There Is No Freedom Without This (or Rather, Without These) | 8 Stoic Strategies To Beat Procrastination

0:00I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$1.49 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$2.99 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

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1:39There is no freedom without this, or rather, without these. It's July 4th, 1776. six. The founding fathers are about to make a very loud statement about freedom and independence, and they will, over the next several bloody and bleak years, give nearly everything in order to will that, a new nation, into existence. But just as much as they were making a statement for freedom, the founders were also staking their eyes on the idea of virtue, classical virtue, that is, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. As we have talked about here many times, the founders were steeped in the ideas of the ancients.

2:25Thomas Jefferson kept a copy of Seneca on his nightstand. George Washington staged a reproduction of a play about Cato at Valley Forge in the winter of 77 and 78 to inspire the troops. And John Adams liked to quote from Epictetus, you see, the American experiment, based as it was on individual liberty, was built on the necessity of virtue. A people freed from the tyranny of government, they understood, still needed to be checked by their own morality, philosophy, and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, John Adams said, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.

3:03Many years later, another American president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, would express it perfectly when he said that freedom was better defined as the opportunity for self-discipline. All of which is to say that the founders were delegating a whole hell of a lot of responsibility to the people when they freed us from the yoke of a king. They were giving us a gift, sure, but also an immense obligation to be good citizens, good people, good leaders of ourselves and stewards of our collective resources. And this responsibility falls on each of us today, no matter where we live or what form of government we're under.

3:39What's legal, what's allowed, what everyone else is doing, what we can get away with? None of this matters. What matters is what we should do, what virtue demands of each of us, and how we live well, whoever and wherever we are. If you're grilling and celebrating the holiday with friends or family or whatever it is that you're doing, take a moment and reflect on the deeper meaning behind the fireworks and the festivities. The comfort and freedom you enjoy were hard won through the practice of virtue and honor, and these same virtues are available to each of us today. What would it mean to approach your life with courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, the same ideals that guided the founding fathers?

4:21How might practicing freedom as an opportunity for self-discipline transform not just your life, but your community and country? Let today be more than a celebration. Let it be a recommitment to the virtues that make freedom possible. A recommitment to truth, to self-mastery, to taking responsibility, to work. The work of choosing virtue when it would be easier not to. Of living up to the responsibilities that freedom demands. Of proving worthy of the liberty we've inherited. Only through this virtue can this great experiment of freedom begun 249 years ago continue. Happy 4th of July, everyone.

5:00I am a little bit ahead of you. I am recording this right now from Issaca in Greece, all the way on the other side of the world. But I am putting some thought onto these ideas today, and I hope you do the same.

5:20We just took our kids to an outdoor performance of The Nutcracker. They had a snow cone, and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

5:55My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It Over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

6:32Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events. We don't say we're never going to do it. We tell ourselves a very seductive lie. We say we're going to do it later. We say we're going to do it tomorrow. That's the one thing all fools have in common, Seneca says, is that they're always getting ready to start. They're going to do it when they wake up. They're going to do it when their kids are older. They're going to do it when things settle down.

7:06They're going to do it later. But they're not. You're not. So in today's episode, that's what we're going to talk about. Stoic strategies for beating procrastination, doing what needs to be done, and being who you are capable of being.

7:23It seems simple, but you just have to show up. It's not about feeling motivated. It's not about the perfect conditions. It's about showing up. Motivation comes and goes. It's not a dependable resource. You can't control it. What you can control is your schedule. You can control your routine. You can control your commitment. There's a famous artist who said that inspiration was for amateurs says a professional shows up and gets to work think about someone like thomas edison controversial sure but he would say that he wasn't a genius it wasn't about inspiration he says i've got no imagination he says i don't dream i don't create things he says the genius hangs around their laboratory day and night he says you want to be there when something might happen right so again Again, inspiration isn't this thing that you bring.

8:19It's something that finds you when you are where you're supposed to be. You learn this as a writer. There is an incredibly underrated power of just showing up every day, putting your ass in the chair and magically the inspiration appears. You don't miss a day when you're sick. You don't miss a day when you're tired. You don't miss a day because something's happening out in the world, right? You make a commitment and you keep that commitment. You show up. It's not sheer brilliance. It's getting to work. You think about someone like Lou Gehrig. Lou Gehrig was, of course, an amazingly talented athlete.

