1: “I vividly recall the moment I realized I’d been overcomplicating my son’s fifth birthday party, which had come to feel like a significantly stressful undertaking,” Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.
“What the stress really signaled, I saw, was that I cared about the project,” Oliver writes, “which is entirely different from saying that it needed to be complex or effortful.”
Oliver’s book is divided into four weeks, each week with seven days or lessons.
In the first week, he explores “the truth of our finitude, in a world where overwhelm and distraction threaten constantly to derail us.”
In the second week, he shares “the insights I’ve found most helpful for taking bold, imperfect action as a finite human.”
There are, however, unseen consequences of taking such advice: “It risks implying that taking meaningful action is necessarily a tough or complex challenge,” he notes.
Certainly, life is challenging. We have “severely limited time, and limited control,” Oliver observes, “necessitating hard choices and a tolerance for imperfection and uncertainty.”
The answer, however, is not always to try harder. To build an accomplished and engaging life, one of the key skills we need is the ability to let go.
“Not making things happen, through willpower or effort,” he writes, “but cultivating the willingness to stand out of the way and let them happen instead.”
Which is the focus of week three.
2: Getting better at getting better is what RiseWithDrew is all about.
Monday through Thursday, we explore ideas from authors, thought leaders, and exemplary organizations.
At the end of each week, we are exploring some of the life lessons Oliver shares in his wonderful book Meditations for Mortals.
Yes, “meaningful accomplishment,” Oliver writes, “takes effort. And filling ourselves with motivation is one important way to render ourselves willing and able to put that effort in.”
But it’s also easy to fall into the trap of assuming that if something takes effort, it must be meaningful.
“Collapsing on to the sofa at the end of a long day spent deep-cleaning our home,” he notes, “or organizing all our digital files into an orderly hierarchy of folders, it’s easy to conclude that we must have used our time well: Consider how exhausted we feel!”
Right on!
Or not.
“Perhaps our home could have waited another month for a deep clean. And maybe we should never have bothered organizing our files at all, because the search function on our computer is amply good enough to track things down when we need to find them.”
Rather than focusing on maximizing our energy and motivation, we might ask: “What if this might be a lot easier than I’d been assuming?”
Interestingly, we often avoid this question because it feels like cheating. Doing so requires a bit of courage. We have to “be willing to let it be easy,” as Elizabeth Gilbert says.
3: Entrepreneur and podcaster Tim Ferriss puts it a different way: “What would this look like if this were easy?”
The benefit of Tim’s approach is that it focuses us on the actions we might take or not take.
“When some daunting challenge barrels into view, just decide that we’re going to experience it as easy instead,” Oliver writes.
This type of thinking “can be surprisingly effective,” he notes, “because it functions not as a mystical command to the universe but as a reminder to ourselves not to fall into the old habit of adding complications or feelings of unpleasant exertion where neither need exist.”
When we fail to follow through on things we care about, it’s often because we can’t find the time or muster the necessary willpower.
“But it’s at least as likely to be because I spooked myself with visions of the perfect result I thought I needed to achieve,” Oliver observes, “or assumptions about the difficulties involved, thereby blocking action that would otherwise have flowed naturally.”
One example: “I must apparently keep relearning the lesson,” he writes, “that when I’m preparing to give a public talk, the best approach is to go for a walk with a notebook, list the points that seem most compelling to me, put them in a sensible order, then practice a few times, enough to get a feel for the talk but not enough to render it stilted or rote.
“Anything more involved than that is asking for trouble: the end result will be worse.”
Remember Oliver’s son’s 5th birthday party?
“I like this example,” he writes, “because it’s actually quite challenging to think of anything less difficult than making a success of a five-year-old’s birthday party.”
“It’s not a tough crowd. If you can get hold of pizza and ice cream, and order some balloons with LEDs in them online, the truly difficult thing would be to screw it up.”
Noted.
More next week!
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Reflection: Am I equating effort with meaning, or can I give myself permission to let things be simpler than I’ve been assuming?
Action: The next time I face a challenge, ask: “What would this look like if this were easy?”—then strip away unnecessary steps and complications before I begin.
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