The Best Time Is Now | 9 Peak Performance Tips from Top Performers

Obviously, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The earlier you get started on something that takes time, the bigger and better the results will be. As Seneca once said about the days that pass us by, "They are gone never to return." And that's sad. But as the second half of that expression about trees goes, the next best time is now. Today. Now is an opportunity to start. This is what you deserve. Today, Ryan talks to some of the top performing athletes and coaches about the keys that they use to make the most of their days, and how you can apply their insights to your own life. Today is the last day to sign up for Session 2 of the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more, including the Premium Leather Edition of the Daily Stoic.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:25Ryan Holiday?

  The best time is now. Obviously, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The earlier you get started on something that takes time, the bigger and better the results will be. It would have been better then, of course, if you had tackled the changes you needed to make in your life in 2020, or 2021, or 2022. January 1st, 2023, it's come and gone. That would have been a great time to get started on new habits, to make new changes. It was a new year, a chance for a new you, a fresh moment, a fresh calendar. But all those moments are gone, just as your chance to plant that tree two decades ago is gone.

• 1:08Ryan Holiday?

  "Missed opportunities, they belong to death," as Seneca once said about the days that pass us by. "They are gone, never to return." And that's sad. But as the second half of that expression about trees goes, the next best time is now. Today, now, now is an opportunity to start. "This is what you deserve," Marcus Aurelius wrote. "You could be good today, but instead you choose tomorrow." But no, don't choose tomorrow. Choose to be good today. Adopt the mindset of the great Steven Pressfield, who writes in his book, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be. Here is my frame of mind as I sit down to work. This is the

• 1:48Ryan Holiday?

  day. There is no other day. This is the day. Don't wait for the bus to come around next year. Don't tell yourself you'll do it later. This is the day. Now is now. Now is the best time to start being the person you want to be. Which is actually why we're relaunching today. It's your chance today. The new year, new you challenge. Typically, we do it live the first 21 days of the year, but we've actually found that most people abandon their new year's resolutions by the 21st of the year. So maybe that's you. Maybe you fell short. Maybe you delayed. Maybe you didn't even get started. But now is the time. We heard from a bunch of people. They came back from vacation late. They procrastinated. They changed their minds. They asked if we could bring it back or give them a second go at it.

• 2:33Ryan Holiday?

  And that's what we're doing. Today is the day. It starts today. It's your last chance to sign up. Sign up now. DailyStoic.com/challenge. You'll see me in there. I'm already riding on a lot of the changes I made from starting the challenge a little earlier than you, but I'd love to see you in there. Join us with this awesome new cohort in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It would have been better if you started at the first of the year, but today's not too bad either.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  You're not going to get better by doing things that are easy. I want to take the hard way. That's when you really build that character. That's when you become resilient.

• 3:18Ryan Holiday?

  There's almost no elite performer that doesn't also have some sort of physical practice. Wherever I go, I'm always looking for the practices or habits that allow people to be great at what they do. Like I was saying, they almost always have a physical practice, like whether it's a meditation practice or a weightlifting practice, whether it's stand up paddle boarding or distance running. There's some physical thing that they do that they bring back to their work. And that's what I want to share with you today. Some secrets from top performers that allows them to do what they do.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  What we're capable of is way more than we think. Why I'm in this sport and why I keep signing up for these really, really long races is that I want to see what's possible physically and mentally. What are we capable of? I call it my pain cave and I'm trying to make it bigger. So I'm hoping that this ceiling or back of my cave can be made bigger if I just keep on going into it and trying to do something a little bit harder or push a little farther than I've ever gone before. And I'm really visual, so when it gets to be that state when I'm running, I'll actually picture the cave, holding like a chisel and a hard hat and just like getting to work on making it bigger.

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  So you don't even think about it as you're exploring the cave? You're expanding the cave? So it's more of a mine than a cave?

• 4:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  And you're trying to go further, deep into the bedrock?

