Why You Can’t Focus (And How to Fix It in 25 Minutes)

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:17Ryan Holiday: There is a lot going on. It is very noisy. It's very easy to be distracted. It is very easy to be overwhelmed. You've got a lot going on in your personal life. You've got a lot going on in your professional life. You pick up your phone and you're getting hit from every direction. You look at the news. There is nothing good going on. You're tired. You're frustrated. It's difficult to focus. We're all extremely busy, but it doesn't feel like we're getting anything done, which only compounds the problem. It makes us feel more anxious, more inadequate, more insecure, more uncertain. So I want to give you some solutions to that in today's video, some strategies you can apply to help you reset, refocus, and realign so you can live better, get more done, and feel better about it.

1:11Ryan Holiday: This is a hard one, I know, but you gotta get up early, right? The mornings are the quietest time. They're the most productive time. They are the most you time there is. Toni Morrison would famously get up early, not just because that's when she was the most productive, that's when it was most beautiful out. She would watch the sunrise. She would feel inspired. But she felt like she had to get all her writing done. She was a single mother who had a full-time job as an editor at Random House. She felt like she had to get all her writing done before she heard the word mom for the first time. If you wanna be more focused, if you wanna be more productive, get up before your kids, get up before other people, get up before you want to.

1:53Ryan Holiday: Get up and steal a march on the world, steal a march on the noise, Get focused, get locked in, get inspired, get creative, get productive before the world has a chance to interrupt or mess you up. Hemingway, who was famously a bit of a partier, you might not think about him as one of those writers that would get up early, but he was. He said he would get up early because in the mornings there was no one to disturb you. He said, it's cool and cold and you come to your work and you warm as you write, right? You get up early, you get something going early on. It doesn't matter. what happens the rest of the day.

2:30Ryan Holiday: It doesn't matter how crazy events to come are. You've already won. By winning the morning, you are well on your way to winning the day. Mark Surreale famously talks about waking up early in meditations, but Seneca does too. He said, we are better people if we anticipate the day and welcome the dawn. He says, but we are base if we lie dozing when the sun is high in the heavens or when we wake up only when noon arrives. Yeah, it feels better to huddle under the covers and stay warm. It feels better to hit the snooze button, to delay having to get into the stuff of the day as late as possible. But that's actually only making dealing with that stuff harder.

3:11Ryan Holiday: If you want to have a focused, productive, happy, good day, get up early.

3:20Ryan Holiday: which actually leads me to the next thing you need to focus on you think you're not a morning person and the reason you're not a morning person is because you're being a night person you think you're taking revenge bedtime by staying up and scrolling your phone or watching tv or even reading which is isn't is hardly a sin but by staying up late you are making it harder to get up early. Maybe you've heard this word revenge bedtime. Revenge bedtime is this thing that you think you're inflicting on the world because it was so noisy and busy. You had so much going on. You get so little me time. So you go, this is my time.

3:58Ryan Holiday: After the kids go to bed, after work is done, after you get back from this or that, you're just enjoying the quiet of your house or, you know, vegging out watching TV, whatever. You think you're pulling over something on someone. You think you're getting away with something. Actually, you are punishing yourself. You are setting yourself up to have a rough morning a lack of discipline at night makes it hard to have that discipline in the morning you see the famous passage in meditations where marx truly is arguing with himself about getting out of bed that's a harder argument to win the less sleep you have gotten when the stoics talk about waking up early they don't mean go without sleep they mean go to bed early and wake up early sleep is important in the military they talk about sleep discipline you are not going to be your best self you are not going to be focused you are not going to be locked in.

4:44Ryan Holiday: You are not going to be what you are capable of being if you are bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived. Sleep is important. Prioritize it. The problem is you aren't getting enough sleep. You make bad decisions, but then you've got more work to do, and then you go without sleep to solve those problems. This is Elon Musk these days. This was Dove Charney when I was at American Apparel. Sleep discipline is important. A successful morning routine is written the night before when you put your phone down, you turn off the TV, you get off the couch, and you go to bed. If you want some help resetting, by the way, getting back to those first principles, locking in, I've got a challenge for you.

