You’re Going To Die. Don’t Put Off Your Creativity for “Some Day.”
An interview with Oliver Burkeman about doing what is meaningful now.
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“The most regretful people on earth, are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”–Mary Oliver
I have bad news. You’re going to die.
I also have good news. If you change the way you think about your mortality, it can greatly improve your life.
There is one book I have recommended to more people than any other in the last several years. Four Thousand Weeks is the rare book that can genuinely change your perspective on life. Four thousand weeks is, if all goes well, roughly the amount of time we are alive on this planet. Author Oliver Burkeman provides paradoxical insights that stem from the irrefutable fact that we are finite humans with finite time. Absorbing the ideas in Four Thousand Weeks led me to several important insights about the role creativity plays in my life. In fact, I credit Oliver and his thinking with helping spur me to action on perhaps the biggest single creative project of my life–writing and publishing a book.
An Unconventional Book
Oliver has just published a new book, Meditations for Mortals, which offers a unique path to more deeply explore the many limitations we face in our lives. The book has twenty-eight short chapters and it’s designed for readers to proceed at a pace of one chapter a day for four weeks.
When I found out about the new book, I reached out to see if he would talk about why we so often put off things we value, like creativity, and he very kindly obliged.
As you may have guessed from the chapter-a-day strategy, Meditations for Mortals is not a conventional book. It’s most certainly not a list of tips and tricks for eternal happiness.
“It is more about the power of a shift in perspective. Even though it feels less practical to be contemplating philosophical ideas than to be given a list of steps, I think it's more practical in the end. If those perspective shifts can take root, they can lead to much more real and effective and lasting ways of living.”
I asked Oliver about the form of the book and whether doing a chapter a day for four weeks was a choice to try and generate deeper personal thinking and insights for readers.
“Meditations for Mortals is an attempt to see if a book can go some way towards being part of a process of actually entering into a different way of being. It is a tool that people can use to go from knowing to actually doing. If you're in that situation where you would like to be showing up in a particular way in your life, but not quite doing it.”
The Curse of the Insecure Overachiever
I have just completed my 28-day journey, and it’s indeed a powerful way to let ideas percolate and become more deeply internalized. One of the biggest insights for me personally has been the realization that, like many others, I have a bad tendency to put off the things I really want to do for “someday.” “Someday” can more specifically be defined as “when all the other important and urgent things in my life are finally done.” I have constantly felt the need to clear the decks before I give myself permission to relax, enjoy, or do things for myself... like pursue creative hobbies.
And that’s pretty short-sighted because, as Oliver has helped me realize, that day will never come. The decks will never be cleared. The to-do list will never be fully checked off. The problems and challenges will never stop coming.
“I think that there are quite a lot of us who live by default in this somewhat anxious, somewhat neurotic mindset that with just a bit more work or just the right system, we could finally get on top of things. There’s this whole framework that psychologists refer to as Insecure Overachievers as a mindset. There are quite a lot of us out there.”
Certain Death Shall Liberate the Insecure Overachievers
Based on that description, I most certainly identify as an Insecure Overachiever. If we continue to put off doing the things that are truly meaningful and important to us for “someday,” though, we are likely never going to get to do those things. Because…
We’re all gonna die.
And it’s going to be sooner than we think. We are simply going to run out of time. And while this sounds depressing and anxiety-inducing, Oliver has also helped me realize that this is, somewhat shockingly, a liberating gift.
“When you do actually look it in the face a bit more, it's empowering. It's liberating. It's not just a relief. It’s also the basis for being able to spend the time that you do have doing some things that matter to you.
“And it’s not because of that dynamic where you say, ‘Oh, life is short,’ so therefore you've got to really, really, really have a sort of high pressure, extraordinary life.
“It’s a relief because I can fall back into the role that I actually have in reality, which is as a human with just a small amount of time on the planet. There are far more things that I could do with my time in principle than I'll ever have. If I can give up that fight, it is liberating.”
If you, as a finite human with finite time, can’t ever finish your to-do list or solve all your problems, then it is much easier to give yourself permission to do the things that matter now. Before it’s too late.
So the question for all of us becomes, “What is truly important to me? Where should I spend my finite, precious time?” There is obviously no stock answer to this question and each of us needs to contemplate it on our own.
How Important Is Creativity?
This brings me to creativity. Creativity is important to me. (Given the nature of this newsletter, I hope that is not surprising 😜) Oliver suggests that we start by acknowledging the myriad forms creativity can take.
“I think we do radically adopt an overly narrow definition of creativity. I think what people are really referring to when they feel that they do something creative or they miss something creative in their lives is really just a sense of aliveness, right? Of growth. Some flame that's burning. That you're not just reduced to a machine going through the motions of life. Through that lens, all sorts of things are creative. Can healthcare be creative? Can teaching be creative? Of course! How absurd to think that it might not be just because it didn't involve arts or painting or poetry or something.”
I feel fortunate that much of my work is indeed creative. The things I keep putting off, though, are creative activities that are fun and not related to work or a particular ‘success-related’ outcome.
I want to get good at playing guitar.
I want to create a comedy podcast or comedy TikTok channel.
I’d like to try stand-up comedy again (like Tori Weldon did!)
I want to practice drawing.
Most mortifying of all, I’d love to learn to sing, even though I am a tone-deaf karaoke nightmare.