• 4:49Speaker 02

  You know, in high school, 10 miles was like our long run and we would be knocked out for days after. Then as, you know, you keep going in, that distance, that number keeps growing and your ability to go deeper into the cave gets a little bit bigger.

• 5:03Ryan Holiday?

  I guess it's the tricky part of distance running. Not to say that Usain Bolt is not also cerebral, but like in a nine-second race, you're not reaching into any file cabinets. It's like hitting a baseball. You're just like, see, hit. So much of what's happening is deeply in the subconscious, like in the muscle memory. Whereas in a 42-hour race, that's a lot of time inside your head.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  For sure, it can be both. And that's where like your brain and your thoughts become so important. In those many, many hours of thinking, if you're continually letting your thoughts travel down a negative path, it's going to feed back into like what your body is able to give you and how it goes out there. If you keep telling yourself that you're awful and this problem that's happening is ruining your race and, you know, you shouldn't make it to the finish line, the odds are getting smaller and smaller as the hours pass that you're actually going to make it to that finish line.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Personally, I have never lacked the discipline aspect. I remember my parents being like, it's okay to let up. It's okay to, you know, not play by the rules. While self-discipline is fantastic in so many regards, and I think in a lot of ways, it also can create kind of a very rigid box.

• 6:20Ryan Holiday?

  It's like, I think the number one cause of injury in athletes is overtraining. Like, most people suffer from a lack of discipline. But at the elite level, it's the excess of discipline that can get you into trouble. And that's where moderation comes in.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  I always say, my coach is there to dial me back, to prevent me from going. And as opposed to like pushing you, being like, come on, you need, you need to get moving. You need to run more. So he's like, no, maybe you should take some rests right now. Because I think for many high achievers, also, the idea of rest is something that is so, like, antithetical to everything that we believe in. I think that rest for an athlete is one of the hardest things that we have to do. I take a rest day every week. And it was actually, it's always my least favorite day. Because for me, that is harder than going out and running, you know, 10 miles or something like that.

• 7:09Speaker 04

  It's almost frowned upon to start something and not finish it. You're called a quitter. So I think that misconception that quitting makes you a failure, or that quitting is bad, is something that prevents a lot of people from finding what that true calling for them is.

• 7:23Ryan Holiday?

  I had Kate Fagan on the podcast, who wrote this amazing book called What Makes Maddie Run, about this collegiate runner who ended up committing suicide. The tragedy of the book, I felt when I was reading it, was this girl is super talented. I think running division one cross country. And she hates it. Like, she hates the program. She hates her life. She hates what it's doing to her body. She's clearly depressed. It's almost like the part of her that was such a good athlete made it impossible for her to be like, I don't have to keep doing this. Maybe quitting is a problem for 90% of the population. But for like, elite performers, quitting is really hard. Because part of what makes you great is that you're not a quitter.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  I relate a lot to that sentiment, especially in my powerlifting career towards the end. My entire business that I've built was surrounding my powerlifting career. Everything kind of surrounds and follows that journey into powerlifting and what that means to me. And I felt sort of that a responsibility to keep going, even though after two or three years, I hated it. I didn't like going to the gym. It felt like a chore. It felt like a job that I didn't want to do. It's important to make the distinction. Am I quitting or am I not doing this because I have my big toenail is bugging me a little bit? Or is it something more serious that I really need to listen to my, listen to my body about?

• 8:38Ryan Holiday?

  To me, confidence is not just, oh, I believe in myself. Confidence to me is a knowledge of what one is capable of doing. And that is different to me than just faith, which one might take without evidence. But I've also seen the demonstrable evidence of what I'm capable of. How does one go about cultivating this, this confident mind that you're talking about?

