Oliver Burkeman has a brutal but liberating message - you will never do it all. Accept that and the real work can begin.

In this expansive chat, Oliver (journalist and author of Four Thousand Weeks, Meditations for Mortals, The Imperfectionist), joins me to explore the counterintuitive truth at the heart of modern life: that embracing limits is the gateway to living well.

We talk about insecure overachieving, parenting, Zen, email, death, and the strange liberation that comes from realising it’s all going to be a mess anyway. Oliver shares his own journey from perfectionism to “imperfectionism,” and we dig into what it really means to live a finite, meaningful, creative life in the age of infinite demands.

If you're a high-functioning procrastinator like me, battling endlessly with the hydra of your never ending self-expectations—you're going to like this.

We cover:

• The 4-hour workday principle
• Insecure overachievement: the emotional engine behind ambition
• Why facing our mortality clarifies things
• Zen, Stoicism, and the power of giving up
• How parenthood changes your relationship with time
• Email overwhelm, control-freakery, and the illusion of perfect systems
• Internal Family Systems (IFS), Focusing and the many parts within us
• What organizations and leaders can learn from “imperfectionism”
• Whether meaningful societal change can emerge from individual awakening
• Morning pages and the one practice Oliver always returns to

Why Listen:

If you ever feel crushed under the weight of your own dreams, stuck in a loop of planning without doing, or haunted by the feeling that you will die unfulfilled—this conversation will soothe you with a balm of friendly rationality and offer poetic license to just be and do the best you can.