What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot, The Only Move That Matters is your next one, which launches in September of 2016. In this podcast, I talk with key performers to reverse engineer their most successful career pivots, interview experts on what it takes to be agile in a rapidly evolving economy, and open a kimono on what happens behind the scenes of mind-busting business.
You can learn to capitalize on risk, fear, and uncertainty as the doorway of opportunity. My promise is that you will leave every episode with practical tips, tools, and tactics. For show notes from this episode, visit JennyBlake.me slash podcast. If change is the only concept, then let's get better at it.
Here we go. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I am overjoyed today to be here in Brooklyn with Oliver Berkman, who wrote one of my top two favorite books, pretty much ever, but especially that I read in 2015 as I was starting to think about Pivot, and I was working my way out of my Pivot.
I might have even read it a year prior. Oliver Berkman is a writer for The Guardian. He's been writing for them for 15 years, which is incredible. His Guardian weekly column is the thing I make a mad dash to as soon as I open my Feedly account.
It's called This Column Will Change Your Life. He wrote a book that came out in 2012 called The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, where he explores the upsides of negativity, uncertainty, failure, and imperfection. I love how Oliver describes his column. He says, I write about social psychology, self-help, culture, productivity, and the science of happiness, and make unprovoked attack on secret.
Oliver, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for inviting me. When I read The Antidote, I read a lot of self-help for about 10 years, and I always felt there was something missing because I fit in that 18-month principle of someone who buys a self-help book has probably bought one in the last 18 months. And when I read your book, I felt like jumping up on a couch and pounding my fist in the air like Tom Cruise talking about Katie Holmes.
Excellent. I'm glad to hear that you had that much. I felt like, finally, I wrote a blog post once called Self-Love Formulas Are Bullshit, this idea that, oh, you have to love yourself completely before X, Y, Z can happen. So we'll get into all that with your book, but I'm curious, what inspired you to write a book about happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking?
That's a good question. I guess there are two levels to it. The simple one is that I had been writing this column for a few years at that point, and I've been trying to sort of meet from the chaff with self-help, basically. My assignment in the column was to, and still it really, to read those kind of books and look at that kind of research and figure out what made sense and what didn't.
And I saw this pattern emerging, right, which is that everything that seemed not to work, either according to the research or when I tried it in my own life, had something in common, you know, something to do with what I call positive thinking, you know, the idea of trying to make yourself feel the right feelings and sort of forcibly make your goals come true and sort of manipulate reality so that it all goes okay. Other people have other definitions of positive thinking. And the things that did work and seem to have something to them, again, all seem to share this quality of being more accepting of the negative, being more able to coexist alongside negative emotions, experiencing failure, all these kinds of things. So I noticed these patterns, and I thought there's something more than a common thing that I want to look about.
I think the deeper answer is that most of us who write about this stuff are sort of engaged in long-term public self-therapy, really. And, you know, I never started writing about these kinds of issues because I've got them all sorted out myself. It's obviously because I haven't got them all sorted out myself. And, you know, occasionally at events or something, someone will say, like, they think they've finally, like, rumbled me.
They'll be like, I think you're just interested in all this happiness stuff because you struggle with these issues yourself. And I'm like, yeah, exactly. Why else would I be interested in stuff? So I guess the deeper answer would be I tried some of this other stuff, and I wanted to find something that worked better.
I spent a good number of years sort of in a futile fashion trying to implement some of the ideas of what I call the cult of optimism, and they haven't worked. I was just going to say the cult of optimism is such a great moniker for it. You say that it's ironic because the cult of optimism ends up being self-defeating. How so?
I mean, I think it's worth going right back, just to get the idea straight, to go right back to that idea about not thinking of a polar bear, right, which I write about a little bit in the book, famous old parlor game trick, whatever, where you ask somebody to not think about a white bear for a whole minute. And you instantly see there that all you can do if you tell someone not to think about a white bear is they're going to think about a white bear. And all that goes to show, I think, is that there's something very basic to how our minds work, which is that if you tell your mind to not think about certain things or to only focus on certain things, to eliminate certain kinds of thoughts or whatever it might be, this immediate blowback, you know, happens, and all you can do is think about those things. And it's not just a game.
