In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman suggests asking yourself these five questions to make his ideas more concrete. The five questions are in “The Human Disease”, the last chapter of the book.
Click here for my full summary of Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
Those five questions are:
1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
Pursuing things that matter to you most will always entail some discomfort. When you’re faced with a difficult decision, say about a job or a relationship, make the choice that will enlarge you (even if that’s uncomfortable), rather than diminish you (even if you think it would make you happier).
2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
It’s impossible to respond to an infinite number of demands. It’s usually also impossible to spend “enough time” on your work, children, socialising, travelling and engaging in political activism. Ask yourself, if you never have time to do all that you hoped to, what would you do differently? It’s cruel to hold yourself to impossible standards; it’s far more humane to drop those standards and just focus on a few meaningful tasks.
3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
To put off confronting finitude, you might treat your current life as part of a journey towards the kind of person you feel you should become. You might think that, once you’ve done that and justified your existence, life will stop feeling so uncertain and out of control. This is both futile and unnecessary. Futile, because life will always feel uncertain and out of control. Unnecessary, because there’s no point waiting to live until you’ve achieved such validation.
4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
Some people spend years treating life as a dress rehearsal. The truth is, everyone’s just winging it, all the time. That applies to journalists, to government officials and politicians, same as everyone else. You may never truly feel like you know what you’re doing — in anything! While that can be alarming, it can also be liberating.
5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
As mentioned in my main summary, we shouldn’t judge how we spend our time solely by its results. There is a sense in which all work—including parenting and community-building—cannot be completed within our lifetimes. Their ultimate value cannot be judged until after we’re gone — if ever at all.