What Stoic Rules Make Life Less Erratic? | A Cure For Procrastination

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1:51Welcome 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.

2:31What Stoic rules make life less erratic? Marcus Aurelius actually never claimed to be a Stoic. Gregory Hayes, one of Marcus Aurelius' best translators, writes that if he had to be identified with a particular school, Stoicism is surely the one he would have chosen. Yet I suspect that if asked what it was that he studied, his answer would not have been Stoicism, but simply philosophy. He then notes that in the ancient world, philosophy was not perceived the way it is today, played a much different role. It was not merely a subject to write about or argue about, Hayes says, but one that was expected to provide a design for living, a set of rules to live by.

3:12That's what this philosophy gives us, a design for living, which is great because as Seneca said, life without design is erratic. So what were some of Marcus's rules? What did philosophy design for him? Well, here's a couple that appear in meditations. Be Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself. Don't be overheard complaining, not even to yourself. Limit yourself to the present. Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed and you haven't been. No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good. Life is complicated. It's exhausting. Creating rules won't solve all those problems, but it will help you ensure that you stay on the right path and not let the complexity and nuance of each obstacle life throws at us to compromise the big high standards that we know, that we hold.

4:02And I do think Hayes is the best translator of Marcus Aurelius. That's the one that I first picked up now all these years ago. And he's the one that we chose to work with when we did our sort of leather Bible version of meditations. It's got Hayes' great intro where today's quote comes from. It's also got a bio of Marcus from me. And then I think the best, most readable, lyrical translations of Marcus, as Marcus was meant to be. And you can grab that at store.dailystoic.com, and I'll link to it in today's show notes.

4:49A Cure for Procrastination To the Stoic, procrastination almost looks like a form of delusion and entitlement. Who is to say you'll even be around next month or next week to deal with it? If it's important, they say, don't wait, do it now. As Marcus really says, if it needs to be done, do it 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?

5:30And 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 and the mind in another, to be torn apart by wildly divergent impulses. If it can be done well, it can be done well now. That's the idea. And then Mark Cirilli 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.

6:06And then Mark Cirilli again, Meditations 822, you get what you deserve. Instead of being a good person today, you choose instead to be one tomorrow. You know, 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 all I know is that I gotta close it up today I gotta do everything I'm capable of doing today I gotta wrap it up give my best do my best do as much as I can so that if I do die tomorrow and someone comes someone I love pulls up my laptop and goes, where was Ryan on that book?

6:52It 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. That'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. I think that's something that strikes me when I deal with people who procrastinate, right?

7:28It's like you assign something with someone that, you know, they've got to do this, this or that. And then, you know, it's like, it's due on Monday. And then Friday, they're like, oh, I couldn't get the file open. and you're like, what have you been doing the last week? You should have known that the file didn't work the second you started this project. And so you often find that people, and this is where that idea of the resistance comes in, people delay getting started. Steven Pressfield says, it's not that we say, I'm never going to write the novel. We say, I'm going to write the novel tomorrow.

8:02So we put 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. I 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 can be done today, anything that could be done tomorrow must be done today.

8:41That 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. And I hope whatever it is you have to do today, you take this message seriously and you go do it.

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