• 9:00Speaker 05

  Three ways you can think about it. I've got to start looking for memories from my past of quality effort, little tiny successes here and there, and some indicators of progress. I've got to start being somewhat more selective about how I think about my past, both long term and short term in terms of yesterday. And maybe I need to be very selective in terms of how I think about basically the last hour of my life. When I was in physical geography class just now, what did I do right in that class? I want to take that memory with me into the future. You mentioned Eli Manning in the fourth quarter. Let's go back to the 2012 Super Bowl. And there he is, three minutes to go on the clock. They're down by five points. They got to score a touchdown. And so Manning takes the snap in the fourth quarter,

• 9:45Speaker 05

  throws this beautiful 40 yard rainbow right into his receiver's hands, despite the fact that that receiver was covered pretty darn well. That play of the game set up the Giants winning touchdown. Two days later, Manning is on a nationally syndicated radio show. Commentator says, do you ever think about the ramifications of failure at moments like that? And very politely, Eli Manning says, no, that's exactly what you don't do. You think about all the times you got it right. That's the feeling that you keep. He was pretty good at doing that. The first real class of activities in terms of cultivating confidence is to be very selective about bringing in constructive memories from your past.

• 10:24Speaker 05

  Second class of activities is being really careful about the stories that you tell yourself about yourself in the present. What are the underlying stories that you tell yourself? Oh, I'm good at this. Oh, I'm not good at that. Oh, I hate doing this. Oh, I love doing that. Understand, ladies and gentlemen, every one of those expressions is basically a belief about yourself. The kid who says, oh, I'm not good at math. Okay, well, maybe up to this point, that could be true, but going forward from this moment, as long as you maintain that belief, I'm not good at math. That belief is now a causal factor in your future experience. One of the things that we have to do is come to grips with the various self-fulfilling prophecies that we're all laboring under. The third class of activities is, of course, how you think about yourself in the future.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  What are the still photos of various futures that your imagination is feeding you? What are the video clips of various future scenarios that sophisticated video production studio in your imagination is feeding you? Why don't we become the director of those short movies of a whole bunch of scenarios that fill us with a sense of energy and optimism and enthusiasm? Once we start working on our minds in all three of those levels, we are developing, as I put it in the book, a mental bank account, which leads to that sense of certainty that we want.

• 11:42Ryan Holiday?

  So the other thing the Stoics talked about, and they tended to use boxing more as the analogy, but I think they also use like lifting heavy things, which is this idea that life throws obstacles or difficulties at us, just like in the boxing ring or on the wrestling mat, you're paired with a sparring partner. And Epictetus says like, you shouldn't bemoan the fact that it's hard, you should say, this is how you become world class, or he says, this is how you become Olympic class material, it's by having strong sparring partners. So how do you think about maybe this injury that you're going through, or just the difficulties you've gone through as your career? Has that made you a more resilient athlete?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I totally think so. It's kind of one of those things that like, you're not gonna get better by doing things that are easy. Like, I want to take the hard way. That's when you really build that character, that's when you become resilient, is going through tough times. I dislocated my elbow on the world stage and like a lot of people may think it would be really easy for me to just, I've done seven times at the games, that's good. But instead, I'm so excited to get back there because I know that I'm going to be better than I ever was. Just kind of taking those hard circumstances and flipping them into a positive to where I'm going to use this to make me the best athlete that I've ever been.

• 12:59Speaker 06

  When you see the Jordan, the Tom Brady, you see a certain level of calmness too. The way I put the word on it, on everything, we talk about you're focused, you're present. To me, being present is being extremely calm. When you stay calm and you have a nice routine, you don't have to go find success. Success will come find you. It will land right on top of you. I guess in acting, they call it trying to catch a feather. It's like if you go chase it, it'll go away from you. But if you just sit there still and let it come, it'll come to you.

• 13:28Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that's why I think ego is so dangerous because I would say ego is not calm and not confident.

• 13:33Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 13:33Ryan Holiday?

  Right? Ego is this like, people think it looks like confidence and maybe it looks like confidence on the outside, but inside, it's like fundamentally insecure, it's sensitive to slights, you know, like a duck is like sitting on the water, it looks calm, but it's furiously paddling. That's what ego is to me. And so you push that ego away and you actually get to a place of calmness and confidence because you're like, I've done the work and I also know that if I don't calm down and get control of myself, I won't be able to access or use the training and the skills that I have as effectively.

