Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Saved by Alex Wittenberg and
We have to give up. You surrender to the reality that things just take the time they take, and that you can’t quiet your anxieties by working faster, because it isn’t within your power to force reality’s pace as much as you feel you need to, and because the faster you go, the faster you’ll feel you need to go. If you can let those fantasies crumble, Brown’s clients discovered, something unexpected happens, analogous to the alcoholic giving up his unrealistic craving for control in exchange for the gritty, down-to-earth, reality-confronting experience of recovery. Psychotherapists call it a “second-order change,” meaning that it’s not an incremental improvement but a change in perspective that reframes everything. When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed.There is nothing passive or resigned about the kind of patience that arises from this effort to resist the urge to hurry. On the contrary, it’s an active, almost muscular state of alert presence—and its benefits, as we’ll see, extend far beyond art appreciation.
Saved by Alex Wittenberg and
In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.
FRUITION” IMPLIES that at some future time you will feel good. One of the most powerful Buddhist teachings is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will. As long as you’re wanting yourself to get better, you won’t. As long as you are oriented toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have or alread
... See moremeaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but from letting them take the time they take, surrendering to what in German has been called Eigenzeit, or the time inherent to a process itself.