5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

‘Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?’

By trying too hard to make the most of his time, he misses his life.

use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer – as if you were a machine in the Industrial Revolution – instead of asking whether the d

each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead.

Elizabeth Gilbert

we often ‘don’t even realize something is broken until someone else shows us a better way’.9 But the other reason we might not realise some everyday process is broken is that it isn’t broken to begin with – and that the inconvenience involved, which might look like brokenness from the outside, in fact embodies something essentially human.

Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time.

Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.