5:25Ryan Holiday: Me and thousands of other Stoics all over the world are gonna be doing the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. It's 10 days of Stoic-inspired challenges to help you do exactly what we're talking about, to clean up, to clean out, to get clarity, to lock in, to focus, to eliminate. I love doing this challenge. It's a great reset for me every year after a long winter, right? Like we went into January with a bunch of high hopes and then life intervened and the weather intervened and maybe we relapsed a little bit. And so now it's time for some spring cleaning. And if you need some help figuring out what you should say no to, what you should do differently, how you should think about things, and you wanna be part of this community of Stoics that's gonna be doing that, I'll see you in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge.

6:09Ryan Holiday: You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash spring. It's gonna be awesome. Let's spring forward into spring. I'm gonna be doing it and I hope you will be too.

6:22Ryan Holiday: One of the reasons it is so hard to focus is because you have too much on your plate. You've got emails to answer. You've got calls to make. You've got meetings. You've got errands. You've got groceries. You've got your kids. You've got social media. Your schedule is packed. obligation to obligation, commitment to commitment, you are hopelessly behind. If you want more tranquility, Mark Srelius writes in meditations, if you want to improve, if you want to have a better life, you have to get ruthless with the things that don't matter that you shouldn't be doing. He said the critical question is like, hey, is this thing that I'm doing essential?

6:54Ryan Holiday: Is this something only I can do? Is this something that really moves the needle? Is this something that's worth my time? Is this what I was put here to do? Most of what we do and say is not essential, he points out. And so you have to be willing to say no to those things. But what happens when you eliminate those inessentials, he says, is that you get the double benefit of doing essential things better. Seneca says that too many of us live in this state of busy idleness. We just do the things that everyone else is doing, or we do the things because people asked us to do them. Like we don't want to be rude to someone, so we end up being rude to our families, to ourselves, to our actual priorities i have on my wall between two pictures of my kids a big sign that says no because i i want to remember that when i'm saying yes to random things that are just coming in or to things that i used to be able to do but really shouldn't be doing anymore i actually am saying no to someone else i'm saying no to to my boys i'm also saying no to myself to my health to my work to my own happiness you have to be good at eliminating the inessential things creating efficiencies creating space and time.

8:01Ryan Holiday: And the only way you're gonna do that is by saying that critical word, the word we don't say enough, which is no. If you wanna say, sorry, I can't, or sorry, not right now. If you wanna be polite about, that's fine. Do it however you need to do it, but you need to say no. You need to ruthlessly eliminate the inessential things that you shouldn't be doing. As Seneca himself points out, he who is everywhere is nowhere.

8:27Ryan Holiday: Do you know what a doom bin is? It's those boxes, bins, drawers, places in your house that are just filled with stuff. Stuff that you didn't want to deal with, stuff that's piling up, stuff that you didn't have the discipline or the strength to throw away, things you told yourself you would get to later. And so now your world is overflowing, right? The closets are bursting, the drawers can't shut you feel like the walls are encroaching on you and literally they are like of course you can't focus your desk your space your house is symbolic of what your mind looks like by the way do you know what a doom box stands for it's it's not just that it has that impending sense of doom in it though it does it stands for didn't organize only moved you gotta clean up your space man i I think it was Flaubert or Proust, some writer whose name I'm forgetting, talked about how actually you want to create orderly space around you so you can be disorderly and chaotic and all over the place in the work itself, right?

9:34Ryan Holiday: You don't want to be a mess out here. You want to be creatively be able to mess around. And the only way you're going to be able to do that is by organizing, by eliminating, by cleaning stuff out. One of the only jokes Mark Sreos tells in meditations is about this rich guy who has so much stuff, he says he doesn't even have a place to ship, right? Like his house is just so overfilled with things he's accumulated that he's basically a hoarder. Seneca talks about how our possessions, we think we own our possessions, but they end up owning us. If you wanna be more focused, if you wanna feel lighter and better, man, just go around your house and start getting rid of stuff.

10:09Ryan Holiday: Take that doom bin, dump it in the trash, dump it in the Goodwill box, right? Take the stuff that is piled up and get rid of it.

10:21Ryan Holiday: You know, you think you're free because the government can't tell you what to do because you are financially self-sufficient, whatever it is, but actually you're owned by those habits that you can't quit, those things that you can't stop doing. Seneca talks about how everybody's a slave to something. You can be powerful and important, but if you can't not drink, that alcohol is more powerful than you are. Maybe you have a desperate need for attention. Maybe you can't not work. Talks about this Roman general. He says that he commanded armies, but ambition commanded him. And then of course, there's all sorts of modern habits from smoking to caffeine.

