The French Art of Taking it Easy with Ollivier Pourriol | A Drink with the Idler

i wanted to say something about love because of course it's valentine's day coming up and um but wanted to have a kind of link with uh olivier our guest by talking about courtly love and i'm getting the hang of this multimedia zoom image now and i've got a new background which shows you the image of two courtly lovers there which i'll talk about so courtney love in a way was the precursor to romantic love which kicked off really in the 18th century um particularly actually with the rise of secularism it's rather interesting that i think broadly speaking what happened was people felt that they couldn't turn to god for unconditional love anymore and so felt they had to turn to other human beings for unconditional love with the inevitable mixed results but nonetheless before that was what was known as courtly love and i think this began all the way back in the 11th century or before um in regions of france that aquitaine and the idea in corey love was somewhat different and i wanted to offer it to you this valentine's day because you know valentine's day maybe a bit less this year but often feels very commercialized a lot of pressure around romantic love perhaps too much pressure and courtly love to revisit that idea perhaps opens up what love can do for us once again now it's well known but that quality love was about the erotic charge between a knight and a lady as you can see in the image behind me there and the ladies the lady was beyond um reach of the night probably married to the lord um and yet in many texts he calls her my lord and i think the idea is that she becomes for him a kind of spiritual guide to awaken a higher self within him charged by the passion of love that couldn't be immediately satisfied and then she gains a sense of the numinous awakened in her by the role that she plays too so the idea was that this was erotic love not just looking for satisfaction in another person but that could reach into higher levels of reality which the philosophers amongst you will know goes actually all the way back to plato if not before where socrates in plato's symposium describes how the priestess diotama introduced him into the arts of love by which is meant the ability not just to see other human beings and love them not just to see things that are lovely in the world around and about but to see that which is good beautiful and true into what you might call spiritual or divine realms as well so courtly love was a reinvention of this very ancient tradition um hoping for the greatest things that love can deliver to us and in the image behind me you've got not just got the knight and the lady but you'll notice that their hands are meeting and that their meeting point there is springing a tree of life a kind of third reality dimension that um that grows that sprouts from their meeting i think it's also very interesting that they almost look like they're mirroring each other they become kind of mirrors for each other and so see in each other into themselves at the same time so this is you know love awakening not a kind of possessiveness i must have you and hold you because my life will somehow become complete if i get that it's awakening this passion to life's current itself and you see this echoed in a lot of fascinating texts from around this time this medieval period right across different cultures actually one of the best known remarks made by roomie is that lovers don't meet they are already inside one another lovers don't meet they're already inside one another and to romantic love to valentine's day that's almost incomprehensible you know the whole point is that lovers meet but no says rumi lovers don't meet they're already inside each other because it opens up this third dimension of life itself that erotic love can make us aware of like the trees springing up from between these two figures here probably in um the whole of western literature the best known example of this um is dante his divine comedy where beatrice his love for beatrice leads him all the way into the highest heavens and actually one of the talks which victoria just mentioned there that i've put online on youtube this week is about dante and awakening to this highest um sense of things through love so i'll put those in the chat after i've finished if he wants to pick those up and but i i want to offer this to you you know look this valentine's day as we like doing at the idler try and rise above the commercialization of romanticism um and if you're on your own don't worry don't let valentine's day steal life from you with these aspirations and but turn back to this earlier idea of love and send a card if you want of course um but remember that there's a higher self within you that love longs to reveal to you and that riding that passion can open up what plato calls of course nothing less than the good beautiful and true and i think we owe this whole tradition to the french so i'm going to hand over now to tom and olivier to take things in their lovely direction as well well thanks so much that's a beautiful introduction uh and very much in line with the themes in olivier's book uh olivier can we just get you to say hi hey oh you are there great excellent um the franchise of not trying too hard and in fact at the beginning you do talk about uh seduction and if you there's nothing more sort of unsexy in a way than someone who's trying too hard um do you think courtly love could be the courtly lovers could be accused of trying too hard well in a way um if you listen to what mark just said um at first as some of you i thought he was talking about courtney love so i thought he was gonna talk about kurt cobain and then i discovered it was a courtly love because my english is a bit rusty now so um but in fact if you follow his advice it means in order to reach a goal you'd better forget about it so um if you if you go after someone with too much intensity you're due to to fail in fact this is the well this is the experience i i got uh uh but i heard that for some other people if this is the opposite and i don't want i i i i'd like to