These are all things that I mentally label, “someday.” Oliver suggests that this is a grave mistake (pun intended).
“If we're going to experience value in life, it either has to be now, or it has to be in some now, at some point. It can't be perpetually postponed because we don't have all the time in the world. And so the ultimate value of whether you're living in a meaningful way is whether there are things that you're doing with your time in the present that make you feel more alive.
The organizing principle becomes the sense of creativity and aliveness and then you make your decisions about how you're going to spend your time on the basis of that. I’m a big proponent of this idea of paying yourself first with time. In other words, being very, very wary of that voice that says, “I'll just get all this stuff out of the way first, and then I'll spend a lot of time on that creative project.”
Oliver has an ingeniously simple solution.
“Just spending 10 minutes on something that you know is really dear to your heart today matters. Not because you're going to then do 10 minutes every single day, or increase the time until you'll do it every day until you're doing two hours a day.
Returning to that question of what kindles the flame inside is very, very important. And it ultimately does come from being willing to ask questions like, “What would I like to do with the next hour?”
Just literally look no further than today. It’s a really powerful practice.”
Overcoming Resistance with Cosmic Insignificance
In addition to deprioritizing creativity as a “someday” activity, another common reason for avoiding a creative practice is the worry and anxiety about putting something out into the world that you might be judged for. What if it’s not perfect? What if people don’t like it? What will people think of me? (Most specifically for me, what if my stand-up experiment is a bomb? What if I truly cannot ever sing and am forever resigned to brutalizing any song I come in contact with?)
Oliver has a solution for this sort of thinking. It’s called Cosmic Insignificance Theory, and in short, it suggests that you zoom way out and consider how completely irrelevant you are in the grand scheme of time and space. You are currently one person on a planet of billions. The Earth is one planet in a galaxy of billions. And your four thousand weeks on this grain of sand is an infinitesimally small fraction of time. In this context, Shakespeare does not matter. Newton and Einstein do not matter. And neither do you.
If you zoom out far enough, Shakespeare will be forgotten about. And that's why I chose that example. From the perspective of the cosmos, you can certainly find the argument or the feeling that nothing matters.
Yet again, this has the potential to be anxiety-inducing.
For some people, that pitches them into a nihilistic panic reaction. I think the other way of thinking about it is, you might as well put things out now, right? Because waiting until you're confident, you can meet a certain standard, or get a certain kind of reaction from the public is just setting some sort of arbitrary tormenting barrier a little bit higher up the scale. And that scale goes on forever.
There's no level you could get to where you could say, “Now I know that my name will echo down the centuries and the millennia. I will never be forgotten.”
Isn’t that (again, paradoxically) kind of a big relief? Oliver is helping us give ourselves a permission slip to do what we want when we want to do it… before it’s too late.
Do. Or Do Not. There Is No Try.
One last empowering insight for creatives. There is no perfect. There is only growth. And growth comes from putting imperfect work out into the world.
The only way to get better is to be willing to put stuff out there, remembering that if you're worried about it being imperfect, the reason that you don't need to worry about that is because it will definitely be imperfect. That's really powerful.
Being a tiny speck of sand in an infinite hourglass, why wouldn’t we embrace the necessity of imperfection and start making stuff? I am hereby stating my intention to move from being an Insecure Overachiever to become a practicing Imperfectionist.
So guess what? I am fortunate to have some interesting speaking opportunities that have come my way because of publishing a book. And the book is about being unconventional and creatively brave. So… today I spent an hour infusing my speech with humour. It’s not standup. But I’m going for it.
And if I bomb?
At least when my finite time is up, I won’t have the regret of not having tried.
Creative Prompts
Are you an Insecure Overachiever like me?
Are you putting off meaningful things in your life for “someday” when you’ve finally “cleared the decks”?
How would you change the way you spend your precious time today if you knew that you would never be able to fully clear the decks? ‘
What is important to you? What are the most meaningful and purposeful ways you could spend your finite time?
What creative work would you be liberated to do if you embraced Cosmic Insignificance Theory and realized that whatever you make or put out into the world, the stakes are actually much lower than you might believe?
What would it feel like to become an Imperfectionist?
A New Storytelling Night in Toronto
Friend of The Guild, comedian, podcaster, and storyteller Joanne O’Sullivan is launching a new storytelling night in Toronto called The Spit. And Geoff Siskind is one of the storytellers on December 9th. “True stories well told” never disappoints.
The Imperfectionist
I’m such a big fan of Oliver’s writing and thinking that I also need to recommend his terrific newsletter, The Imperfectionist. Every couple of weeks, Oliver writes about mortality, productivity, embracing our limits, and other ideas about how to survive in our chaotic world.
(Here is another Oliver-inspired post from
at : Confessions of a Chronic List Maker!)A huge thank you to Oliver Burkeman for taking some of his very precious time to chat with me–it was a true treat to get to have a conversation with someone who has impacted my life and thinking.
And thank you to so many of you who have supported the launch of my book, Earn It. What a wonderful and generous community the Creativity Guild has become–I’m very grateful for all of you.
Until next time,
Steve
Fantastic post Steve. Will be sharing it widely. What a cool opportunity for you to have talked with Oliver. A perfect example of “actually doing” leading to something phenomenal, and allowing you to share something creative with all of us.