11:01Ryan Holiday: What can't you not do, right? What habits, what substances are you a slave to? And how can you reassert some of that independence, that autonomy? How can you claw back the freedom to not do it? There's a story I tell in Discipline and Sesame about Richard Feynman. It's the middle of the day. He's a professor at Caltech. And he just feels like, man, I should have a drink. It was at a like not socially acceptable time. And he just realized like, I don't want a drink. I just feel like I have to have one. And that was what made him quit on the spot. He just didn't like something having that power over him.

11:35Ryan Holiday: And I think seeing it as an assertion of our independence is really important. What has power over you? What are you a slave to? How can you reassert that power? That is key. If you can't not check Twitter 30 times a day, that's a bad sign. If you find yourself always patting your pockets, reaching for your phone, if you can't sit in silence for a few minutes without distracting yourself, these are bad signs. These are signs that you are not as free or as powerful as you think you are. And you got to fix that.

12:08Ryan Holiday: you are just too reachable everybody is too reachable you think you got your facebook inbox your instagram inbox and your twitter inbox and you've got those 50 group chats that you're a part of you've got your work email and your personal email you've got your phone number maybe you have a landline you've got whatsapp you've got slack and linkedin and telegram and god knows what else Like you are just accessible by a thousand different ways. And this is like dying by a thousand cuts. Of course you're not focused. Of course you can't lock in to things, right? There should not be a dozen ways that people can get ahold of you in real time.

12:44Ryan Holiday: Who could possibly keep track of that? And still, this is the key. I tell the story about Napoleon. Napoleon was famous for not opening his mail, sometimes for as much as two weeks. And he would find that when he would go through the mail after having waited, a lot of the issues would have resolved themselves. It's not just that you have all these ways that people can reach you. It's that you're constantly checking them. You want to know, do I have a message here? Do I have a message here? You let your phone ping you, literally make sounds, interrupt your focus on the spot with some totally trivial interruption, some DM, some invite, some stupid question that somebody could have figured out for themselves.

13:23Ryan Holiday: You are too reachable. You have to protect and limit your inputs. An open door policy is good in theory. It's also a recipe for never focusing and never getting anything done. When I was at American Apparel, I saw this with Dove Charney. Dove had an open door policy. He would give out his phone number. He told people to call him. He thought that that's the job of the CEO, that there'd be no layers between him and somebody working at a retail store. And there were some advantages to that, but the big disadvantage was that he had 250 stores in 20 countries, which meant there was always somebody who needed something in some time zone.

13:59Ryan Holiday: So yeah, he wasn't sleeping. So yeah, he was unable to think long term because he was constantly being pinged and interrupted by short term urgent things. You're too reachable. You got to eliminate some of that reachability. You got to turn off those alerts. You got to be harder to get a hold of. Who likes bugs? Not me. I guess my wife does. My kids sometimes like bugs, but I don't like bugs in my house, right? I don't like them around my food. I don't like them crawling on me. I don't like bugs. And the problem is you see one bug and then you ignore it and all of a sudden you got hundreds of bugs and you got an infestation.

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15:08Ryan Holiday: Well, Pesti pesticides are fully registered and have been used in hospitals and schools all over the country. And you can try Pesti totally risk-free with their 100 % bug-free guarantee or your money back. If the bugs don't go away, you get a free refund. Bugs hate to see you coming with Pesti. Just go to Pesti.com slash Doeg for an extra 10 % off your order. That's P-E-S-T-I-E dot com slash Doeg for an extra 10 % off. Shopping at Whole Foods is one of the things I do in our family, like the grocery shopping is my job. So I was glad to be able to do that even on vacation. And then, you know, being here in Hawaii, it was the same Whole Foods experience we're thinking about, but then also a bunch of regional stuff too that they only have at this Whole Foods.

15:52Ryan Holiday: We love shopping at Whole Foods because there's always new flavors and foods to choose from whichever Whole Foods you are like, whichever Whole Foods you happen to be at. So save on regional flavors at Whole Foods Market, and maybe I'll see you at the Whole Foods in Austin sometime. One of the things we're all carrying is guilt. We're carrying these sort of Cold War conflicts, these stalemates, these vestiges of confrontations and disagreements. Maybe we did something. Maybe somebody did something. And this stuff is just out there. It's just hanging there. And so it makes it awkward. We don't want to go here.

