Next Big Idea Transcripts: Malcolm Gladwell & Oliver Burkeman

Listen to Malcolm Gladwell's conversation with Oliver Burkeman on Apple Podcasts or Spotify .

Malcolm Gladwell:

Hello everyone, I'm Malcolm Gladwell, with The Next Big Idea Club, and I am talking today to Oliver Burkeman. Oliver, are you in England or are you in Park Slope? I saw some mysterious tweet or something from you, which suggested you were on the Yorkshire Moors.

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah, we moved from Park Slope to the North York Moors, so I'm in a cold cottage in the North York Moors.

Malcolm Gladwell:

I should say before I ask the next question, that what I thought would be fun to do was to tell the story of how you came to write the book. But, I want people to read the book, so I don't want us to spend our time talking about what's in it, I want people to approach it with a kind of sense of excitement. But, I do think it's really fun to talk about how you came to write such a interesting book. I'm going to make you do the one thing that English people hate to do, which is I'm going to make you talk about yourself.

Oliver Burkeman:

Ugh, all right then.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Does that fill you with horror or enthusiasm?

Oliver Burkeman:

One tries to avoid it, but then you sort of get into it because British people are egotists as well, beneath the surface.

Malcolm Gladwell:

As someone who grew up with... I was born in England, my father, very proper Englishman. Nothing delights me more than prodding the English into being something other than their essential selves.

Oliver Burkeman:

I'm happy to try, yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell:

This is highly amusing territory for me. My question was, was the move to Yorkshire an outcome of the kind of thinking that went into writing this book? After writing a book of this, does one naturally move from Park Slope to the Yorkshire Moors?

Oliver Burkeman:

I'm really keen to try to spin the move here on those lines. I think the proximal cause is to do with my wife getting sabbatical time from her university post, and there are those kind of reasons. But, I'm not sure I would have been able to go with the flow and do it in a previous incarnation of me when I was more uptight than I am now. But, it's also kind of home for me, I grew up near here so it's not totally unfamiliar.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Where did you grow up in England?

Oliver Burkeman:

In York. In the city of York.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Oh, in York. Yeah. That's where I wanted to start. There is a little moment in the book, much too short for my thinking, where you talk about your family.

Oliver Burkeman:

I come from a family of people you might reasonably call obsessive planners. We're the type who like to get our ducks in row by confirming as far in advance as possible how the future is going to unfold, and who get antsy and anxious when obliged to coordinate with those who prefer to take life as it comes. My wife and I are lucky to make it to the end of June in any given year before receiving the first inquiry from my parents about our plans for Christmas. And, I was raised to regard anyone who booked a flight or hotel room less than about four months before the proposed date of departure or occupancy as living life on the edge to an inexcusable degree. On family vacations, we could be guaranteed a three-hour wait at the airport, or an hour at the railway station, having left home much too far ahead of time. "Dad suggests arriving at airport 14 hours early," reads a headline in The Onion, apparently inspired by my childhood. All this annoyed me then, as it annoys me today, with that special irritation reserved for traits one recognizes all too clearly in oneself as well.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Let's talk about the Burkemans. So, you grew up in York.

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Tell me more. Keep going.

Oliver Burkeman:

I was born in Liverpool, actually. I grew up in York, but I was born in Liverpool. That enables me to say that it was in the same maternity hospital that John Lennon was born in. But, I grew up most of my childhood, adolescence, in York. Does that tell you things about the Burkemans? I don't know. What I'm sort of zeroing in on in the passage that you mention is, I suppose, coming from a family of compulsive planners who are always trying to leave for the airport another three hours early to make sure that there's no possibility of missing the flight. And, I kind of contextualize that in the context of my paternal grandmother's flight from Nazi Germany, and the sort of messages that I think she must have received and then passed on to her children, and through one step removed to her grandchildren about the necessity of really knowing what you're doing, making plans, acting when you absolutely have to act in order to forestall disaster and all the rest of it. Which, is very useful if you're escaping Nazi Germany, but not very useful if you're just going on vacation from York.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Were both your parents this way, or just your mother?