ask you advice but i see there's many of you so maybe we can have some statistical advice um someone told me it was a really masculine idea the idea that you'd better not go after your goal to reach it and i heard that women were very well much more efficient and and they really knew what they wanted so you know after i wrote that book i met french people and i'm the french some french women told me i had it wrong you know that uh women know what they want and this is well they go after it and they get it and i had uh a different approach so i guess and you somehow so you somehow the fact that you hadn't noticed that they were heading towards their goals with such uh ferocity kind of kind of shows you that you're right about the frank charles of not trying too hard because part of the what you're saying i think a sort of paradox in the book is that you know the french spirit um or the french attitudes it's not about not making any effort it's about not appearing um to make a huge effort and you might be sort of actually working quite hard secretly is that fair exactly and uh if you want some history about it uh at the beginning my my publisher told me well you know you have to explain um in what way that would be more french because i i don't think it's only french but um the french have a reputation for not being lazy but uh looking easy or without any not making any effort and uh so you have to appear lazy because you have to hide work but in fact that dates from the 17th century uh when we had the 17th 18th century when we had kings and uh if you are part of the court you you want to pretend that everything is easy and comes easy for you uh as of after the french revolution i didn't with the 19th century under the industrial bourgeoisie you suddenly work was the first value and the meritocracy and the egalitarianism so you had to work your way through life and suddenly work became a value but before that you had to to appear a fourth place in in fact i think that the 20th century made some kind of a weird mix between the aristocratic appearance of not making any effort and the bourgeoisie valuing work hard work and we made the mix you know we work hard to pretend we don't and it works pretty well because i had the chat with you before we started and you still think that we spent two hours or four hours for lunch and in fact some of us work in fact in france but we hide it you hide it very well i i was telling olivier the story i wrote in my newsletter today that many years ago i had lunch with some friends with some french businessmen in the north of france um to discuss a business deal because they were going to make some absence for us which we would sell in the uk um and the first thing we did was have lunch and this lunch started about half past 12 and it went on until two three four more brandy more wine no conversation about business whatsoever and then eventually rather embarrassingly because i i was the editor of the idler magazine um and was promoting idleness i said to them don't you think we should do some work [Laughter] and um and they said oh uh travis uh the more you work that's a good motto unless you produce and so that reminded me of your book but yeah you know i think you're you can trace back actually very clearly these two traditions in france um and we're obviously fans of the the philosophical french tradition the philosophical stroke aristocratic tradition you were talking about um but in 2017 macron uh i think memorably i'm gonna try and read this in french but he he said um um could you translate that olivier if i read that correctly well um i thought we were going to talk about philosophers not about uh politicians uh well what i'm saying is yeah but what i'm saying is that you know the the macron is um rebelling against the french spirit uh of philosophy um and by being bourgeois essentially um and he's about hard work utilitarianism yeah but that dates uh from the time when he thought that maybe he was i mean the master of france and that you don't stay master of friends for a long time so now i think he he has changed his mind well or the world made him change his mind but uh you know um what happened to you absinthe business i was asking you but it's interesting that you talk about absence because in fact in france we have a tradition with poets like rambo and berlin and they're supposed to drink accent i don't know what you're drinking right now it looks good i don't think anymore it's supposed to make things easier for you you know to give you some kind of uh like muse when you're a poet and you drink alcohol it's supposed to to make things easier and in the book i talk about it because in fact rambo he produced all of his poetry produced a lot before he was 20 and then he stopped he quit poetry but he started studying latin and greek very early on so he spent the 10 000 hours you know this famous rule rule of thumb supposed to make you an expert in any field if you spend enough time so when he was 17 he was the best pupil in latin in a in his uh high school and he got the national price which is the proof that he didn't come easy for him he he put on he put the hours in you know yeah so this is uh the idea that you really introduced the book with um is the malcolm gladwell ten thousand hours idea which is that more or less he's kind of talking about an apprenticeship isn't he because ten thousand hours would be about sort of six or seven years i think uh given the 40 hour week um which i always thought was not actually a very revolutionary idea um and you're quite uh ambivalent about the ten thousand hours well i'm naturally ambivalent um i when i talk about not trying too hard it doesn't mean that you don't have to try uh it doesn't mean that you don't have to work it means that you work much more efficiently if you work in a field you love or you dream about and i'm talking about the sledge dogs i don't know much about them but i read the book by david epstein called the jeans the sports gene and he talks about the dogs and he's asking a dog trainer uh how do you make them uh pull the sledge and he said you know what you can't train them for that