certain amount of sense when you're in your 40s and you're still telling yourself that the real part of life is is coming later and this is still a dress rehearsal for that moment it might begin to strike you as as no longer quite so quite so credible the other way of getting into that is just to say that um there seems to be this pretty much universal law that um if all you do is become more efficient uh in any system is made just more efficient with with nothing else being done in terms of how you select your priorities if all you're doing is trying to process more stuff then all else being equal that will attract more and more stuff to do into your life so getting getting better at processing email at a faster tempo just basically attracts more email into your life for Fairly straightforward reasons you you reply to more people and they reply to your replies and you have to reply to those replies you get a reputation in your organization or wherever it is for being very responsive on email so more people email you so there's this kind of unending uh aspect to it um that occurs in lots of other domains uh uh besides email and and so you can't ever actually you're not going to get through an effectively infinite supply of something by by processing it more efficiently in fact the opposite is going to happen um and so I think that's why this it always feels like this um like this moment of of Mastery is is just over the just over the horizon but it's never quite it's never quite Where You Are it is a very um deceitful feeling uh for anyone who's struggled with it I think just maybe the word struggled is the right word right it's because you really do feel at times you're so close to just nailing it and then it will be different yeah tell me about your your Journeys here I mean there's a whole I I'm kind of one of these guys who tries to inbox to zero never successfully um what is the is it called the Pomodoro Technique you you briefly touched on your dabbling in that what's that technique and and what are some of the others the other techniques that people are exploring as ways to defy the gravitational inevitability of uh of what we're talking about well this is a really interesting point actually I I think it's a one worth emphasizing the Pomodoro Technique is many people will know I'm sure is this is this approach where you you divide up your work time into 25 minute periods interspersed with five minute breaks and then after you've done four of those you take a longer break and it's just a way of sort of boxing up your time other approaches to the sort of classic approach of time boxing that involves you know giving every segment of your calendar a specific job uh uh and there are you know 100 other of these kinds of techniques and many many of them including the Pomodoro Technique are so like totally great like there's absolutely nothing intrinsically wrong I don't think with with um you know using this or that protocol for when you say great meaning they will increase an individual's productivity yeah right I mean they're well they are fine as a way of structuring your day that might well help you make the right choices uh understand how much time you have available and therefore decide that certain things are more important uses of that time than than not and if you read the writing of the guy who invented the Pomodoro Technique he's very on board with this idea that it's about turning time from being an adversary to an ally by just sort of seeing that you're in some sense your time already is made up of 25 minute periods right and you could look at it that way so it's just a question of uh uh being explicit about that and making choices about what you're going to put in those times and taking appropriate rests all of these techniques are when I say great I mean all of these techniques are like fine if they if they work as a way of lending order to the day I think the real problem that you see again and again and I certainly had fur for a long time is that people see them as they throw themselves on them as kind of you know paths to this salvation that I think we are talking about in some implicit way because it is a very sort of religious feeling uh in in some ways uh they they think that they can ride this approach to life to that point of finally feeling like they're doing enough finally feeling like they're like the air traffic controller of their of their lives and that's the problem right so you know I mentioned in the book um my early experiments with with David Allen's getting things done um the big sort of you know which kick-started the modern uh phase of productivity writing and there's so much great stuff in that in that book uh some of which I still in some ways practice today but I completely I was so fixated in this idea that I was somehow going to be able to do everything that I I completely missed what he says very clearly early in that book which is that it's it's about having too much to do and staying calm in the middle of having too much to do and I totally took it as a way that was going to help me not have too much to do because I would have done ever I would have been managing to do everything and um and we're just a certain kind of person anyway I think really drawn to just we just take anything and co-opt it into this psychological project of uh trying to feel like we're fully in in fully in control of our lives in a way that we that we can't be um I'm fascinated to talk to you about this because it seems that a lot of I think you could easily see that a lot of the that a lot of the more physiological physical biological stuff could easily be dragooned into a similar kind of kind of project of feeling in total total control of our situation um I don't know if you see that happening I I do in yourself maybe I don't know no absolutely and and um you know I I sort of write about his in the epilogue of my book where I sort of say you know I think when when my obsession with this topic began about a decade ago I mean maybe 15 years ago in one way but but really in Earnest a decade ago um there's zero question in my mind with with the you know with the benefit of the Retro spectroscope I have today that it was 100 percent a how do I run from Death basically it was just this is this is just a I'm gonna put my head in the sand and and March my way towards something that deep deep down I know is impossible which is immortality but I'm gonna Focus so much on this thing that you know I'm not going to confront my fear of death or I'm going to confront my fear of death by shouting louder at that fear with this thing this thing and this thing is all the things I'm going to do to live longer um I think a lot of people can relate to that and I think people have different reasons for it I talk about what my reasons were for that but um but I can I can say now that I realized that completely I have a slightly different take today but it but like you I still struggle meaning I still watch people die and get very sad uh just uh recently someone who I actually had on the podcast died and he was you know in his early 80s so you know by most people's standards hey he he lived two and maybe slightly Beyond normal life expectancy but I don't know it just it always bothers me when when someone dies you know it still does and I intellectually I know that that's a very bizarre way to feel that you know he he had his four thousand weeks he did a lot with those four thousand weeks um he he had a wonderful family like you have all of these things like there's nothing to mourn other than the fact that he's not here and yet I still have a sense of sadness about that and I understand that that part of that produces a distraction from what's happening today like if you dwell on that too much you miss out on the fact that well the best thing you can do to honor the Legacy or the memory or whatever is to to do your thing today um but you know you're right another thing you write about that I love is the the challenge of trying too hard to be present right this this is also this has equally become kind of cult-like which is yeah I am going to be the most present person ever and like I'm going to will myself into that uh so so say a bit about that yeah I mean it's it's it's it feels like it's the natural reaction at first when you sort of begin to realize that you've been running into the future for so long through these kinds of uh techniques in this approach um it's like all right surely what I have to do is the opposite of that and that's like be really really present and then you read books on mindfulness that say you know uh when you're washing the dishes when you're loading the dishwasher just just do that thing be present in that moment and then you find right something sort of paradoxical about how the mind works in those contexts as soon as you're self-consciously trying to will yourself into the moment then you're not doing it because what you're actually doing is is thinking about um whether you're in the moment enough and so yeah I tell this absurd story in the in the book about um getting to witness the the Northern Lights when I was in uh Northern Canada and having been sort of like getting excited about it for several days of my trip and and um and when it finally happened and I was sort of dragged out of the place I was sleeping by some neighboring guests at sort of two in the morning um uh to to see this um just finding myself thinking like firstly trying really hard to be there and being very much aware that as a result I was I was not and then just having stray thoughts like that it looked like an old PC screensaver and all these kind of like these terrible thoughts that just totally totally ruined the kind of sacredness of the moment because I had been uh so sort of cognitively engaged with trying to be there and by contrast you know we can all point I think to moments in life that sort of perfect afternoons and things like this that were not planned they were not because we set out to um have a perfect a perfect day um so there's kind of a theme that runs through all this I think it comes up thinking about rest and Recreation and Leisure as well that you do sort of to make there's a sense it just sounds like a sort of annoying Paradox but there's a there's a sense in which you do have to be willing to waste time to to make the most of time you do have to be willing to um to just sort of care a bit less about whether given afternoon given weekend is is spent in a deeply meaningful way in order to maximize the the chances of it of sort of lucking out into one of those deeply meaningful times because you need to not be fixated on on trying to on trying to force the force the matter and what do you think that means I mean is that something that can only be appreciated in in retrospect or is that something that will also be appreciated in the moment meaning you mean you mean the sense of meaning yeah this experience that that I I think we're acknowledgingly want right we're acknowledging that we we want to feel a certain way and I think you're doing a pretty good job establishing especially for anybody who's tried you're not going to achieve that sense of meaning by achieving like right getting more things done on the to-do list is not going to be the path to make that happen um and so there's what what is that thing that we're trying to make happen and do we know it when it's happening huh that's a really good question that I don't know that I really know what I think about um certainly just in my immediate direct experience the the best times in life are either best in in recollection in hindsight or they are you know flow states in the moment which and and as we know from flow States right it's like it's can you be aware that you're in them I think just in some bodily sense you can be aware that you're in them but you can't you're not in them once you're thinking too hard about them in a in a in a in a in a verbal way um I don't know if it's quite the same point but maybe it connects I think that one of the strangest parts of this is that um is that happiness