Oliver Burkeman

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD NOMINEE FOR READERS’ FAVOURITE NON-FICTION “Rehab for burned-out high achievers.” —The Guardian How would life open up if we stopped treating it as a problem to be solved? Addressing the fundamental questions about how to live, Meditations for Mortals offers a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life Oliver Burkeman calls “imperfectionism.” It helps us tackle challenges as they crop up in our daily lives: our finite time, the lure of distraction, the impossibility of doing anything perfectly. How can we embrace our nonnegotiable limitations? Or make good decisions when there’s always too much to do? How do we shed the illusion that life will really begin as soon as we can “get on top of everything”? Reflecting on quotations drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help, Burkeman explores a combination of practical tools and daily shifts in perspective. The result is a life-enhancing and surprising challenge to much familiar advice―and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living more fully. A map for a liberating journey toward a more meaningful life―a journey that begins where we actually find ourselves, not with a fantasy of where we’d like to be―from the New York Times bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks

Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts

Meditations for Mortals

David Reina

This, here and now, is real life. This is it. This portion of your limited time. The part before you’ve managed to get on top of everything, or dealt with your procrastination problem, or graduated, or found a partner, or retired. And before the survival of democracy or the climate have been secured. This part matters just as much as any other, and arguably even more than any other, since the past is gone and the future hasn’t occurred yet, so right now is the only time that really exists.

Laura Dobie

The challenge, then, is simple, though for many of us also excruciating: What's one thing you could do today - or tomorrow at the latest, if you're reading this at night - that would constitute a good-enough use of a chunk of your finite time, and that you'd actually be willing to do?

But for most of us, if we're being honest with ourselves, the temptation is often to exaggerate potential consequences, so as to spare ourselves the burden of making a bold choice.

My favourite way of combating the feeling of productivity debt in everyday life is to keep a ‘done list', which you use to create a record not of the tasks you plan to carry out, but of the ones you've completed so far today - which makes it the rare kind of list that's actually supposed to get longer as the day goes on.

Most of the long-term benefits of reading arise not from facts you insert into your brain, but from the ways in which reading changes you, by shaping your sensibility, from which good work and good ideas will later flow. ‘Every book makes a mark,’ says the art consultant Katarina Janoskova, ‘even if it doesn't stay in your conscious memory.’

The second piece of advice is to resist the urge to stockpile knowledge. At least where non-fiction sources are concerned, it's easy to fall into the assumption that the point of reading or listening to things is to add to your storehouse of knowledge and insights, like a squirrel hoarding nuts, in preparation for a future when you’ll finally get to take advantage of it all.

Sometimes it's OK just to read whatever seems most fun. Spending half an hour reading something interesting, moving, awe-inspiring or merely amusing might be worth doing, not just to improve who you become in the future - though it might do that too – but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive.

Perfectionists love to begin new endeavours, because the moment of starting belongs to the world of limitlessness: for as long as you haven't done any work on a project, it's still possible to believe that the end result might match the ideal in your mind. You can luxuriate in the feeling of pure potential; it's like opening the curtains, one weekend morning in childhood, to find the streets and gardens blanketed in virgin snow. By contrast, finishing things means slogging your way through the messy, imperfect reality of what the project actually became; the childhood analogy this evokes, for me, is grinding to the end of a history homework essay. (And not because I didn't like history essays: I was a huge nerd, and probably enjoyed them more than playing in the snow. But only starting them. Finishing them, mired in disgust at what Id produced, felt like torture.)

Sometime in the aftermath of those poisonings, Benedict apparently understood that the point isn't to spend your life serving rules. The point is for the rules to serve life.

‘Dailyish’ is one that does. In not insisting on your doing something absolutely every day, it shifts the focus away from the ultimately meaningless question of whether or not you have an unbroken chain of red Xs, and back to the life it’s supposed to be serving - to the thing you're seeking to bring into existence, whether that's a piece of writing, a work of art, a happy family, a healthier body or anything else.

A friend of mine vividly recalls the uplifting and energising moment when, feeling burdened like Harris by the endless problems that seemed to get in the way of her doing her job, it dawned on her that the problems were the job. Anyone, or a piece of software, could do her job, if it weren't for the problems. Her unique contribution lay in her capacity for solving them. 

Beyond the mountains, there are always more mountains, at least until you reach the final mountain before your time on earth comes to an end. In the meantime, few things are more exhilarating than mountaineering.

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