Has it happened yet? Has that steely resolve behind your New Year’s Resolution already failed? Not so fast: what happens next is crucial. What if it isn’t willpower you lack, but the flexibility to embrace failure as part of the process? As Maya Angelou wrote, “…it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” A growing body of literature has great advice for overcoming crippling perfectionism in ways that are kind to yourself, and to the world.
In the best tradition of self-help guides, Australian writer Madeleine Dore’s recent I Didn’t Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt draws upon a wide range of writers and authorities to support her thesis to move our thinking from mechanistic ‘productivity’ to ‘fecundity,’ a more organic and holistic conception of how we cycle from seemingly fallow periods to burst of creativity. Apt citations include Cal Newport’s blockbuster Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, and B.J. Fogg’s Tiny Habits: + the Small Changes That Change Everything – or was it James Clear’s Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results : An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones? Both, I think, and of course there’s the seemingly obligatory mention of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience, (I mean, seriously – have you read a piece of 21st Century pop psychology that doesn’t mention Csikszentmihalyi, to every audiobook narrators’ dismay?) Yet what sets Dore’s book apart is her own stance against optimization, and her thoughtful and compassionate embrace of the whole person, warts-and-all, conveyed in a personable way that steers clear of the forced familiarity of, say, Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
One of the best books mentioned by Dore is Oliver Burkeman’s recent Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, with a waiting list and well worth the waiting for. As in his prior book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, Burkeman takes a metacognitive approach to the prescriptions and proscriptions of productivity and time management gurus, reminding us of the imperfect and temporary nature of our existence. As he says at the start of his book, “The average human life span is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.” Burkeman writes a column on self-help books for The Guardian, playfully titled ‘This Column Will Change Your Life,’ and he brings the same gently mocking humility to the audacious task of suggesting how we might better spend our time on earth. For a sympathetic but somewhat more practical program on wrestling the hard trade-offs of a realistic life plan, check out Greg McKeown’s excellent Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.
If we’re imperfect and temporary, then what’s the point? How about just having fun! Karen Rinaldi’s spirited, funny It’s Great to Suck at Something: The Unexpected Joy of Wiping Out and What It Can Teach Us About Patience, Resilience, and the Stuff That Really Matters makes a case for discomfort and the life-affirming practice of “transcending our usefulness” by resisting specilization and optimization, and just trying things for the heck of it, even if they might not produce anything. Reinforce this “go for it” message with Samantha Matt’s Average is the New Awesome: A Manifesto for the Rest of Us, and Reshma Saujani’s Brave, Not Perfect: Fear Less, Fail More, and Live Bolder.
~ Posted by David W.
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