feels like sort of the wrong the wrong framing for for what we're what we're talking about here I'm I'm always really really um fascinated by those moments in people's lives and I've had a couple of them myself where somebody close to you is going through some sort of immediate serious crisis there's there's nothing good about what's happening you you wouldn't want it if you could have chosen for it not to be happening it wouldn't be happening and then in the middle of this emergency you it's just obvious that you've got some like your job is to like I don't know do their dry cleaning it might not be being a shoulder to cry on it depends you know it might be it might be your job is something very mundane to just keep someone do your make your contribution to somebody uh weathering this crisis and that sense of knowing that you're in exactly the right place that like there is no question there's no um it makes you realize how I feel among my friends I have a good reputation of being quite good in a crisis which feels very flattering until you think about it what it really means is you're just incredibly ambivalent and indecisive in all other times right because it's it's when you have a when you have a choice about what you should be doing there is this great sense of sort of second guessing and fretting and being indecisive and yeah I think we all have these experiences when there isn't really a choice when choice is taken away when it's incredibly obvious what you should be doing to help in that moment which are in some sense deeply fulfilling even though they're not happy um and I think there's a clue there to what we're looking for in other times of of life it is this sense that there's not really any option of manipulating our experience fitting a few more things in worrying whether we're missing out on something else all that sort of goes away in those times I don't know if it's the same point but it does seem really important to me do you think what you're describing can exist um or is at least well let's just start with that can that exist without some interaction with another person because the example you gave requires another person right in this sense uh it in this case it requires that you are there to help another person so which we're gonna I want to talk much more about the use of time as a good versus sort of a a shared good but but we'll come to that because I think that's one of the most important points of the book and there are many um but as I sort of rack my brain to think about the most joyful moments and I say this as a 10 out of 10 introvert I mean I need endless amounts of time by myself uh to function if I don't have that I come off the rails but the truest Joy I have even as a 10 out of 10 introvert is with others and it makes me wonder is what we're talking about here so much about the relationship of not just time but time with others I'll give you an example so yeah I play this game with with with patients where I sort of say like you know if you could be in perfect health indefinitely so you we're going to Grant you eternal life but you have to do it on a desert island now it's a great desert island because you don't have to find your own coconuts like everything you want is there right so we've somehow solved every problem and away from the island there are robots churning away giving you everything you need so you've got your Netflix you've got your food you've got your whatever to your heart's content You Can Have Anything the only thing you can't have is another human being are you happy and most people when they think about this for just a few minutes come to the conclusion no it would be very difficult to be happy whatever whatever we define happiness is that's such a sloppy word but but you you know fill in the blank your positive valence very difficult I mean what do you think of that and what does that tell us here yeah it's super interesting I think it's I think it's basically right I think that I think that we're talking about things that can only happen in some form of relationship I would say that there probably can be such a thing as you know your relationship with parts of yourself um you know that I think when people are journaling for example they are maybe in a relation with unconscious parts of themselves I think you can be in relationship with with the natural world in certain ways um but by and large I think it's I think you're right that you know the the deepest ways in which we're in relationship are with with other people and I mean there's a million different angles to to sort of endorse that point uh stated like that it it doesn't sound super controversial I think where it connects to what I'm so interested in and I'm writing about in the book is that um it's there's a sense in which other other people other consciousnesses are kind of um in some way they're sort of an affront to any idea that we can use our intellect to control our world right because as soon as you're in any kind of even slightly intimate relationship of Friendship with somebody else it's like people have their own agendas you have to you you're brought into an encounter with your your limits because you you can't just like uh make the rhythms of family life go exactly as you uh uh want them to do if you manage that you find everyone else is very miserable and that's not what you wanted so um we're sort of brought into this encounter with the fact that we that we are these finite uh beings and I think that's really important and edifying for us somehow because part of what is going wrong at least for me in my personal experience with the whole Mastery of time uh approach is it it's some notion that I ought to be able to solve the the problem of life with with my intellect right that I ought to be able to figure out the the workflow and the scheme and the goal setting system and like and and work life out and other people are at once you know a constant reminder that you can't use your own intellect to work out life because everyone else is living their own lives and has their own agendas um and also that huge numbers of just very practical things that mean anything to us just can't be done except in some form of relationship so whether what you care about is uh raising a family making music playing sports uh being pursuing a sort of a religious Faith or you know building a business or um being a political activist like a million different kinds of things that that that energize people but they all have that in common that need to collaborate and that uh that understanding that like you you don't get to run life in the way that I think we often feel that way that we want to um and actually I give some examples in the book right of people who sort of get into the position where they do have an extraordinary amount of control over how time unfolds in their own lives and then find themselves kind of lonely and and miserable uh as a result of that yeah let's let's talk about uh Mario uh I mean I don't know if that's who you're referring to in the moment but it's an interesting story I hadn't heard of this this character uh it's kind of bizarre yeah and I feel like I shouldn't uh I shouldn't uh defame him he may be I suppose as I say in the book he may be happy all I'm saying is I know that I would not be happy if I had designed uh yeah yeah I think that's a fair point let's do it through the lens of I agree with you I would be great I would be very unhappy in doing what he's doing regardless of the luxury the opulence the wealth uh sounds like you would you would share in that just just tell folks briefly what the story is yeah so is this guy um who uh is the subject of uh New York Times short movie called um the happiest guy in the world I think it's called which is how he describes himself and his fellow who has um constructed a life spent almost entirely living on board a cruise cruise ships um as a sort of the ultimate loyal customer of uh of the cruise line that he uh frequents and this movie is just a short really well made movie um and you can tell from the title that the filmmaker also is skeptical that uh of his self-description as the happiest guy in the world he has sort of Total Control in a sense over what he does with his with his time uh he is not bound to a location he's not bound to uh a job he doesn't he's not bound to chores because that's all handled for him and there's just a sort of deep poignancy that comes across in this in this short movie again not sure he'd agree uh this is my uh interpretation about what I would feel uh of what I would say is loneliness right it's this sense that he is out of sync with he's not in he's not synchronized with the rhythms of anybody else's lives um and and as a result there are these sort of awkward moments in the in the film where he's uh kind of uh greeting the staff of the cruise ship and saying that his that referring to them as his friends and you have a kind of a sense coming off them that like yeah they're going along with being his friends because they're the employees of the cruise line right so they've got to they're not going to be rude to him but it's not a friendship and and I think that a lot of this has to do with the idea that you know what I would say if I was in that position I would say that I had made a major mistake in thinking that time is best understood as this thing that you should sort of hoard as much of as you can for yourself achieve a kind of total sovereignty over it if you can as opposed to something um that gets its value as a kind of a network good right gets its value from from being shared and there's some there's all sorts of anecdotes from people who sort of become digital Nomads you know and and and roam the world uh running their businesses from their laptops lots of plus points to that I think it's maybe often a wonderful thing to do for a few years in your young adulthood but they soon find right that they've sort of with all this Freedom they've kind of exiled themselves from the very normal routines that actually we find deeply fulfilling of like you know several Friends meeting up for a drink or you know going for a bike ride or just very normal things that that rely on our surrendering some of our control over our some of our individual control uh over time and there are you know many other examples no I I think this point about regular Goods versus Network Goods is is important let's let's even continue to expand on that right so you know classic regular good is money all things equal more of it is better than less of it so in other words there's some even though you could argue you could hoard all the money in the world it's not going to make you happy but but if you could choose between having more or less it's logical why you would choose more um but I think you know the great example of uh cell phones right telephones like uh right you don't want to have all the cell phones yeah you just need one and you want everyone else to have one of them right that's a network good and to think of time as money is missing a point a little bit you need to think of time as cell phones it's you have to have time that everyone else has and to your point let's maybe this would be a great time to kind of talk about the great Soviet experiment about the uh asynchronicity of time I thought that was so fascinating I never really considered that before so yeah there was this extraordinary attempt in the early Decades of the Soviet Union to kind of LeapFrog uh the state of economic development of the West uh by eliminating the the seven day week five days of work two days a week and replacing it with a with a five-day system so that it would be five days through the year four days of work one day of rest four days of work one day of rest and the sort of uh allegedly ingenious idea here was that it wouldn't be the same four days on one day off for everybody instead the the population was divided into cohorts color-coded cohorts and depending on which one you belonged to your four days and one day would be different so they were all kind of staggered through the year