Meditations for Mortals

After the success of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, since I want to explore meditation, I was eager to read this book. Oliver writes well; his newsletter is the only one I follow on a private account in English. It felt necessary.

Excellent book. I marked a lot. It always makes you reflect on how we use our lives, and it inspired me to calm down. Always a pleasure to read Oliver!

Notes

• A 28-day guide to imperfectionism, meaning not spending your days striving to do everything, but realizing you will never manage it and focusing on what fills you spiritually
• Realize that you will never complete all your tasks. When you grasp that, something unlocks. You drop the futile efforts and accept being ‘drenched’ in imperfection
• The point is not systems to be productive. The point is developing the willingness to do something
• Treat your to-do list like a menu to choose from, not a pile
• Stop hoarding knowledge. Don’t rush through books just to take notes; take your time to do things and enjoy them. That’s how you learn
• In general, don’t be hard on yourself. Sometimes the right thing is to do what you enjoy
• The end point of imperfectionism is that when you let go and see you can use your time not to do everything, but to do something that enriches your life
• Redefine what ‘complete’ means with small deliverables
• Some tasks make us anxious, so we keep building tasks around them to feel ready. No. Do them, even if they’ll be imperfect, better than building a perfect structure around them while procrastinating
• Seinfeld example: he didn’t invent a streak method; he just did the work
• This doesn’t mean doing something ‘daily’. ‘Daily-ish’ is much healthier because you set your own pace and it’s not too rigid. Say 5-6 times a week, 4 if it’s a tough period
• Beyond the mountains, there are always more mountains, at least until you reach the final mountain before your time on earth comes to an end. In the meantime, few things are more exhilarating than mountaineering.
• Anxiety that others will be disappointed: it’s okay. Acknowledge that they feel that way and that’s fine. We have our own journey
• Everything that happens to us is either a good thing or a good story to tell. Much of this zen spirit is about accepting life’s unpredictability
• Set a quantity goal. Write two hundred words or work on it for 2 hours. Better than setting unrealistic qualitative targets
• Embrace distractions, because if you see them as a nuisance, an obstacle to your goals, you miss many good moments in a pursuit that, as we know, is futile. For example, today I stopped everything to listen, enjoy lunch, and spend the afternoon together. The rest can wait
• If your focus has been diverted, accept it. Deal with your new reality
• Scruffy hospitality: a bit of mess when we host guests takes the pressure off everyone
• Finale: we will never manage to control the future; there will always be too much to do. Embrace having an imperfect life
• Beautiful final words: You are here. This is it. You don’t much matter - yet you matter as much as anyone ever did. The river of time flows inexorably on; amazingly, confoundingly, marvelously, we get the brief chance to go kayaking in it.