Posted on by Asia Lenae

Oliver Burkeman on the Myth of “Doing it All” & the Secret to Making the Most of Your Harrowingly Short Life

We live in a time-obsessed age.  We want to control it, to conquer it, to use it wisely.  If you’re a reluctant self-help enthusiast like me, you’ve tried everything to streamline your schedule and increase efficiency: read books like The Checklist Manifesto and The 4-Hour Work Week, used apps to track your calories and your sleep, been convinced by tech bro podcasts that the key to success was to emulate billionaires’ morning routines.

Sadly, most self-help convinces us we can optimize our lives as if humans were nothing more than yet-to-be-perfected machines.  In his part how-to guide, part philosophical treatise Four Thousand Weeks, British journalist Oliver Burkeman rallies against such misdirected self-help and suggests there’s more to life than crossing items off a to-do list in the name of productivity.  

The New York Times observes Burkeman’s work can sit comfortably on the “shelf next to the books published by Alain de Botton, literary-flavored advice on love, friendship, work and other conundrums.”  The comparison to Botton is apt: both are British, both are charmingly cynical, and both fuse together the wisdom of the ages into how-to guides for modern mortals.

Though its premise (life is short— we should make the most of each day) seems unbearably commonplace, Four Thousand Weeks manages (for the most part) to escape self-help’s empty cliches.  In fact, I dare say Burkeman will inspire you to look at time in a whole new way.

A self-proclaimed “productivity geek,” Burkeman was at one time a devoted believer in the religion of productivity: he used highlighters to color code his planner, broke down his day into 15 minute increments, and tried countless efficiency systems such as Inbox Zero and the Pomodoro technique.

Then one winter in 2014, he had an unsettling epiphany: he was never going to scale the mountain of all his “to-do” tasks and blissfully arrive at the summit of “being on top of everything.”  

According to Burkeman, the problem with most time management philosophies is they rest on the erroneous premise that we can do everything.  If only we could find the most efficient way to structure our day/tackle our inbox, we could launch our 6-figure business, have a happy marriage and regularly run marathons.  If only we could find the most aesthetically-pleasing Pinterest-worthy planner, we could systematically prioritize our to-do list and “get it all done.”

But the reality is we can’t do it all.

Staying late at the office means we can’t have game night with our family.  Opting to go with our friends to a bar Friday night means we most likely can’t go running early Saturday morning.  If we only have 2 weeks of vacation a year, we can’t possibly go to every one of our “must-see” destinations: we have to choose between the endless excitement of New York and the majestic turquoise waters of Bali.

The problem with the be/do/have it all mentality is it encourages us to say “yes” to every opportunity: social invitations, networking events, more and more responsibility.  The result?  We have full calendars of other people’s priorities.  Because we said “yes” to Sarah’s dinner party, we spend our Saturday night nibbling on quiche instead of working on our 3 act play.  And because we said “yes” to yet another project at work, we can no longer take a romantic holiday to wine country.

Ultimately, time management isn’t about “doing it all” (which is impossible)— it’s about coming to terms with the fact that you’re never going to.  You’re never going to have a bustling social life and work 60 hours a week.  You’re never going to have the picture-perfect marriage and a high-powered career.  You’re never going to be a world-class pianist and a Harvard PhD.  Perhaps a few super humans among us can do many things, but the rest of us mortals must make choices.  Time management requires you face your finitude: as Burkeman asserts, “your time is finite, doing anything requires sacrifice— the sacrifice of all the other things you could have been doing with that stretch of time.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Joan Didion on How Detours Bring Us Closer to Our Destiny

Most of us have clear ideas about how our dreams should unfold.  If we want to be movie stars, for example, we imagine our breakthrough moment will be an Academy Award or a critically-acclaimed starring role.  We dream our big break will manifest in a very specific way: a major director will notice us while we’re waiting tables; after a single audition, we’ll land our ideal part.  We imagine we’ll be “discovered” in some romantic fashion like Lana Turner, casually sipping a coke at a malt shop.  Our initiation into Tinseltown will be the legendary stuff of Hollywood lore.

But sometimes our “big break,” doesn’t seem big at all.  This, we think, wasn’t how it was supposed to go!  We were supposed to be “serious” actors— not amateurs in a 30 second McDonald’s commercial!

If we’re about to pass up an opportunity because it isn’t as glitzy or glamorous as our fantasies, because we think it’s a roundabout detour on what should be a straight and narrow path to our destiny, essayist and journalist Joan Didion would say one thing: don’t.

Didion understood that dreams don’t always come true the way we hoped.  After graduating from U.C. Berkeley in 1956, she moved to New York City to become a writer.  Her first gig was writing merchandising copy for Vogue.  Though Vogue is certainly a prestigious publication, Didion didn’t exactly imagine her “dream job” would involve writing compact 1-line captions for patent leather pumps.  Another writer might have dismissed this type of “writing” as frivolous.  But Didion saw fashion writing as a way to perfect her craft and polish her prose.  In her landmark 1978 essay “Telling Stories,” one of many characteristically clear-eyed pieces from Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Didion realizes that her time at Vogue played a formative role in shaping the writer she’d become:

“It is easy to make light of this kind of ‘writing,’ and I mention it specifically because I do not make light of it at all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words, a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toy weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.  In a caption of, say, eight lines, each line to run no more or less than twenty-seven characters, not only every word but every letter counted.  At Vogue one learned fast, or did not stay, how to play games with words, how to put a couple of unwieldy dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence composed of precisely thirty-nine characters.  We were connoisseurs of synonyms.  We were collectors of verbs.  (I recall “to ravish” as a highly favored verb for a number of issues and I also recall it, for a number of issues more, as the source of a highly favored noun: “ravishments,” as in “tables cluttered with porcelain tulips, Faberge eggs, and other ravishments.”)  We learned as reflex the grammatical tricks we had learned only as marginal corrections in school (“there were two oranges and an apple” read better than “there were an apple and two oranges,” passive verbs slowed down sentences, “it” needed a reference within the scan of an eye), learned to scan the OED, learned to write and rewrite and rewrite again.  “Run it through again, sweetie, it’s not quite there.”  “Give me a shock verb two lines in.”  “Prune it out, clean it up, make the point.”  Less was more, smooth was better, and absolute precision essential to the monthly grand illusion.  Going to work for Vogue was, in the 1950s, not unlike training with the Rockettes.”

