I’ve just finished my second read through of Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. It’s a good book, although I find it uncomfortable to read in many ways. I do love this quote though.

In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing? It’s easy to spend years treating your life as a dress rehearsal on the rationale that what you’re doing for the time being is acquiring the skills and experience that will permit you to assume authoritative control of things later on.

But I sometimes think of my journey through adulthood to date as one of incrementally discovering the truth that there’s no institution, no walk of life, in which everyone isn’t just winging it all the time. Growing up I assumed that the newspaper on the breakfast table must be assembled by people who truly knew what they were doing: then I got a job at a newspaper…

…It’s alarming to face the prospect that you might never truly feel that you know what you’re doing in work, marriage, parenting or anything else. But it’s liberating too, because it removes a central reason for feeling self-conscious or inhibited about your performance in those domains in the present moment. If the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all.

It’s even more liberating to reflect that everyone else is in the same boat, whether they’re aware of it or not.