A Sense of Urgency | Following The Doctor’s Orders

In the kitchen at Per Se, one of the best restaurants in the world, there is a sign. All it says is: A Sense of Urgency. That’s what a great chef, a great service staff, a great organization has. A great person needs it too.✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail📕 We created a premium leather-bound edition of Meditations- To learn more and to pick up your own copy of this beautiful new edition of Meditations, visit dailystoic.com/meditations📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook See 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  A Sense of Urgency. In the kitchen at Per Se, one of the best restaurants in the world, there is a sign. All it says is "A Sense of Urgency." That's what a great chef, a great service staff, a great organization has. A great person needs it too. Yet, far too many of us lack this. In meditations, Marcus Aurelius chides himself for acting as if he's going to live forever, as if he has unlimited time. "You could be good today," he writes, "instead you choose tomorrow." He tells himself he needs to concentrate like a Roman and do the task in front of him as if it was the last thing he was doing in his life. In short, he needs to attack everything with a sense of urgency.

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  We all do. We say that we're doing it, that we're working on something, but are you? Where is the progress that proves it? It seems more like you're acting like you have forever, that the customer isn't all that important, that it doesn't matter if the food gets cold. You need to hurry up. You need to get after it. Not with frenzy or haste, but with all deliberate speed, with purpose, with the concentration of a Roman, the clarity of a person who understands that tomorrow is not a guarantee. People, progress, your destiny, it's waiting on you. It demands a sense of urgency.

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  I actually talk a lot about a sense of urgency and quote that line in part one of Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control. Hustle is obviously super important, that sense of urgency, but then it has to be balanced with deliberateness and care and sweating the small stuff. It's captured by an expression that was a favorite of the Roman emperor Augustus, "Festina lente," make haste slowly. And anyways, I talk all about that in Discipline is Destiny. And I hope you check it out. I'm really proud of the book. The book's doing great. I've heard from thousands of you all over the world that have enjoyed it. You can grab Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control anywhere books are sold. We've got signed copies at DailyStoic.com. And I do hope you check it out and of course, wish you much, much discipline.

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  Following the doctor's orders, this is today's entry in The Daily Stoic. Just as we commonly hear people say that the doctor prescribed someone particular riding exercises or ice baths or walking without shoes, we should in the same way that nature prescribed someone to be diseased or disabled or to suffer any kind of impairment. In the case of the doctor, prescribed means something ordered to help aid someone's healing. But in the case of nature, it means that what happens to each of us is ordered to help aid our destiny. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 5:8. It is funny, right, to think about in

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  the Roman days, someone being prescribed to walk without shoes or to ride a horse. Also, I guess, better than being prescribed to bleeding. But we'll get to today's meditation. The Stoics were masters at analogies and used them as a tool to help strengthen their reasoning. Here Marcus Aurelius observes how willingly we will put up with unpleasantness if commanded by the magic words "doctor's orders." The doctor says that you've got to take this nasty medicine and you'll do it. The doctor tells you that you have to start sleeping hanging upside down like a bat. You'll feel silly, but soon enough you'll get to dangling because you think it will make you better. On the other hand, when it comes to external events, we fight like hell if anything happens contrary to our

• 4:19Ryan Holiday?

  plans. But what if, Marcus asks, the doctor had prescribed the exact same thing as a part of our treatment? What if it's as good as taking our medicine? Well, what if?

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

  What's so magical about those words the doctor orders is that feel like we don't have a choice. Of course, you don't have to listen to the doctor. I guess some people don't listen to their doctors. But you go, oh, well, they know better. They chose this for me. That's what the treatment of this disease, ailment, sickness is. Who am I to object? I will accept it and I will go along with it because I want to get better. But then when you're stuck in traffic, or a job turns out to be harder than you thought, or a relationship turns out to be more difficult than you thought, you have to do anything that you didn't expect, you didn't want, you don't like, because you feel like you have a choice

• 5:14Ryan Holiday?

  of the matter, you don't want to do it. But what if, Marcus is saying, actually, this too is chosen to make you better. And in a sense, that's what the obstacle is the way as a philosophy is really about. It's this idea that these things aren't things we have to do, they're things we get to do, things that were chosen for us. You can see it as some sort of higher power if you want, you can see it as fate if you want, you can just simply see it as a thing, but that it is something that's going to make you better, that it was assigned to you, right? In meditations, Marcus de Rios talks about how, he goes, it's unfortunate that this happened. And then it catches him, no, it's fortunate that it

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  happens to me, right? He was saying, oh, no, wait, this was chosen for me. I am right for this. This is right for me. So stop fighting, stop pushing against the thing and see it as a prescription. See it as part of the process. See it as an assignment you've been given. How will you handle it? Are you going to be a good patient or a bad patient, a good student or a bad student? This is everything. These things were chosen for you. And all you have to do in turn is choose them back.

• 6:40Ryan Holiday?

  It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. You built this Memento Mori calendar for Daily Stoic to illustrate that exact idea, that your life, in the best-case scenario, is 4,000 weeks. Are you going to let those weeks slip by? Or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall, and every single week, that bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you filled in,

• 7:24Ryan Holiday?

  that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/mmcalendar.