and the idea was that this would enable um the factory machines to run every single day of the year and never need to stop and uh this would result in extraordinary economic gains um what it did very quickly among other unintended consequences was to sort of um desynchronize the whole um population right because if you had a friend or even a spouse and a spouses were supposed to be um assigned to the same cohorts but it often didn't happen I think if you had somebody you wanted to spend time with and they were in a different cohort then you were never free you never you never had the same weekend to to um to spend time um it hugely disrupted there for the family and it disrupted the church and as others have pointed out right both of these were kind of features rather than bugs from the point of view of the the Soviet leadership that you're sort of undermining these these other centers of power uh in the in the society but you got there's an amazing uh letter to to prove that kind of amazing that was written at all but somebody complaining that um you know holidays and a holiday at all if nobody else in your life is available to spend the holiday with and you've just got to like go to the cafe and and uh drink a cup of coffee on your own um so it's a sort of extreme example of how uh how damaging it is to our quality of life to be put in a situation where our time is not properly synchronized with other peoples but as various people including the writer Judith shulovitz uh her quote in the book has pointed out like we we've kind of done something like that to ourselves in in uh 21st century us and and UK because although we do not have that kind of um deliberate top-down government uh messing with our attempts to uh synchronize our time pretty much everybody for one reason or another both the kind of people who are sort of called into work irregular shifts in retail but also the more privileged people who set their own hours and you know work on their laptops or whatever all of us are all at different on different schedules than than everybody else and this is helps explain this kind of notorious problem that everyone talks about especially in big cities where it's just so difficult to find a time when like three of your you and two friends can can meet up for a for a beer it's not that you don't have any time it might be that you feel very busy as well but it it's just that it's not the same it's not the same time uh and I think this is it's a real and a sort of a growing problem the way we've sort of completely fallen out of sync with each other because almost anything you do and I write in the book about how much I've got out of singing in amateur choirs over the years you know but anything like that you you all need to agree that it's going to be at the same time of the day on the same day of the week otherwise it's it's not happening um so I think there's a kind of a deep point there that has quite a few sort of low level practical ramifications as well well and that's the interesting thing right without time you couldn't do these things we couldn't synchronize and synchronization is so important for civilizations and yet it's potentially the thing that gets us back to this root problem which is we now think we can Master this thing called time and as I think we're learning if you try to master time time will Master you so right we need time to have a civilization we can't really synchronize it because of the success of civilization Ergo we try to gain control over it by mastering it some of us more than others and we end up feeling like we can't and you know I love the um I love the way you point out the flaw in the logic of the the story about the rocks the pebbles in the sand which I I mean I'm I've always thought I lived by that thing I know my rocks I know my Pebbles I know my sand uh maybe explain to folks what that is and and why that might be a fallacy sure yeah right if there's anyone on the planet who hasn't heard the original story which is I I think probably reproduced in a thousand time management books it is this this anecdote has different versions but it's basically you know in the one I know I think a professor arrives in a classroom one day with a rocks some some large rocks some Pebbles some sand and a big glass jar and he challenges the students to fit all of this stuff into the jar and the students who have to be kind of dumb for the purposes of the story right start putting in the the sand first and then the Pebbles but then the Rocks Don't Fit the Pebbles first and the sand the Rocks Don't Fit and then he very smugly points out no no look if you put the big rocks in first then the Pebbles and the sand Nestle in the spaces in between the moral of the story is if you make time for your biggest priorities uh then you'll get them done and you'll have other time for other things but if you don't first of all make time for your biggest priorities um you won't find time for them because all this other stuff will will fill up the finite space and it's actually just true so far as it goes right you know there are there are kind of decisions to be made between between things that really matter and things that don't really matter but uh I think much more importantly is that it's a whole it's a scam right it's a rigged it's a rigged demonstration because he has only brought into the classroom the number of big rocks that he knows can be made to fit into this jar and I argue in the book that a I think a problem that we have as humans but especially as humans in the modern world the real problem that we have is that there are just far too many big rocks there are far too many things that legitimately matter could be said to matter so there are certainly marginal benefits to around the edges you know to kind of um how you're arranging your day and making sure that your um putting in the the important stuff and not spending too much time on stuff that doesn't matter but the but the really big challenge I think um is seeing that there will always be more big rocks than we'll have time for and having the the courage really to to neglect a whole lot of them in order to focus on a few of them being willing like Elizabeth Gilbert says this right she has a great line about how we think that saying no is so important because if we say no to all the stuff we don't want to do we'll have time for the things that we do want to do but actually the true art of saying no is saying no to things you do want to do in order to do some other things that you do want to do Because deep deep deep in our minds there seems to be this assumption that of some sort of natural law that says well like we're only gonna feel that where are you going to feel that the number of things we're going to feel like they matter has ultimately got to match up to the time that we have and it's just you know it just isn't the case we can feel that vastly more matters then we're going to have time for and so I think that really goes to the heart of this idea that like figuring out what to neglect being willing to let things go waving goodbye to possibilities this sort of very dark uh kind of disappointment that's baked in to to any life that it's sort of handling that is the big is the big challenge I think well I love the story that you tell whether it's apocryphal or not about uh Warren Buffett speaking with his Pilot the the I think you describe it as The Lure of uh the Allure of middling priorities um I think that actually captures the essence of what you just said which is a far more realistic version of the The Rock problem do you want to share that yeah sure and I think I think it's pretty established now that it wasn't Warren Buffett or the Warren Buffett denies it and I make this clear in the book but it it you know if people say wise it's irrelevant who says it I think the story is yeah yeah and when people come up with like wise sayings it's either Confucius or the Buddha or Warren Buffett basically who gets there gets them attributed to them um right he's allegedly asked how how should I sort of set my priorities in life uh and he replies you should that you should make a list of the 25 uh things that matter to you most in your life goals priorities uh rank them in order from from 1 to 25 and the top five are the ones that you should sort of pour your time and energy and attention into but the next 20 and this is where most of us might come to a different conclusion right many people might say well the next 20 those are kind of pretty important so whenever you get a little corner of time do something on one of those um and he says no those 20 are the ones you should avoid at all costs because they're the ones that um matter to you enough to lure you away from the top five but don't matter to you enough to be uh the top five um even in this story there is a little bit of um not quite facing the the truth of the matter I think because um it could simply be that there are many many things that all belong in the top five more than five things right I mean you're still implying that you can do that ranking but I think what's so important about it as a way of approaching life is that it it doesn't ask you to believe that uh everything you're going to decide to to not do to that all the things you're going to to neglect you have to convince yourself didn't really matter in the first place it's like no they did really matter it would have been good to do those things um but finitude our state as humans demands that we make some choices anyway and actually I think it's very comforting in the end right because if you feel that you want to not only you know be great in your work and be a great parent and and pursue a couple of like leisure activities but also do these other 20 things and you feel that they're ought there must be a way of doing it that's a very tormenting way to live when you see that like oh right there's just always going to be more that I want to be doing than that I can be doing I think that actually allows you to let go of of some of those other things to see that it's just our job as human beings to like pick a handful of the things that really compel us and focus on them rather than to somehow make you know Infinity fit into a finite into a finite container what is it that you sort of realized circa 2014 you write about this sort of Moment of clarity I think you were sitting on a bench Somewhere in Brooklyn yeah yeah yeah how did this sort of coalesce for you then well this was very much this was very much on the sort of productivity and work side of this of this whole thing and it was a kind of an intellectual Epiphany I don't know you might resonate with this right you can sometimes figure things out in your in an intellectual level and then it takes kind of years to live into them in a real way so it wasn't like my life changed that moment but it was a it was a winter morning in middle of the week I had like a huge even more number of larger number of things I felt like I had to do um by the end of that week than normal and I was on my way to my uh co-working space where I worked then in Brooklyn and um sitting on this bench like trying to game it out trying to figure out like what combination of scheduling and what order I could do things in and how I could make it work to really power through and actually get to the end of all these things that felt like obligations for that week um and just suddenly being struck by the thought the understanding that like oh it's impossible oh I see I'm trying to do something impossible um and and feeling that as a sort of like a burden being lifted right in that moment it's like oh right I can't be expected to find a way to do all this I've I've taken on more things than I can do uh in the time that I felt I had to do them and maybe there are going to be some downsides to having to renegotiate things or fail to meet some deadlines but then I'm gonna have to deal with those downsides because you know there's no alternative and I find this to be I think it runs through a lot of what we're talking about here a lot of what I've written Maybe