self help Archives -

FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS by Oliver Burkeman

FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS is the average human life span, and this book deals with how it is we can accept this horrifying fact.

It’s a book about time management, but not in the usual sense, of how you can fit more into the time you have. Rather, he says what is important is to accept that you will never do everything, and learn to find that a relief, rather than a regret. Here he is:

. . . philosophers from Ancient Greece to the present day have taken the brevity of life to be the defining problem of human existence: we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.

He thinks that our usual approach to time management, which is to be as productive as possible, is essentially us running away from the great truth that no matter how hard we work, or how much we want to, we will never get round to even a tiny fraction of everything that is possible for us. It is much better, in his view, to accept this up front:

Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather then letting them get made by default – or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all.

He advises us, to ‘pay ourselves first,’ that is, do what you want to do first, and be comfortable that other things will slip (e.g., spend the first hour of the day on whatever is your most important priority). Second, he advises us to limit our ‘to-do’s, so we don’t kid ourselves we can do everything; and third, and most challengingly, to avoid our ‘middling’ priorities. If you made a list of 1 to 25 of your priorities, he thinks you should focus on numbers 1 to 5, and then carefully avoid numbers 6 to 25, because they are the really dangerous ones – the ‘second-best’ options that could end up eating up your life.

There is clearly much to think about in this book, but it was this observation that really struck me:

One of the puzzling lessons I have learned is that, more often than not, I do not feel like doing most of the things that need doing. I’m not just speaking about cleaning the toilet bowl or doing my tax returns. I’m referring to those things I genuinely desire to accomplish.

In his view, a lot of what feels unpleasant – for example, boredom, or procrastination- comes from the fact that we do not like to encounter our finitude. He thinks that often when we are struggling to concentrate on something we want to do, and turn to our phone, it is because it is deeply unpleasant to face up to the fact that this thing that matters a great deal to you is now real: like, it may not be as good as you hoped, it might fail, etc etc, and that is very painful.

However:

If you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it.

And:

You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results

There you have it. This book certainly gave me plenty to think about, and unfortunately I seem to mostly think about it when I wake up at 3am. Always a great time for considering your life choices.

Side point, he refers to a fantastic time management book from 1908, called HOW TO LIVE YOUR LIFE ON TWENTY FOUR HOURS A DAY. I loved this book in my early twenties. If you’d still like to take a go at fitting everything in, then I recommend it.

THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK by Mark Manson

Here is an example of how a great title does half the work. Though the author’s point is not so much that we should not give a f*ck, but rather that we should only give a f*ck about what we give a f*ck about. Easier said than done, in my experience. I often find myself getting riled up about things that I know I do not care about. In any case, the book is refreshing in its emphasis that there is no life without problems; the point is to choose the right problems.

I also thought this was useful:

If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.

Here his point is, don’t measure success too much based on things you cannot control, e.g., the approval of others, promotions, etc. Rather focus on things you can control, e.g., doing your best. Associated with this is what you should measure yourself on:

Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. . . . Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator. . . . (You should) define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible. This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented . . . This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world.”

I can’t say it’s the best written or most insightful book I’ve ever come across, and admittedly I lost it in an Uber before I finished it completely, but that said I enjoyed it.

YOUR BEST YEAR YET by Jenny Ditzler

A re-read of a book from a couple of years ago. I read it again to help me get some discipline and produce some new year’s resolutions. 2021 has to be a better year than 2020, just vaccines alone, but I’m hoping to give it a push. The blog of last time I read it is here. It’s a pretty good book, I recommend it.

YOUR BEST YEAR YET by Jinny Ditzler

Regular readers will know I am on a self-help kick. A friend of mine recommend this one to me, and I found it pretty good – it’s a straightforward guide to trying to decide on your goals. As Ditzler puts it:

After the initial spurt of growing up and becoming an adult, most of us don’t stop to think about goals in the same serious way we did when we carefully planned our education, our career, our first place away from our parents. We begin to ‘follow our noses’, reacting to circumstances . . . Time goes by and soon we begin to feel our lives are out of control and there’s nothing we can do about it. Things which matter most to us aren’t getting enough attention and life gets frustrating. We feel we are no longer in charge of our own lives.