Oliver Burkeman:

That's my father and his —

Malcolm Gladwell:

Oh, this is your paternal grandmother?

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah. My mother's family are Quaker, so that's another reason why I'm going to be really uneasy about being asked to talk about my emotional life.

Malcolm Gladwell:

This is getting more exotic by the moment, by the way.

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah, that's the mix, quaker and —

Malcolm Gladwell:

Oh wait, you haven't answered the question, was your mother as neurotic as your father about planning?

Oliver Burkeman:

My father is very much alive and thriving, and sometimes he hears conversations where I'm talking to people about his neuroses, so I feel like I need to backpedal a little bit. But, no. I think that anxiety about time and doing things at the right time, and things like that, is more on his side of the family. You know, I just have never really deeply thought about... I mean, I've thought about my background and my childhood, and all these kind of therapy-ish questions, but it's hard for me to see where the specific influences come from, in terms of Jewishness or Quakerness, and things like that. You're going to have to ask me another question, see if I can...

Malcolm Gladwell:

Oliver, you literally wrote a book where you clearly read in-depth 100 of the most interesting and philosophical books of the last 100 years, and yet when I ask you a simple question about your parents, you're at a loss. This is the most English thing I've ever... This is fantastic.

Oliver Burkeman:

What's the question?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Now I love it that you... Now you're getting all riled up about this. My question is... So, here you are. For those of you listening to this conversation, Oliver has written what I think it's safe to say is an absolutely fascinating book on this question of our relationship to time, and how we aught to organize our life around our anxieties about the passage of time and the weight of our obligations and such. It's a book that, to my mind, demands some interrogation of its origins. It's not like you were doing a biography of Winston Churchill. If you were doing a biography of Winston Churchill, it wouldn't matter who your parents were, right? But, in midlife, you've written this very deeply engrossing, philosophical thing on some of the most fundamental questions about how you want to live your life. So, I want to know more. I want to know how you got there. And so, I want to start with your parents.

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah. I'll try and work backwards. The place in all this subject matter where I really do think about my own psychology and the kind of person that I am, is in having, really I think, since I was small enough to remember, this kind of desire to get a handle on time. To, I don't want to say to stop time slipping through one's fingers, because it's not quite that, but this idea that one aught to be using time in a productive way. And that, there was some sort of implicit end point here, that you might get to a point where you were being so productive and sort of dutiful in your use of time, that you had somehow justified your existence on the planet. When I talk about it in those terms, that strikes me as sort of Calvinist in a way, that kind of idea, which is not quite the same as the Quaker influence on me. But, certainly this idea that one has some sort of a responsibility to use time well. Which on the one hand the book is about, but I hope in a way it's totally an opposition to that kind of idea of feeling the need to maximize, to wring everything you can out of your time.

Oliver Burkeman:

I remember being told at a very early age by my somewhat hippy-ish and very sort of well-intentioned parents that I only needed to do my best in school, I didn't need to hit certain grades in order to be well-regarded or loved by them. I just needed to do my best. I remember internalizing that message quite opposite from the way that I think it was meant, as, "You've got to do the very best that you can do to make the most of the time that you have." So, something that I think was meant to be forgiving as a message struck my ears, probably also for reasons for which my parents ultimately to blame I suppose, as a sort of an exultation to seize control of time in some way. Am I helping? Is this illuminating?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Very much. No, this is interesting. This is interesting. So, you're saying that the origins of your interest in this question go very deep. You and I are both writers, I'm a little older than you. I also come from a culturally mixed parents. I had none of these anxieties as a child. None whatsoever. So, what you're describing is not something that every child has. I dare say it's a little unusual to have that feeling that even as a child you had a feeling that you had this obligation to be a kind of effective steward of your energies.

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it because I already realized as soon as it came out of my mouth that it sounded like I was trying to get enormous amounts of work done as a five-year-old or something. That would not be true. But yeah, something about the relationship to time being one that involved duties of some sort, or obligations of some sort. That's true. I'm fascinated to hear about anybody who grows up without that. It seems sort of just in the water that you would sort of... and it clearly isn't.