this move where you sort of see that your problem is worse than you thought it was and that is incredibly liberating uh because you go from thinking that you face an incredibly hard challenge to seeing that actually it's not really hard it's impossible and the shift from really hard to Impossible is actually quite important because you can stop beating yourself up for not being able to do something impossible and I'm thinking now just in terms of what you were saying before about the initial motivations for your interest in the in in all the the physical stuff like I think there's a similar Liberation to go through right in seeing like finding a way to live forever that's impossible then you drop through into the ground of okay we can work on and certainly one can maximize one's chances of a longer life you can certainly maximize the quality of the life that you have but you sort of drop away from that um kind of me against the universe thing that you can throw years of energy into but you're never actually going to win and then there's something much more engaged with the world about being in the the realm of the possible right because then you're like getting stuck in I don't know if that do people say getting stuck in in America I don't know but in Britain that's the idiom right it's like you're getting actually into the activity of doing real things in the world you know one of the things that I'm struck by in reading your book and you and I were speaking about this earlier but but your book is as I said kind of one of these four books that I've read many times but um I've I've tried and failed many times to come up with a unifying theory of them and uh as I was saying I um I set it as a goal to do this before I turned 50. so you know 18 months before I turned 50 I had sort of set this goal of by my 50th birthday I will come up with a unifying theory on this aspect of life as it ties into what these four authors have said you know what you've written what Bill Perkins has written Arthur Brooks Ryan holiday and no no doubt there are others out there who are writing in this in this area as well but but I was just I wanted to limit myself to just these four things I thought this can't be that hard well that birthday came and went there was just another thing I failed at right and and I'll tell you one area where I'm really struggling right is sense of purpose what is the role of sense of purpose now I have vacillated in my life on this there have been times when I had such a grandiose view of my role that I felt everyone should have a legacy I mean with a bit of an inside joke so you know my wife and I who met in Baltimore where you met your wife um when I was in residency which was a you know kind of a slog right this was you know you're working 110 to 120 hours a week um and talk about asynchronous time right like you know my wife is working two jobs I'm working one job that might as well be three I mean we're virtually never together um and when we are I was just working right so I was either swimming or working on this surgical manual I wanted to write I wanted to write like the all singing all dancing Bible for surgical residents and she's sort of like what the hell are you doing like why don't we just chill out and I was like no no like this thing's going to be my legacy and she thought it was so funny that she actually got me a t-shirt that said what's your legacy but it said like PA it was my initials colon quote what's your legacy like she's just mocking me with this t-shirt um and then I think about where I am now where I I I'm so far at the other end of the spectrum that I also worry it's problematic which is I don't think there's any such thing as Legacy like we're all gonna die none of it matters if I died tomorrow nothing changes the Earth will continue to move on its axis with the exact same precision as if I live to a hundred like nothing will change and if I live another 40 years no matter what I do in those 40 years it won't matter nothing will change in the universe and you write about this idea of cosmic insignificance therapy both of these seem problematic right like the total lack of sense of purpose which I'm not saying I don't have a sense of purpose I'm just saying I feel so insignificant that it it I flirt with the idea of being so insignificant that I think it there are days I struggle with doing things because I'm like well I do them because I'm I'm good at sort of doing things but that's very different um whereas Arthur Brooks in from strength to strength would really talk about this important of sense of purpose right in this yeah the joy the Fulfillment that comes from having a purpose that's larger than yourself so how I'm sure you've thought through all of these things how do you Rectify that particular issue of is what we're talking about here too nihilistic it's so interesting and yeah I mean I think what we're circling around here I I don't think I'm going to solve the mystery of what of the theory that unites the books but I I think we're circling around this idea of of finitude and reconciling ourselves to what it means to be finite obviously that's my particular angle so I'm you know I'm doing it from my perspective but it's this it's this way of thinking about meaning in life that doesn't accept this binary of like either we are Gods either we do things that echo down the centuries forever or if we can't that must mean that we're nothing and there's no point in it all right it's a very there's something kind of I mean very seductive about it and I'm I'm as bad as anyone falling into this but there's something sort of inhuman about that because it doesn't kind of meet who we who we really are as humans which is sort of extraordinary and capable of extraordinary things and also very much not not Gods so in the section of the book on Cosmic insignificance therapy I'm sort of first of all explaining how I feel that it's very it can be very energizing and empowering to sort of drop the requirement the the inner requirement that we everything we do in our lives has to be sort of extraordinarily um important on a on a grand scale because obviously if you zoom out far enough you can make anybody's life completely unimportant and you can do that with like Mozart if you zoom out far enough right I mean uh some people might be remembered for several thousand years but you know just making a million years instead right and so so there's nothing there's nothing that we can do that matters in that sense and I think that can be very liberating it means that you know if you're prone to in decision and spending time feeling like you've got to do things exactly right then it's a good reminder that like doesn't matter enough to to worry about but yes then of course the risk is that you're sort of lifted out of that terrible kind of like oh no am I doing things extraordinarily enough with my life is this am I getting the things right or am I going the wrong way you're lifted out of it so far that it becomes sort of lighter than air and it's like well there's just why am I even here what's the point I've been really really um influenced here by the work of a philosopher called idolandau who wrote a book called um finding meaning in an imperfect world and um he's um one of the points I take him to be making there is just like it's quite strange that when it comes to uh thinking about what what meaning is what purpose is we we insist on using these um these criteria that either no human or maybe in some cases sort of a tiny number of humans in each generation could ever hope to meet um there's something sort of cruel to ourselves in saying that that that meaning is is only at this Cosmic level and it's it it's slightly arbitrary it probably is motivated by our fear of death and wanting to feel like we're Immortal and and um that our Legacy will will last forever but you can sort of drop it to some extent you can say well like if what I'm doing with my life influencing a number of you know making life better for a number of my contemporaries or even just you know being a good parent uh be a good member of my neighborhood like if I'm using a standard of meaning that is defining that as pointless well maybe I can just use a different standard rather than um I have to feel what I'm doing is is me is meaningless and so I think Landau would argue that the the nihilist the person who thinks like there's there's no point in anything he thinks he's being really sort of um facing the hard Facts of Life right he's saying like don't kid yourself there's no point to any of this but in fact he's kind of um still Clinging On to a fantasy which is that like that he should be able to he's got very high standards for what meaning should be right and then he finds that the nihilist then he finds that life doesn't measure up to the standards so he's like well it's all pointless but in fact those standards oh I feel like we even know that those standards don't apply right I mean again we're talking before about meaningful times when you're helping a friend through a crisis or something like that like there's a feeling of meaning in those times or a feeling perhaps of aliveness some people might say um that it kind of feels self-justifying right sure you can still point out that in any X number of thousands of years it wouldn't have mattered that you were there for that person but it mattered then um and Landa has this great line about like you know we don't we're always doing the thing to ourselves where we're saying like well it's not a meaningful human existence because something that we couldn't be expected to do as humans is is is Something That We're Not that we're not doing that thing if someone uh loves that dog you don't kind of correct them and tell them that actually their dog is no good because it can't drive um if if someone has a really nice chair in their house that's real pleasure to sit on you don't say well no it's a useless chair because it can't boil water for a cup of tea right we just don't expect things we don't we don't expect those things of those of those things so fine and and can we maybe not expect of ourselves as as finite humans these kind of god-like uh acts of cosmic meaning and still find that the meaning that is available to us as as finite humans is actually like really really something serious and important and that becoming more and more wholeheartedly human is maybe a better goal in life than than trying to sort of Escape The Human Condition and become a become superhuman that makes a lot of sense and that's the only place that I can reconcile at Oliver is um yeah in the big picture I'm not you know I'm not I'm never going to bend the Ark of the universe like I have no delusion about that but I'll matter to my kids and I'll matter to my wife and I'll matter to my friends and that's the focus which then brings us back full circle to the Trap of productivity because at least for me this is maybe I don't know if you struggle with it in this warped way I then say well gosh I have this real sense of urgency I'm back to now wanting to control time because I know the statistics once my kids are 18 I have virtually no time left with them right you'll you they say on average you have 19 years with your children 18 of them occur in their first 18 years of their life one year of total time with them occurs once they go off to college that's it a cumulative time so right I then think oh my gosh I have to master my time because I have such a it's not just the finitude of my life it's an even greater finitude of the time I have with my kids yeah now now I'm doubly whipping myself to make the most of my time and and you know my wife and I have this discussion all the time which is like God I wish I didn't have to do anything like I wish I could do nothing until our kids were all gone and I wish I could do a reverse retirement I wish I could retire for the next 15 years yeah and then I'll work the remaining Decades of my life when they're gone anyway I mean again all of these things are irrational thoughts but this is this is the psychosis neuroses that