It’s A Very Timeless Thing | A Cure For Procrastination

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1:04Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

1:43It's a very timeless thing. In one sense, he was as unlike you as is even possible. He was born to a rich family 18 centuries ago. He was selected by a dying and childless king to succeed him, made part of a chain of adoptions that would make him the most powerful man in the world 23 years later. He was worshipped as a god. He also buried nine children. He led an enormous army. He had the power of life and death over millions of subjects. He was a high priest in a time of primitive cults. Marcus Aurelius was not like you at all. How could he have been? The past is a foreign country, they say, and Marcus Aurelius existed in a remote, exotic corner thousands of years ago.

2:25He was not like you at all. Yet. This is a guy who struggled to get out of bed early. This was a guy who loved his wife and also had to deal with gossip that she was unfaithful. This was a guy who loved to go hunting and horseback riding. He also enjoyed plays and poetry. He got mad about stuff. He liked playing pranks. He had close friends and mentors. We can tell from meditations that Marcus Aurelius was also just like us. David Hernandez de la Fuente, a Spanish classicist and translator of Marcus, actually a recent guest on the podcast, I'll link to that. He says that the man's writings reveal the picture of a man with two voices coexisting, one that doubted and suffered, while the other acted as a teacher, offering comfort and certainties.

3:09Marcus Aurelius was a guy with the same inner dialogue as us, the same struggles as us. the same battles as us. This was a very different man from a very different time, yet he was also still essentially a human, still essentially us. He has so much to teach us. He shouldn't be so relatable, yet somehow through the peculiarities of meditations, as we've said before, he somehow is. It's a remarkable twist of faith and also a very timeless thing. If you haven't read meditations, you absolutely should. My favorite translation is the Hayes translation, the Modern Library. I've got a paperback of it at the Painted Porch, but I also put out our own edition, that leather edition.

3:50That's the one I read every day. I'll link to that. And if you're like, hey, I really want to read meditations, but I don't know where to start or I want a book club. Well, let's all do it together. We have this really cool daily stoic course on how to read meditations and what you should take out of it. I think it's one of the best courses we've done. You can check that out. And if you join Daily Stoic Life, you can get it for free. So a bunch of awesome stuff to check out. Just do your job and do it well.

4:42it with courage and promptness. Procrastination seems to make things easier, but it damns us to a low-grade gnawing state of anxiety. Is that how you want to spend this week, any week, your last week? Ask yourself, what am I avoiding? What can I handle today instead of tomorrow? What can I do promptly and bravely right now? And then we have one quote from Moral Letters from Seneca and two from Marcus Aurelius. From Seneca, we have anything that must yet be done, virtue can do with courage and promptness. For anyone would call it a sign of foolishness for one to undertake a task with a lazy and begrudging spirit, or to push the body in one direction in the mind in another, to be torn apart by wildly divergent impulses.

5:26It can be done well, it can be done well now. That's the idea. And then Marcus Aurelius says, this is the mark of perfection of character, to spend each day as if it were your last without frenzy, laziness, or any pretending. And then Mark Surrealis again, Meditations 8.22, you get what you deserve. Instead of being a good person today, you choose instead to be one tomorrow. I really like this frame of reference, thinking about procrastination as a form of arrogance. Who says you'll be around to get to it tomorrow? Who says you can afford to put it off? And so as I'm writing, I tell myself, look, I don't know what's going to happen.

6:07All I know is that I got to close it up today. I got to do everything I'm capable of doing today. I got to wrap it up, give my best, do my best, do as much as I can so that if I do die tomorrow and someone I love pulls up my laptop and goes, where was Ryan on that book? It won't be finished, but they'll see that my stuff was in order, that I got as far as I could, that it wasn't a scattered mess, that I hadn't been putting stuff off, that I hadn't been waiting until later. I think I'm proud to say that as a writer, I've never missed one of my publisher deadlines. In fact, I almost always deliver early.

6:40That's, I think, one key to procrastination. Set good deadlines, generous deadlines that you're capable of beating and then work every day. And so you beat them. People are impressed, but really you budgeted some extra time there. Steven Pressfield says, it's not that we say I'm never going to write the novel. We say off the start date over and over as the procrastination, we tell ourselves we're going to do it. We're just lying to ourselves about when we're going to do it. And I think this is why the practice of memento mori is so important. If you go, I don't know if I have tomorrow, but I do have right now, I do have 20 minutes that I can dedicate to this.

7:18I do have an hour that I can dedicate to this. I can have that conversation that I needed to have with the person. I can close this thing off. I can get caught up on this or that. Don't do it later. do it now, cross it off. Anything that could be done tomorrow must be done today. That was MacArthur's rule as well. The Stoics and successful people forever have been battling against procrastination and the resistance. It's a fact of life. That's why Pressfield calls it a war of art. I hope whatever it is you have to do today, you take this message seriously and you go do it. if you want to come see me talk you want to see me get over some my own stage fright and you want to ask questions and hang out a bit i would love to see you i'm doing events in london rotterdam and dublin in early november and then after that vancouver and toronto this is all basically the 12th through the 20th so it's going to be a busy november for me so grab tickets ryan holiday.net slash tour both the events in australia sold out so these will sell out also so grab your tickets I'll see you all soon.

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