Why patience is a superpower Oliver Burkeman TEDxManchester

few years ago arrived at an art gallery that's part of harvard university in the united states sat down on folding chair in front of this painting which is called cotton merchants in new orleans by edgar dager and looked at it for three hours straight think this might legitimately prompt question in some people's minds something along the lines of what in the name of all that is holy would you want to go and do that for didn't do it because love art galleries because kind of don't love art galleries find it so exhausting that thing you end up doing where you shuffle from painting to painting wondering if you've spent sufficiently respectable amount of time in front of one of them to move on to the next and looking at one painting for three hours straight is kind of torture it's not it's not boring it's agony you might remember some research from few years ago that suggested that about 45 percent of people if you put them in room on their own with nothing except machine they can use to administer electric shocks to themselves would rather self-administer electric shocks than just sit there and you probably thought if you saw that you probably thought these people are crazy i'm telling you try to spend three hours looking at cotton merchants in new orleans by edgardaga and you will start craving some of that sweet sweet voltage now the reason was there was because was trying to develop skill i've become convinced is tantamount to superpower in the in the modern world think it's the missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to living happier less overwhelmed lives when it comes to finally getting around to the things we care about the most maybe even when it comes to addressing some of our most pressing social and political problems the trouble is it's like the least sexy sounding superpower you can possibly imagine it's nothing to do with passion and inspiration and creativity and all that stuff it's the skill you've been railing against ever since you were four years old and your parents told you you needed to show more of it i'm talking about patience it's superpower but don't think there's going to be successful superhero franchise anytime soon based around the adventures of character called incredibly patient man lucky for you this is ted talk format designed for an era when nobody has any patience at all and 10 minutes from now you will know everything that know about patients lot of my work has focused on this idea of our daily struggles with time and how we can find some more sanity in that relationship and we talk lot here lot don't we about distraction busyness overwhelm burnout don't think we pay enough attention to the lens of impatience which define as the feeling that you need to make the world move faster than you actually can make it move so for example there's little bit of the world that is my five-year-old son there's the speed at which feel need him to move when we're putting on his clothes to leave the house there's the speed at which he actually does move and then there's the the friction the discrepancy between the two there's huge amount of evidence to suggest how impatient we've become as society but my favorite example is the estimate that amazon would lose 1.6 billion dollars year if it's home page loaded one second more slowly than it does because that's how impatient we've become so for example think lot of what we think of as overwhelm busyness or at least the pain of that is actually impatience it's the feeling that we need to have our tasks go faster than they actually can go if we're to avoid drowning in our responsibilities lot of the anger that we see all around us today think is ultimately impatient used to live in new york city where the moment any driver encounters traffic jam they just lean on their horns you know and it's not because they think that honking is going to solve the problem of traffic congestion in new york that honk is just an existential howl of rage about the fact that they can't make that bit of reality move as fast as they think they need it to and likewise we talk lot about distraction think distractibility is very often in patients too people say they're too distractible to sit down with good book think they mean that when we try to let ourselves read book give ourselves over to the time that reading book takes it's too painful to slow down to the time that that requires and perhaps you've noticed this bizarre irony that all the technology we've developed to save ourselves time ends up making us feel more impatient this should not be what happens by any sane logic right in world with 747s and dishwashers and email and smartphones we ought to all feel much much more relaxed because of all the time that has been freed up but of course that's not what happens anyone who's ever worked in any office with communal kitchen knows that thing where you arrive to use the microwave and you find seven seconds left on the clock by the last person so you have to cancel it and reset to use it yourself it's not because the last person reached that point and made very judicious decision that their leftover lasagna was at exactly the right level of heatedness no it's because they got seven seconds from when the dinger was due to ding and they just couldn't bear the waiting any longer so in roundabout way that's what was doing on this folding chair at the art museum at harvard i'd noticed all this impatience in myself and wanted to try to reconnect to sense of patience this exercise the three-hour exercise comes from an art historian at harvard professor jennifer roberts and she has all her incoming students do it right they have to choose painting or sculpture and go and look at it for three hours straight she knows that this is torture but her argument is that in world conditioned for hurry world that's so committed to the idea that we have to do everything as fast as we possibly can you actually need these kinds of structures you need to be able to force yourself to slow down to let the thing take the time it takes because it's all too easy to think that just by looking at painting for few seconds you've thereby seen it really seen it in fact seeing painting is something where you don't get to dictate the schedule it just takes the time that it takes and professor roberts makes this fascinating point about patients that part of the reason we think about it is so yucky and boring is because we associate it with with passivity with lack of power we think of for example young women in victorian times urged to cultivate the virtue of patients basically just to reconcile themselves to the fact that their societal role was to stay home and not be ambitious and do needlework and wait while their husbands did more exciting things in the public sphere but as society accelerates patience actually becomes form of power it becomes the ability to resist the urge to go along with all the internal and external pressures that are prompting us to go faster and faster it becomes the ability to benefit from experiences that you would not have if you just went as fast as everyone else it becomes subversive and think certain great figures in history have long understood this right look at patience in the the work and the example of martin luther king or mahatma gandhi this is not patience as resigning yourself to your fate it's the opposite it's the patience to wait out the oppressor until finally victory can be achieved but it may be the case that this is kind of power that we all need to try to seize now the problem is it is not remotely comfortable power to try to seize 40 minutes into my time on the chair at harvard was just squirming in my seat was so annoyed that hadn't chosen different painting was furious that the idiot who was making me do this stupid stunt even though that idiot was myself looked at my watch at one point was convinced must be about halfway through my three hours and 17 minutes think