Chapter 153: Carl Honoré imparts illuminating insights into intentional idleness

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The pace of living is accelerating.

I often feel like things are happening too quickly to process ... the reels are going too fast, the scrolls have too many colors, the information feed feels like a flood.

I just can't process it all!

Do you feel the same way?

If so you need this conversation as much as I did.

Carl Honoré is the grandfather of the "slow movement" — a Canadian born, UK-based author, journalist, and ​popular TED speaker​ whose first book, the 2004 long-running bestseller '​In Praise of Slowness​', sparked a global conversation about time, speed, and how we live.

What's happened since 2004? Life has gotten even faster! Which makes his ideas and insights even more valuable. I love Carl's work so much I’ve read 'In Praise of Slowness' three times and enjoyed his tangential books on parenting in an era of hyper pressure ('​Under Pressure​') and making the most of our longer lives ('​Bolder​').

Carl is a warm, sagacious soul who oozes kindness and wisdom and in this conversation we talk about the best way to cook risotto, why you should read Orwell to your kids even in their 20s, how social media is changing travel, the benefits of learning new languages, the meaning of the phrase "tempo giusto", mindful ways to slow down our busy lives, and, of course, his 3 most formative books...

Let's flip the page to Chapter 153 now...

Chapter 153: Carl Honoré imparts illuminating insights into intentional idleness

View full transcript here

CONNECT with Carl

Carl’s 3 Books

  • First book (24:24)

  • Second book (39:32)

  • Third book (1:10:58)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • “The slow revolution is about doing things at the right speed.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “So if you are asking what polyglot means to me, it means joy-I love words, I love how they move around in the world, how they shape how we feel, how they change things, how they sound, how they look on the page. And the more words you have right across different languages, the more kaleidoscopically happy your life is, from my point of view.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Language is the perfect passport.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Language is just a kind of poetry we have at our fingertips.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I'm trying to save myself through my writing and try to help others live better lives and help the world be a better place.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Reading was a central part of parenting, family life for us.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The whole spark for my moving into thinking about slowing down was when I caught myself speed reading Snow White to my son, right? You know, my version was so fast, it only had three dwarves. It was not a good look. And I realized then when I caught myself flirting with buying a book called The One Minute Bedtime Story, so Snow White in 60 Seconds, I thought, this is insane, right? I'm racing through my life instead of living it.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Because I think we all have that or those of us who are lucky enough to have had books read to us as kids have that folk memory of that sacred magical moment when a parent sits down with a kid and the world around you just vanishes and you're in that bubble together and you're telling stories. You're doing the most eternal, simple human thing together. You are telling a story and you're sharing words and you're cuddling and you're reacting together.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “And I've read books out aloud to my, daughter was, you know, 21. I read Animal Farm by Orwell out loud and Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck out loud. And of course, my daughter could read it herself, but that wasn't the point. The point was being together, the human voice, sharing the story in a different way. And I just, it's just a kind of magic.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I feel like curiosity is even more urgently needed today because it feels to me like people have retreated into echo chambers and silos and little patches where they don't need to be challenged or questioned.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We cant really know ever everything.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The hallmark of this moment is that just as soon as you think you've got a fact, it turns out that fact is slippery and wobbly and it's not as solid as you thought it was.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We need that headspace, we need that bandwidth, we need quiet in order to go deep.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Skimming through life instead of actually living it.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Because when you go quiet, you go inside. And when you go inside, you reckon. You reckon with the big stuff.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We live in this world where we're more connected than ever before. Where there's lots of noise and sound and fury, but we feel very uneasy, right? Lonely, disconnected, like we're not really living the right lives for ourselves. And I think the big part of that is we just don't create space and moments for silence.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Whole libraries are going to be written about our tortured relationships with phones.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “So much of what would have been leisure now is packaged up as a product that not only is being sold to us, but that we're selling to other people, right? So we're turning our own leisure into a performance.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Orwell is such a beautiful clear crisp prose stylist. If you've got a teenager accustomed to consuming online content, Orwell is a good gateway drug.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Shows that the basic human need for the slow stuff, right, the reflection, the reading, the stillness, the quiet, the conversations, the listening, all that stuff, it's there, right? The muscles that want that are maybe a little atrophied and a bit tired, and they don't get used enough. But as soon as you give human beings that offering, they want it, right?” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I love when a writer identifies something that you know from your own life, you know to be true, but you've never articulated it.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “If you embrace it wherever you are as a process of opening doors instead of closing them, as an adventure instead of as a punishment, then aging can be an upward curve.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I'm mostly writing to please myself. So I want to write a book that I want to read through, and that I don't want to put down, and that I don't feel gets turgid and stalls and overstays its welcome in certain anecdotes.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Orwell is such a beautiful clear crisp prose stylist. If you've got a teenager accustomed to consuming online content, Orwell is a good gateway drug.” — Carl Honoré | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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