that kind of fuels it yeah no absolutely and I it's funny the format of conversation like this is such that you say that and then it's like I feel like now I'm going to offer the solution but I'm just like yeah I totally get it I think that and I totally feel it too and I'm not sure that there is uh a solution but I think that um a lot of what we're talking about is the I think there's a shift from doing things unconsciously to doing things consciously that is really important and that um you know Ing and seeing that there is this trade-off is in some ways the the best that we can hope for that trying to solve the problem through Through Time mastery is not going to make things better because that's going to be undertaken in the unconscious belief that there's a way of maximizing Your Capacity so much that you know you can spend all the time that feels like it matters with your kids and you can spend all the time that feels like it matters on the work and it's like actually if the starting point is if the starting point is that that isn't possible then I I think firstly you make wiser decisions around the edges right so maybe you do backpedal a little bit on certain work things in order to maximize a bit more time with kids maybe you do organize your time in certain strategic ways to sort of make those gains around the edges and free up capacity but more fundamentally I feel like you can just sort of see like yeah it's like it's a it's a sad truth about being who we are and being fortunate enough to have these different domains of Our Lives that we that we value people if people do if people who are parents and people who have worked that gives them meaning or whatever other things might be competing in there in their lives um and so this comes back before actually I wanted to say in response to talking about the the person you were talking about who who died and and the sort of um the fact that one doesn't stop feeling sad about those things or struggling with these things you sort of um uh person who thinks they're going to find a way to master their time and make enough time for everything is trapped in this kind of future oriented anxiety the person who sort of sees the truth about trade-offs and the truth about finitude doesn't suddenly become happy and reconciled to it all but it's a different kind of um feeling it's a it's a kind of poignancy right there's a sort of tit sad sad tinge to life that um uh you don't get away from but you know I'm sort of struggling to articulate this but it's but it's but it's part of living a meaningful life is to is to just sort of be consciously in that fact that yeah we don't get all the time we would we would wish to have I don't know if that made sense no it does and I and I I think going back to what we talked about earlier I think that's why I have yet to construct this unifying Theory because it's not a unifying theory in some ways suggests a solution it's a series of equations right unifying theories in physics are equations I don't think there's an equation here um right even though my engineering background wants one um yeah and and and and there isn't and you know a lot of the physiologic stuff can be broken down into equations right we can talk about cardiac output as a function of contractility and stroke volume and heart rate and you know systemic vascular resistance and all these things like we can really talk about physiologic stuff that way um now of course at the cellular level we're still hosed I mean there's a lot we can't talk about in that regard um but we still have biological mechanisms that we somewhat understand this is much more difficult um and if people are sitting here listening to this on a podcast that's about longevity and asking why are we talking about this well I would argue if you're not talking about this what the hell does that other stuff matter right right and I think you really put your finger on it with the sort of the idea that um a a unifying Theory suggests a solution it's this kind of yeah it's the acceptance of the fact that there isn't a solution that is such a powerful psychological transition I think and it totally yeah it totally goes along with doing everything you possibly can to sort of maximize both the quality of your experience and the amount of time you can have the you know the probability of having of having more more time to have those experiences but it steps away from this idea that one day you're going to find the the solution to the to The Human Condition they're all these great sayings and phrases and ways of putting it that come out of Zen Buddhism where people are sort of um pointing to this notion that like what drives us crazy is thinking that there has to be a solution uh to the condition in which we find ourselves um so uh the quote I use at the beginning of the book from Jocko Beck the American uh zen teacher is she said uh what makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured which is quite an interestingly sort of medical way of of stating that stating the the problem um uh uh a friend of mine years ago who's a meditation person as well said like um from a certain point of view everything is palliative care right because um we're we're not going to you know none of us is getting out of this alive there are plenty of sort of more cliched sayings that that pinpoint the same problem um but yeah it I don't think that's a recipe for nihilism I think that's a recipe for sort of letting go of a quest that wasn't possible in order to really really get involved uh in the quest that is possible there's so much I learned from from from from your book and again as I said I think there are places where it overlaps so so much with with others and it reinforces things that I've already seen the value in and one of the most important is what Ryan holiday writes about as Stillness and what you write about is atalic activities um my reading of this because I take notes when I'm reading a book so so what I wrote at the bottom of that page was atelic activity is the antidote that was my note in red pen why is that such an important the antidote meaning what I was referring to I think was um the aversion we have to being uh you know to being still the aversion we have to being alone with ourselves you know with our thoughts and things like that um say more about this why why is yeah you know you have so many great examples in the book you could draw from any of them but but just broadly speaking why is why are why are you and Ryan coming at this same conclusion from totally different you know Ryan is coming at it purely through a stoic philosophy lens you're coming at it frankly through the lens of observation and empiricism yeah so um I think sort of start at any any part of this but the idea of an atelic activity which is coined by uh a philosophical Kiran Setia um is this the notion that of an activity that is that is done for itself alone not to get somewhere not to get something else uh that it's not the kind of thing that you will ever have done enough of and so the example I use in the book just because it's something I enjoy a lot is hiking right I mean you you can't make hiking in any meaningful sense more efficient because you're just like it it I'm sure you can walk in more efficient ways than others but the point is simply that the reason that people are drawn to an activity like that is for the experience itself sure there are some ancillary health benefits absolutely but you're not trying to get somewhere either uh in terms of training or in terms of geographically trying to get somewhere it's just it's done for itself alone a lot of kind of activities around Arts music dance uh can be pursued in a more sort of uh in a way that culminates in something but they don't have to be and a lot of the enjoyment people get is in in itself alone and yeah I think what Ryan means by Stillness um is also something that almost by definition can't be an instrumental use of time and so I think the unifying idea here is that there is something wrong with pursuing a life in which time is considered in exclusively instrumentally so that you're always assessing the value of how you're using your time by where it's leading you and how well it's getting you to that goal because of course you at some point like either this has to cash out in a present moment of meaning or you're always postponing it has the effect of sort of always postponing the the Moment of Truth uh into the future and there's a great uh quote that I use the book as well from from John Maynard Keynes The Economist who who who I think gets at the point of why we do this why we want to live for future activities even though it's a kind of anxious way to live even though we're never quite at the moment to fulfillment it's because um by projecting our um our interests in what we're doing constantly into the future you're sort of securing what Keynes calls a spurious immortality for them right so he's got this quote where he says um the purpose of man uh does not love his cat but only the cat's kittens nor in truth the kittens but only the kittens kittens and so on Forward Forever to the end of Captain uh as he puts it and it's kind of a terrible way to live because you never get to actually love your pet or you know plug in there whatever the other benefit or value of an activity would be but it has this great advantage on a subconscious level that like it's all because of somewhere you're getting and as long as you're still getting somewhere then you don't have to fully kind of face the pain of the fact that like no this is it that it's not a dress rehearsal that that this is the time you have to use meaningfully if you're going to have a meaningful life and I I fall into this trap all the time you know of sort of catching myself seeing that I'm really thinking about two days time when this stuff's out of the way when this other stuff has been completed when I figured out how to do something like then I'll start you know living in a present way and and really like getting the value of life um but what we're really doing I think I agree with Keynes about this is is sort of constantly projecting that moment forwards because it's kind of feels like um we don't have to die again I think it's worth saying that again Oliver because it's so profound right I this is I think this is the jugular issue I think it is this connection to our mortality and our finitude that is underpinning all of this difficulty because on the one hand it just shouldn't be this hard like I I I I I sometimes laugh at my struggle with this where I'll have a number of things you know over the next month that ostensibly all are enjoyable right like oh I'm doing this thing with my kids on this day and and we're going to go camping on this day and oh I've got a day set aside to go racing my car on the track I mean these are all things that are just pure Bliss to me and when I look back at the month after the fact I realize every time you're in one of those moments you were thinking about the next one the one right right it's just it's just yeah it's tragic and and I think this point of am I doing that because subconsciously I need to do that to avoid confronting the finite nature of time hmm I I I don't know if that makes sense but but no it makes sense of how I'm hearing and processing this yeah it makes total sense and I think you know certainly in my experience but I'm but I take solace from the fact that in you know I don't think the great philosophers of History found any alternative to this is it's not that we need to aim to leave that mindset behind in favor of a kind of total perfect reconciliation to mortality it's just that you shift from this kind of avoidant stance which triggers so much kind of saps the meaning from life to a stance that kind of looks it in the face and feels kind of sad about it right it's like it's not that you don't want to get tripped up on the idea that you're supposed to become you know totally Zen about this awful human fate you can sort of just kind of integrate to some extent only to some extent in my case