Books Quote by Oliver Burkeman

““Dennis' book is far less annoying than most such works, thanks largely to his disarming sense of humour about being worth £700 million ... his book conveys a similar message to many of the others: to make a fortune, you need stubbornness, a lack of regard for what other people think of you and a willingness to take risks. Those qualities, Dennis suggests, made him what he is. To which Jerker Denrell might respond: how could he possibly know?””

Oliver Burkeman

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Books Sense of humour

More by Oliver Burkeman

Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the…

Oliver Burkeman

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“And here lies the essential between Stoicism and the modern-day 'cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, 'happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm…

Oliver Burkeman

“By the second day, the song lyrics had faded, but in their place came darker irritations. Gradually, I started to become aware of a young man sitting just behind me and to the left. I had noticed him when he first entered the mediation hall, and had felt a flash of annoyance at the time: something about him, especially his…

Oliver Burkeman

Through positive thinking and related approaches, we seek the safety and solid ground of certainty, of knowing how the future will turn out, of…

Oliver Burkeman

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“All these counterproductive ways of thinking about failure manifest themselves most acutely in the phenomenon of perfectionism. This is one of those traits that many people seem secretly, or not so secretly, proud to possess, since it hardly seems like a character flaw – yet perfectionism, at bottom, is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all…

Oliver Burkeman

“Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the…

Oliver Burkeman

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“The greatest benefit of negative capability—the true power of negative thinking—is that it lets the mystery back in.”

Oliver Burkeman

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What made Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein such creative geniuses? It wasn't reading books or watching YouTube talks about How To Be More Creative, that's for sure... If startling insights could be systematically arrived at, they wouldn't be startling. The best you can do is to create a conducive environment: put in the hours; take time to…

Oliver Burkeman

“Perhaps you don’t need telling that self-help books, the modern-day apotheosis of the quest for happiness, are among the things that fail to make us happy. But, for the record, research strongly suggests that they rarely much help. This is why, among themselves, some self-help publishers refer to the ‘eighteen-month rule’, which states that the person most likely to purchase…

Oliver Burkeman

Who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realise that your reluctance about…

Oliver Burkeman

“Incremental theory’ people are different. Because they think of abilities as emerging through tackling challenges, the experience of failure has a completely different meaning for them: it’s evidence that they are stretching themselves to their current limit. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t fail. The relevant analogy here is with weight training; muscles grow by being pushed to the limits of…

Oliver Burkeman

It is illuminating to note, here, how the daily rituals and working routines of prolific authors and artists - people who really do get a lot done - very rarely include techniques for 'getting motivated' or 'feeling inspired'. Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasise the mechanics of the working process, focusing not on generating the right mood, but on…

Oliver Burkeman