they have to love it and if they don't love it they even if they train they won't get as good as the ones who love it so um it's very interesting and there's a guy called dan i don't i forgot his last name an american guy who read malcolm gladwell on the the rule of 10 000 hours we've got maybe to explain what it is uh tom what do you think well yeah briefly that um you know he says well anyone who ever got good at anything put in 10 000 hours of practice well it comes from a study by a guy called ericsson uh from florida university i guess um and he made a study with the vile violin players uh in the berlin school with very high level and they made a study about just 30 people and 10 of them were supposed to become high level first level soloists 10 of them would become orchestral musicians and 10 of them would well were teachers uh to be you know and they made three categories and they studied how long they had practiced for instruments and there was a correlation between the number of hours they had spent and the the time well the age fiat started studying their instrument but the the danger of that is that you may think that if you spend enough time you become certainly good and david epstein goes again that and he says for example in chess to to reach the level of master some people spend twenty three thousand hours and some of them spend three thousand hours so you may spend 20 more years to reach the same level that means that training is not enough you know there's something else so usually you say um when you want you can reach a goal i don't know there's a when there is a will there is a way i had a friend who kept saying that to me in fact you should reverse it um you know if there is a way there may be a will if you can then you should make the effort but some things are not worth spending your effort on this is what i mean you know life is not just about effort and life is not just about pain i see a lot of people trying and and striving around me to reach a goal they can't reach and that's um that's a shame i think you know to make people think that they are guilty of not reaching a goal because some goals can't be reached no so if you if you follow these ethics of of absolute work you may waste your time so i'm not saying you don't have to work um i mean you have to work in uh with the economy you know uh intelligence and uh with the nice rhythm so i take the metaphor of the sea if you watch see it's not always at a high level you know it goes uh like that so you have to find some wisdom and some rhythm in your effort in your life to give him to to give it some some balance now you you're a big fan of the ancient greek philosophers and there's a lovely passage in the book where you're teaching a girl uh her philosophy baccalaureates and she's very worried about this exam that she's taking um and you basically sort of tell her that he's he's the worry and the work are not going to help her um what will help her is as he said earlier sort of loving the subject and actually really concentrating on the subject not on the result and you get a lot of and and you know you you bring socrates in as proof of that idea well it's uh both a true story and it's uh something that i use to build a chapter very easily but may it may it may sound like a philosophy lesson i was lucky with this student because she started very low level and she ended up with a very good grade at the exam but the my point was i told i told her you know what the philosophers they didn't do their work and invented their theories um just so you can study them and and get an exam they did it because they had to as uh as mark explained you know well plato didn't do that so he did he did that for both fun and because he had to do it so i told her forget about the exam it's the best way to understand because we didn't do it for the exam and at the end at the end if you understand well you pass your exam but i thought it's just a way to say um to reach a goal maybe sometimes you have to work but not to be obsessed with the goal because if you work with the the element itself the there's the i know there's a easy english i think it's english you wrote the elements you know if you're in your element everything seems easier and uh you see the meaning of what you do if you do it only for the exam there's a lack of of meaning it's just uh an exterior goal if you understand it from the inside then it it becomes easier and you pass your exam without any effort but that was why i i told this um a little story what about the streets of paris because what we love about paris is our idea of you know 1950s situationists um we love the idea of sartre and camus smoking galwa's outside les dumego and that sort of thing uh we love you know uh roland bart and montaigne you know there's a long list of people and you are you're a big fan of descartes as well um but what's what's happening to the philosophical discussion and that sort of street culture in paris right now where is everybody it must be i mean it's bad enough in london but uh you know at least in london we're normally kind of inside but paris life is really kind of lived in cafes hasn't it well if i remember well because i used to live in london when i was 60 years old i was attending the frenchly save and uh when i had the opportunity i would spend some time in the pubs too so i guess you have a very strong pop culture too um and well we we all suffer don't we we need the the social space whereas apparently there's nothing at stake and that we are free to to talk and uh nobody's gonna tell us what to think and that we miss it and i think it's uh uh it's difficult to um to find this freedom in the virtual space or i'm happy to to well i can't say i meet you but i i can feel there's um an a very warm atmosphere between you i don't know how you you made it to to build that kind of link like i can feel the warmth uh i'm well in paris i hope you don't hear my baby screaming in the back you know and i feel there's a sense of community and this is what we miss but if you're talking about philosophy you know what philosophers is better when they're dead because else they fight