Next Monday, March 28th at 2PM central, I’ll be interviewing Oliver Burkeman about his work and his book, Four Thousand Weeks. You can set a reminder to tune in via YouTube:
This was really fun. Watch my chat with Oliver on Youtube:
Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks
My March pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. To join our discussion next month, sign up now.
Unboxing the latest for our @literati book club… pic.twitter.com/JD0oQFnPdw
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) March 1, 2022
Here’s my intro:
What will you do with the rest of your time?
What sounds like a straightforward self-help book is actually a deep reflection on the nature of time and how humans have historically dealt with it. “The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief,” Burkeman writes. “Assuming you live to be 80, you have just over four thousand weeks.”
Burkeman gives us permission to be imperfect, to forget about little tweaks and life hacks, and focus on the big things that matter. Freelancers, or creative people with weird schedules, might find comfort, as I did, in how difficult it is to make time off count when that time off isn’t shared by others.
I love how Burkeman is able to pull off the magic trick of writing self-help books that are, at their core, deeply suspicious of their own genre.
Four Thousand Weeks was one of my very favorite books I read in 2021. (His previous book, The Antidote, one of my favorite reads of 2013, was a big influence on my book Show Your Work!, which is the first book I consciously wrote knowing it’d be shelved in self-help.)
Here are some notes I took on the “The Principles of Patience” section of the book.
Oliver has agreed to chat with me online about the book in late March, so stay tuned for that!
To join our discussion, sign up for the club.
The principles of patience
“Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”
—Herman Melville
In Oliver Burkeman’s excellent latest book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, he outlines 3 principles for “harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life.”
1. “Develop a taste for having problems.”
Burkeman quotes the French poet Christian Bobin:
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. With that thought, an ocean of profound peace entered my heart.
The sooner you welcome uncertainty and not-knowing as normal ways of being, the better off you’ll be.
2. “Embrace radical incrementalism.”
People who work a little bit every day tend to cultivate the patience it takes to get good. These people also quit their day’s work when it’s finished: they identify what their chunk of time or task is per day, they do that and only that, and save more for tomorrow. (See: “Something small, every day” and the “Chain-smoking” chapter of Show Your Work!)
3. “More often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.”
To illustrate this point, Burkeman uses The Helsinki Bus Station Theory. (The original speech is here.) As the photographer Arno Minkkinen explained, Helsinki bus lines start out traveling the same path but then diverge at different points in the route, spreading out to far and wide locales. When you find your work resembles someone else’s, or you’re on someone else’s bus, traveling someone else’s path, don’t try to go back to the bus station at the very beginning and completely reinvent yourself and start from scratch, keep working and “stay on the bus!” At a certain point, your path will split off into something new. (I wrote a book about this called Steal Like An Artist.)
In going through my “patience” files, I found this lovely thought from a piece about helping students develop “the power of patience”:
The art historian David Joselit has described paintings as deep reservoirs of temporal experience—“time batteries”—“exorbitant stockpiles” of experience and information.
This is one of my favorite ideas: that art contains embodied energy that we can unlock, activate, and tap into with our attention. Our energies unlock the stored energy.
We must assume the same is true of our own work: that we must take the time to stockpile enough our own energy in the work so it may be worthy of the energies of others. But the energy in the work won’t just consist of the time we spent actually making it, it will also consist of all the time we spent leading up to the work… all the days we thought were going nowhere…
Surprise is an enabler of seeing
In Alan Jacobs’ latest newsletter, he tells a story of literally stumbling into the Pantheon and San Lorenzo in Lucina while wandering around Rome. (It’s so delicious to think about actually being able to flaneur and wander around a foreign city again one day.) Alan points out how different it felt to happen upon them by chance vs. actively seeking them out.
“Surprise is the great enabler of seeing,” Alan writes.
He points to a passage in Walker Percy’s essay, “The Loss of the Creature” (collected in The Message in the Bottle) in which Percy explores how education and classification systems blind us, essentially, to the reality of things we’re trying to see. For example, a man taking a trip to see the Grand Canyon:
Why is it almost impossible to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon under these circumstances and see it for what it is — as one picks up a strange object from one’s back yard and gazes directly at it? It is almost impossible because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind. Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex head on. The thing is no longer the thing…. it is rather that which has already been formulated—by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon.
In another newsletter that hit my inbox this morning, Oliver Burkeman posted an excerpt from his forthcoming Four Thousand Weeks, about his problem of trying to “live in the moment” while trying to take in the Northern Lights.
