Oliver Burkeman on knowing, doing and 'staying on the bus'

Learning from Oliver Burkeman's 'Four Thousand Weeks'

The first time I trained for a full, 26.2-mile marathon, it was the fall of 1996 and I was twenty-five years old. The Atlanta Olympics had just wrapped up, and a friend I’d met during the games had convinced me to sign up for my first marathon, even though I hadn’t run more than six miles at once, ever.

But, I was single with a job that left me plenty of time to train after work and on the weekends, so I said “sure.” Along with her, I attended an introductory meeting for everyone training for the race, and received this training plan:

I can’t believe I still have this plan, all these years later!

There it was, all in black and white (or salmon, actually). The plan we needed to follow. Every mile we needed to run, every day we needed to run those miles, all laid out in precise detail. The only thing left was for each of us to follow it.

And I did, more or less religiously. There were a few days here and there that I skipped training runs, but I could count them on one hand. Otherwise, I stuck to plan and it paid off — I remember feeling good for pretty much the entire 26 miles.

Once I was done, friends became interested in running their first marathon too. “Run it with me,” they said, so I decided to sign up for another 26.2-miler later that same year. After all, I had a plan I knew would work; all I needed to do was follow it again and all would be well. Right?

I felt so good, so fit and strong from running that first marathon. For weeks and even months after, I let myself rest and eat whatever I wanted. I’d run a marathon, after all; couldn’t I take it easy for a little while? I ran sporadically, but nothing approaching the mileage I’d been putting in before.

The months rolled forward, and soon it was time to start training for my second marathon, the one I’d told my friends I’d run with them. We all shared the same plan (the one on salmon paper above) and promised to follow it faithfully.

But I found myself cutting corners. A dropped mid-week run here, a shortened Sunday long run there, and a few weeks in, I was falling behind on the miles I needed to get in each week to be ready in time for the race. As week piled on week, and that deficit kept growing, I found it harder and harder to get to where I needed to be.

Still, I promised my friends I’d run the race with them — and I did. But it was a lot tougher than my first marathon, as I added some twenty minutes to my time. Thankfully, I was still just twenty-six years old, so my body was able to rescue me from my relative lack of training.

When I look back at that time now, I don’t kick myself too hard. I was in my twenties, I was having fun, and new things and people came into my life. Still, there’s a part of me that wonders, what if I’d stuck with that training in a more committed way, instead of letting myself get pulled away from it like the talking dog in Up?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, a book by Oliver Burkeman, a British writer who developed an almost obsessive interest in the productivity tools and systems he often reviewed for his column in the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper.

One day, he realized their futility when he sat down and added up the time we can expect to have in the average human lifespan: about 80 years, or 4,000 weeks: “The problem isn’t that these techniques and products don’t work,” he writes in the book. “It’s that they do work — in the sense that you’ll get more done, race to more meetings, ferry your kids to more after-school activities, generate more profit for your employer — and yet, paradoxically, you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result.”

The whole book is fantastic (and fairly short, at 245 pages), but I’m most taken with a chapter near the end of the book on patience, titled “Staying on the Bus.” It may sound odd, I realize, especially when you read the opening graphs, in which Burkeman describes one of the strangest classroom assignments I’ve ever heard of:

When you take a class with [Jennifer] Roberts [who teaches art history at Harvard University], your initial assignment is always the same, and it’s one that has been known to elicit yelps of horror from her students: choose a painting or sculpture in a local museum, then go and look at it for three hours straight. No checking email or social media; no quick runs to Starbucks. (She reluctantly concedes that bathroom breaks are allowed.)

Living as we do in the age of the infinite scroll, I’d bet most of us would have trouble looking at a work of art for three minutes straight without checking our devices, let alone three hours. But what Roberts asks of us amounts, however insignificant it may seem, to a kind of defiance — that we resist the gravitational pull of electronic distraction and allow our minds rest, so we can focus on one single thing.

What do we get from that? Burkeman asks. Why not just let our minds float like butterflies wherever they may?

Because there’s something better, deeper and more satisfying than whatever momentarily piques our interest — but it takes work on our part to see and cultivate it. And that’s what he calls “staying on the bus,” a phrase Burkeman writes that he heard from a Finnish photographer named Arno Minkkinen, describing a parable about Helsinki’s man bus station:

There are two dozen platforms there, he explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one — and for the first part of its journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops. Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction — perhaps you start working on platinum studies of nudes — and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the owner of a gallery. But you’re dismayed to be told that your pictures aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knockoffs of the work of [another photographer], whose bus had been on the same route as yours. Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else’s path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialize. But a few stops later, the same thing happens: you’re informed that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus station. But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognized as being truly your own.

What’s the solution? “It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.” A little farther out in their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage — the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.

You can apply this to your work, to training for a marathon, to staying in a relationship — to anything, in fact. Whenever we’re attracted to something, we have an initial burst of excitement and energy, which always eventually wears off. That’s the crucial moment when, if we allow ourselves, we can fall away and miss out completely on what might have happened.

But there’s also no guarantee, I know, which is why big choices can be so paralyzing. What’s the right way to go? There’s only one way to find out.

I hope all is well in your world — as always, let me know how your running/life is going, and keep in touch.

Your friend,

— Terrell