Sublime

An inspiration engine for ideas

AllPeopleCollectionsArticlesAudioBooksFilesHighlightsImagesLinksNotesTextTweetsVideosSocial

the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable.

Oliver Burkeman • The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

All of which helps clarify what’s so alarming about the contemporary online “attention economy,” of which we’ve heard so much in recent years: it’s essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to

Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

In his book ‘Range’, David Epstein lays out an alternative to the oft-touted ‘10,000 hours + deep expertise’ approach for crafting a career that has become our accepted wisdom. Instead what he describes is the embracing of broad learning, of continuous experimentation in different fields, of multi-disciplinary thinking and of the power that general... See more

Zoe • The Magpie Mind

This confrontation with limitation also reveals the truth that freedom, sometimes, is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community—participating in forms of social life where you don’t get to decide exactly what you do or when you do it. And it leads t

Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Anything on the other side of the line – anything other than our thoughts and actions – we can safely decide is fine. We can ask ourselves: how is it fine? Why is it fine? Why is it OK to not try to fix or change this? What would happen if I left it? What terrible thing would occur? We can enjoy the warm glow of relief as our centre of gravity retu

Derren Brown • Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

I’m convinced, in any case, that it is from this position of not feeling as though you need to earn your weeks on the planet that you can do the most genuine good with them. Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality, the strengths and weaknesses, the talents and enthusiasms

Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count.

An alternative, Shinzen Young explains, is to pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.

Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

You needn’t embrace the specific practice of listing out your goals (I don’t, personally) to appreciate the underlying point, which is that in a world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones—the fairly interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship—on which a finite life can come to grief. It’s a self-help cliché that

Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

‘Let go of certainty,' says author and journalist Tony Schwartz. ‘The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides.'