16:32Ryan Holiday: We're worried about bumping into someone there. We're waiting on this. We're refusing to do that. If you could settle some of those grievances, if you could tie up some of those loose ends, you would feel better and there would be a weight lifted on you. Now, you can't make someone apologize, right? That's not in our control. You can't make someone admit that they're wrong, but you can always make amends. You can always own your part of it. you can clean up your contributions to a mess. This is actually one of the challenges we do in the Spring Forward Challenge, and we've done in the New Year, New You Challenge before.

17:05Ryan Holiday: How can you go into a new year, into a new season, having wiped some of these slates clean? Think about a grudge you're holding onto. Think about a conflict or a disagreement, something that seemed really important at the time that you know you can apologize for, that you know that you can fix, that you know that you can make right. Clean it up, clear it out, apologize own your part and look it's not always going to work i remember a couple of years ago there was someone i got in a big disagreement about i'd written about them one of my books and i've been critical of them but i felt like you know as as the years went by that i'd been a little bit unfair to them and i felt bad about it i went to apologize and i sort of owned what i felt like i did wrong i explained how i felt i offered my apologies i asked if there was anything i can do.

17:51Ryan Holiday: And the person was just like, just like so much anger, still so red hot about it. And it was actually really striking to me. I mean, it was sad that I didn't get to fix it, but it made me realize, oh, I'd much rather be where I am with this situation than where they are. Like it made me go, oh, they're still carrying this and it's still right there at the surface. And that sucks for them. And again, I feel bad about what I did. I feel bad about that. I wish it hadn't happened. we were both participants in what happened neither of us was blameless but i do know that going forward i'm not carrying that weight that i don't have that psychic or karmic debt on me anymore i've made my amends if at some point in the future they want to talk more about it if at some point in the future they come around that's wonderful i'll have that conversation then but i put that to bed i got that out of my life off my shoulders and now i'm better for it and which is what mark like that person, to not carry it around, to not be changed by it, to move on.

18:55Ryan Holiday: I just spoke to two baseball teams at spring training. I spoke to the Cubs and the Diamondbacks, and both times I got to check out their cafeteria where all the teams eat. What's fascinating about professional sports teams is how much money they spend on nutrition. They prize these athletes. They want them to be at their absolute best. So they think about every calorie they consume every ingredient they obsess over nutrition and diet and i said this is all well and good but every single person in this room is unthinkingly consuming garbage day in and day out as far as their information diet goes social media the news media there's tvs around the clubhouse just playing the news playing espn stuff that they should be tuning out as we said earlier people have too much access to us whether you're famous or not people have too much access to you random breaking news has too much access to you.

19:43Ryan Holiday: Obviously, I'm biased as an author, but I would say much less television news, fewer podcasts, even fewer YouTube videos. If you want to turn this off, that's great. You should be reading more books, read poetry, read literature, read philosophy, read history, read biography, get out of the present moment, read stuff that's worth paying for, that's going to have a long shelf life, that's going to make you better as a human being yes it is important to be informed but knowing what is happening everywhere in the world that is not being informed that is knowing a lot of trivia being informed means knowing what things mean it means knowing what matters it means as mark's really said eliminating the inessential so you can make more room for the essential for the important thing how how could you possibly focus when you are filling your brain with all of this noise when you are allowing all of that in.

20:37Ryan Holiday: I have never taken a walk without thinking after, I'm so glad that I did that, right? I'm not saying that taking a walk is going to solve all your problems, but it's not going to make any of your problems worse. And it's going to help you think about them better. There's a beautiful letter that Kierkegaard writes to his sister-in-law who was depressed and sort of bedridden and sort of in this downward spiral. And Kierkegaard, who was a famous walker, he could be seen walking in Copenhagen almost every day, sometimes for hours a day. Kierkegaard said, above all, do not lose your desire to walk.

21:08Ryan Holiday: He says, every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and I walk away from my illnesses. He says, I've walked myself into my best thoughts. And he says, I know no thought so burdensome, so bad that you cannot walk away from it. Take a walk, get outside, get moving, get into nature and work through what you're stressed about work through what you're distracted by work through what you're anxious about i promise you when you return from your walk you will be calmer you will feel better you will be more connected with yourself and the world and you will be in better health in every sense of the word if there's one habit you could do to focus better feel better i would say take a walk take a walk every day take a walk in the morning take a walk at night walk as much as you can it is magic Seneca talked about how we need to take wandering walks to give our brain a break.