8:53He was a solid position player. He was a good hitter. But really, his success is rooted in the fact that he didn't miss that many days of work. Had he continued at his normal pace, had he not been stricken with ALS, he would have put down numbers that would have surpassed Babe Ruth and many other players. He showed up despite when he was tired, despite when he was hurt. He had to push through doubt and ennui and not feeling it. And he had slumps he kept going through those slumps there's actually a story about him he hits a pretty bad slump when he's a minor leaguer and he starts to get discouraged he wants to quit and one of the managers comes to him and he says the most important thing you can learn as a young athlete is that you can't be good every day you still have to show up right but you can't expect to be perfect every day you show up you put in the work stuff comes out of the other side there's actually a story that Twyla Tharp, the choreographer, tells in her book, The Creative Habit.

9:45She talks about how she knows if she just gets out of bed and gets downstairs and raises her hand up to call the cab to get to her studio, then she'll get to the studio, then she'll start warming up, then she'll start practicing, right? She knows she just has to do that first thing. It's getting out of bed and getting downstairs. You have to win that first battle, the battle that wants you to make the excuse of not doing it.

10:15Okay, so you're there. You have showed up. You got to the cab. You got to your desk. You opened the computer. You picked up your instrument. You're on the field. Right now, procrastination comes in in a different way. You have to worry about quitting or giving up or phoning it in, right? All those other times that you got this far and then didn't make it to the next thing. Steven Pressfield talks about the resistance, right? He says, when I sit down to write in the morning, he says, I have no expectations for myself for the day's work. He says, my goal is to put in the hours, to sit there, put my finger on the keys.

10:52He's reducing the expectations or the standards, right? Because that's sometimes where we get in our own way. He says, I don't judge myself on quantity. He says, I'm asking, did I show up? Did I try my best, So you showed up and then did you try? And this is really a stoic perspective, I think. Seneca said that the path to wisdom wasn't like some grand epiphany or some burst of inspiration. You know, wisdom was one quote, one story, one conversation, one anecdote a day, right? It's this step-by-step process. Zeno would talk about how well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing.

11:29I know if I show up and I write today, and then I show up and write tomorrow, and I show up and write the next day, I am well on my way to finishing a first draft. I can edit and polish a first draft, but if it doesn't exist, if I haven't stacked those days on top of each other, I'll never get where I want to go. There's a writing rule, just two crappy pages a day, four crappy pages a day. The idea is you don't have to produce perfection. You just have to produce something. So what is the next right thing? What's the next right thing for you to do? That's how we beat back procrastination. Because first we made excuses for not getting there.

12:09We got over those. Now we want to make excuses that we can get out of it. But if we can trust the process, if we can commit to just keeping at it, to doing that next right thing, then we'll have another next right thing and another next right thing and another next right thing. In meditations, Mark Cerullo says, you can't let your imagination crush your life as a whole, right? He says, stick with the situation at hand. Say, why is this so unbearable? Why can't I endure it? He says, you'll be embarrassed to answer. So you're like, yeah, why can't I take one more step? Why can't I spend 10 more minutes on this?

12:44Why can't I do one more sit up? Why can't I run one more mile? Why can't I do one more phone call? Why can't I try one more time? Your mind is wandering. You're starting to get distracted, you're not feeling it, what's the next right thing for you to do? What's the next little bit that you can do? I'm trying to just do what I have to do today, this task in front of me. I'm not thinking six months in the future. I'm not thinking even about tomorrow. What can I do right now if I can do that well? Mark Cirillo says, concentrate on the task before you like a Roman. He says, do it like it's the last thing you're doing in your life.

13:28One of the reasons I think it's hard to focus and do what's in front of us, one thing that gives us an excuse that is procrastination but doesn't feel like procrastination is we have too much going on, we're doing too many things, and as a result, we never have to lock in and focus on what's in front of us. Seneca talked about how to be everywhere is to be nowhere. We're too over committed we've got too much going on and we get paralyzed we get overwhelmed one of marcus realises questions he says you have to ask yourself in everything that you do is this essential and he says because a lot of what we do and say isn't essential they are things we picked up from other people they've they're things we've been doing a long time they're things that we're doing because someone else asked us we're doing them because we're running away from something but if we want tranquility if we want peace if we want productivity we have to say hey is this actually an important thing is it moving the needle and he says if the answer is no and you eliminate it what you get is the double benefit of doing the essential things better so procrastination isn't doing everything with you know superhuman willpower part of it is eliminating the things that are sucking out your willpower.

