This Is How To Live Well | Don't Let Your Attention Slide

Marcus Aurelius' life teaches us how to live well. And because he lived well, his story also teaches us how to die well: with grace, with strength, with empathy, and with the comfort of knowing that he lived a good life as a good man. 🎉 Celebrate Marcus Aurelius' Birthday this month by reading Meditations with us and the Daily Stoic community. On April 26th, 1905 years after the day of his birth, Ryan Holiday will host an invite-only LIVE Q&A to talk about all things Marcus Aurelius and Meditations. Get 20% off with a Meditations BOOK & GUIDE bundle. Join the LIVE Meditations Q&A with Ryan Holiday by purchasing before April 26th! Get all our Meditations offering and learn more at our official Meditations Collection at dailystoic.com/meditations today. 📚 Pick up copies of Deep Work, Slow Productivity, and Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com📔 Pick up your own leather bound signed edition of The Daily Stoic! Check it out at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow 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.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Welcome 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, 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.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  It's one of the most haunting paintings you'll ever see. More than 11 feet wide and eight feet tall, painted in rich but dark oils, Eugene Delacroix, a student of the Stoics, captures Marcus Aurelius at the end of his life. A plague has devastated Rome. His troubled son stands in the wings, unlikely to rule well. Marcus has had a hard life, filled with adversity, not meeting, as one historian noted, with the good fortune he deserved. Yet he strived to do right and to be good. He escaped imperialization, in his words, avoided being Caesarified and died purple by the power of his position. He kept the faith, kept his empire going, doing his best.

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  And now, weak and frail, the end was here. He knew, as he would say to his bodyguard, that the sun was setting. With his last breaths, he is said to have grabbed the attention of his friends, who are shown weeping and gathered round in the painting. "Why do you weep for me?" Marcus asked them. "They should be thinking of the plague and all the lives that it claimed. They should be focused on getting their own affairs in order." And while these words, and the words that Marcus said to his bodyguard, were his actual final words, the last lines in meditation... Meditations are worth musing on today as they are as beautiful and haunting as that great painting. As Gregory Hayes renders them, "You have lived as a citizen in a great

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  city, five years or 100, what's the difference? The law makes no distinction," Marcus writes. "And to be sent away from it, not by a tyrant or a dishonest judge, but by nature who first invited you in. Why is that so terrible? Like the impresario ringing down the curtain on an actor. But I've only gotten through three acts. Yes, this will be a drama in three acts. The length fixed by the power that directed your creation and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine. So make your exit with grace, the same grace that was shown to you." As I detail in Marcus's chapter in Lives of the Stoics, which is actually in the back of the leather-bound edition of Meditations that we have in the Daily Stoic

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  store, the life of Marcus Aurelius is one that teaches us how to live well. And because he lived well, Marcus's story is also one that teaches us how to go out well, with grace, with strength, with empathy, with the comfort from knowing that he'd lived a good life as a good man. Maybe you've read Meditations front to back a dozen times, but if you haven't studied his life, his last words, his example, you must. We're calling April Marcus Aurelius Month here, Meditations Month, because it's Marcus's 1905th birthday. And so we've just been doing this deep dive into Meditations. We have this awesome step-by-step guide, sort of a course about Meditations, if you've

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  been interested in reading the book. We're gonna be doing a live Q and A as part of that course on April 26, which is for everyone who has purchased it. I did a new foreword to the paperback edition of Meditations and the hardcover, which you can grab at store.dailystoic.com. And then, of course, we have our leather-bound edition of Meditations, if you want one that will stand the test of time. And you can bundle all that stuff together. I'll link all of that in today's show notes, or just head over to dailystoic.com/meditations.

• 4:27Ryan Holiday?

  Don'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 error? Not by any means, but it is possible for a person to be always stretching to avoid error. For we must be content to at least escape a few mistakes by never letting our attention slide. That's Epictetus's Discourses. Winifred Gallagher in her book wrapped quotes David Meyer, a cognitive scientist at the University of Michigan. Einstein didn't invent the theory of relativity

• 5:12Ryan Holiday?

  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. You'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?

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  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. This 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 tick, tick, ticking away. You've got to think about... Your attention is something to protect, something to spend wisely. And as my friend Cal Newport, who I've had on the podcast a bunch of times,

• 6:40Ryan Holiday?

  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. Basically, 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, 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

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  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. Imagine 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,

• 8:09Ryan Holiday?

  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. What 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 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 switching, it creates a residue. It creates a lag, creates a glitch, and it adds up. You have to understand that. 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.

• 8:54Ryan Holiday?

  It's why even the fact that it was only vibrating on the table, it was less disruptive than that super loud ringtone that can sort of pierce the silence of a room. You gotta create focus, you gotta 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.

• 9:23Ryan 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 of 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.