I think it applies, it's been shown to apply, you know, to all sorts of psychological phenomena around happiness and other things. If you try really hard only to feel certain kinds of things, you'll get the opposite. So it's a very sort of stressful way to live, to be constantly trying to eliminate negativity, constantly trying to feel pumped up and psyched up about your goals. It doesn't result in what you want, which is to feel crazy all the time.
It results in the opposite, which is like constantly scanning to see if there's any negativity or constantly worry that you need to be focusing on your goals even harder. And, you know, in the outer world, it doesn't work. Your goals are not best met that way. It kind of rejects the reality of the situation, the reality of life, really, which you talk about in the book.
I developed what I started to call the personal development police, that something would start going wrong and I would not like it. And then I would go, the personal development police in my head would say, oh, no, don't think a negative thought, you're going to manifest more negativity. And all these books would inherit back to me in a way that was a really downward spiral. Downward spiral, it's quicksand, whatever.
It's like, you know, the hardy fight in this kind of way, the worst things get. And there's also this kind of weird moral layering as well. But if positive thinking is how everything works, then if things don't work out for you, it must be because you're not thinking positively. It must be your fault.
Which sometimes, sure, it's your fault that things go wrong, but sometimes it isn't. Often it's luck. The real skill, I think, is learning to surf that situation rather than anything else. And, yeah, it's just like this amazing, I mean, one way of thinking about it is such a scam, right?
Because you listen to a guru saying, think positively, and it'll go right. It doesn't go right. You think, I must not be thinking positively enough. So you go back to the same guru for more advice or to another, you know, motivational seminar.
Whereas, you know, and I made this comparison before, you know, if you bought a TV from a manufacturer and then it broke, and then you went back to the same manufacturer and it broke again, like, you'd stop buying TVs from that manufacturer pretty quickly. But in the case of positive thinking, it, like, locks you into the cycle. So I think it's a pretty bad thing. The antidote that you offer is this negative path to happiness.
Can you describe that at a high level, and then we'll get into some of the different threads of thought around it? Sure, yeah. And I think I have to write from the start saying that I don't necessarily think it's the solution to everything, because if I said that it was, I think I'd be doing the same thing as the positive thinking. So I'm trying to rebalance things, really, rather than offer a one-size-fits-all.
But what I mean, I guess, in a general sense is this idea that various different philosophies and techniques that involve cultivating a friendlier, more open and tolerant attitude or negative emotions is probably a lot wiser and more fruitful. So there are lots of different manifestations of that. But it's this basic idea that, you know, if something occurs either in your emotional world or in the world outside the distance, great. Maybe the first instinct that we often have is trying to stamp it out or run away from it or totally change it into something good.
Maybe that impulse should be resisted and something else can grow from taking a different attitude. You introduced first the Stoics and their approach of calm indifference, which I really liked, examining beliefs and the benefits of worst-case scenario planning. And on the third point, I thought, I actually talk about worst-case scenario planning in the pivot chapter on finances. And my editor asked me to take it out.
Someone had given the feedback, but it didn't really belong and it was depressing. And I thought to myself, and I had remembered your book, that that's the point. Like, we can't pretend that the worst-case scenarios are not going to happen, because they might. Right, absolutely.
And I think it's not just, you know, different people's personalities are set up differently. So there are people like me, maybe also you, maybe a lot of British people, I don't know, who sort of like the idea of thinking about the gloomy side of things. But it's more than that, right, because it has to do with how we reassure ourselves when we're stressed. And it seems very clear to me, especially after doing all the reporting of this book, that when you're worried about something, so in case finances could be losing all your money and being extremely poor, the natural thing you want to do is reassure yourself or reassure your friend or whatever it is, and you say, it's not going to happen, it's not going to be in that manner.