Malcolm Gladwell:

I would tell my bother that I was bored and she would say, "Good." She would say, "A little rest for your mind is a wonderful thing. It's fine to drift around, no one's counting. You're seven." So, this is totally a counter to the... When you observed as a child, things like the compulsion to get to the airport incredibly early, what was your reaction to that?

Oliver Burkeman:

Oh, I think probably just the usual mild annoyance at one's parents' foibles. I definitely didn't have any kind of grand philosophical insights about, "Well, this is an ultimately pointless effort to swage one's anxiety because you'll never actually get to the position of being certain that you won't miss your plane." So, there will always be that tiny little gap of uncertainty. That's the context in which I put it in the book. I don't have a lot of memory of thinking about a lot of this stuff consciously until I was maybe in the sixth form, whatever you call that in the States. But, just before going to college, that was when it really went into overdrive, for me. But, it was definitely there. I definitely had that stance towards time, I just don't think I articulated it.

Malcolm Gladwell:

You say in sixth form it goes into overdrive, what does that mean? What's happening then?

Oliver Burkeman:

I think part of this is a pretty familiar tale of people who are high academic achievers and they do really well, and they're the best people in their high schools. And then, they go to fancy universities that are competitive because they were the smartest people in their high schools. And then, it's really terrifying because suddenly everybody is good or much better than you, or you think they are. At that juncture, that was when I really remember getting stuck in to the idea that scheduling out my days and figuring out my exam preparation timetables in exactly the right way was utterly essential, because I just needed to be able to keep my head above water in this slightly terrifying environment of Cambridge University where everybody seemed to be much more confident than I was. Although, I don't think they were on the inside, and I probably looked perfectly confident on the outside.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Even there though. There's a variety of responses one can have in that situation. This is a common thing for many of us who have some intellectual ambitions. We get to college, we're thrown into the deep end, and we have an anxious moment. How are we going to keep our heads above water? There's a variety of responses. Some people quit. Some people hyper-specialize. Some people find an alternate route, they do sports and define themselves that way. But, you thought the best strategy was-

Oliver Burkeman:

Time management.

Malcolm Gladwell:

... was time management. Right?

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell:

And then, we're jumping ahead a little bit, when you were at The Guardian, you'd wrote this column, and you'd spent a lot of time talking about productivity. This was an interest of yours. Journalistic interest of yours.

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah, along with... The column was about all sorts of self-help and psychology of happiness and stuff. But yeah, a big element of...

Malcolm Gladwell:

So, this note in your thinking is present throughout your... Pops up in sixth form, it expresses itself in Oxford. You get out of Oxford-

Oliver Burkeman:

Cambridge.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Cambridge, sorry.

Oliver Burkeman:

Don't insult me.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Here we go again. How long before you started writing about these kinds of topics? Was it right away or was there a break between?

Oliver Burkeman:

No, I went into journalism pretty immediately, but no, it was another six, seven, eight years I think before I was writing much about them. I was aware I think even then when I started writing about them, that it was a great alibi to be able to write a kind of sardonic newspaper column about these issues that I clearly was actually quite invested in. It's very nice to be able to address an audience of fellow skeptics and poke fun at bad self-help, charlatanry, and things like that. I don't think I would have denied at the time that it was some form of therapy as well.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Yeah. Because, you write a book, what, 10 years ago? Called Help! I was curious, how would you describe the ideology of that book, compared to, for example, Four Thousand Weeks? What's the difference between what you would learn about your thinking on these matters on that book and what you would learn from reading Four Thousand Weeks?

Oliver Burkeman:

I think in that book, in Help! I'd plunged into writing about this world of self-help with its comically grand claims and its all manner of extremely dodgy characters. And, I'd sort of salvaged this idea that most of these grand claims were nonsense, but that there are things you can hope to do, to quote the subtitle of Help!, to become slightly happier and get a bit more done. There is something... I'm deeply attracted to this kind of idea of really radical incrementalism and radical modesty in self-improvement goals. There's something about that that really resonates very deeply with me. I think the general sense you'd get from that book is just that there's a certain kind of sardonic stance to take to this whole field, that is on the one hand not going to fall for its nonsense, but that sees a way through. Sees that there is actually some benefit to these ideas, that there is hope for us to change our habits, to change our set points of happiness, to some extent. Because, I'm talking to an audience of Guardian readers who, I assume, are just as skeptical, borderline cynical, as me about the world of self-help and productivity advise. And so, in a way, the fun part of that was actually suggesting that there was something decent lurking in all of that, rather than the part of the job that was kind of tearing it down and criticizing it.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Your objection at that point to the self-help industry is simply that their claims are exaggerated. You think they overpromise, is that what...