14:44So you have more willpower for the things that matter. It can be easy to spend a bunch of time on your email inbox as an excuse for not making the calls that you need to make, or reading the report that you need to make, or working on the presentation that you need to make. So your to-do list is long and overwhelming, and you're procrastinating, but you're not just supposed to do everything on that list. You have to eliminate some of those things. Pair down what you're doing. Think about what's only important. A question I like to ask is, is this something only I can do? Is this something I can delegate?

15:18Is this something I can eliminate? And if it is, I want to get rid of it. I want to solve this problem upstream. Publius Sirius, one of the early Stoic philosophers, would say rivers are easiest to cross at their source. Instead of strategizing to solve some difficult problem, ask yourself, is it a problem that you need to be solving? Is it a thing that you need to be doing? And when you eliminate those things, you'll have less procrastination and less distraction.

15:46It was Churchill who said that another way to spell perfection is paralysis, which is to say it is good to have high standards. It's good to ask a lot of yourself. But sometimes this is a way to actually ask nothing of yourself. We say that it's going to be too hard. We add endless amounts of preparation. We intimidate ourselves. We exhaust ourselves. We make it harder than it needs to be. Again, my writing rule of a couple crappy pages a day. This is a way to ensure that I get to the end of the draft and then can start editing it. But if I am editing while I'm writing, if I am criticizing myself as I am writing, I'm going to lose heart.

16:28I'm going to lose momentum. I'm going to not get to where I need to go. And so oftentimes we get in our own heads because we are being perfectionists. You know, Mark Cerellus reminds himself in meditations, he says, remember that you don't live in Plato's Republic. We don't live in the perfect world. We don't live in the theoretical world. We live in the real world. And we have to make sure that we don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough, that we don't let an ideal situation get in the way of making progress towards a solution. In Discipline is Destiny, I tell this story about Martha Graham, another great dancer.

17:09She's been working for months and months on this Guggenheim Fellowship dance. Her standards are getting in the way. She can't see that what she's done is really, really good. And she's tempted to just throw the whole thing out. And it's not until her collaborative partner, Louis Horst, steps in and he goes, the things you do are not always gonna be at the same level. And he points out that Beethoven's sixth symphony follows the fifth. He says, but without the sixth, you wouldn't have the seventh. What he's saying is that sometimes because we get stuck with something not being up to our standards, we get bogged down endlessly with it.

17:41We can't actually see that not only is it preventing us from finishing this, but by not being able to finish this, it's preventing us from starting and then finishing the next thing and starting and finishing the next thing. So to understand that sometimes our perfectionism is just a pretty indulgent form of procrastination, it's preventing us from doing a thing that we can't even conceive of yet. There's always going to be this part of us that wants to keep tinkering and polishing and perfecting, but at some point you have to ship it. Churchill said this too. Churchill's a professional writer.

18:15He says at some point you have to kill the beast and fling it to the public, right? At some point you have to go, this is as good as I can do. I have to do this with all my books. This is as good as it can do. I'm sending it into the publisher. But what I have learned in the process is that by sending it into the publisher, it's coming back with notes. And then it's getting better for those notes. And then I'm doing another round. And so actually, it's not even future projects you're holding back, but you're holding back rounds of edits on this very thing. You need to get it out from under you and in front of other people.

18:46Look, you're great because you have high standards. You just can't let those standards paralyze you.

18:56Ultimately, most of the strategies for beating procrastination are about taking willpower out of the equation. It's about making it a habit. It's about reducing the amount of choices, reducing the hump that you have to get over. Still, this is the key. I quote one of my favorite passages from the psychologist William James. He said that the person you should pity is the person who wakes up every day and has a lot of choices to make. He says,

19:48work are subjects of express volitional deliberation. We have to automate. We have to create systems. We have to create structures. This is what I do on Monday. This is what I do on Tuesday. This is what I do on Thursday. This is what I do when I have free time. This is what I do after I finish my work. This is what I do in the morning. This is what I do with the kids for bedtime. These are the things that we have for dinner, right? It's limiting the scope of choices, creating automation, creating consistency, reducing the opportunity for us to make excuses. This is what Twyla Tharp is tapping into when she says, I just have to get started.

20:27When you create a routine, when you create a system, when you create an order, I do this and then this and then this and then this, right? That seems like a lot. Oh, I have to do all that. But actually, after you do it enough times, you really have to just do the first time and then the routine takes over. Seneca talked about how a life without design is erratic. To that, I would add, it is also exhausting because it is on you to keep things in bounds. It is on you to decide what happens after this and that. No, you create a design, you create systems, you create structure, and you give yourself over to those things.