If you do this and do this and do this, you can make sure this worst thing doesn't arise. But every time you do that, even when it's well-meaning, you're sort of reinforcing this notion without really meaning to. You're reinforcing the notion that if things did go terribly wrong, that this would be absolutely catastrophic and it would be death, basically. You're sort of inadvertently suggesting that whenever you say everything's going to be fine, you're saying it would be really bad if they weren't fine.
And to me, it seems so much more relaxing and sort of anxiety dispelling to be able to look in and stare at this worst-case scenario and say, OK, it would be bad if that happened, but I could cope, or these are the actions I can take now to make sure I cope, you know, set up an emergency fund in the case of finances, whatever it might be. And then I can, not only am I going to be calmer about not having to worry that the worst-case scenario would be calamitous, but I think I'm actually going to have more energy and focus for you to experience success, right? So it's not, I don't think it actually is a good way of thinking about life, but I think it's a really empowering way of thinking about life, because, you know, if you can launch a new project safe in the knowledge that if it failed, it wouldn't be absolutely catastrophic or you could cope, it would be far more, far less omitted about, you know, taking the risks, because it's not, you know, because you could live with it if it all came crashing down. There's a certain relief in dismantling the fuzzy fear monster and actually saying, well, if it did, here's what I would do.
Or following the thread and saying, well, I'd still be alive. Yeah, yeah, and you know, and sometimes... And maybe not, and you think that's ultimately the worst. I mean, I haven't really thought about this thing so much, but your question brings it up.
You know, you might sometimes determine that you didn't want to take that risk, because actually the risk of alienating your spouse and children or something was far too great a risk to run it or whatever. So you get to divide and sift kind of dumb risks from really exciting risks. And that's a very useful skill, too, you know, to know that you can cope with certain things failing and to know that you don't want to cope with other things. I might actually be British at heart somewhere, because when my friends will talk about relationships or kids and what they do when they're 80, I'm like, well, you might get hit by bus before then.
So, you know, you'd be lucky to make it to 80, whether or not we're talking about this relationship or these potential kids. Part of me feels like, you know, I'm just not going to deny it. I don't please guarantee anything. Right, well, there's also a catch in my book about trying to come to terms with death as well.
But I do think, you know, we can talk about that, but just on a very mundane level, I think we do tend to overestimate that fuzzy worst-case possibility is much scarier, most of the time because actually we're just exaggerating how bad it is. And I think the cult of optimism says, don't you dare even entertain. I'll hear people's language and I used to do this, too. Oh my God, I can't even say for a second that that might occur, let alone going to visualizing what you said is so called negative visualization, because we have to do the positive vision.
And I'm all for the positive vision statement, it's in my book as well, but that there's so much fear that by giving even a half a split second of attention in some cases you might be taking a huge risk that would leave you in a very different situation, financially, professionally, whatever. But a lot of times you're not thinking that big of a risk. And if you build it up through sort of telling yourself you're never allowed to think about failure, then it just becomes scarier, and I think that could lead to procrastinating on your stuff you want to do. So yeah, it's counterproductive, lots of different from coming away.
Speaking of failure, toward the back of the book, you talk about failure for failure's sake, that in our culture now, we have a lot of failure porn, like on Fast and Fast Company, Entrepreneur Magazine, where it's like, oh, look who failed, and now they're a billionaire. And you're saying, can we learn to embrace failure? That's failure. It's not always needs to be some straw funding to gold.
Can you talk about that? Yeah, it's a really interesting distinction. I'm glad you brought it up, because I think, you know, as you say, the way we normally hear about the importance of failure these days is like, look at me, I'm a successful billionaire, and it's because I was willing to fail. And, you know, that might be true.
I don't think it's nonsense. But, of course, the problem there is that you never hear from all the people who are willing to fail and didn't become billionaires and didn't write best-selling celebrity autobiography. So, you know, it could be that being willing to fail is correlated with extreme success or terrible failure, or Adam's terrible failure, and you just would never find out. But what I try to say in the book is that, you know, ultimately, if we're going to embrace failure, I think that it involves being able to think about being willing to just fail, you know, for things that just, in a given domain of life, go wrong.
