Best Of: Stop Chasing More. Start Embracing Your Limits.

I'm Rufus Grisscomb and this is the Next Big Idea. Today, how to live a meaningful life as a flawed, finite human in an era of infinite tasks. For 15 years, Oliver Berkman wrote a column for The Guardian. The title, This column will change your life. When I finished writing it, one of the very nice emails I got was from somebody who said they'd grown up reading it.

Nothing will make you feel older than that. Oh wow. But um Well, you probably grew up writing it, right? Right, yeah, it changed my life. Oliver devoured self help books, tested countless journaling and time management systems.

He meditated, sampled various flavors of Buddhism and Stoicism, but in the end, none of it changed his life. All it did, he says, was make him slightly more anxious, as yet another new technique proved not to be the silver bullet. Having failed to become a productivity ninja and sensing that others might be failing too, Oliver wrote a book called 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, in which he writes, bracingly, The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short, but that isn't a reason for unremitting despair. Or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It's a cause for relief.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (76 minutes, 13,454 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.