it's worth stopping to ask why should it feel so painful to give painting or book or five-year-old or relationship problem or business dilemma you know the time that it requires guess the sort of grand unifying thesis of my work on time is that we have very hard time as human beings with our finitude with the fact that we only get on average about 4 000 weeks on the planet so there's always going to be more to do than we possibly can do and with the fact that we have so little control over that time we don't know how the future is going to unfold we can never feel secure about what's coming and so we're constantly engaging in all these futile and stress-inducing attempts to make ourselves feel more in control of our time than we really are and hurrying through life trying to make reality go faster is one way really good way to try to acquire that feeling because it feels like doesn't it if you could just go fast enough you could finally reach that sort of serene and commanding position of of mastery of your time now it doesn't work because the supply of things to do is infinite so you're never going to get through it no matter how far you get go how fast you go but it feels like it might and so it's it's comforting whereas patience requires facing the truth that you're limited that you don't get to dictate the speed of reality and it involves the painful confrontation with the fact that you just have to let certain things take the time they take so in moment i'll close out here by giving you three examples of how think you can harness the power of patients in your own life and why it's the pain of patience is price so worth paying not just in art appreciation but first of all just for the record this is what happens when you spend three hours looking at cotton merchants in new orleans by edgar dager on folding chair at the harvard art museums it's really uncomfortable for while mean really uncomfortable but what happens eventually is that you sort of surrender to the discomfort you stop trying to run away from the present into the future and that is when the painting starts to give up its secrets so if you're me you start to literally see things you haven't seen before like the sort of ghostly translucency of the figure on the right or the way that the furniture the lines of the the objects seem to pass through the bodies of the of the characters in the painting all sorts of things like this and then eventually you're sort of sucked into the scene in the painting it's like you're there it's like you can feel the humidity and the claustrophobia and the watchfulness on the faces of the men and and taste the dust in the air and hear the creak of the floorboards it's like when you surrender the attempt to dictate the speed of the experience that's when the real experience can begin so promised you quickly three tools and the first of these is to practice creative waiting the poet john keats called this negative capability he's talking about the ability to stay in that space of not knowing of not having solution instead of always anxiously racing forward so that you get any solution at all and he thought that this explained the genius of william shakespeare i'm going to use an example from the other end of the spectrum household repairs the idea is that when you face some challenge like did the other day when the water supply to our dishwasher came loose and there was leak that couldn't figure out just see what happens if you just stop and look so the old me would have opened the cupboard under the sink and just like stabbed around in there hoping to almost solve the problem by chance but now knew what had to do is what did do got on my back and inserted my head into the cupboard under the sink and just started tracing the pipes and the connectors and five minutes in the fix was incredibly obvious by being willing to go more slowly towards the solution actually ended up going more quickly to solution and if that works for shakespeare and fixing my dishwasher venture to suggest that it works for pretty much everything for our relationships with our kids our business and creative troubles and and all the rest of it number two is to embrace the power of stopping you hear endlessly in sort of creativity circles about how important it is to just get started and that's true but the american psychologist robert boyce when he was studying the writing practices of academics he discovered something very interesting which is that the ones who produce the most writing who developed the most accomplished body of work they were also really good at stopping if they decided to work for say 90 minutes on writing in given day they did their 19 minutes they got up and walked away that way they didn't turn writing into this huge intimidating problematic thing in their lives boyce that that urge to keep on going when time is up it's very often just impatience it's the feeling that you've really got to get this finished now or that you're worried you might never feel as inspired again so you've got to harness the time if instead you can bring yourself when you're pursuing creative calling or developing habit to get up and walk away after even very short time that's the way to build this muscle of patience that will keep you coming back and back and back and producing the most over the long term and then finally learn to do one thing at time you don't need me to tell you that multitasking doesn't work we can't never hear the end of that these days but it's interesting to me think that the reason it doesn't work is because it is ultimately another kind of impatience there's that feeling isn't there that if you have finger in every pie you have multiple projects on the go or you're literally doing multiple tasks at the same time that you're getting through stuff as fast as you need to get through it you're going to achieve that state of total control over your time totally doesn't work because actually what happens is the moment any task gets difficult you just bounce off to another task instead so you never go through the difficult and challenging parts of any project so what you have to do instead i'm convinced is tolerate the anxiety of neglecting almost everything on your to-do list keeping it waiting outside the door while you do one thing finish it go and get one more thing it's not pleasant but it is the way ultimately to focus and get more done that you actually care about getting done and that just to finish mean think that's the most important point here lot of this is incredibly painful i'm not even convinced that anything i'm saying here is recipe for happier life it actually sort of it actually hurts to slow down to the speed of reality it doesn't feel good think that it can start to feel good but we should stop expecting that for example when you first sit down to try to focus on good book that it's going to feel great our minds are conditioned to go much much faster than that or even stopping to rest don't expect the first day of beach holiday to feel as delightful as you expect because it pushes back against everything that we're conditioned to do instead or listening really listening to other people the sovereign act of patience perhaps in in relationships as opposed to just waiting till they finish talking so you can say the thing that you were planning to say don't think that ever gets easy think it it's kind of it kind of sucks so don't think it's recipe of happiness think that it is recipe for much more meaningful life because think if we can enter into this mode of living where we have slowed back down to the speed at which reality actually unfolds if we can surrender little bit that craving to dictate how fast the whole of the rest of the world goes we will find that we live more fully that we spend more time doing the things we really care about the most and that we get to appreciate little bit more this absurd and ridiculous gift that we all get of having any time on the planet at all thank you very much you