Not go wrong en route to being right, but just go wrong. Partly because I think the peace of mind and authenticity that you can demonstrate in your life if you really have this nailed, I'm not saying I do, you know, is a good thing. Secondly, because there is a sort of, there's something very compendible and comrade-ly about failure, you know, that there's something very isolating about extreme success, and there's something very sort of, there's something very open, and I don't know how to express it, I mean, I could tell the whole story of the Millennium Dome in the UK, which was a sort of terrible, terrible failure, but the British population sort of loved the fact that it failed, and it made us all feel very sort of, like, a lovely community of people. It's hard to express it in a free way, but, and, you know, also, let's take it to the max and say that, you know, ultimately our attempts to do anything forever in a permanent way of being failed at the very end, and sort of coming back down to earth in this way is, and I quote Natalie Goldberg, the Buddhist writer who talks about failure being like bringing us back down to the ground into the mitty-gritty to life as it really is.
I'm not counselling, like, you know, go for this, try and make all your projects a disaster, but that sort of willingness to think that in some areas, and in ultimately all areas, you just might not succeed, and that would be okay, again, it's really empowering. It's not counselling despair at all. It's the exact opposite of it. You also say, J.K.
Rowling, her Harvard graduation speech, where she talks about life was really hard, and in that speech she's not saying, oh, I look back and I'm so glad it was really hard, and she'll say it's still to this day, and good things have happened since, but to not try and pretend that failure is some wonderful, most magical experience, but actually in the moment it's really tough. Right, and I think that she says, if I recall correctly in that speech, that, you know, once she had hit bottom there, once she knew that there was nothing to lose, and that she might as well do this thing that was creatively so close to her heart, there is a real sense, obviously it's easy to say now, but there is a real sense in which it wouldn't have mattered what happened to it, you know, at that point, which is very creatively freeing to get to the point where you say, you know, I have failed, I have experienced failure, I might as well at this point write the novel that I want to write, and firstly, she claims it wouldn't have mattered if it hadn't been her. but secondly, I want to suggest that maybe it was more likely to be once it was written from that truly not trying to game the system, not trying to check the boxes and make a bestseller, but just like, might as well do this now. And it really is that vulnerability of people sharing failures.
I think the TED Talks that resonate are when someone shares a story of adversity and failure. So at the same time that we reject it, this almost brings us, it's like the ego version of being able to go without all of our things like the Stoics would practice. And you quote Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts saying, just because you experienced a failure in your life has actually nothing to do with who you are as a person underneath that. Right, there's some fascinating work also that I do mention about, by a historian called Scott Sandage, about when the word failure came to be attached in American history to people rather than events.
It's pretty recent, right? It's only in the last couple hundred years that the idea of thinking of a person as being a failure as opposed to, you know, they tried something and that venture was a failure and he connected to the rise of the credit ratings agencies and the way that banks need to be able to say this person's a good risk, this person's a bad risk and maybe it's okay in the context of banks, but this idea of global rating of because you did something and it was a disaster, that means you as a person are a disaster is totally unhealthy and no good. It kind of reminds me of what's happening with social media. So first we have the credit scores, but only the banks can see.
But now everybody can see how many Facebook friends a person has or how many followers or how many likes their control. And it's fine as long as you're not investing your identity in it. And it's hard not to invest your identity in it. It's very hard to do anything I'm just doing without sitting and waiting to see who likes it.
And then, you know, concluding something about yourself on the basis of that, which is clearly ridiculous. Right. Let's talk about goals. I underlined an exclamation mark where you talk about that the Yale study of goals is BS pretty much, or at least no one could trace it out.
So for all you listening, and I think I quote this in my first book, I have... You're forgiven. It's so widespread. It's like one of the first personal development stats I ever read in probably the first book I ever read 10 or 15 years ago.