but you can sort of integrate that poignancy into the experience and then you do sort of land you know you do sort of fall back into the the moment that you're in um Yeah It's tricky because I think that you know those of us in this kind of productivity mindset have spent a lot of time kind of beating ourselves up for not doing enough yet or not getting to a certain point and it's very easy to take that same stance towards the challenge of uh reconciling yourself to it all right and then feeling that like you're somehow falling short because uh you don't feel completely Zen about uh mortality I don't I don't think there's any reason to believe anyone ever does you know I took some comfort in knowing there was at least one other person who did the math which I forget who it was you were referring to in your book you're referring to someone though who had basically done the math on how improbable each of our existences is um right I I you you know anybody who I guess has thought through embryology can't help but but think about that which is what's the probability that that sperm on that day hit that egg on that month to result in me being here and and you only need to think about this through the lens of siblings like you have siblings that are you know they're genetically similar but they're completely different people and so therefore you know there's a you know sub trillion probability event that I even exist and one of the things you point out that can be again I'm I'm sort of thinking about this through the lens of partial antidotes right notice there's no solution to this problem as you said it's palliative care but what are some partial antidotes another one might be flipping the problem statement from not oh I can't believe I only have four thousand weeks how am I going to make the most of them to I can't believe I even get one week like right yes absolutely Miracle we're here yeah yeah I think I mean yeah from going from going to that idea of getting to have the the time I think is um is such a powerful transition partly because and this is kind of Heidegger and all sorts of stuff I grappled with and trying to write this book and don't don't recommend anyone else grapples with with Heidegger but um partly because it shifts the attention from the specific content of experience to the fact of their being experience um and that is really helpful because it means that actually you don't need to spend quite so much time worrying about whether you're doing the right things because you just get that sense that it's a miracle that you're doing anything it makes kind of you know potentially make sitting in a traffic jam at least if not pleasurable then less enraging because it's like experience is happening like what are the chances and that's kind of amazing uh even if um even if you're doing something that we would normally characterize as uh as really frustrating I mentioned somebody in the book who who had this experience after a a friend of his um died unexpectedly and young and finding himself in sort of yeah traffic jams or Supermarket cues or sitting on stand waiting on hold on phone lines whatever and and having that thought like what would my friend have given to be in this to be in this traffic jam now to be waiting in this queue now and there's a way of yeah just really dialing into an appreciation of the fact that that that there is experience uh as opposed to exactly what it is you're experiencing yeah one of my friends um said something very similar and I thought this was just such a such a great thought which is we all sort of lament getting older um and it's not let's put aside the number right it's the birthday but just the changes that occur like it's it's not fun to experience more pain it's not fun to have a little more ache it's not fun to have less pep in your step and and at some point we're all experiencing that and she said very wisely well consider the alternative being dead right like yeah maybe it sucks to turn 65 and look in the mirror and not see the face that you saw when you were 25 but isn't this better than having died when you were 25 I mean it's another way to sort of think about this problem um but let's go back to Martin Heidegger because I'm going to take your word for it because after you read a little bit of his writing I realized I'm not going to be smart enough to interpret what he writes it was way too obtuse for me um but I'm not sure it's a question of smarts it's a very very impenetrable and endlessly debated question what on Earth he means yeah but anyway yeah but but let's talk about this idea of of you know having versus being time because this comes up so much in the book but I think it's you're always going back to to his work um so again notwithstanding the disclaimer that he was a Nazi sympathy Sizer and that you know we can that can color maybe your view of him as a person but but his philosophy nevertheless is interesting no absolutely and uh slightly to my regret after the book came out I discovered very similar uh outlook on this question in the work of a one of the founders of Zen called uh dogen uh writing and I think that 12th 13th century um and he wasn't a Nazi so I should have um and he was the original I mean he thought about it like decades but you know right exactly right he came first and he wasn't a Nazi so and it's much clearer it's kind of puzzling but it's not aggressively um impenetrable in the way that uh uh Heidegger often is but yeah this is just this thought that yeah I think you're right it comes up again and again in this in in this material that um that maybe um in some sense being and time are the same thing Heidegger's Masterwork is called being in time uh one of dogan's most famous works translates as being time with a with a hyphen as if they're the the same thing and it's kind of strange to think about it first but um but there's something very true about it this notion that maybe if the idea that we have time if you can see the ways in which that is flawed right because you don't you never really have time you never really have more than a more than the single present moment you don't get it to keep in the way that physical possessions say we we have you don't have time in that sense um and if there are sort of all sorts of problems that come from treating time as this resource that we need to maximize and then it starts doing strange things like you know you try to maximize it and you end up with more stuff to do and all these kind of perverse things because we're treating it as something that it isn't well maybe it makes a bit more sense to think of the idea that like we that you are time that you are the moment and that you are a kind of in hindsight your life will have been a portion of the time that that you were this is not an idea necessarily that you know people working on the physics of of time would have much much uh time for but um the the this there's a really powerful shift here um that I think sort of return it's basically beyond words so I'm just sort of pointing at it and hoping that some people uh hearing this will will be able to feel the shift that I'm talking about but it's a it sort of returns you to your life it it it it it it it stops you engaging in this attempt to sort of yeah be the air traffic controller of your life from above or sort of try to get out in front of your time and and steer it and it and it and it puts you back into the position of just being a portion of of time in a way that feels to me really really liberating there's a very famous quote from a story by um Jorge Luis um the the novelist um that goes I'm I'll get it I really mangle it but it goes something like like time is a time is a river which Bears me along but I am the river time is a fire that consumes me but I am a I am the fire time is a uh tiger that attacks me but I am the tiger and I think he's he's he's making the same transition right we're constantly trying to sort of fight time but actually we just our time and yes I think I think it's probable that this is not just beyond words for me but that it might be sort of in some definitive systematic sense beyond words which is possibly also why it's so hard to understand in the in the work of Heidegger but I think we're gesturing at something important here anyway think about or how how should one think about almost doing what we're kind of suggesting not to do but for a different purpose right so so I think what what we're sort of saying is look if you jump into the productivity hack space it's a fallacy it's you're going to chase your tail and you're never going to be made whole um just as and you use this example just as the alcoholic can never quench their thirst fully right just as no amount of alcohol can numb the pain that is at the root of that addiction no amount of productivity can numb what is gnawing away at the need to achieve and be productive and um I know that for people out there who can't relate to extreme appetites for either alcohol or productivity they might not have a clue what the hell we're talking about but um they're going to have to take it on a leap of faith that those that those are very true statements um but nevertheless I think as humans we work with tools we work with protocols we work with procedures we work with tactics and and we try to make the best of the situation we try to palliate yeah you write about several of these I I think you know we should talk about some of these things because I I think they make a lot of sense right so let's let's talk about these three principles of paying yourself first limiting work in progress and of course we already addressed but it's worth revisiting you know resisting the Allure of middling priorities the I like those three let's talk about how to operationalize them sure yeah um and I think you're right right we're getting it we're getting at this question of like what is the role of a technique or a method or a productivity system once you have begun a little bit to go through this process of kind of disenchantment with the with the lure of of sort of total productivity and infinite capacity um and yeah I think that's the moment at which to use these kinds of techniques right it's once you're sort of no longer thinking that they're going to save your soul they're just useful things to do and specific ones like the ones you mentioned I'll talk about you know have this a well they're well attuned to the to the job of kind of embracing limitation and finitude they're not the kind of techniques that are going to lead you astray back onto that back onto that um treadmill to paying yourself first um very well known Concept in in personal finance that uh you know when you get paid you should take some money out of your paycheck and put it into savings and Investments right away and then your regular expenses come out of what's left rather than spending what you need to spend and hoping that there'll be some left over uh at the at the end um because there isn't because we live up to our means and the same thing uh is is true of time if you if you think that that if you take the approach of like clearing the decks I'm going to get through all the stuff that I need to get through so that I get to this time when I can finally put real focused attention onto the things I care about that's never going to happen for some of the reasons we've discussed the decks will never be never be clear so paying yourself first is just the act of taking that important thing and doing like at least a little bit on it now first thing in the morning uh right away you know in other words not not um not trying to clear the space for it but just claiming the time for it and learning to tolerate the anxiety of the fact that while you do that more emails will be coming in more things will be filling up the decks um asking for your asking for your attention and this can be you know it can be work related but it could be something else like if there's a project you want to work on a creative Pursuit a relationship you want to nurture like it's just the acceptance that at some point you're gonna