Want a More Meaningful Life? Embrace Your Limitations.

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Self-improvement, Arts, Books, Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2024

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In his mega-bestseller “Four Thousand Weeks,” Oliver Burkeman showed that the shortness of life “isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief.” Now, in “Meditations for Mortals,” he invites us to embrace what he calls “imperfectionism.” Accept your limitations, your finitude, your lack of control — because “the more we try to render the world controllable,” he warns, “the more it eludes us; and the more daily life loses … its resonance, its capacity to touch, move and absorb us.” ✨ Want to hear Oliver’s advice on how to keep your feet on the ground this election season? Head over to bookoftheday.nextbigideaclub.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn presents.
0:05.0	I'm Rufus Griskam and this is the next big idea.
0:10.0	Today, how to live a meaningful life as a flawed finite human in an era of infinite tasks. For 15 years Oliver Brookman wrote a column for The Guardian. The title,
0:37.0	This Column Will Change Your Life.
0:39.0	When I finished writing it, one of the very nice emails I got was from somebody who said they'd grown up reading
0:45.0	it. Nothing will make you feel older than that.
0:47.6	Oh, wow.
0:48.6	Yeah.
0:49.6	Well, you probably grew up writing it, right? Right, yeah, changed my life.
0:54.0	Oliver devoured self-help books,
0:57.0	tested countless journaling and time management systems,
1:00.0	he meditated,
1:02.0	sampled various flavors of Buddhism and stoicism, but in the end
1:06.6	none of it changed his life. All it did he says was make him slightly more anxious as yet another new technique proved not to be
1:16.4	the silver bullet. Having failed to become a productivity ninja and sensing that others might
1:22.2	be failing too, Oliver wrote a book called
1:24.7	4,000 weeks, time management for mortals, in which he writes bracingly, the
1:30.7	average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short, but that isn't a reason for unremitting despair.
1:41.0	Or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time.
1:46.2	It's a cause for relief.
1:48.4	You get to give up on something that was always impossible.
1:51.8	The quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally
	...

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