And it's that, I'm sure you've all heard it, but they did a study at Yale and the group who wrote down their goals, it was like 3% of them were richer than all the rest combined, and everything had come true. So ever since, there's been this trend of write down your goals, write down manifestation lists. So first, what did you find when you looked into this Yale study? And then what's the anti-goal approach?
The Yale study is so funny. I mean, you've encapsulated it well. It's just got this status as like the linchpin or the keystone of popular writing on goals. I spoke to activists at Yale and people at business school, where it's occasionally also attributed, and, you know, they've encountered it before, but they've never found any record of this study, not in a different year than the one that's given.
It really doesn't exist. There was a reporter for the last company many years ago who also got onto this and did a very funny set of phone calls where he went to ask one of the big people, I know that Brian Tracy and the Tony Robbins and some others, and asked each of them, like, can you tell where you got it from? And one of these guys would say, I think you should ask that guy. And so they'd go to that most patients, and he'd say, you keep mentioning this, where did it come from?
And eventually it's a perfect circle. So literally, you know, nobody knows where it comes from. Obviously, the made-upness of the Yale study of goals doesn't on its own show that. It's because of the placebo effect that it's working.
It doesn't show that goal setting is nonsense. And I actually don't think I argue that goal setting is to be completely dispensed with. What I'm trying to talk about, based on a whole bunch of research, is this idea of the over-the-seed of goals. To question this assumption, it's really deep, especially in the popular self-help literature, but there's no degree of intense focus on your goals that is a bad thing.
You should write them down, you should pin them to your mirror, look at them while you're shaving, putting your makeup, you should repeat it to yourself for a few times before you're there. There's no, you know, it's always a good thing. And there's plenty of evidence now to suggest that it really isn't a good thing for lots of reasons. The most obvious, I guess, being that it creates a tunnel vision and prevents you from seeing all sorts of other opportunities that might actually help you in a more fruitful way, but you're so focused on the end point.
And secondly, there's a lot about the way that focusing on the outcome instead of the process. It sort of induces procrastination, it makes the end point very intimidating, it's much harder to actually just put in the work that you need to put in to write a book, launch a business, whatever, when you are really fixated on the end goal. So when I talk about the sort of anti-goal approach, firstly, I'm just talking about maybe having a mindset of holding your goals a bit more loosely and not obsessing about them so much. And secondly, focusing on process.
And sometimes, you know, you can set a process goal, but that's a way around, you know, as a sort of compromise situation. When I was writing this book, I tried to say, you know, I'll write 800 words, 900 words every morning, and I will do that, but I will not set any quality expectations for it. And I won't be thinking about how this book's going to be really great or, you know, a huge bestseller or something. And that enables you to actually do that work, right, because it's sort of value-free, and anyone can just go and put that process in for a day.
And also, the moment you've done that for your day, you succeed it. Like, you've met your aim, and you can do it every single day. And otherwise, you're sort of waiting until the point at which the whole thing's finished or published, and until then, you're constantly, like, you know, on edge about whether you're going to succeed. You succeed every day that you write 800 words, because we've got this right out of the word.
And then also, there's some stuff that's in there about just sort of reconceptualising life a bit and not thinking about a professional career as climbing, climbing, climbing up to one summit where you then, you know, sit back and rest and dominate for the rest of your life. But more on the analogy of, you know, frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad, and maybe the goal is to just do a whole lot of interesting, meaningful things. And some of them will be paisa to some others, and some of them will pay back to some others. And you won't be sort of constantly in the state of none of it counts until I get to that.
Right, and it kind of brings in the discussion you bring in Buddhism and attachment. I feel like we have certain soul goals. Like, writing a book, kind of, it's so much work. It really kind of has to come from a soul-level place of commitment, yeah.