It was at Vogue that Didion developed her distinctive style and terse, tough-minded prose.  Lesson?  We never know how the seeds of our dreams will blossom and grow.  For more from this stellar sentence stylist, read Ms. Didion on writing as a process of discovery and the pains & perils of self-doubt.

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Joan Didion on Self-Doubt

Oscar Wilde once said, “The artist’s life is a long, lovely suicide.”  Though Wilde could be dramatic, the idea that writing is agonizing is certainly not an overstatement.  Writing is torment.  Writing is laboring all day on a single page only to toss it in the trash.  For every day of creative bliss, there are countless days when you want to quit.

To go to the blank page is to meet your demons.  When we write, we must battle that barbarous inner voice who whispers “you’re not good enough” at every turn.  Still, we write songs and sonnets because we possess a primal urge.  Writing is a way of saying “I was here.”

All writers struggle with self-doubt, whether they’re toiling away in anonymity or are widely renowned.  It’s hard to imagine someone as influential and iconic as Joan Didion questioning her own talent.  But much like Virginia Woolf— who felt inconceivably inferior compared to her idol Marcel Proust (“Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out a sentence,” she wrote to a friend in 1922)— Didion believed she was hopelessly dull compared to her infinitely more interesting peers.In “Telling Stories,” one of many incisively-observed essays from Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Didion offers a glimpse into the writer’s fragile psyche.  In the fall of 1954, Didion, who at the time was a junior at U.C. Berkeley, earned a coveted spot in writer and literary critic Mark Schorer’s English 106A.   “An initiation into the grave world of real writers,” English 106A was a writer’s workshop that required students to write five short stories.

As an inexperienced nineteen-year-old, Didion swiftly sunk into the quicksand of insecurity.  “Who am I to write?” she wondered, “Do I even have anything meaningful to say?”

Her classmates had met famous people and travelled to far-flung places.  Her own life felt uneventful by comparison.  She had never been in love or known real difficulty.  She had never had an affair in Cuba or danced all night in Harlem or sipped wine in Tuscany.  Her short life was circumscribed within the 100 square miles of her native Sacramento.  Certainly, she believed, there was nothing in her unremarkable life that could be transmuted into a short story or novel:

“I remember each other member of this class as older and wiser than I had hope of ever being…not only older and wiser but more experienced, more independent, more interesting, more possessed of an exotic past: marriages and the breaking up of marriages, money and the lack of it, sex and politics and the Adriatic seen at dawn; the stuff not only of grown-up life itself but more poignantly to me at the time, the very stuff which might be transubstantiated into five short stories.  I recall a Trotskyist, then in his forties.  I recall a young woman who lived, with a barefoot man and a large white dog, in an attic lit only by candles.  I recall classroom discussions which ranged over meetings with Paul and Jane Bowles, incidents involving Djuna Barnes, years spent in Paris, in Beverley Hills, the Yucatan, on the Lower East Side of New York and on Repulse Bay and even on morphine.  I had spent seventeen of my nineteen years in Sacramento, and the other two in the Tri Delt house on Warring Street in Berkeley.  I had never read Paul or Jane Bowles, let alone met them, and when, some fifteen years later at a friend’s house in Santa Monica Canyon, I did meet Paul Bowles, I was immediately rendered as dumb and awestruck as I had been when I was nineteen and taking English 106A.”  

As a fellow English major at U.C. Berkeley, I can relate to Ms. Didion’s plight.  I—too— had to navigate the notoriously labyrinthine halls of Dwinelle as a shy, self-conscious girl in my early twenties.  As a transfer student from junior college who barely graduated high school and never dreamed of going to a prestigious four-year university, I had to constantly battle the debilitating sense that everyone in my class was somehow more qualified than me.  In the stately lecture halls of the Wheeler building, I felt unforgivably less than my bookish classmates who wore oxfords and chinos and had impressive internships at magazines.  Like Didion, I never spoke for fear my words would reveal my stupidity.  As Didion writes, 

“In short I had no past and, every Monday-Wednesday-Friday at noon in Dwinelle Hall, it seemed increasingly clear to me I had no future.  I ransacked my closet for clothes in which I might appear invisible to the class, and came up with only a dirty raincoat.  I sat in this raincoat and listened to other people’s stories read aloud and I despaired of ever knowing what they knew.  I attended every meeting of this class and never spoke once.  I managed to write only three of the five required stories.  I received— only, I think now, because Mr. Schorer, a man of infinite kindness to and acuity about his students, divined intuitively that my failing performance was a function of adolescent paralysis, of a yearning to be good and a fright that I never would be, of terror that any sentence I committed to paper would expose me as not good enough— a course grade of B.”

Paralyzed by fear, Didion didn’t write another story for ten years.  For a decade, she lost the battle against her merciless inner censor.  The irony, of course, is that— despite her insistence that she wasn’t interesting/intellectual/experienced enough— she would go on to become one of the most vital voices of her generation.  

Lesson?  Even great writers suffer writer’s block and fear rejection.  For more from Didion, read about her ideas on art as expression & discovery, her time at Vogue, and her famous sense of fashion.