Oliver Burkeman:

What emerged and was emerging, I guess... I haven't really thought about it in these terms, but I guess what was emerging that would come clearer into my next book, the antidote is that its not just a grandiosity of the claims made, it's also an overall orientation towards focusing on positive thinking, trying to make yourself maximally happy, trying to eradicate negative experiences, trying to make fresh starts. I think that's a big theme in a lot of this, this idea that you could leave your whole past self behind and launch a new you, which I think I probably tried to do every week and half for many years of my life, and was at that point seeing through the deceptions of.

Malcolm Gladwell:

There was a period in your life when you feel you were complicit in all of this, you were a willing subject for the grandiosity of the self-help movement?

Oliver Burkeman:

I don't mean that I was consuming the books. I wasn't reading Tony Robbins' Awaken the Giant Within at the age of 15 or anything. No. I mean, what I was doing in my life was chasing a kind of an illusion that I think a lot of that culture does encourage people to chase. So, this is the idea that from now on, you're going to have these very good habits, you're going to organize your time or your physical stuff, or whatever, in a way that is going to be like, "Okay, from now on, life is going to function properly. And, there'll be this sort of moment of truth after which everything will work." Does this... Probably doesn't resonate with you, based on what you said about your childhood. You were probably completely brilliant.

Malcolm Gladwell:

This is all brand new to me. This is quite fascinating. I don't mean to get too personal, but what were you trying to fix? So, you looked at yourself and you said, "Oliver is imperfect, I feel I can make him better." What are you dwelling on? What are the imperfections you're dwelling on in this period?

Oliver Burkeman:

This conversation is so much more therapy-ish than I was expecting. I think that's probably a good thing. It's really striking to me when I look at myself in those days, and even today, how much difference there is between different domains of life. I was always terrible at sport, say, and I don't think I was ever bothered by that for two minutes. Whereas, I was kind of accomplished in academic stuff and felt a very great need to be more accomplished than I was. I think, ultimately, it just goes, there are deep questions of self-worth here, right? This is stuff to do with the idea that there's a certain amount of things you need to get done, or standards you need to reach in order to justify your existence on the planet, if we're going to get maximally existential about it.

I think a lot of it is the fixed mindset idea associated with the psychologist Carol Dweck, and all that whole set of ideas. For reasons that I don't pretend to understand about myself, each thing you achieve, each accomplishment just creates a new bar that you have to always measure up to from that point on, so it's very miserable way to be a high achiever because it just sort of...

Malcolm Gladwell:

If I was talking to 30-year-old Oliver right now and I asked 30-year-old Oliver, "Are you happy?" What would he say?

Oliver Burkeman:

I might have said that I was, but I think that the honest response would have been that I was very close to the point where I was going to be happy, that I just sort of had to clear through a certain amount of outstanding tasks that I had to do, or I needed to sort out a couple of areas of my life. I had to get back in the habit of exercising, or get back in touch with certain old friends. It could be a million different things, but that I almost had everything in working order, but not quite. That's a very familiar feeling to me, going back along way, that it would just need one more push of self-discipline or a few more hours in the day.

Malcolm Gladwell:

It's an effort-based notion of where self-actualization lies. If you try harder and just are more efficient about or more skillful in your self-management, you'll get there. That's the implicit notion there.