each other because we don't agree on anything and they're just a bunch of uh well um i won't use the word but it's better if you don't meet a philosopher you know they are arrogant pricks and uh they end up presidents of france so what i like is the the company of uh easy going fellows and uh i i chose descartes in my book because people have a misconception about him there everything every time they have something dull to say they think that descartes said it uh because uh the humor of the card was hidden and the card's life is really amazing he was a warrior because he was idle he was looking for idleness that at that time if you were a soldier you were like a traveler and uh there went a lot of fights so you had a very free life it was before the invention of discipline you know and uh so the card was was a wanderer and there was an anecdote in the book i like a lot where you see that this guy we think is all about reason but he had rented a boat in northern germany and uh he spoke german by the guide he don't know he understood and he i hired three mariners and he heard that they were about to kill him because they saw he was a foreigner and instead of trying to convince them you know you could think that the philosopher is just somebody who's talking and talking well he took out his swords you know and he threatened them in their own language and suddenly was one against three but they became very you know lovely people they're ready to take care of him so descartes was that kind of he was this guy who said okay there's a time for thinking when you have time to think you can spend a week thinking about an idea doing metaphysics whatever but you don't have to spend too much time thinking because life is about acting making choices and making choices uh without knowing uh in advance you know it's not about just doing what is reasonable it's uh doing even when you don't know what to do and this is what i learned from the cards you know so i put it on the book because to make things easy in fact it's uh it's about um making a very simple distinction between when it's time to think and when it's time to act and uh there's a philosopher i like a lot uh in the in the wake of the cards his name is alan and i talk a lot of him about the book if you don't want to buy the book listen this is a good sum up of what is in the book and he says there are two words if you want a good doctrine of action the first word is continuing and the second word is touching and he said the order is important you know usually people think they have to start and then continue he said this is the opposite because life is always already started for example today maybe you join the conversation you know there's always a conversation going on this is why we enjoy pubs and cafes you can join a conversation and it's the same for walking you know walking you if you start walking you don't need to start you always like walking and you need to continue so there's only one good advice in this book it says uh starting is too difficult starting is for god no when you're a god you can start a world we are just human beings who are unable to start anything so we may just continue you know do what you're already doing but do it better and uh this is what i like about descartes is in fact if you listen to him he's a good friend now he gives you good advice now um tell us a little bit more about allah because i hadn't actually heard of alan before reading your book what when was he writing well ally is a philosopher at the beginning of the 20th century and i i like him a lot because he was a pacifist but when it was time to to go for war well he went you know because he said that the the place for pacifist is fighting with his with everybody else when you have to so if you can um avoid warn do it but if you have to do it go for it you know with the everybody and he did it he was 47 years old in 1914 which means that he didn't have to do it you know it was too old to do it but here he had he was in good health so he went and he refused to be an officer so he he fought in the artillery with soldiers 17 18 years old and he was a teacher and every time i you know um i live not far from the place where i used to teach uh lisette behind the the pantheon maybe you know this uh this place and uh there's something very moving when you go to to that to that place there's a big monument big wall with all the names of the students and teachers who died in world war one and when i pass by i i watch this wall and i see the names of all his students you know this guy was the best teacher of the 20th century the first half well most of his students died in the war and when he came back from the war he was angry and he he wrote his memories about the war and in fact this is to me a real philosopher because he was not thinking what uh he's not he was not thinking what he would do if he would become president or king or a leader of men and he said i want to to to to stay a simple soldier you know and so he put all his uh intelligence uh understanding of life and philosophy to the service of the people and he started the popular university so i really am like a guy you know um always uh at the service of the common man um so it sounds like he uh the alarm for you you know he had a lot of humility in contrast to these like arrogant pricks you were talking about earlier well you know what uh what i like about him is he doesn't look like philosopher he had the moustache and he looked like a cavalry officer and he had some arrogance or confidence you may say you know he looked uh he stood proud uh and descartes was the same he could be a warrior was not afraid of thinking with uh you know impetus i don't know how you would say that you know the way you start an action or you where you start something uh you have to start with pride and you can feel it you know it's a human uh being proud of being human and yeah he didn't like the university people i personally i like university people because i know many of them and i i i believe in uh in intellectual work but what i like about him is that at one point you have to to stand for yourself you know you