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An epiphany is always a good way to begin a show.

And the British writer Oliver Berkman had one about 10 years ago, a bona fide epiphany is always a good way to begin a show. And the British writer Oliver Berkman had one about 10 years ago, a bona fide epiphany on a bench, in a park in Brooklyn, where he lived then.

And I was kind of even more stressed and anxious than I usually was at that time about all the deadlines that I had to get through by the end of the week, all the other tasks that were sort of piling up on my to-do list.

And I was sitting there doing something that I'd done many times before, sort of cycling through all the kind of productivity techniques and time management tricks I could maybe use to actually get through all this stuff, you know, figure out which social events I could cancel, how much I could reduce my sleep to sort of make it all fit in.

And just being suddenly struck very powerfully by the realization,

oh, it's impossible.

I'm trying to do something impossible.

I'm trying to fit in a number of things that can't be fit in to the time available.

And just really experiencing that thought in that moment as an extraordinary liberation, a weight of my shoulders.

It's pretty difficult to keep on beating yourself up

for failing to do something that you have understood nobody could ever do.

And it's liberating because there's a kind of a shift.

When you go from seeing some challenges very, very difficult and that it'll

reflect badly on you if you can't pull it off, if you go from that to seeing that this challenge

is in fact impossible, it makes no sense to continue fighting that futile battle. And you actually

feel, I actually felt freed to pour my time and energy and attention that week into the sort of best use of the time available.

So it was actually very sort of empowering. It wasn't kind of so I might as well not bother doing anything. It was something much more positive than that.

I realized that I needed to sort of change my understanding of what I thought it was that I was doing.

And that sort of changed understanding of what it means to be overwhelmed,

whether one should really spend one's whole life chasing this hypothetical future moment of

...