21:00And that creates a lot less room for procrastination.

21:08obviously the stoics think obviously philosophy is about thinking but it's also about doing right there's a latin expression acta non verba deeds not words it's about doing the verb not being the noun so as a writer it's not i think of myself as a writer this is the life of a writer It's am I writing? You don't think about and plan your workouts. You go to the gym and you start working out. You do the thing. Emerson said, you cannot spend the day in deliberation. You cannot spend it in reflection. You have to be doing. You have to be doing the thing. Virtue is a thing that you do, not a person that you are.

21:50But by doing it, you become that person. Show up, do the thing. Don't overthink it. don't get in your way, do the thing. Don't talk about your philosophy, Epictetus said, embody it. Don't talk about your habits. Don't talk about your routines. Don't read about routines. Don't study routines. As soon as this video is done, turn it off and go do what you need to do.

22:18And the reason you need to do what you need to do is that life is very short. Procrastination is arrogant. You have to realize that you're putting off until tomorrow. When you put things off until tomorrow, you are assuming that you get tomorrow. But we could leave life at any moment, Seneca said. We could go at any moment. So this present moment is all we have. It is our opportunity. It is our chance. It is tomorrow. Do it now. Do the things you need to do. Don't put it off. Don't wait. Do it. Samuel Johnson talked about how knowing that you're going to be hanged in two weeks, really concentrates the mind wonderfully.

22:57You know, you do that exercise. What would I do if I found out I had cancer? What would I do if I found out I didn't have much time left, right? You'd get real serious real fast. You'd eliminate a lot of inessential things very quickly. You'd get over obsessing what other people think about you and you'd get to work, right? You'd get to work on what you've been putting off and what you've always wanted to do on the legacy that you want to leave behind. So this practice of memento mori, and I carry a memento mori coin with me. Here's one right here. This idea, memento mori, you could leave life right now.

23:30Let that determine what you do and say and think. Something very humbling, sobering, but also inspiring and moving by meditating on the shortness of life. As Seneca said, it's not that life is short, it's that we waste too much of it. Stop putting it off. Stop saying you'll do it later. Do it now.

23:52and look one of the things that holds us back that that i think gets us caught up in our perfectionism is we're thinking a lot about what other people are going to think right what are the critics going to say are they going to judge me how this is going to be received are people going to like it but part of stoicism is reminding you that that is not in your control what you control is whether you do the work what you control is that you are doing your best that's up to you. The rest, outside of your control, not worth thinking about. You don't have to be perfect, but you do have to give your best.

24:22One of my favorite stories, a young Jimmy Carter, he's just graduated from the Naval Academy and he's being interviewed by Admiral Hyman Rickover, who's the head of the, basically the nuclear Navy service. And these are these famous, incredibly difficult interviews. And over the course of this three or four hour interview, they talk about all sorts of different things, physics and literature and the history of warfare. And finally, Rick overlooks at a young Jimmy Carter and he says, what was your class rank at the Naval Academy? And Carter says, you know, I was top 50 in my class or something like that.

24:50And he's very proud of this. I mean, that's an extraordinarily hard thing to do. But Rick overlooks at him and he says, but did you always do your best? And Carter wants to say yes. You know, instinctively, we want to say yes. But he thinks about it and he thinks about times that he sort of phoned it in or things that he put off to the last minute or opportunities he could have jumped on or extra credit he could have done. And he says, you know what, sir? No, I didn't always do my best. And Rick overlooks at him and he says, why not? And then ends the interview and walks out. And that question haunts Jimmy Carter the rest of his life as it should haunt us.

25:23Why aren't we giving our best to this thing? Why are we holding something back? Now, this is very different than perfectionism. Perfectionism is about some impossible standard. Doing our best is about, are we showing up? Are we putting everything we have into it? Are we really trying? or as I have done it sometimes in my life and I think perhaps many of you have, we tell ourselves that this thing doesn't really matter, that it's not serious, that we don't really care about it because we're trying to protect ourselves from what others might think. We're trying to protect ourselves from the pain of failing or being laughed at.

25:57No, to me, I try to push procrastination and perfectionism aside and I just try to say, did I show up today and do my best? Did I do what I was capable of today? And this helps you because sometimes you're really feeling it and what you're capable of is a lot. And other times when you're sick, other times when you're tired, maybe your heart's been broken, you give what you're capable of that day. And cumulatively, that adds up to a lot. You show up and you do your best. That's always in your control. Every day, I send out one Stoic-inspired email totally for free, almost a million people all over the world.

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