Oliver Burkeman:

There's a very grand thought about oneself in a way, right? Which is that this dominant position of having everything sorted out is within reach. It's just a question of intellectualizing your way to the right system for doing it. You could well imagine someone more realistic never having the thought in the first place, that they were ever going to be capable of getting their life sorted out, or meeting all the demands that were made of them, or keeping their inbox clear from day-to-day. It just wouldn't be on the cards to begin with. And then, I guess you probably do get people who think that through sheer force of personality or something they can do that just through being brilliant. But, I was definitely a person who thought I could do it, but only once I'd discovered the right system for doing it. Sounds tragic when it comes out of my mouth.

Malcolm Gladwell:

I ask these questions only because there was a point when I thought to myself, "Oh, what is Oliver really unhappy?" I began to worry about you, that this book was... It seemed to me like there's a reading of this book that, Four Thousand Weeks, was born out of a great deal of pain and discomfort with the way... What you're describing in the book is something that I feel like almost all of us experience in the modern world, the tyranny of these rising obligations, the addiction to our cults of self-improvement, the stranglehold of the iPhone on our... I could go on. All these kinds of things. But, what was interesting to reading the book was I was like, "Okay, I recognize that in myself. I recognize that in myself." But I don't recognize the unhappiness part. It just seems to me like... I look at my parents, they just had a different set of anxieties. I don't think their anxieties were less than mine. My grandparents had their own. I sort of think of it all as... My interpretation is that what I'm going through is just normal, it's just the 21st century version of the same thing that my great, great grandparents went through in the 19th century. Whereas with you, I felt like you felt that there was something genuinely toxic about modernity that was causing people like you, Oliver, to put you in a position of genuine crisis. Am I over-reading things?

Oliver Burkeman:

No, I don't think so. I'm not sure I would frame it in the terms you put it at the very end. I don't know that there is something irredeemably toxic in modernity that is the cause of all this. But, yeah, it is a... If you're on this treadmill in a way that you, to any extent, identify your self-worth with it, and it sounds like from what you're saying, you're on the very, very low end of having any such link in your mind between your worth as a human and your ability to navigate this and to stay on top of things in this crazy situation. But, if you do have that kind of linkage, then it is a kind of... I don't think most of the time that I was most deeply in this mindset I would have described myself as very, very sad, but it's certainly not a happy way to live. It's certainly an anxious way to live. But, places, happiness, and fulfillment, and a sense of peace of mind always in the future and never where you are right now.

Oliver Burkeman:

Very happy for you to carry on therapizing me, and I don't want to be guilty of trying to Britishly throw the ball back into your court, but that thought that occurs to me that's so fascinating is I find it really hard to believe that anybody doesn't feel some dose of this today. And, I find it especially hard to believe of exceptionally high-achieving, accomplished people like you. Because, it's almost like, "What would be the motivation to have written all the books that you've written and to have created all the other content..." Terrible way to put it, you know what I mean. But, podcasts, audiobooks, and everything else. "What would be the motivation to have gone onto that escalator in the first place if you were just completely relaxed about your relationship to the world?" Which, is obviously a terrible thing to say, because the answer could just be, "The joy of creative expression." And obviously it should be. Maybe it was, in your case.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Well, I suspect it's because I may have inherited from my own parents something that fits very much in the theme of your book, that I don't think—I may be wrong—I don't think of either of my parents as being future-oriented. We never discussed tomorrow. We only ever discussed today. I never think about tomorrow, really. Not much. All of my memories of my most powerful memories of my parents, my father's no longer with us, my mother is very much, is of them being in the moment. My father would only ever talk about what he was doing, and we would almost never talk about what he intended to do. My mother was always celebrating the thing that was happening. She'd make a fresh scone and eat it, and then she would say something to the effect of, "In this moment, eating..." Not this way, but she would communicate this idea that, "At this very moment, eating this particular scone, I am insanely happy." She wasn't thinking about, "I'm going to gain weight." It just never came up.

My best memories of my father, he was an Englishman, so we would go for long walks on cold days with the dog. Nothing would be said. We might walk for two hours and there would be three sentences. The whole exercise was just about enjoying each other's company. There was no grand plan. He wasn't trying to get exercise. The walks had no function. They weren't planned. We would get lost epically all the time. It didn't matter. One time, we were walking down some frozen river, he thought it was five miles but he forgot that the river was curved, wiggly, and so we walked 10 miles. We were all freezing to death and we had to be rescued by some — it's just like, "There's no..." So, I think that's very much the way I don't really think about it. I'm not thinking about tomorrow.