have to love philosophy and uh and to make it um to believe in it and when you believe in it you're you may act as if you are helped by dead people of uh like socrates you know and sometimes you meet a teacher like that i met one teacher like that and i i thought he was in direct connection with the socrates and the plato and allah you know and he made me love along so it's like a line of individuals that lead you back to the original philosophy and of course socrates had been a hero in the peloponnesian wars when he was younger he was he was a soldier too wasn't he mark uh well we'll come back to that in a second but um just to wind up this section olivier um can you talk about philippe petty that the tightrope walker because i mean he really embodies what you're talking about uh thinking and acting and walking a tightrope is a sort of philosophical act yeah it's interesting because uh it's a tightrope walker um and the first time he made a what did he do you know between the towers of notre dame the par the paris here by night with the key at stolen he he put a cable and he walked on it you know in the morning in and notre dame the paris just in front of the police the main police station in paris so he was arrested but not on the cable of course when he came back on the ground and uh in france well nobody really noticed you know there was like a few lines in francois or whatever and a few years later in 1974 did the same thing but between the twin towers and suddenly became a huge star but it was not much more difficult it was of course because it was higher it was 400 meters high and the it was a 60 meter cable it was windy spent 45 minutes on it and they sent helicopters to convince him to well but became a star because um in fact he answered to an argument that was made by montaigne because you told me you talked about him and by pascal and both of them say if you take the best philosopher in the world so when pascal writes that he thinks about himself of course you know if you take the best philosopher in the world and you put it in a in a cage um and it says between the towers of notre dame you know if you hang him there or or if you put between the two towers of notre dame um how you call that a wooden like a plank no large enough to work on it nobody is wise enough to try that or to think about it without falling you know just thinking about it makes you fall in your imagination when you imagine don't do it because you you may hurt yourself you know it don't hurt your imagination because this is uh priceless but what i was really amazed um by was the the ability of felipe to respond to answer uh to montan and pascal but not by thinking just by doing and by preventing himself from the wind of thought and he says if you think on a wire you fall and me you know i'm an intellectual worker you may say and i know that uh thinking is uh the enemy i mean thinking is at the same time the most beautiful thing we have and we share and we experiment that's uh too much thinking overthinking overanalysis prevents us from living so it's a weird uh balance we have to find you know when i see a wall of books like if i watch my library i think okay i won't have time to read all of that before i'm dead so if i start reading it's like uh turning my back on life so but if i just act without books well it's boring you know life without book is like life without glass of beer of wine i don't know what you're drinking tonight um what do you what by the way what did you find a balance you know sorry what are you drinking olivier this evening right now nothing i i get to sleep too early before the end of this conversation but i promise you to to drink to everybody's elf uh just after we finished okay that's great well we'll definitely we'll believe you um now would you like to come in mark uh there must be something some reflections you'd like to make yeah well actually i mean i was thinking sorry but i'll just think about this this idea of the um uh the tightrope walker the chess player um you know or it could be a tennis player let's think about federer you know when they go right to the top they don't actually work that hard you know when you when you um uh of course they're practicing all the time but when when you read interviews with federer um you know he's playing about four hours tennis a day um he has two days off a week and they say what do you do at home and he says i do nothing all day i get to kind of hang around you know he doesn't actually work that hard and there was an english cricketer ed west he said something similar that you know the really top people the ones right at the top um they know how valuable uh doing something completely different to their main thing is or simply doing nothing i mean the only experience that i've had that i think might vaguely be an echo of of that is uh i did i play um the piano and and at one point i was you know quite reasonable i might have done a music degree and stuff like that and i do remember at that stage um every so often when i learned a piece really well it felt like the music kind of took over me rather than me playing the music and i'm not saying it was a perfect performance for anything but there was that kind of sense somehow and and the strange thing is it it did require many many hours i mean i'm completely with olivier on the whole 10 000 hours thing i think it's rot actually and the psychology is very dodgy as a lot of psychology is and i speak as a psychotherapist and because of what's called the replication crisis but that's a whole other another discussion but nonetheless you know there's a funny thing a kind of flip occurs when you put in all the time the effort it somehow becomes part of you and then more than you can take over and that's what i sense in someone like federer as well it's why he feels like a god um that you know it comes from who knows quite where and that's what's really exciting about it and i don't know if that's quite what olivier is talking about um as well um but that that was my thought were you talking about that olivia is that olivia what do you think about these the the the the really top you know