have to do that in a in a present moment um and it's not going to feel like it's the right time it's not going to feel like everything else is out of the way because everything isn't is never going to be out of the way um so you could operationalize that as you know spending the first hour of the work day doing your most important priority something like that there are lots and lots of different ways to make that concrete uh limiting your work in progress uh is is again is one of these um methods that just acknowledges up front that your bandwidth is incredibly limited that your time is incredibly limited and says oh okay now what and um there are again lots of ways to do this but this is just the idea of of setting an upper limit of the to the number of tasks or projects that you're going to allow to sort of be on your plate at once so I illustrate this in the book using this idea of two to-do lists this is an extremely simple way of doing this right you could in principle have two to-do lists one an open list where you put absolutely anything and everything that's on your plate it could have like 400 items on it the other is a closed list it might only have five slots on it and the the rule is that you feed tasks from the long list to the short list until those five slots are full and then you can't add any more until you've freed up a slot by by completing one of those tasks so it's just a sort of artificial bottleneck that you're placing on your workflow and all that's happening here is you're taking a fact that is already true for all of us which is that we can only give our attention to a handful of things uh on a given day in a given week and you're just making it conscious and you're saying okay I'm going to make myself I'm going to make all these other things wait outside the door until these things have been have been done there are lots of other ways of implementing this anyone who's familiar with kanban methods of project management will will recognize that the resonances here it's just a way of um making of articulating and making conscious the limitations that we work with as humans and the extraordinary thing is that when you do this you actually find you you do get more productive right you buy by being willing to make the other things wait you do end up processing more more tasks more projects than if you than if you didn't and then yes finally the middling priorities idea was just that there are lots of things that really feel like they matter and those are the ones you have to be aware of if they are not the ones that really matter the most uh because the the urge to try to find a way to um make time for all of them and end up uh you know uh going not doing any of them well is really strong and and you made a point before but I want to reiterate because I think it's so important which is you know there's two types of saying no right there's saying no to things you don't actually want to do that you know maybe on the surface might look like they're worth doing but deep down you don't want to do them so you're kind of happy to say no but then they're saying no to things that you do want to do but you know are not top five and you know about three years ago I really started to take that seriously so seriously in fact that that became the source of or the the substrate for my journaling was right I kept a no Journal all the things I said no to with an emphasis on things that I actually wanted to do you know I I think we're all fomo machines but but I have some strong fomo genes and uh boy it was it was really difficult to do that and to and I created a system of accountability where I had a person that I would show up with to discuss my no list these are all the things I said no to that I actually wanted to do so um again I think all of those those three things all fit together very well around that um so uh yeah I I think again that's not a solution it's a Band-Aid right and the discomfort that you feel I think it's really important to sort of zero in on that the discomfort that we feel when we say no to something that we did want to do is very different to the kind of talked up feeling that you get when you're racing through stuff to try to not have to say no to anything it's kind of it's unpleasant but it's an encounter with reality and and it's and it's good in the end I think yeah yeah we didn't talk much about it but I I think you part and parcel with this because we've touched on it is this idleness aversion and the flip side of that is the need to be patient and how impatient we are yeah tell the story of the uh I forget the name of the professor at Harvard but the she has a class an art class and the the students going through it have to do this painful experience which you yourself undertook yeah uh Jennifer Roberts uh she she has her um incoming art history students at Harvard uh choose a painting or a sculpture in the area there are many many venues to do that in the Harvard area and then go and uh look at it for three hours straight um and I did this yeah with a with a painting by dagar in the Harvard art museums um and and the idea here is that well I mean the the motivation for her came from um seeing that seeing the students who were who were coming into her course and and and feeling that their whole lives were so geared to speed both just generally because of the way the technological culture works but also because of the pressures of highly competitive University right there's all these kind of incentives to get stuff done as fast as you can that they were that it was actually her job she felt to kind of try to influence the tempo of what they were of what they were doing to slow them down and she did it herself and I did it and and the the really fascinating thing that that you learn in this context in the art case and I'll I'll explain why it's relevant beyond that but the in the art cases that like if you can sit with the intense discomfort that is involved in looking at a painting for such an obviously absurd amount of time right she knows it's an outrageous length of time that's the point um after their first sort of hour or whenever it happens for you when the discomfort begins to fall away a bit and you really just sort of get into a different Zone you literally see things in the painting that you hadn't noticed before and I don't mean you come up with like smart fancy sounding new interpretations of what you're seeing I mean like literal objects in paintings that that you that you apparently didn't see for sort of 45 minutes of looking and looking at that at that painting um and so the reward for kind of what you're doing there is you're sort of you're you're giving the experience the time that it takes instead of trying to dictate the the time that it takes which is extremely tempting for us in all sorts of of of contexts um and so I'm sort of using that in the book as as one example of um the benefits of sort of being willing to take experiences at the speed that that they need reading is another really classic example you can sort of do a certain amount to read faster and to train yourself to read more efficiently but it's very small really before you start losing the The Experience especially with kind of creative writing fiction and I think that a lot of the time when people say that they don't have time to read or that they don't like reading anymore so whatever they what they mean is that they they really hate that it needs them to slow down that a sort of Mind conditioned to speed into going faster has to kind of surrender to the fact that like reading especially if it's like a good novel or something is just going to take a certain amount of of time that you just have to to let it take um and it's really striking how uncomfortable that that feels um how How Deeply unpleasant it is to to sort of give up control over the pace of something like that because like it doesn't feel like it doesn't make any sense that it should be as painful as it is but it is and then I think that on the other side of that there are huge Rewards what do you think problems that we encounter tell us about how to become more patient in other words what is our relationship with a problem have to do with becoming more patient wow I could go in so many different directions what's coming to mind is that um I think there's a patience that's involved in allowing a problem to be unresolved until uh a solution presents itself and being willing to not hurry forward to resolutions just to get rid of the feeling of having a problem um I've I've found this myself I mean it was I got it from this book The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck but I found this myself in really mundane context but it's so interesting and sort of it's such an education um to when something sort of goes wrong in the house like you know when there's some problem with the I remember this happening very vividly when there was a problem with the the water supply to the dishwasher this can kind of comes out from I don't know anything about Plumbing but like comes out from it's under the it's in the cupboard under the sink and then it connects to the to the dishwasher and um the urge that we have and Scott Peck writes about this in the context of fixing a car with no knowledge of how to fix cars the urge that we have in those contexts is so often to just sort of like like fiddle around in the hope that almost by chance you would like fix the fix the problem and never works you know because it takes expertise to or say some sort of understanding of what's going on anyway to to be able to fix fix the problem and instead learning and I have and this I do literally do this now with things that that like involve you know appliances and things like that to just be willing to look at the situation to trace where the pipes go and where they connect and what the joins are and like you know you don't learn how to be a plumber in this process but you just see the situation and the solution becomes clear right it becomes obvious that oh I see right that should go there and it's come loose from there so I can just tighten that now it'll work and you know that's a really mundane example but I think the the point there applies in all sorts of other kinds of of problems that we hurry to Solutions because we want to feel like we're in control of the process even if it leads to some terrible outcome and to sort of stay in that space of of not knowing uh takes you know it takes that skill uh John Keats the poet called negative capability which I think is just so such a such an extraordinary phrase right that the ability to stay in uncertainty and not having a resolution and not always to be kind of like fidgety restlessly trying to get things all you know uh tied up with a bow so yeah that's what that makes me think about and let's think about incrementalism because I loved this idea right which is that you know it's a bit of a tortoise and hair thing you write about the um the professor who or the study I think that looks at more productive versus less productive academics and just from a writing perspective and the amount of writing done by the more productive people on any given day is rather unimpressive right yeah this is just I mean I feel like this is something that that you I'm sure can speak to in the sort of physiological side of things because it is something to do with like the nature of writing as as an athletic activity or something but Robert Boyce the professor you're talking about found that the most consistently productive writers were the ones who made their writing work only a modest moderate part of their of their days and their weeks um because it sort of didn't it it this meant that it didn't become something um intimidating there weren't these sort of huge psychodramas with having your life dominated by these tasks you didn't start to they didn't start to resent it or to procrastinate on it for that reason it was just this kind of modest thing and then the consistently applied over over days and days and days and weeks the the output really built up uh much much more