Kayaks and Superyachts
This post below (and the title) is NOT written by me. It is written by Oliver Burkeman, the author of the sensational book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.
Oliver's writing is beautiful and penetrating, and it highlights, in such a warm and wonderful way, our vulnerability and struggles as human beings. If you like this, please consider subscribing to his email newsletter called The Imperfectionist. My only addition to his piece below is this quote from Zig Ziglar: "You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great."
If you would like to hear Oliver, he was a guest on our podcast The Resilient Surgeon. Highly recommended.
And now, here is today's post from Oliver Burkeman's The Imperfectionist:
AT THIS POINT in a book on getting around to what counts, you might be expecting some kind of a system.
That was how it always went with me, anyway. On picking up a work that made any kind of promise about building a more successful or meaningful life, I’d immediately flick past the opening pages to the part where the author set out his or her step-by-step system for actually making it happen. Few things are more appealing, when you’re hoping to change your life, than a new system for doing so. But that allure can lead you astray. Almost nobody wants to hear the real answer to the question of how to spend more of your finite time doing things that matter to you, which involves no system. The answer is: you just do them. You pick something you genuinely care about, and then, for at least a few minutes – a quarter of an hour, say – you do some of it. Today. It really is that simple. Unfortunately, for many of us, it also turns out to be one of the hardest things in the world.
It’s not that systems for getting things done are bad, exactly. (Rules for meaningful productivity do have a role to play, and we’ll turn to some of them later.) It’s just that they’re not the main point. The main point – though it took me years to realise it – is to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it’s part of any system or habit or routine. If you don’t prioritise the skill of just doing something, you risk falling into an exceedingly sneaky trap, which is that you end up embarking instead on the unnecessary and, worse, counterproductive project of becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing.
The problem I’m referring to arises like this: you want the peace and clarity you believe you’d derive from meditation, say, so you resolve to become a meditator. You purchase a book on changing your habits, skim through it, then start figuring out how best to make a meditation habit stick. You order a meditation cushion. Perhaps you even get as far as sitting down to meditate. But then something goes wrong. Maybe the sheer scale of the project of ‘becoming a meditator’ – that is, meditating day after day for the rest of your life – strikes you as daunting, so you decide to postpone the whole affair to some point in the future, when you expect to have more energy and time. Alternatively, maybe the novelty of becoming a meditator positively thrills you – until a week or two later, when monotony sets in, and the letdown feels so intolerable that you throw in the towel.
What you could have done instead was to forget about the whole project of ‘becoming a meditator’, and focus solely on sitting down to meditate. Once. For five minutes.
It’s worth mentioning another version of this problem, in which people try to become a different kind of person as a way to unconsciously avoid doing the activity in question. Suppose you want to start a business, but the prospect intimidates you. What better way to never quite get around to it than to turn it into a long-term project? That way, you get to spend months doing research, and undertaking brainstorming exercises, and emulating the daily routine of one of your entrepreneurial idols, complete with 5 a.m. wake-ups and a ‘hydration protocol’ . . . and you never have to do the scary thing at all.
A pair of images that help clarify things here are those of the kayak and the superyacht. To be human, according to this analogy, is to occupy a little one-person kayak, borne along on the river of time towards your inevitable yet unpredictable death. It’s a thrilling situation, but also an intensely vulnerable one: you’re at the mercy of the current, and all you can really do is to stay alert, steering as best you can, reacting as wisely and gracefully as possible to whatever arises from moment to moment. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger described this state of affairs using the word Geworfenheit, or ‘thrownness’, a suitably awkward word for an awkward predicament: merely to come into existence is to find oneself thrown into a time and place you didn’t choose, with a personality you didn’t pick, and with your time flowing away beneath you, minute by minute, whether you like it or not.
That’s how life is. But it isn’t how we want it to be. We’d prefer a much greater sense of control. Rather than paddling by kayak, we’d like to feel ourselves the captain of a superyacht, calm and in charge, programming our desired route into the ship’s computers, then sitting back and watching it all unfold from the plush-leather swivel chair on the serene and silent bridge. Systems and schemes for self-improvement, and ‘long-term projects’, all feed this fantasy: you get to spend your time daydreaming that you’re on the superyacht, master of all you survey, and imagining how great it’ll feel to reach your destination. By contrast, actually doing one meaningful thing today – just sitting down to meditate, just writing a few paragraphs of the novel, just giving your full attention to one exchange with your child – requires surrendering a sense of control. It means not knowing in advance if you’ll carry it off well (you can be certain you’ll do it imperfectly), or whether you’ll end up becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing all the time. And so it is an act of faith. It means facing the truth that you’re always in the kayak, never the superyacht.
The challenge, then, is simple, though for many of us also excruciating: What’s one thing you could do today – or tomorrow at the latest, if you’re reading this at night – that would constitute a good-enough use of a chunk of your finite time, and that you’d actually be willing to do? (Don’t get distracted wondering what might be the best thing to do: that’s superyacht thinking, borne of the desire to feel certain you’re on the right path.) Because the irony, of course, is that just doing something once today, just steering your kayak over the next few inches of water, is the only way you’ll ever become the kind of person who does that sort of thing on a regular basis anyway. Otherwise – and believe me, I’ve been there – you’re merely the kind of person who spends your life drawing up plans for how you’re going to become a different kind of person later on. This will sometimes garner you the admiration of others, since it can look from the outside like you’re busily making improvements. But it isn’t the same at all.
So you just do the thing, once, with absolutely no guarantee you’ll ever manage to do it again. But then perhaps you find that you do do it again, the next day, or a few days later, and maybe again, and again – until before you know it, you’ve developed that most remarkable thing, not a willpower-driven system or routine but an emergent practice of writing, or meditating, or listening to your kids, or building a business. Something you do not solely to become a better sort of person – though it may have that effect, too – but because whatever you’re bringing into reality, right here on the rapids, is worth bringing into reality for itself.