22:00Ryan Holiday: He said, so the mind can be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing. And that's exactly right.

22:12Ryan Holiday: Walking is great exercise, but I don't do it for the exercise. It's not for the physical benefits that you take the walk. I'm also doing something physically hard every day. I go for a run. I swim. I lift weights. I do something physically difficult every day. Seneca talks about how we wanna treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind. We wanna assert constantly who is in charge, and that is to say, you, you are in charge, right? Not your lower self, your higher self. You decide what you're gonna do. You decide how far you're gonna go. You decide what your limits are. Not that voice that wants to make excuses, not the part that likes things to be easy, not the part that is easily tempted or drawn off the path.

22:54Ryan Holiday: assert control over yourself. Physical exercise is great for you physically. It's great for your health. It's also a great metaphor. It's also a great training ground for that focus, for that intensity. It's a place to channel some of that distraction and that negative energy. I come back from every run, from every swim with a few ideas, with a better way of thinking about things in a calmer state of mind. Do it every day if you can.

23:26Ryan Holiday: This is not a book for us. This is not a book for readers at all. This was a book for the writer. 2 ,000 years ago, the most powerful man in the world sat down every day and wrote notes to himself. He wasn't thinking about publication. He wasn't trying to perform. He wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything. He was only speaking to himself. He was trying to dump his thoughts out on the page instead of on other people. He was trying to fight to be, as he said, the person that philosophy tried to make him. I'm of course talking about Marcus Reelius' Meditations, one of the most unique books ever published in the history of literature.

24:04Ryan Holiday: It is a journal and that journaling process is essentially inseparable from Stoic philosophy. Stoic philosophy is journaling. Journaling is a form of Stoic philosophy. Working your thoughts out on the page, thinking about what you think, reminding yourself what's important, reminding yourself what's in your control, processing those emotions so you are not being ruled or led astray by them. Journaling is a must-have practice if you are trying to be more focused, if you're trying to be calmer, if you're trying to be more productive. I don't write in my own journal for my ideas. I write to get into a place that I can be better equipped to deal with the ideas that I have so that I could do my job, my life, all my roles and responsibilities from being a person to a parent to a professional.

24:49Ryan Holiday: All of that is helped in the pages of my journal. If you're not doing it, you're missing out. I don't care how you do it, where you do it, if you do it a lot, if you do it a little, but you need a journaling habit.

25:04Ryan Holiday: There is one exercise that you need to do every single day that will help you focus, that will help you reset, that will put things in perspective, that will calm you down, that will give you a sense of purpose and urgency, and that is to meditate on your own impending death. Memento mori, remember you are mortal. This is what the ancients did. It's what the Stoics did. They thought constantly about death, not just because people died all the time in the ancient world of causes and diseases that we've done a lot to address in the modern world, but because every human being who has ever lived will die.

25:39Ryan Holiday: It's true in the ancient world. It's true today. The problem is we like to think we're the exception to this. And that's what allows us to get distracted, to procrastinate, to focus on the wrong things. The arrogance of thinking we have unlimited time. The delusion to think that life isn't ticking away at this very moment. That's the thing Seneca wants us to understand. He says death isn't something at the end that happens once. He says death is happening right now. You are dying every minute. You are dying every day, he says. You are dying as you get distracted, as you waste your time on frivolous things, as you get caught up in petty fights and grievances, as you try to pile up possessions that you forget you don't get to take with you when you die.

26:20Ryan Holiday: So an active, quiet meditation on our mortality. Taking a few seconds to think, in the light of my own impending end, does this really matter? Is this really important? You could be good today, Mark Shreel says in meditations, but instead you choose tomorrow. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. Right now is right now. You have right now. And meditating on our mortality helps us focus. Samuel Johnson said, if you knew you were gonna be hanged in a fortnight, it would concentrate you immediately. That's what meditating on our mortality gives us. It gives us a better shot at the present moment. It reminds us to focus.

26:53Ryan Holiday: It eliminates the inessential. It humbles us. It shakes us out of our indulgent, distracted self. And that's why it is the final practice in today's video. and if you're not doing it, you're gonna end up wasting your time.