rapidly than the people who would sort of Swing wildly back and forth between putting in huge numbers of hours and exhausting themselves and then not being able to do it for uh for for days after that because they were because they were too tired and where this has really made a difference to me just literally in my writing practice is is the in the power of stopping right because this is the part of the part of what he emphasized was that um he actually advocated that if you that if you find yourself on a roll right if you say well I'm only going to write for an hour or two because I'm going to keep it this modest thing in my in my life if you find yourself on a roll at the end of that time it's incredibly tempting to just like want to keep going and ride that wave of motivation and he was a proponent of stopping at that point like making yourself stop being as important as making yourself start um and I don't know you may have a better explanation of what's going on here but I've found it in all sorts of contexts right if you if you stop the thing that you're doing kind of sort of sooner than you want to um it does something very helpful to motivation like it makes you want to come back to it the next day uh in a way that is not the case if you if you sort of let yourself get get spent and voice makes the point that that's actually you know wanting to to ride the wave of motivation is actually a kind of impatience very often it's a kind of um uh belief that you've got to grab the inspiration while you've got it now grab the energy while you've got it now because you might not get it again and it's actually very it's a very Act of great confidence to be able to say no I'm going to stop now like I said I would and return to it tomorrow I think it makes a ton of sense and and I would even say that that physically I've transitioned more to that type of a relationship with exercise in my uh older age call it uh My Philosophy used to be the exact opposite right and and maybe there was a bunch of other reasons for that but but it was clearly a sense of every day you had to burn every match that was that was really how I felt about it um and today and I think it's a healthier approach it's I will always leave matches in the matchbox at the end of the workout I'm never gonna burn every single match now there's an exception here and there you know some days you just really want to go for it and really see what your limit truly is but but but it is actually better I think from a from a longevity standpoint and I say that physiologically but just as much psychologically to leave the workout but a little bit more with a little bit of I could do I could do a little bit more and I can't wait to get back and do it again and and I think part of that is just preserving the drive to be back in there because I think if you're burning every match every day it gets awfully hard to to show up and in reality you're probably not actually doing as much good physically right right right yeah I know that makes a lot of sense Oliver you closed the book with sort of 10 steps uh you know 10 I think you call them tools or steps for embracing our finitude we won't go through them now because you know I want people to get the book if they haven't already done so I want them to read the book I want them to to kind of go through this in the in the in the way that that I've done it with a highlighter and you know really tried to try to learn what can be done but are there any of those 10 that you think we have in at least somewhat peripherally touched on that that you want to dive into I think we haven't spoken so much in general about the degree to which this this desire for control over time manifests as a desire for control over the future for as a antidote to worry and uh as well as being a sort of productivity geek and all the rest of it I'm certainly a sort of inveterate Warrior about the future and I write in the book about the ways in which a lot of worry and kind of obsessive planning can be understood as an attempt to kind of from the standpoint of the present kind of thrower straight jacket over the future right to feel like you've got it under your control you know what's coming when in fact another of the aspects of our being finite human beings is like what's been called like our total vulnerability to events right Anything could happen at any moment to anyone that's just the way it you know it is to be uh human and so one of the things that I we haven't talked about that's one of those one of those um items in the in the appendix is this this idea of um a quite precise idea about curiosity as a as a stance to take towards life and in the context of that I'm talking about being a I'm borrowing the advice of somebody else about being a researcher in relationships right this stance where your attitude towards any kind of interpersonal relationship although it comes from how to sort of relate best to small children as a parent or a caregiver but is this idea of like instead of trying to get things to go in a certain way or hoping that they'll go in a certain way taking the stance of like wondering how they're gonna go seeing if what you can taking the stance that of trying to sort of find out what you can about um another person having that sort of open stance that says like I wonder what's gonna happen I wonder what this other person is like rather than that kind of attempt that background attempt to kind of see if they're going to line up with what you feel you need to happen or how you feel you need people to be so I think that sort of that sort of idea of being sort of curious it's a bit of a cliche these days right you should be curious in life but but it's but it's it's specifically that kind of stance that is agnostic within limits about what happens next or how a relationship with somebody turns out to be I think that's a really sort of resilient and helpful attitude to have in life it's probably one of the least specific of those 10 at the back of the books but I seemed like the one to mention here you know there's another one Oliver that's sort of on this list that I think about a lot it actually kind of overlaps with with Bill Perkins ethos and die with zero and it's the idea of being instantaneously generous um and not sort of punting generosity until another day uh and this is you know again I think I think you'll enjoy uh reading die with zero uh and that's really that was yeah certainly one of the three most important things I took away from that book is we have all these plans to do things tomorrow it's like God this person has been so great in my life and I can't wait to show them in 10 years how great they've been it's like what the hell does that how about you show them today uh you know how much they've mattered to you uh so tell me for you how this came on that list what was what brought what brought this on the list for you well I just came across this extraordinary line from the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein about how his personal practice is if a generous thought arises in his mind that sort of implies some action right donating to a charity sending a note to somebody to say you appreciate them his practice is to try to do that thing immediately rather than later what really resonated with me about this is I've always had a lot of difficulty with stuff especially coming out of mindfulness and Buddhism that says that implies to me that we should be more generous or we should be more grateful or kind it's quite hard to will that kind of situation but what this is is a way of saying well look actually a lot of these urges in most decent people do arise all the time right you already think that a certain friend you appreciate that they're in your life you say you do what you already feel like actually it'll be really good to make a donation to that particular philanthropic course the problem is that you just then like say well I'll do it later when I'm got all these other things out of the way it's the problem is acting on it not generating the the warm feeling it's hard to generate the warm feeling originally so I really took this on board from from reading about it and try to do it but it's also I think it goes beyond just this one example of generosity although I think it's really important to to put it to do it in that context time and again you find yourself in this situation or I find myself in the situation of wanting to become the kind of person who does things in a different way who is always sends lots of generous notes to friends or who I don't know it could be lots of other use good habits in life and the desire to become that kind of person actually ends up as an obstacle to just doing that thing because you tell yourself like okay well that's going to take a whole like reorganization of my schedule or like you know I'm just a bit busy today to start being that kind of person I heard from somebody who said that like he'd he'd um he he'd um made a deal with himself that he was going to sense like three appreciative notes a week or something to people in his in his world or maybe even it was ever a day and catching himself like as a result of this plan not just sending an appreciative note because like he was on track to becoming the kind of person who did it all the time um and I think it's one of the downsides of the otherwise you know very laudable aim of trying to develop good habits is you can really let the kind of idea of development of a habit stand in the way of doing the the thing it's daunting to consider that you might spend 20 minutes a day from now on meditating every day so and I can get in the way of just like just doing it once now and then deal with tomorrow tomorrow um so the instantaneous part of that I think is really is really important it's like it's like yeah you'll find a way and a reason to to postpone that thing but it's really powerful to try to make it your actual make the explicit practice be I will do that kind of thing When the Thought arises well there are eight other uh great points there which again aren't I just want to make sure we're not overselling this they're not the solution to this problem you're not gonna you're not gonna go and adopt these 10 uh ideas or behaviors and somehow at least if you're me and presumably for you be it complete peace with the duration of your life never struggle again with trying to achieve something never again uh struggle with trying to be productive I mean none of none of these things but boy if we can move the needle a little bit and focus on these experiences and and enjoy the experiences that do Define those 4 000 weeks more than the ability you know the the trying to grasp water which is effectively what it's like when you're trying to master your productivity um I I think there's something there and for me I think just coming to grips with getting a little bit better as opposed to being perfect is is the best step I can take right right yeah no completely and you know the only defense I make for the book not containing the solution to all of this is that no other book contains it either right that that moving the needle that's that's our job right that's that's that's the the that that's the thing that we can do um and so uh yeah that that's the thing that's that's available to us as finite humans yeah well Oliver thank you very much for not just making the time today but obviously more importantly putting putting the years into uh this work here which as as I've said before and has you know we've said now uh this is kind of one of those books that is is on a is on a growing list of books for me that speaks to another piece of a life well lived both in quantity but more importantly in quality yeah well thank you so much it's been such a privilege to have this conversation um I've really appreciated it thank you [Music]

Channel: Peter Attia MD

Views: 21,110

Keywords: Peter Attia MD, Dr. Peter Attia, Early Medical, The Drive Podcast, The Drive, Longevity, Zone 2

Id: B0PaNe5sb4g

Length: 128min 51sec (7731 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023