Why You Can’t Stop Your Productivity Addiction - Oliver Burkeman - #1061

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
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Is it possible to be the best in the world and relaxed at the same time?

**Oliver Burkeman** (0:37)
The best in the world? I don't know. What I do think is that it is very possible to be really, really good at what you do and relaxed. And actually my experience is that the more relaxed I can be, the better I am at things. I'm not going to claim to be the best in the world at anything. But I think that notion that you've either got to choose a relaxing life or an accomplished one, this is the thing I'm on a mission, very personally motivated mission to prove is not how it works.

**Chris Williamson** (1:11)
I think there's a tension between having high standards, which is hypervigilance and obsession and focus and really paying attention to stuff.
That just tends to bleed into the personality and the ambient anxiety. I can see, for instance, if you were to say, is it possible to be the best in the world and never relax at the same time? That question would seem pretty obvious to answer. Yes, of course, because the exact same level of resolution that you're obsessing over your pursuit with is the thing that destroys the rest of your life. The interesting question is to work out whether you can be on and off, or if you can hold things a little bit more loosely whilst still getting the right level of output you want.

**Oliver Burkeman** (2:05)
Yeah, it's really interesting. I think that there's something, I mean, this runs through a lot of what I tried to write about, but there's something about wanting to feel in control of the process of getting better at things or being good at things, which is kind of completely different from the actual process of getting better at them or being good at them. So I think this is on some level just the banal observation that people who really excel in what they do are very often, or perhaps more often, in a flow state while they're doing it.
They sort of let go into the action. They're not sort of sitting back inside their minds, they're sort of controlling it all in a very sort of conscious, control-y way. So yeah, for me, and of course I'm talking about things like writing or speaking. I mean, I'm not talking about I may work differently and to different degrees for kind of sports performance and things. But you find that the more I'm trying to make sure that things go well, that's just like a, and therefore I'm sort of un-relaxed and clenched and muscles tense and everything. But the more you sort of pop into this awful self-conscious space where nothing works and it's much better to lose yourself in the activity than to be trying to control it.

**Chris Williamson** (3:30)
I think a lot of people are struggling to find a healthy way to pursue goals without tying their self-worth to the outcome.
That is one of the fundamental problems. Like if I, the only way that I can get myself to pursue a goal is if I care about it. And in the act of caring about it, I'm going to be disappointed if I don't reach it. And in the act of the disappointment is some sort of value judgment about me and my worth and whether or not I should. So how do you healthily pursue goals without tying your self-worth to the outcome, given that the only sort of goals you do pursue are ones you care about and in the caring, the disappointment and in the disappointment, the self-worth?

**Oliver Burkeman** (4:15)
So I mean, there's a sort of ideal way of doing this, which I don't claim to have totally pulled off or anything, but I think the distinction is when you say care about, there's a way of caring about goals that basically defines yourself as inadequate and insufficient until you've met them. And there are other ways of caring about goals. So there's a concept in psychology, the concept of the insecure overachiever, which whenever I mention it in public audience context, so I don't like half the people in the room. Just the look of recognition that passes over their face is amazing, right? So people who do really well in life and they're driven, and they're probably applauded and celebrated by their friends or by society at large for doing loads of impressive stuff. But on some level, and I was like this for years, they're doing it to try to fix something about themselves or to try to feel okay, and to try to sort of fill a void. So loads and loads of really successful people in the world, they ultimately are sort of feeling like they've absolutely got to succeed. Otherwise, on some level, they don't really deserve to exist or something. And that sort of puts you in a perpetual place where everything you're doing in terms of goal pursuit is to try to make yourself feel sort of less bad about yourself. And it puts you in this really awful situation as well, which I definitely used to experience a lot, where anything you achieve in the world, which you might think you could then feel proud and happy about, just instantly becomes the minimum standard that you've got to meet next time, which is a very depressing way to live, right?