But then the attachment that might follow by creating too many specific goals and parameters around what's going to dictate success, that's where it seems to create more of an issue. And like you said, waiting to celebrate until, okay, three years out, because then what happens a lot of times is then there's the next goal right there. There's only a flash second of being happy. Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, I think if you mean goals as in the sort of values that steer you in the life, then I am not for one moment going to talk against those. But it's a question of, you know, so, yeah, thinking in terms of writing, which is, you know, what we do, it's hoping to build, again, not saying I've succeeded in fear, but hoping to build a life where, like, every day, by working on books, I get to express and embody a value that is important to me, rather than that thing is only embodied or, you know, expressed once it's finished or once it's a huge test, you know, or something like that. Speaking of writing, you talk about the difference between feeling motivated and just doing work. And I always find this a very interesting debate among creatives in general.
You cite, I forget who he was, Casey or Chuck someone, where he says, yes, Chuck Lowe, inspiration is for amateurs. And then a lot of the, you know, when we say motivational speakers, motivate, so people feel motivated to work on a creative project. Now I kind of wait for inspiration, but I also know the rigors of work. What did you find when you did the research on feeling motivated?
Well, I mean, there is a well-known finding that too much motivation, too much psyching up and sort of arousal in the broad physiological sense of the word is detrimental. So you can, up to a certain point, you get to going, and up to a certain point, it's just like, you know. That reminds me of like the writer's retreat, where it's like, I'm going to go to the woods for three months and I've tried to do that once for a week, didn't write a thing. Probably cause a lot of pressure.
Yeah, now I've had similar experiences. The thing that was so powerful for me, and I write about it in the book, but it also helped me write the book, you know, is this idea, as you say, you don't have to feel like doing something in order to do it. That you, when you tell yourself you've got to feel motivated, psyched up or inspired or whatever it might be, you think you're helping yourself get things done, but you're setting up another barrier, really, because you're now saying, not only do I have to do all these things like open up my computer and load up the file and have some sensitive to the thing, but I also have to feel like doing those things. And that is way harder, mainly because the human mind is a much more sort of crafty and idiosyncratic and perverse machine than your computer and your physical actions.
So you're really setting up this big hurdle, which is, you know, I'm going to demand the right mindset and that's fine. I don't think I'm going to power through those feelings or beat them up, which is why I get slightly have some reservations with some of these ideas in some books about you've got to fight resistance. Yeah, I agree. Or like the ego is evil.
Like he's this evil monster. Yeah, I agree. And you know, in general in life, they always make resistance sound like a sort of force that you've got to punch in the face. But if you go up to humans in the street and they just didn't wear any punch in the face, they tend to get more aggressive and punch you back.
So in the same way, I think if you launch yourself at resistance and procrastination saying I'm going to destroy you, it just comes back in that sort of friendly way. Okay, well, you're, you know, this feeling is going to be here today and meanwhile I'm going to do this. Elizabeth Field in her book Big Magic, which I'm sure you've encountered, has a nice analogy of like, you know, fear. She's talking about fear as impediment to creativity but you can think of lots of other things, like you know, all sorts of other negative emotions.
And she has this idea of like, you know, okay, you're going to let it come along for the road trip but it's not getting anywhere to the same way. And I think that's a really nice kind of like case. It's in the backseat seat. Yeah, I think she had it in the backseat.
See, I dogged that because I actually thought it was somewhat condescending how she talked to her fear still. And I remember and I kind of felt like, she's now talking to her like this little petulant child and I don't know, can we have our fear sit in the front seat? Can we be even more cordial with it than having to say, I know, I'm just curious. I'm just wondering.
I think it's a really interesting distinction because on the one hand I sort of want to say that condescending is the right attitude to have to those next emotions but you don't actually know. I mean, you're right. If we still have an edge of I'd really like to get rid of you. Yeah, you're this little petulant child that can sit in the back seat.
So I don't know what fear as a peer looks like but it's my motivational face. Yeah, exactly. Okay, now how can we help people distinguish because there is stuff in the cult of optimism and even the career space I might even be guilty of in that if you don't feel like doing the work how does one know when it's not the right work anymore or not the right job or career? Yeah, this is really, really this is really, really interesting.