It’s broadly framed as a workshop to do at new year, though you can do it anytime, and is structured around ten questions. The first are about reviewing the year past. She claims:

Almost without exception, people’s initial thoughts about the past are negative. . . Unless we stop to think about what really happened, we assume that there is far greater cause for disappointment than celebration

I found this to be shockingly true. I was amazed to see how much more I had achieved in the last year than I had failed at. Indeed, one of the more interesting parts of the book is not just doing the questions but hearing the author’s review of the many people she has seen answer the questions.

She provides a structured set of ways of thinking about your life, which I found quite useful, and various examples of how people succeeded by being pragmatic in their approach. I was tempted to eyeroll, but was stopped by:

. . . take note if you find it much harder to believe these experiences than the earlier examples of peoples’ problems

Her guidance to getting your goals is something she has rather clunkily branded “Gold Time” self management, where you carve out time to focus on what is important but not urgent, which she argues is the stuff that most frequently drops off our list, but is in fact the stuff we should absolutely be doing to actually be in charge of our lives.

To my mind, figuring out what you want in the first place is much harder than actually executing it, but still, it was an interesting way of thinking about your priorities.

I recommend this book and have tried to put some of its steps into practice. It is remarkably difficult to give up one’s prejudice against self-help. The author notes:

Most of us trap ourselves by not being willing to take the necessary steps to be the master of our own lives, yet we’ll be damned if we’ll let anyone or anything serve as our master in the meantime! The result- no one’s in charge. We get nowhere. Every bit of true progress I’ve made in my life has come from really listening to a teacher or an author and having the discipline to practice his or her lessons until I have learnt them. Action and follow-through are everything.

I may as well try someone else’s approach. It’s not as if mine is working so well.

MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS by John Gray

I picked this book up pretty much at random from my parents’ bookcase one night when I had run out of reading matter and needed something to take to bed.

I only managed about the first thirty pages, but they were irritating. Gray makes some coherent arguments about what he imagines the differences between men and women to be, which some people might find useful to think about. For example, he encourages women not to feel rejected if a man feels like sitting quietly with the paper.

Gray says that men feel it is important to be successful providers, and thus may feel upset if they receive ‘unsolicited advice’ from women. He also says that when women wish to share their feelings, they do not want men to ‘offer solutions.’ I see. So when I say what I think someone should do, that is unsolicited advice, but when a boy tells me what to do, that is offering a solution.

Thank god it was already bedtime.

PERSONAL MBA by Josh Kaufman

This is an unusual entry for this blog. It is, according to the author, a distillation of the most important ideas to be learnt in an MBA.

The author clearly has a pretty big chip on his shoulder about MBA programmes, and in particular about their price. He froths at the mouth for some time in the introduction about how much debt you go into to attend one, and how little you learn. I suspect he may be right about this, though it seems pretty obvious to me that most people do not go to business school to learn about business so much as to make contacts and to have a prestigious institution’s name on their CV. And these are very valuable assets, probably much more important than actually knowing what you are doing.

So this book focuses on the secondary goal, which is actually learning about business. I found it a very good basic introduction to the main concepts in business: profits, costs, overheads, etc. It is very clearly aimed at those starting a small business, and has many excellent recommendations, including explaining how to predict when a business will begin to make a return on investment, and how to start from the most basic beginnings.

Fittingly, for a book about reading, I also learn how to appropriately commodify books and magazines. Apparently, while there are many value forms (production, leasing, etc), reading matter may be classified as ‘audience aggregators,’ that have value primarily because the attention of the audience you gain can be sold on at a profit. Take that, Proust, Shakespeare, et al!

It really makes you think. For example, it made me think: if only Herman Melville had had a copy of PERSONAL MBA while he was dying in poverty! How different the history of nineteenth century American letters!