You Are On The Right Timeline | Don't Let Your Attention Slide

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.

0:14Ryan Holiday: You are on the right timeline. It might not seem that way. In fact, it might seem like everything is falling apart. You didn't get the promotion you wanted. The election turned out differently than you hoped. You just got some disappointing news. You just got hurt. You just got screwed over. Meanwhile, that person you can't stand is getting ahead, getting lucky break after lucky break. This isn't the timeline I'm supposed to be on, you think. This isn't how it was supposed to go. But what if it is? That every event is the right one, Mark Screelius writes in meditations. Look closely and you'll see, not just the right one overall, but right, as if someone had waited out with scales.

0:58Ryan Holiday: This wasn't just mental jujitsu for him, though. He believed we had to make this the right timeline and how we acted. We had to look for the good, he said, but most importantly, we had to embody it with our actions, with goodness, what defines a good person. We had to keep to it in everything we do. It might not feel right, might not seem fair, but it is still ours to shape. It is our job to make it right. And in a way, that's what Meditations is as a book. It's Marcus Aurelius trying to remind himself that for all that's going wrong in his life, all that's going sideways, all that he's dealing with, he is on the right timeline.

1:39Ryan Holiday: And in fact, as he says in Meditations, this isn't unfortunate that it happened to me. It's fortunate that it happened to me. And how can he turn it into account? How can he use it for fuel? and meditations is both the reminder of that and the means by which he is doing it and we're doing a deep dive into meditations this month we're calling it meditations month here at daily stoic and uh if you want to do a deep dive into the book with me we're doing a live session here towards the end of the month we've got our digital guide to meditations we've got our leather edition of meditations it's on sale we've got a bunch of stuff going on whether it's your first time reading meditations or your 50th, I think you're going to get a lot out of this course, out of this group thing we're doing together.

2:23Ryan Holiday: I get something out of it each year that we do it, and I'd love to see you in there. Sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash meditations. I'll see you in the live Q &A here in just a few days. And yeah, it's just a reminder, you are on the right timeline if you make it the right timeline.

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5:05Don't let your attention slide. It's April 21st. This is today's entry from The Daily Stoic, which you can check out in The Daily Stoic store. When you let your attention slide for a bit, don't think you will get a grip on it whenever you wish. Instead, bear in mind that because of today's mistake, everything that follows will be necessarily worse. Is it possible to be free from air? Not by any means, but it is possible for a person to be always stretching to avoid air. for we must be content to at least escape a few mistakes by never letting our attention slide. That's Epictetus's discourses.

5:41Winford Gallagher in her book Wrapped quotes David Meyer, a cognitive scientist at the University of Michigan. Einstein didn't invent the theory of relativity while he was multitasking at the Swiss patent office, because in truth it came after when he really had time to focus and study. Attention matters. And in an era where our attention is being fought for by every new app, every website, every article, every book, every tweet, and every post, the value of attention has only gone up. Part of what Epictetus is saying here is that attention is a habit, and that letting your attention slip and wander builds bad habits and enables mistakes.

6:18You'll never complete all your tasks if you allow yourself to be distracted by every tiny interruption. Your attention is one of your most critical resources. Don't squander it. Does anything get better by only half focusing? Does that ever produce good work? And the answer is no, it doesn't. Attention is everything. Attention is the prime resource. It's, you know how you know attention is worth something? Because of all of the people who are not just competing for it, but building multi-billion dollars, or in the case of Facebook, trillion dollar businesses on top of it. Attention is the most scarce resource in the world.

6:59This is based on our time, first and foremost, right? It's based on this non-renewable resource, which is our life, which, as Seneca says, is always ticking away. You've got to think about your attention as something to protect, something to spend wisely. And as my friend Cal Newport, who I've had on the podcast a bunch of times, and he wrote two great books, which I highly recommend, Digital Minimalism and Deep Work. You can check out Deep Work in the Painted Porch bookstore. Love it. I'll link to it in today's episode. But to me, deep work is the ability to focus, to control your attention, to lock it in on something and not be thrown off it, not be pushed off of it.

7:38Basically, Cal says, if you think you're a good multitasker, you're bullshitting yourself because you're not. Nobody is a good multitasker. You think like you're switching between tasks. Like, for instance, as I was recording this because I forgot to put my phone on do not disturb, I got a spam call. And you might have noticed that little glitch where I was talking, and even though it only took me a half second to turn it off, it's going to take a second longer than I would like to admit for me to come back to being fully engaged in this conversation that we're having. Now, thankfully, this isn't a super taxing thing to do, but imagine that I did that a lot of times over the course of writing a book.

8:17Imagine if I did that a lot of times over the course of my relationship with my kids, which we all do. It takes a toll. It adds up. The more you can focus, the less you can let your attention slide, the better. As Epictetus is saying, is it possible to never do that? No, right? It is impossible to be free of error, to always be locked in, to never be distracted. But we must be content to limit it as much as possible. Everything that follows from that place of distraction, from letting your attention slide, from focusing on the wrong thing, from letting yourself get riled up, letting yourself get sucked down the rabbit hole, letting yourself go into doom scrolling mode.

8:57What comes out of the other side of that is not as good as the alternative. The conversation you have is not as good. The work that comes out of it is not as good. The connection between you and your kid or your wife or whomever is not as good. When you let your attention slide, there is a cost. That It's switching. It creates a residue. It creates a lag, creates a glitch, and it adds up. You have to understand that it adds up. So lock in, create boundaries. Like that's what the do not disturb mode on the phone is for. It's why I usually put it face down in the other part of the room. It's why I don't have alerts on my phone.

9:32It's why even the fact that it was only vibrating on the table was less disruptive than that super loud ringtone that can sort of pierce the silence of a room. You got to create focus. You got to create space. You can't let your attention slide. Your attention is the most important thing. You only get this moment once. Don't waste it being distracted. Don't waste it by being only half present. You have to focus.

10:01Ryan Holiday: Hey, 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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