I'm not sure I have the clear answer but it is, yeah, I think that there is a level of gut feeling and a level of intuition that is different to you know, I just don't want to do this kind of petulant feelings. I think partly you learn the distinction over time. I mean, I just know that every day producing certain pieces of writing that I have been totally pleased by in the long run and really happy that I did. I know that I felt really reluctant to do it.
So there I see it as a sort of immediate response that needs to be put aside. I think about situations where, you know, over the long term you get the feedback from the thing going out in the world or you get the feedback from wherever it might be relationship, place you're living and it doesn't happen in the long run that actually this is just you being self-defeating at the moment and that it actually is a reason to switch course. And I also think there's something that Susan Piver, about how that Chuck Close idea can turn into it's 9am and I decided I'm going to work on my project between 9am and whatever and I'm just relentlessly going to force myself to do it regardless of having any passion for it. And I think once it comes to the point where you're doing some kind of psychological violence to yourself that is another way of reading that it doesn't turn that it's not quite right.
I think one other thing that comes from that idea as well is if you have the freedom of your schedule and I'm well aware that most people don't it's interesting to see what happens if you just don't try to do anything at all and sit around and watch TV and at some point in that process it's like I'll just get so bored with that that I want to start reading some psychology books and going and looking into some topic and I think that's a good evidence that I'm into that for real rather than trying to force myself. But yeah, it's a subtle tricky distinction between that gut feeling that says this is no longer juicy and one to say well no it is it's just that I'm a bit childish about producing. Well I love that you brought in gut instincts and intuition because that's something I talk a lot about and it is more intangible but I agree with you. I think there is a gut feeling of whether it's worth pushing through in those moments of not feeling motivated in quotes.
Let's talk about meditation. I love how you say in the book that it has become the new stereotype of meditation is not that it's some path to ecstasy but that it's going to lead us to a trans-like calm and even since your book was published meditation has exponentially taken off. So what's the myth of the trans-like calm and what did you find in your research in this area? I mean I think there's even newer myths that are starting to build so I'll say that about it as well but the calm myth is this idea that it's always in the self-photography right it's either a man or woman in business attire but they're cross-legged on a beach or something and it's like this is how to feel totally zen in the middle of your busy stressful life and it's all about this idea that people who meditate like going around in this state where there's like no thoughts in their head and nothing troubles them and like firstly I don't really think that there are many people who have meditated a lot who are really in that state secondly I'm not sure you want to be and I'm not sure it's what is sort of suggested in there if you go back to the source with meditation so basically what I encountered when I did that meditation retreat and when you look at the research is that what this is really about is learning to be less attached to your feelings and your thoughts not to not have them so the analogy that the modern teachers always use is like weather patterns so it's being able to see that your mind is the sky and clouds come and go and the sun comes and goes and rain comes and goes you don't need to get stressed out about it but that's not the same as eliminating all weather so that nothing ever happens and it's like living in sorry and of course even they have weather right it's just that it's the same but I do think that is an important distinction because otherwise you suck yourself up a failure you sit down on a meditation for 10 minutes your mind is full of buzzing things and then you think I'm looking at this because I ought to be able to limit a thought and it's just not true I like how you say even 5 or 10 minutes of meditation that you manage most mornings is sufficient to feel as if I've applied a squirt of WD-40 to my mental machinery it's great, it doesn't have to be a cure-all it's just a squirt of WD-40 and you can take it further of course and I'm trying to but even then you don't get to the translike harm you get to a sort of way of being in the world that precisely enables you to be in busy situations and sad situations and stressful situations and not trying to possibly think your way out of them or numb yourself to them or something like that so yeah, do it 5 minutes but even if you do it much longer and go on lots of retreats and things I don't think that what opens up to you as possibility is really monotony it's just something much more alive than that Yeah, and that really takes us to the crux of the book which is what all these different philosophies have to say and it sounds like you've discovered in the process is that this is who we are this is what life is we're all going to die we have insecurity life can be chaotic it can be sad and that as the Stoics say