Oliver Burkeman:

The question in my mind where it causes me confusion, or certainly would have causes the younger me confusion, is then... I think I've heard you and read you talking about both your parents, and I think have both been accomplished in their own ways and in their own fields, as I understand it. And you clearly are. I think the younger me certainly would have assumed that everything you just described then would mean that you might now be working at a surf school in Bali somewhere on a casual basis or something, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Malcolm Gladwell:

I wish. Sounds quite enticing.

Oliver Burkeman:

It's hard to look at what you do and not see you as driven in some sense. Driven is an interesting way of thinking about all this, I think, because it's not a... We use that word as a compliment, but it kind of is a little bit suspect when you think about it. Certainly, I was driven to try to solve some personal problem, or a whole set of them, when I was first writing about these topics in a journalistic context.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Yeah. Let's quickly move back to you, since you are subject to this interview and I am just a sideshow. I thought that some of the loveliest passages in the book were about your son.

Oliver Burkeman:

It took becoming a father for me to grasp how completely I'd spent my whole adult life, up to that point, mired in this future-chasing mindset. Not that the epiphany was instantaneous. Indeed, what happened first, as my son's birth approached, was that I became more obsessed than usual with using time well. Presumably, every new parent arriving home from the hospital to face the reality of their incompetence in the matter of child rearing feels some desire to spend their time as wisely as possible. But at the time, I was still enough of a productivity geek that I compounded my problems by purchasing several how-to books aimed at the parents of newborns. I was determined to make the very best use of those first crucial months. I wanted to know that I was doing whatever was required to obtain optimal future results in the domain of child rearing.

Except, this now began to seem to me like an astoundingly perverse way to approach spending time with a newborn. Obviously, it mattered to keep half an eye on the future, but my son was here now, and he would be zero years old for only one year. I came to realize that I didn't want to squander these days of his actual existence by focusing solely on how best to use them for the sake of his future one. He was sheer presence, participating unconditionally in the moment in which he found himself, and I wanted to join him in it.

Malcolm Gladwell:

When you use a child, a baby, to illustrate... You use that lovely phrase from Adam Gopnik, "Causal catastrophe." Actually, when Adam Gopnik uses that phrase, what does he mean? Describe the meaning of that notion for a moment because I want to dwell on this, because I think this is a beautiful way to understand a central message of the book.

Oliver Burkeman:

He's talking very specifically about raising children, and he's criticizing the idea that the measure of a good or a bad parent-child relationship, a good or a bad moment of a child's life, a good or a bad parenting technique, whatever that is, he's criticizing the idea that these should all be measured on the basis of whether they produce good adults at the end of the process. Of whether they lead to future, older people who are better or worse for that relationship, or that experience, or that parenting approach. He sort of says, "At first, it seems obvious that could be the only measure of these things, but when you think about it, it sort of completely neglects the real, present moment." I think this is his example, I've certainly claimed that it's his example. That, on the one hand, the question of whether you should allow your 11-year-old child to play violent video games gets bound up in these questions of, "How good is the research? Does it suggest that kids who play violent video games will be violent or in other ways troubled in later life?" But, it could be the case that the answer to that was absolutely not. That, there was nothing in later life that was sort of native associated with that.

It could still be that spending that part of your childhood playing violent video games was just not a good way to spend childhood, just in and of itself. You can think of a million different examples of this. But, that's—by the causal catastrophe, I think, the fixation on endpoints as the value of everything.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Four Thousand Weeks is really taking that idea and running with it very beautifully, and saying it really applies to all of us in the way we think about our lives. That, we're not just doing the causal catastrophe with respect to our small children, we're doing it with ourselves. We're evaluating our behavior and choices based on some anxious interpretation of the long-term consequences, as opposed to simply, to use that horrible phrase, living in the moment. My wonder when I read that was, did having a child make you realize the truth of what Adam was talking about, and realize how often we make that error in our lives?

