Resources
Everything worth your time on the question: Whose permission am I waiting for?
← Back to the sessionREAD · BOOK
Oliver Burkeman
Read this if your problem isn't knowing what matters. Your problem is trying to make everything matter at once.
The title comes from a simple observation. An average human life is surprisingly short when expressed in weeks. Burkeman challenges the idea that becoming more productive will eventually create enough time for everything. It won't.
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Daniel Gilbert
Funny, and much harder on the reader than it first appears. The chapters on imagination filling in the gaps are the ones that matter here.
Gilbert's subject is how badly we predict our own future feelings. We imagine the highlights of a life we do not have and quietly leave out the Tuesday mornings. That is directly useful when a desire keeps returning: it lets you ask whether you want the life attached to the thing, or one missing ingredient inside it, without dismissing the desire as a fantasy.
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Bronnie Ware
Best for a blunt view of what people wish they had allowed themselves.
A palliative nurse's account of what people said at the end, and the first regret on her list is having lived the life expected of them rather than the one they wanted. Treat it as testimony rather than evidence: it is a small, self-selected sample and it reads warmer than the research does. It earns its place because it is specific about the shape of a suppressed want, which the studies are not.
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Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste
Worth it if the exercise found that something you care about only feels worthwhile once somebody notices. He explains the mechanism without making you feel corrupt for it.
The readable account of self-determination theory, written by the man who spent forty years testing it. The finding that matters here is that rewards and approval reliably change why people do things, and that behaviour which survives without either is telling you something the rest is not. It gives you a usable test rather than a feeling.
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Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec
Best for weighing the cost of not acting against the cost of acting.
Their finding is that regret over things we did fades, while regret over things we did not do tends to grow and to become more abstract as it does. Read it carefully though. The same abstraction is why inaction regret is easy to romanticise: the road not taken never has to survive contact with reality. Both halves of that are useful when deciding whether a want is worth acting on.
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