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When my small leadership learning group met early in the year to address the changes we would individually make to be more effective in 2026 – with the focus on subtracting things we could live without – I was surprised when three or four members referred to sustaining ideas they had taken away from Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals. I had not read the book when it first appeared in 2024 but was intrigued and, when I noticed a paperback edition had recently come out, I decided to catch up.
In a sense, that reflected one of the 28 short essays in the book that had come up in our discussion: Viewing the information flow deluging us as a river rather than a bucket. “It’s become a ubiquitous modern problem to have not only a teetering pile of books you’ve been meaning to read, but a digital stack of articles you’d like to digest, plus a long queue of podcast episodes to listen to, videos or TV shows to watch or videogames you’ve purchased and would love to play, if only you could find the time,” Mr. Burkeman writes.
We tend to view that backlog as a bucket, a container that fills up and we must empty. Instead, he suggests considering it a river that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by. In this case, the book had conveniently floated back again, another reason not to fret so much about emptying the bucket initially.
Mr. Burkeman’s essays revolve around embracing our limitations and making time for what counts. “The most liberating and empowering and productive step you can take, if you want to spend more of your time on the planet doing what matters to you,” he begins the first essay, “is to grasp the sense in which life as a finite human being – with limited time and limited control over that time – is really much worse than you think. Completely beyond hope, in fact.”
To do everything demanded of you is impossible. You will continue to be overly busy. You will never produce perfect work. So get on with life and accept the limitations. “It’s precisely because you’ll never produce perfect work that you might as well get on with doing the best work you can,” he writes.
Embrace imperfectionism. Stop viewing your limitations as an obstacle to fulfillment and free yourself to build a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality.
In doing so, be willing to pay the price for your decisions. You can jettison a lot of the things that plague you – from answering that next email immediately to attending an awful meeting to working at your current job – but, he stresses, “freedom isn’t a matter of somehow wriggling free of the costs of your choice.” Just weigh the trade-offs, without exaggerating them, as often is the temptation. That’s still freedom, he insists, but freedom within limitations. Life has limitations. Life has trade-offs.
One lesson helpful to managers – indeed, my own peer group spent the next session focusing on it – is to develop a taste for problems. It begins with this essential question that neuroscientist and podcaster Sam Harris posed to a friend moaning about the various challenges at work: “Were you really expecting to have no more problems at some point in your life?”
Mr. Burkeman notes that “problem” is the word we apply to any situation in which we confront the limits to our capacity to control how things unfold. We view what is happening now as flawed because it is marred by too many problems. But life wouldn’t be much without problems – without these hills and mountains to climb.
And for managers, problems are the job. You have been hired to grapple with them. “Beyond the mountains, there are always more mountains, at least until you reach the final mountain before your time on earth comes to an end. In the meantime, few things are more exhilarating than mountaineering,” he says.
He also challenges us to embrace the upside of unpredictability. Not being able to guarantee your plans will bear fruition in a mysterious way makes life worth living, he argues. For many people a major life milestone occurred in some mundane moment, such as attending a party where they met a spouse or found someone with an irresistible idea they agreed to collaborate on. “The more we try to render the world controllable, the more it eludes us,” he says.
Similarly, be open to interruptions. Events that you think shouldn’t be happening are often where great things happen. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have boundaries or not try to work somewhere quiet. But when interrupted, by your kid or a colleague or an anxious thought, give it your full attention (even if you need to postpone when you will do so).
We are all mortals, with limitations. We fight them. But in some cases, we need to accept those limitations and work more capably and enthusiastically within them.
Cannonballs
- A study of nearly 30,000 management-track employees from a large retail chain found women receive substantially lower ratings of their potential despite receiving higher performance ratings. And those ratings of potential prove inaccurate as the women subsequently outperform male colleagues.
- After co-hosting a meeting of founders of consumer companies, Namirah Quadeer of the Polymarket predictions company, learned the gap between a good product and a winning product is distribution. The winning product goes and finds its user, not the other way around. The strongest founders treat product and distribution as a single problem.
- The first rule of management and human interaction is to leave other people an out, says entrepreneur Seth Godin.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.