• 14:02Speaker 06

  I was at Cal, Berkeley, when I played football, and one of our defensive players came in at halftime and this dude was yelling and screaming and going nuts. He went out there and played the worst.

• 14:14Ryan Holiday?

  Think about why do players talk trash? It's to make the other player angry.

• 14:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:19Ryan Holiday?

  And then you know they're not going to be as good. And then we do that to ourselves all the time, right? Like we know that anger in other people distracts them, pisses them off, overwhelms them, gets them into trouble. But with me, my anger is good fuel. And it's like, no, it's not.

• 14:34Speaker 06

  No, it's not.

• 14:38Ryan Holiday?

  Keep the main thing, the main thing. What does that mean? And how do you guys actually apply that?

• 14:44Speaker 07

  So number one would be if we all come in to help the Rams improve at football. What that leads to, what we're hoping is right? Some version of a Jim Collins flywheel effect, a snowball effect where we just keep rolling the the snow and the ball gets bigger and bigger and bigger. In the entertainment business, the neat thing is what keeps professional sports rolling is maybe the the drama that takes place in between the games. Whether one person likes this color and the other person likes that color, one person voted for this politician, the other, that's not the main thing.

• 15:18Ryan Holiday?

  Is it like that the the organization has the main thing of like get better at football? And then does each subsequent person have their own main thing?

• 15:26Speaker 07

  Everyone has a specific role. They know that role. They understand that role. And it can also help individuals determine, wait a minute, this isn't a role that truly fulfills me, so maybe I'd better go look somewhere else.

• 15:40Speaker 08

  I had the mantra one season that good is the enemy of great. Like everything I do every day, I have to be great. I have to be worthy of that next moment. When really, my new one is perfection is the enemy of good. When you try too hard to have that moment every single day, you actually rob yourself of that kind of synchronicity that happens when it does all come together. And when you have been like toiling and working and just focusing on that process and also adapting to what's happening in the world, which might be, yeah, having a few weeks where you feel off. For me, I was just sick and had to take an extra week off the bike. Those things happen and it's not going to be perfect. But oftentimes in my career, when I really analyze what's happened in those kind of

• 16:23Speaker 08

  like big amazing moments, there will often be a few things that I look back on, like 2018, when I won the world championship, I actually hurt my knee in June and I took two weeks off. At that moment of winning Worlds, I said, man, I'm so glad I hurt myself. I had this break. I ended the season so energized. But in the moment, it felt like my career was ending. Having that kind of long view and trusting that process is so much easier said than done, but it is really kind of the crux of making those moments possible.

• 16:55Speaker 09

  Most highly talented people were talented at a young age. They had some proclivity at a young age. This is, I'm talking more about the sport world than business. And as a young age, what most people do is that they're supposed to form their identity. But if the identity is almost infused with the thing that you do, then your identity is mapped to your outcomes. And you have this below the conscious surface that I am what I do. And I think a big part of my work in high performing environments is to help people, this is like decouple who you are from what you do. And it's so intertwined. That's why the fight-flight-freeze mechanisms are on full tilt for people prior to walking on stage or prior to getting on the mound.

• 17:37Speaker 09

  Those true brain mechanisms that are responsible for survival are on point when there's nothing of real threat, physical threat. The only thing on threat, whether you're on the mound or on the stage, is other people's opinions. It's not that you don't identify with what you do, but your identity is not just that. When you pull apart what you do from who you are, the work is to say, well, who am I independent of what I do? It's that part of you that's the same as when you're 30, that you're three or 13, you know, like, who am I? And then the thing that I do ends up becoming the way I'm expressing my craft and expressing my philosophy and expressing my psychology. There is a difference between the brain and the mind. The brain is like the hardware in a computer and the mind is like the software that runs the hardware.

• 18:22Speaker 09

  It doesn't quite hold up when you really pull on the science of it. But it is interesting to think about, like, okay, you were born with some hardware. But who trained, who programmed your software?