The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning,’ argued the social psychologist Erich Fromm. ‘Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.’ Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities – for success, for happiness, for really living – are waiting.

— Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman Quotes

The only real question about all this finitude is whether we’re willing to confront it or not.

— Oliver Burkeman

You can grasp the truth that power over your time isn’t something best hoarded entirely for yourself: that your time can be too much your own.

— Oliver Burkeman

You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it.

— Oliver Burkeman

The alternative approach is to fix a hard upper limit on the number of things that you allow yourself to work on at any given time. In their book Personal Kanban, which explores this strategy in detail, the management experts Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry suggest no more than three items.

— Oliver Burkeman

You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.

— Oliver Burkeman

Schemes and plans for making things better fuel our dissatisfaction with the only place where happiness can ever be found – the present.

— Oliver Burkeman

The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. By contrast, the bad procrastinator finds himself paralysed precisely because he can’t bear the thought of confronting his limitations.

— Oliver Burkeman

Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.

— Oliver Burkeman

1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?

— Oliver Burkeman

To rest for the sake of rest – to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake – entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value.

— Oliver Burkeman

1. Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity.

— Oliver Burkeman

Denying reality never works, though. It may provide some immediate relief, because it allows you to go on thinking that at some point in the future you might, at last, feel totally in control. But it can’t ever bring the sense that you’re doing enough – that you are enough – because it defines “enough” as a kind of limitless control that no human can attain. Instead, the endless struggle leads to more anxiety and a less fulfilling life.

— Oliver Burkeman

It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives.

— Oliver Burkeman

Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.

— Oliver Burkeman

Think of it as “existential overwhelm”: the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do.

— Oliver Burkeman

But the undodgeable reality of a finite human life is that you are going to have to choose.

— Oliver Burkeman

I was peeling a red apple from the garden when I suddenly understood that life would only ever give me a series of wonderfully insoluble problems.4 With that thought an ocean of profound peace entered my heart.

— Oliver Burkeman

It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.

— Oliver Burkeman

To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place.

— Oliver Burkeman

Any finite life – even the best one you could possibly imagine – is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.

— Oliver Burkeman
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