a true life task, though it might be difficult, will be something you can do. If you only have fifty pounds in the bank, your life task won’t require the immediate purchase of thousands of pounds’ worth of movie-making equipment

for finite humans, life certainly is a tough challenge: you’ve got severely limited time, and limited control, necessitating hard choices and a tolerance for imperfection and uncertainty.

The challenge isn’t to locate a few needles of relevance in a haystack of dross. The challenge, in the words of the technology critic Nicholas Carr, is figuring out how to deal, day in day out, with ‘haystack-sized piles of needles’.

After all, if you’re hopelessly trapped in the present, it follows that your responsibility can only ever be to the very next moment – that your job is always simply to do what Carl Jung calls ‘the next and most necessary thing’ as best you can. Now and then, to be sure, the next most necessary thing might be a little judicious planning for the

That said, titles on the topic that have genuinely helped trigger action in my own life include Steve Chandler’s Time Warrior and Gregg Krech’s The Art of Taking Action: Lessons from Japanese Psychology.

The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.

To begin with, it acknowledges the reality that most of us don’t have the capacity for more than a few daily hours of intense concentration. But it also respects limitation in another important way: it frees you from the futile perfectionistic struggle to try to make the whole day unfold in accordance with your desires. It respects the fact that

The second piece of advice is to resist the urge to stockpile knowledge.

On a societal level, the quest for control often directly undermines our capacity to do meaningful work.