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Oliver Burkeman Quotes

Total quotes: 5
“It’s psychologically far easier to declutter your home if you first take a photo of anything to which you’re emotionally attached. People are readier to part with such items when they know they can trigger the same old feelings by consulting the picture later.”
— Oliver Burkeman, Actually, we can buy happiness
Tagged: Declutter, Get Rid Of Things, Organization
“The social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has persuasively argued that the all-positive approach, with its rejection of the possibility of failure, helped bring on our present financial crises. The psychological evidence, backed by ancient wisdom, certainly suggests that it is not the recipe for success that it purports to be.”
— Oliver Burkeman
“The relentless cheer of positive thinking begins to seem less like an expression of joy and more like a stressful effort to stamp out any trace of negativity. A positive thinker can never relax, lest an awareness of sadness or failure creep in. And telling yourself that everything must work out is poor preparation for those times when they don’t. You can try, if you insist, to follow the famous self-help advice to eliminate the word ‘failure’ from your vocabulary — but then you’ll just have an inadequate vocabulary when failure strikes.”
— Oliver Burkeman, The Positive Power of Negative Thinking
“Take affirmations, those cheery slogans intended to lift the user’s mood by repeating them: ‘I am a lovable person!’ ‘My life is filled with joy!’ Psychologists at the University of Waterloo concluded that such statements make people with low self-esteem feel worse — not least because telling yourself you’re lovable is liable to provoke the grouchy internal counterargument that, really, you’re not.”
— Oliver Burkeman
“Though much of this research is new, the essential insight isn’t. Ancient philosophers and spiritual teachers understood the need to balance the positive with the negative, optimism with pessimism, a striving for success and security with an openness to failure and uncertainty. The Stoics recommended ‘the premeditation of evils,’ or deliberately visualizing the worst-case scenario. This tends to reduce anxiety about the future: when you soberly picture how badly things could go in reality, you usually conclude that you could cope. Besides, they noted, imagining that you might lose the relationships and possessions you currently enjoy increases your gratitude for having them now. Positive thinking, by contrast, always leans into the future, ignoring present pleasures.”
— Oliver Burkeman, The Positive Power of Negative Thinking
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