Oliver Burkeman:

Totally, and I think you're totally right. I think that parenthood can provide a very vivid illustration of something, but I'm not concerned with trying to focus on the things that are unique to that experience. It's just a very vivid example of something that is baked into the very idea of using time, right? This is a sort of a paradox or a tension maybe, is all it is, in the book, that I try to grapple with. The question is, "How can we make the best use of our time?" But, there is something in the idea of using time that is inherently instrumental, that inherently measures the value of any moment by where it's leading. I can't see how we could ever get past that. There are all sorts of worthwhile things we do in life that we could never do if we were insisting on purely just being in the moment with no concern whatsoever for where things were leading.

But, that particular kind of anxiety that I am deeply familiar with, that says that you're heading somewhere, and you can get there. It's not guaranteed that you'll get there. You'll need to use lots of discipline and the right systems and methods to get there, but you will be able to get there. And then, there'll be peace of mind and there'll be plain sailing. I think I probably feel it a little more acutely than lots of people, but I think that is sort of deeply baked into our culture in all sorts of contexts.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Reading your book made me think a lot about... I'm a runner, fairly serious runner. Runners, we're always having a version of this exact same discussion, because the great mistake that people make when they would like to be competitive runners is that they think of the daily running that you do, the training that you do, strictly in terms of preparation for some future race or performance. As a result, you lose sight of why you became a runner in the first place. You forget the joy of just going for a run is that what attracted you as a seven-year-old. And then, you wake up and you're 50, and every step you take on a Tuesday evening on your run around the park is simply seen as preparation for the race you're going to do in three months. And, you've just now destroyed this beautiful thing that you had.

There's these running message boards I was reading this morning about—someone giving advice to people who are starting out in running, and the best advice was, "If you're running and you're not enjoying it, stop." They don't mean give up running, but just walk for a while, catch your breath, run a little slower. You should be out there to enjoy yourself. The point of the activity is the moment. It's not building some kind of complicated sand castle that is going to make you into a super athlete down the road. It's interesting, because it's very difficult to teach that... I'm sticking with running for a moment, to teach that lesson to runners. In fact, when I was reading about it, Four Thousand Weeks could be given to every young competitive runner. You don't mention running at all, but it's so much about so many different things that we do in the world that we've turned into something other than what they should be by this kind of over-preparation, overthinking, this over-structuring, all the things that you identify in the book is kind of problematic. Part of me wanted you to do a sequel, part two for young athletes.

Oliver Burkeman:

I'd be very happy if a copy of it was put into the hands of every young competitive runner in America, but I'm not sure I should be writing from a sports psychology perspective. There's an important distinction that I want to make there between... I totally think the joy of competition is a real thing and a real value as well, despite being raised as a Quaker on cooperative boardgames where nobody wins. So, it's not that there's something wrong with wanting to, whatever you do in running, setting your new personal best or come in the top whatever of a race. It's that notion that you need to do that for some reason in you, that things won't be all right unless you get there or unless you do everything you can to try to get there. That, there's something to do with your self-worth, your justification.

There's something of salvation in the idea that you get it right. So that, if you triumph in the running, or the moment when you get to fold your arms complacently and say that you raised a very excellent child who's now a very successful adult, that in that moment you'll somehow have been redeemed. I think there's a sort of religious feel to some of this stuff, that you need to do this. That's the thing I want to target and try to let go of and help other people let go of, I think.

Malcolm Gladwell:

To stick with the running example, the people who say, "If you're unhappy, slow down or even walk for a bit," they're saying that that is actually the best way to get your best time when you want to race. The very things you do that you think are making you faster runner on race day are not, they are exhausting you, burning you out. There's a whole list of reasons. But, relaxing and discovering what is joyful about running is actually what makes you the best possible performer, right? The paradox of training is that you do not prepare for your best race by running as fast as you do in your best race. You prepare for your best race by doing something very, very different, by doing something sustainable, and relaxing, and joyful.

Oliver Burkeman:

If it's parallel to other domains with which I'm more familiar, doesn't feel good at first, right? It requires a kind of patience that doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. It requires letting yourself feel emotions that you might be trying to get rid of by always running your fastest and your hardest, and aiming for the very best result on every training run. It requires letting something happen that I think makes people uneasy. Does that make sense? I have no idea if it's true of running. It's true of other things.