chess players and sportsmen and so on well to start um uh because i reread my book in english well translated by ellen because we worked a lot about it on it in fact to tell you the truth i don't like talking about the top people because what do i know about a top player and we keep you know in these books how to blah blah blah we keep trying to understand how the top people made it and in fact i'm ambivalent about that because if they are gifted you know that means that they reach the top because they are gifted under this or they are geniuses or whatever and at the same time if i think they are a genius why would i even try uh to do like them they did nothing else found the work at what they love so federer it's interesting because this is an example that david epstein takes for his new book range and i recommend it to you it's a very nice book and it compares federer with this top golf player forgot his name very top the like the best in the world ever what's his name tiger woods and he says okay tiger woods specialized very early on like maybe was one year old and he started golf and federer is the opposite because he went to tennis very late in his uh fleet life and he started with football and blah blah and with a mix of everything in the end he had a wide range of activities and uh he made his own way of playing tennis and was so good at it so david epstein makes a kind of deduction he says uh nowadays we should not specialize too early and too much and uh he even says that the recent nobel prizes were generalists you know and people were interested by many things and we changed uh their center of interest every five or six years and they made connections you know between different realms and this is how they created new ideas but to to take you to take an example that's more common to us but closer i think learning a language you know is much more interesting because everybody is able to do it and uh you don't need to be a top you know talker me i i know when i was 16 years old and i was living in london in my english family and they i was trying very hard to lose my french accent and after a few months of vainly trying that they told me we love it when you talk because you sound so french and then i say okay forget about losing the french accent you know i should not strive that much to get rid of what makes it charming so but you know if i remember well when i was 16 years old i didn't understand the word on tv you know i was living in london and i was watching movies with my english family and not understand i would understand it but not that much like maybe one word every three or four words and now well after a few years of watching series and movies with subtitles uh in french then i moved to subtitles in english and now i understand the even if there are no subtitles so i'm very happy to understand more how did that happen because i've spent a lot of hours in the element but i was not forced to do it it's because i love it you know and this is the only morals we should take the only example is that if you jump inside a language and you make mistakes and who cares you know and then you have a chance to make connections like we are in a virtual pub i'll drink later so it's very virtual but i i feel we have a kind of conversation you know and it's it's uh it would have been impossible for me when i started so um things become easier you know uh why because you spend time in it not because you count the hours because you love spending your time there so build a new habit and i remember when i was living i lived in the u.s too you know a friend of mine was an accountant he had the car so he was driving me back home every day i was 25 years old he was 59 60 and he was learning italian three words a day and i say okay do you have italian friends it said not yet no and this is more an example i i love him his name was jean he used to live in scotland and i kept his that lesson this is not federer you know but now i i know that if tomorrow i want to start chinese i'll think about jean as my role model i learn three three words a day maybe just one at the end of the year have 365 something or maybe three times that and i have chinese friends maybe one day but i start with english speaking friends so there we have it the the the effort-free method of learning a language from um jumping jump in the pool of language you jumped in the pool well olivia your your english is brilliant and i'm really glad that you still have your french accent because it does sound extremely charming victoria have we got some questions from our yeah we have we have thank you olivia thank you mark thank you tom um can we start with that uh rhythm of work angie andrew burnett you've got a question on that theme actually are you there yes will you ask your question yes hi olivier thank you so much you talked about um having a word i can't see you i see justin we want your video on okay here i am and here is that hi matching american shirts um yeah thanks olivier this is super interesting so the question i had was you talked about having a rhythm of work and you talked about the c which was a really nice analogy and my question is what's your personal rhythm of work what does that look like for you well you know as i have three kids including a baby my with rhythm of work is uh using the uh the left space and uh and uh [Music] well i don't choose the highs and lows you know anymore so but the a good rhythm is um because my work is writing in fact i give lectures and i write so when i give a lecture i try to be not too tired so if i have the choice between spending one extra hour preparing for the work and going to bed i go to bed now this is uh my experience because it's better to be present and to be awake for the conversation we we may have than to have over prepared and be just tired when it's time to be present and um the second thing is uh that as i'm trying to to to write uh stuff so i can tell you about the moment when i wrote this book it was in greece it was on my holiday time um and i used the environment uh to to i was in touch with the sea i love swimming and snorkeling and skin diving and you know