Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

by Oliver Burkeman

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‘When you can’t do it all, you feel ashamed and give up,’ notes the author Jon Acuff, but when you ‘decide in advance what things you’re going to bomb … you remove the sting of shame’.

necessarily be somewhat routine, and opportunities for exotic travel may be limited. An alternative, Shinzen Young explains, is to pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.

preschool education expert Tom Hobson, though, as he points out, its value is hardly limited to interactions with small children: when presented with a challenging or boring moment, try deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity, in which your goal isn’t to achieve any particular outcome, or successfully explain your position, but, as Hobson puts it, ‘to figure out who this human being is that we’re with’.7

meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein: whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind – to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work – act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later.

‘I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber,’ Blaise Pascal