Would You Be Mad At This? | A Cure For Procrastination

0:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

1:09love-dense history books. Yet you're surprised when someone is rude to you or when someone holds a retrograde opinion or fails to say thank you or spouts crazy conspiracy theories. As if such things aren't, as Mark Surrealis points out in a famous pseudo-mathematical proof in Meditations, as if they aren't a statistical probability, as if there wasn't going to be someone somewhere who thought or acted like that. The point is that different people have not just different interests, but also that a diverse world is going to have a diverse array of different kinds of people. Some will be wonderful and kind.

1:46Some will be annoying. Some will be that mob of people shouting at little kids trying to integrate a public school. Some will be volunteering to help starving children in countries far away. Some will contain multitudes, like the people who fought bravely against fascism in World War II and then came home and held up fascism in those public schools that the mobs were gathering around. People are complicated. People are contradictory. People have limitations and flaws. People will inspire you one moment and utterly disappoint you the next. The person who disappointed you, who you disagree with on nearly everything, may one day surprise you with some moment of principled bravery and then go right back to being the things you dislike.

2:31You can't let this confuse you, you can't let it disillusion you either. You shouldn't let it make you upset. You have to learn how to take it in stride, which is not the same as accepting or agreeing, because the more it throws you off your game, the more power it gives them, the more power it takes away from you. A stoic doesn't waste energy wishing people were different. A stoic uses their energy to stay steady, to stay good, to stay in control. Because in the end, the only thing you control is you.

3:11Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin, and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

3:56We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity, but it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory.

4:38Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. We 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.

5:19My 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.

5:56Becky. 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.

6:15A 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 Mark Cirilla 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?

6:55And 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 and another, to be torn apart by wildly divergent impulses. 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.

7:31And 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. You know, this idea of this four virtues series, the first book is courage. So it's funny, you know, they're saying do it with promptness and courage. That's the first virtue. The second virtue is the virtue of self-discipline or temperance. 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.

8:11All I know is that I got to close it up today. I got to do everything I'm capable of doing today. 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.

8:44That'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? It's like you assign something with someone, 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. They're like, what have you been doing the last week? Right. You should have known that the file didn't work the second you started this project.

9:21And 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. Right. So 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.

9:52I 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.

10:30Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say, We so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

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