Do It Before It’s Too Late

Ryan talks about the importance of being prepared for the worst. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com. Do it before it's too late. If you went into surgery tomorrow and died, after they informed your family, they'd cart your body down to the morgue of the hospital to do an autopsy. Then the doctors would convene a postmortem panel and discuss how this happened and how they could learn from it. Never again, the surgeon might say to themselves, "I won't ever make that mistake again,"

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  which would all be very well and good for everyone but you. Of course, far preferable to a postmortem would be a pre-mortem. Seneca called this the premeditatio malorum, a meditation on all that could go wrong before it went wrong. Exile, war, torture, shipwreck, he said, "All this should be before our minds." The only inexcusable thing for a leader to say, he said, was that "I did not think that could happen." Our job, whether we're surgeons or sailors, driving our kids to school or driving in the Indy 500, is to be prepared for the things that life can throw at us. It's to think in advance about the potential problems and have solutions for them.

• 1:34Ryan Holiday?

  It's to be adaptable, to have grace under pressure, to not shy away from unpleasant possibilities just because we prefer to visualize everything going well. The Stoics considered the worst so they could perform their best, and that's what you have to do. That's what you'd want someone working on or for you to do.

• 1:55Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. So check it out, DailyStoic.com/email.