Malcolm Gladwell:

It does. There's another running idea that I wanted to bring up with you, which I do think as well fits into what you're talking about. Part of what I grasped in reading your book was what's dangerous or what's wrong about the mistakes we make in this manner of our approach to time? To use the metaphor of the treadmill, the point about the treadmill is the treadmill never stops. There's a couple moments in the book where you talk about the value of stopping, of taking a break from... Of honoring breaks. The thing about the Swedes, that Swedes are not just happier when they're on holiday, they're happier when other Swedes are on holiday, which I thought was lovely. So perfect. So Swedish, by the way. Of course they would be, they're all having [Swedish 00:45:29]. They're just sitting around eating coffee, cake. What you don't know is, to grow up in Canada in the '70s is to be inundated with propaganda about how the Swedes have it better than the Canadians. The Canadian government would run ads on Canadian television and radio which exhorted us to be more like the Swedes.

Oliver Burkeman:

Wow, that's amazing.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Someone with a Swedish accent would instruct us about how to live our life better. So, the Swedes, it's always been the Swedes. The Swedes have figured it all out, right?

Speaker 5:

These men are about evenly matched. That's because the average 30-year-old Canadian is in about the same physical shape as the average 60-year-old Swede. Run, walk, cycle, let's get Canada moving again. This message is brought to you by the CFL, CPB, and its sponsors for ParticipACTION.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Runners do a version of this, they do what's called periodization, which is one portion of the year you do nothing, one portion of the year you do nothing but long, slow runs, and one portion of the year you do really intense speed work. It's the variety that rescues you. That was a note in your book that I really... In many ways, it's the simplest of all of the kinds of lessons you're teaching us. It's the most intuitive. That, it's the monotony of our neuroticism that's so problematic, whether the relentlessness of it.

Oliver Burkeman:

Yeah, I think that's that linear idea that you're going to push forward towards this moment of completion of whatever it is you're doing. It's so powerful. One of the things that I... I write about the work that the psychologist [Robert Boyce 00:47:08] did among academic writers, looking at which academics managed to actually get lots of writing done and which were sort of paralyzed by procrastination and so-called writers block for much of their careers. And, finding among other fascinating findings this idea that the ability to not just to only aim to write for an hour, say, before taking a break, but then to make damn sure that you take the break and walk away at that moment, even if you're on a role. Even if it feels like you want to keep going and push yourself forward.

Oliver Burkeman:

Because actually, the practice of tolerating the discomfort of stepping off of not giving into the impatience that says, "If I race forward, I might get to the end of this project, this chapter, might add another 3000 words to my word count and get to feel really great about that." The willingness to forgo all of that, to get up and walk away even though you could produce more, that this was actually an incredibly powerful skill that made their writing appetizing to them day, after day, after day, and made them enthusiastic to get back to it. In aggregate, over the long haul, led to much greater output.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Yeah. That idea of self-improvement coming from restraint and the withholding of effort, that's the common link in what you've just described and in the running notion that you get better by having a more balanced and, like I say, restrained approach to your work.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Oliver, I hope what we've done is given people a taste of why this book is so... It's really engrossing. There's so many ideas that prompt reflection. I found myself stopping. I would read a little bit, then I would stop because there was so much to think about. It's really a remarkable and lovely little book that I profoundly enjoyed. My hat is off to you. I hope its made me slightly better at making my way in the world.

Oliver Burkeman:

Doesn't sound like you needed the assistance, but I don't know.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Oh, we all need a little bit.

Oliver Burkeman:

I'm incredibly honored. Obviously it means an enormous amount coming from you, so thank you very, very much indeed.

Malcolm Gladwell:

To all those listening, Four Thousand Weeks. I cannot encourage you to read this more strongly. From all of us at The Next Big Idea Club, thank you for taking the time, Oliver, and take a long walk on the moors for me. I'm sorry I'm not walking with you.

Oliver Burkeman:

Thank you, I'll do that. Thank you.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Okay. Bye-bye.