i i practice apnea too so i was waking up very early in the morning six in the morning in the water but it was not winter time of course uh and once my body was uh happy with what he had done uh the day was over for the body and it was time for thinking but thinking was coming from the pleasure of having used my body inside the element around me and i was watching what was around me and there were tomatoes and the and fig trees and in fact greece is amazing because you you feel that everything is at hand you know and everything is like um [Music] well there's a lot of generosity from nature even on the rocks so the the rhythm the wisdom of rhythm is um be as relaxed be as relaxed as possible uh in the effort no not being tense all the time thank you sorry i've been too long guess not no not too long at all that answer your question angie how does it fit in with your rhythm thank you yeah i think that's interesting i like to go out for a run before i start work and i think that's another way of kind of yeah loosening up the mind a little bit and i love how olivier said that he worked after having worked in the sea especially linking up with the analogy of the tides coming in and out and when we were living in the us just up until the last autumn we lived right on the beach and that was always a great place to go and think and sort of reset for the day ahead but it's interesting because at the moment so angie has a a kind of nine to five type job i've just started writing a book and our rhythms we're trying to sort of align our rhythms i'm you know i'm trying to work out where like i i can write in silence but then if there's a zoom meeting or something i can't really concentrate on writing and so like trying to work out how we share an office in in our home here so yeah so throw in a baby as well now and uh yeah oh i don't know how you all do it um but yeah start with some exercise there's a general wish we could all go to greece but we're wishing let's um thank you angie can we go on to sarah sarah sanderson you there sarah oh hi there it's actually mark oh hi mark hi yeah i um i remember working in a a bar or a campsite in france in the late 1980s and i shared the bar duties with a local french chapter this was in normandy uh and he used to just casually uh as a bit of a joke um he used to call me um a hooligan this was the period when you know english football fans had a bit of a reputation for tearing up stadiums in in foreign lands and it used to really wind me up because i used i used to think it was just a really lazy stereotype about english people just because i was male and of a certain age and the question i wanted to ask was whether french people find it a bit irritating when um the likes of us talk about them always wanting to have a to a three-hour lunch and you know is that basically just a lazy stereotype not really been going on for a long time well naturally uh to tell you the truth i take it as a compliment because uh um i think it's disappearing and the ability to spend a lot of time at lunch gives you a better rhythm to uh to go back to angie's uh remark you know people who think that they can work uh 10 12 hours in a row in fact we have studies and we have testimonies from people that are really creative including nobel prizes explaining that you can't use your mind at top speed and productivity or whatever more than four hours a day and um if it's possible it's better to to cut it in uh twice two hours with maybe a long walk between them so i think that uh people spend a lot of time at work uh not because they're guilty or be just because they have to pretend they are productive all the time and we all know that if we spend we've all been to school you know and we know that uh our attention span is not uh that wide and it's impossible to listen to somebody talking uh for two hours without daydreaming and the you know the uh um this is a philosopher allah who says that the attention beats like a pulse you know so the tension is not like a constant light on an object it's more like a pulse and if you respect the rhythm of attention you have to know how to pretend to be paying attention at moments of dullness and boredom and uh if you if you are part of a meeting you know what i'm talking about and the attention is like a thunderbolt you know uh it's like a strike and so you have to know how to rest to allow the defender to strike at at times and and even rowing you know rowing you have to relax and then you have to oh maybe fighters even on the boxes but not tense all the time they they put intensity and one punch and most of the time they are like you know mellow and suddenly they're hard and they heat so this is more about that you know and uh of course we have to get rid of the cliches but it's like that we all cliches for each other but it's um that's interesting isn't it because there's a there's a real ethic isn't there amongst kind of sports psychologists that it's you know 80 perspiration and twenty percent inspiration but i think you seem to be suggesting that those percentages might be slightly the wrong way around no in fact they call it the the matthew effect you know i think it's matthew effect i'm not good with the bible maybe you help me uh this is uh the the part where it says that to those we have i shall be given and for and to those we we don't uh shall be taken even more in fact if you train people of different abilities the good ones are going to run even faster and the not so good ones they're going to be better but in fact the gap is going to be wider so you know what's the point of training if you're in competition this is why um you write the psychology of sports in fact you you better train if you're good if you're not you better quit and maybe learn the language because if you learn the language you'll make friends you know and uh you don't have to be in a competition you're you're doomed to lose yeah that's that for me mark we're going to have to i want to squeeze one more person in so i'm going to um move on olivia if you can stay for one extra minute i'd like to you know what i can stay longer if you want i i'm happy to be with you ah