Why You Can’t Stop Your Productivity Addiction - Oliver Burkeman - #1061
Modern Wisdom
Chris Williamson
4.6 • 5.9K Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2026
⏱️ 92 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Is it possible to be the best in the world and relaxed at the same time? |
| 0:08.4 | The best in the world? I don't know. What I do think is that it is very possible to be really, really good at what you do and relaxed. |
| 0:18.6 | And actually, my experience is that the more relaxed I can be, the better I am at things. |
| 0:25.7 | I'm not going to claim to be the best in the world at anything. |
| 0:27.6 | But I think that notion that you've either got to choose a relaxing life or an accomplished |
| 0:33.9 | one, this is the thing I'm on a mission, very personally motivated mission to |
| 0:40.0 | prove is not how it works. I think there's a tension between having high standards, which is |
| 0:47.9 | hypervigilance and obsession and focus and really paying attention to stuff. |
| 0:55.0 | And that just tends to bleed into the personality and the ambient anxiety. |
| 1:02.3 | And I can see, for instance, if you were to say, |
| 1:05.4 | is it possible to be the best in the world and never relax at the same time? |
| 1:11.6 | That question would seem pretty obvious to answer. Yes, of course, because the exact same level of resolution that |
| 1:18.1 | you're obsessing over your pursuit with is the thing that kind of destroys the rest of your life. |
| 1:24.9 | The interesting question is to work out whether you can kind of be on |
| 1:29.0 | and off or if you can hold things a little bit more loosely whilst still getting the right |
| 1:34.2 | level of output you on. Yeah, it's really interesting. I think that there's something, I mean, |
| 1:43.1 | this runs through a lot of why I try to write about but there's something |
| 1:45.8 | about wanting to feel in control of the process of getting better at things or being good at things |
| 1:52.4 | which is kind of completely different from the actual process of getting better at them or or |
| 1:59.0 | being good at them so i think there's you, this is on some level just the banal observation |
| 2:05.2 | that people who really excel in what they do are very often, |
| 2:08.6 | or perhaps more often in a flow state while they're doing it. |
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