it's the calm indifference as the Buddhists might say it's equanimity that it's just even meditation now in the media it's all about the benefits and the focus and the this and the productivity we're selling it so hard and that creates all that attachment to those results and that what you're really saying is that's why I love this book so much standing ovation but that to embrace the uncertainty and the wisdom of insecurity and that when we can recognize that there's nothing to fix and be okay in that state that's freedom Yes, absolutely and again, I always feel guilty talking about it because it implies that I've totally sorted it out in my own life You look like a Zen master This is a natural ball We're going to eat it's good I haven't pulled my hair off it's just fell out No, but it's that you I mean, it's two things firstly, it's that struggling to not accept those realities makes them worse so the point about wisdom of insecurity which is a title of the Bacon book by Alan Watts is that trying to get secure makes us more insecure so actually, you know relaxing into it is just a happier way to live but yeah, it's also just this incredible relief of this is the way life is these are certain things that can't be eliminated I can let go of that burden of struggling and I can do some really interesting cool fun things instead because I'm not trying to sort of feel better all the time so it's this big irony that if you stop focusing on trying to feel better you will actually I think probably feel better but you probably don't want to do it in all the time but it's just like the back door but yeah, it's just I forget who I'm borrowing it from but I mentioned somewhere that it's just this question do you want to get to the end of your life and think and be able to say that you successfully managed to eliminate 70% of the possible human emotions and to not think about 70% of the things that happened to us or do you want to say I was there for the whole ride on the high bits of the rollercoaster and the low bits and as low as I could I was present for the whole experience and I think ultimately it's pretty easy to answer that Do you think working on this book and integrating the lessons to whatever extent will change how you approach your next book?
Yeah, I think it is doing and it really is doing and the thing about this book is I really was going on a journey in writing it and it changed me and I think you can tell I'm talking about how to achieve happiness at the beginning and I'm like maybe we shouldn't be thinking about happiness maybe we should be thinking about authenticity or meaningfulness so I have to literally quickly change my philosophy from one end to the other and yeah I'm in that situation it's helpful at this point in this book above all because it's inevitable that you don't really know exactly where we're going in the early stages of the project and would be I think and hope if I didn't know exactly where I was going I was just like going through the motions of removing it from my head onto a piece of paper no it's alive rather than dead that's really cool that's a great analogy like book as life because it relates to so many people's pivots as well which is actually maybe we wouldn't want to know the whole thing we'd be bored right I can't remember whether I put her in a book or whether it's elsewhere but Susan Jessas who wrote Feel Fear and Do It Anyway which is a great book seems like one of those cliche self-help books but actually if you think about the title it's great it's not a positive thinking book at all she says in one of her other books if someone handed you a list of all the events that were going to happen from now until they died would you want to receive it and some people might say well as long as all the events are going to do the events I want to receive it which they're not going to be but even if they were I don't think you want that list because the moment that you know what's going to happen all the way through even if every single one of those things is brilliant the life has gone out of life in some fundamental way it's really very profound I thought it was very profound and then I love that Oliver's just starting work on his next book that you're saying not only do I not have to know all the specifics of it but I don't even know if I want to and that instead of even for certainty or happiness that these qualities of vulnerability and authenticity start to rise and I think that's just really cool and inspiring thank you I hope it turns out to be wise we'll find out but I don't know yet awesome well Oliver thank you so much this has been so fun and thank you for writing one of my favorite books everyone should read it thank you very much I really appreciate it where can people find you if they want to read more of your work and keep in touch my website is oliverberfman.com b-u-r-k-e-m-a-n and a lot of my stuff is on the Guardian site theguardian.com excellent and I will link to everything we mentioned in the show notes at jennyblake.me slash podcast and if you enjoyed this show I would be very grateful for a rating and or review on iTunes thank you everyone for listening and Oliver for being here today thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast to learn more and get in touch visit jennyblake.me where I blog about systems at the intersection of mind buying and business or find me on Twitter at jenny underscore Blake and remember build first then your courage will follow haven't it always