The more Burkeman tried to take them in and be in the moment, the more he failed. In fact, he got so far away from being in the moment by trying to be in the moment that he had a thought that still makes him squirm: “Oh, I found myself thinking, they look like one of those screensavers.”
The attempt to “be here now” feels not so much relaxing as rather strenuous – and it turns out that trying to have the most intense possible present-moment experience is a surefire way to fail. […] To try to live in the moment implies that you’re somehow separate from “the moment,” and thus in a position to either succeed or fail at living in it.
Part of the problem is that the brain only really registers what it doesn’t expect to see.
When we think of seeing, we imagine the eyes sending a bunch of data to the brain and then the brain interpreting all that data.
“It turns out, however, that the brain does not work like this at all,” Carlo Rovelli writes in Helgoland. “It functions, in fact, in an opposite way. Many, if not most, of the signals do not travel from the eyes to the brain; they go the other way, from the brain to the eyes.”
What happens is that the brain expects to see something, on the basis of what it knows and has previously occurred. The brain elaborates an image of what it predicts the eyes should see. This information is conveyed from the brain to the eyes, through intermediate states. If a discrepancy is revealed between what the brain expects and the light arriving into the eyes, only then do the neural circuits send signals toward the brain. So images from around us do not travel from the eyes to the brain—only news of discrepancies regarding what the brain expects do.
This, Rovelli points out, is actually a very efficient way of functioning: no need to worry the brain with what it already knows is there.
The implications for the relationship between what we see and the world, however, are remarkable. When we look around ourselves, we are not truly “observing”: we are instead dreaming of an image of the world based on what we know (including bias and misconception) and unconsciously scrutinizing the world to reveal any discrepancies, which, if necessary, we will try to correct.
Surprising the brain, however, is almost impossible to plan or strategize! You can’t really will surprise, you can only put yourself in situations where you have a better chance of being surprised.
It’s easy to surprise your brain by looking around a foreign country, but much harder to do in your everyday environment. (In Rob Walker’s excellent The Art of Noticing, he suggests trying to be a tourist in your own town, and to “Spot Something New Every Day.”)
An artist makes the ordinary extraordinary, but if we only really register what we aren’t expecting to see, a great part of the artist’s job is to try to estrange his mind from the ordinary things he’s trying to see.
“Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.”
I am fond of drawing tricks as tools for estrangement: drawing something upside down, drawing something without looking at the paper, etc.
But seeing with fresh eyes is never a simple task.
I suppose all one can really do is keep your eyes peeled.
Pointing at things
The story goes that the painter Al Held said, “Conceptual art is just pointing at things,” so John Baldessari decided to take him literally, and commissioned a bunch of amateur painters to paint realistic paintings of hands pointing at things:
Of course, all art is, in a sense, pointing at things! The artist sees something and she points to it so you can see it, too.
Hedda Sterne, in an interview with Art in America, said she thought art was about, saying, “Hey, look!”
The intention, the purpose, is not to show your talent but to show something…. I had a very great urgency to show, to share. The cat brings you in things, you know? It was that kind of thing. I discovered things and wanted to share them.
Something similar from Corita Kent: “I just make things I like bigger.”
Sterne emphasized that she pointed away from herself. To Bomb magazine: “I see myself as a well-working lens, a perceiver of something that exists independently of me: don’t look at me, look at what I’ve found.”
It’s the same for writers: Good writing is often just pointing at things.
In his most recent newsletter, Oliver Burkeman suggests that people who want to make writing less hard should just think about showing people something that you’ve noticed. “Look, over there,” your writing should ask, “can you see?
“When you write,” says Steven Pinker, “you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, that you are directing the attention of your reader to that thing in the world, and that you are doing so by means of conversation.”
“Which sounds obvious,” says Burkeman, “except that it makes immediately clear how many writers are doing something else.”
Academics are often more focused on showing off their knowledge, or their membership in an exclusive circle…. Journalists are often trying to inflame your anger, or rally support for some cause.
“The reader wants to see,” Burkeman says, “your job is to do the pointing.”
It is the same for blogging, says Robin Rendle: “blogging is pointing at things and falling in love.” (I like his ordering: not falling in love and then pointing, but pointing and then falling in love. Loving something by paying attention to it.)
As I wrote in Steal Like An Artist,
“Step 1: Wonder at something.
Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.”
Point at things, say, “whoa,” and elaborate.