well that's so sweet of we i know a lot of people often have to leave but let let's fit in jim and uh jim holland and at least have one good answer and one good question from that jim oh great thank you thanks olivia i really appreciate it um it was very interesting today hi um yes i live in the u.s and um so we hear a lot of stories um uh with a construct uh you know on television in movies etc with a construct of somebody starting from very little uh putting in very hard work and then becoming excellent and you know these stories can be inspiring um on the one hand um but then also sometimes um i've noticed that they're used in a negative way where you know one can be faulted for not putting in enough hard work uh and that can be that can feel you know very um bad um and so i'm just kind of wondering what your take might be on those type of narratives um if that's something that is uh more u.s centric or is that something that has kind of been a narrative throughout history around the world um and you know whether or not you think those are helpful for inspiring people or you know can kind of be a mix of helpful and also um not so helpful thank you well i love that question because i'm i'm writing scripts myself and i translate it into french a book written by an american script doctor called john truby it's called the anatomy of story so this is a subject a conversation we went very deep inside together and in fact what's interesting when you tell the story of a character you have a so what makes you interested in the movie is that something happens to somebody you know and uh so you keep punching your character and in the end he's supposed to have a self-revelation and change his life and uh or maybe just uh get lost and um if you describe the usual commercial you hollywood movie somebody going from zero to to to the top and this is a success story and everybody can relate to it or or take it as a horizon but if you take the the really deep and this is for um you know for teenagers this is a movie for teenagers but if you take deep writing in fact you see it more in series right now in uh and it started started with hbo with complex characters and with characters we have to learn something not to win but to lose because this is what happens in your life you know you have to learn how to lose and the best teachers they teach you how to lose and how to respect the uh the opponent you know so uh if you write movies for teenagers uh you may teach them how to lose two and and even you know clinton sweet for example it's interesting because when he made a movie like million dollar baby she dies at the end but she got what she wanted and it's a recognition from strangers because her family was rotten you know so this is a deep story and the best sports stories even the ones where somebody wins usually tell you something about learning to turn your back on your family make it by yourself you know there's usually there's a deep meaning and then if you go into the real complex stories it's always a mixed and it gives you more balance because winning is for young people you know so if you want to write fiction for everybody uh don't forget about what's to be lost you know it makes you like easier in fact thank you thank you for your question i didn't actually answer it with the the full spectrum it deserved but uh thanks for the question you're welcome thank you good question thank you jim and thank you olivier thank you for your time thank you for your great wisdom um well no no no you know what i have to tell you i read the book again before this meeting because i was afraid of not understanding your questions and i'm telling you in the book i'm i'm bragging a lot i keep telling stories about how i did this and that so please if you read the book put that on the side and and keep the uh the wisdom i took from others it's really a collection of uh pebbles i i took on the on the beach of wisdom and uh this is things that are really useful we we use just a few of them today but most of them are just about uh finding the right position instead of striving to act you know in fact if you have a problem to solve [Music] you just find comfort you just sit back and watch the problem resolve itself uh i can just sum it up right here but this is an advice that comes not just from tightrope walkers and and champions but from people like wittgenstein and from piano players but at the moment where they are weak no when they have a problem the problem is how to face it how to let the problem solve itself you have to love the problem you have not to be in a hurry so this is not a book for people who want to produce more and produce more efficiently it's just about an attitude and how to live more relaxed life and to be honest with you i don't like the title of my book i would get rid of the french part you know uh because it sounds as if the french knew something better than other people but don't forget it's just a marketing tool uh used by my publisher my french publisher and in fact you know every time you compromise there's a price to pay and what i don't like in the book is the compromise i made putting french in the title so forget about the french [ __ ] and the the art of not trying too hard is enough you know thank you your invitation i was very happy to uh to uh have this chat with you it was really fast i was afraid uh my sentence were maybe too slow too difficult to understand but i enjoyed very much uh just watching you and trying to talk to you wherever you are in the world it's it's amazing to chat everybody every hi to everybody we're getting lots of comments and we've really really enjoyed it please if you if you can send me the comments uh i would be happy to to read what you wrote uh yeah we can we can send the whole recording we're always talking though yeah we'll do that for you we'll do that thank you olivia thank you so much and listen everybody unmute so you can thank olivia yourselves thank you this was brilliant

Channel: Idler

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Id: lVBw3mg8pjM

Length: 61min 42sec (3702 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021