Are You Disciplined Enough For This? | 7 Essential Stoic Productivity Tips (From Top Performers)

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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.

• 0:31Ryan Holiday?

  Do you know how to do nothing?

• 0:36Ryan Holiday?

  Nothing, it seems, is harder for the busy person than to slow down. Seneca knew this. It was as true in Rome as it is today, and that's why he wrote with such pity about the conquerors, for whom there was never enough, about the lawyers, very well into old age, still exhausting themselves in court arguing for clients they didn't care about, trying to win a little more money or acclaim, none of which was going to follow them into their graves, which were closer than they would have liked to think. Seneca must have judged himself too for his inability to walk away earlier, when it became clear what life in Nero's service was really going to be like. Yet here we all are, equally incapable of slowing down, of stepping back or reflecting on what is important, finding balance, of using stillness to our advantage.

• 1:21Ryan Holiday?

  At the end of his career, after he'd been pushed out of power, the French president Charles de Gaulle was asked how he spent his days. "Ask the cat," he replied. "We play solitaire and take walks together." It isn't easy for a man to force himself into a discipline of idleness, but it is essential. "Life is not work," he said. "To work without stopping sends a man mad. Remember that. And to want to do so is a bad sign. Those of your colleagues who could not stop working were by no means the best." Yes, Marx really said, "We ought to wear ourselves down doing what we love." But he didn't mean that literally, not fully. He meant that the time and energy we allocate to a vocation every day should be something we love and something we give our all to in those hours.

• 2:05Ryan Holiday?

  But to do more than that, to sacrifice yourself on the altar of work, that contradicts the essential Stoic virtue of moderation. We have to know how to do nothing. We have to know when it's time to take a break. We have to slow down. We have to seek stillness. And those who cannot are not the best because they have no tranquility, no perspective, and no self-control.

• 2:36Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I've always been fascinated with top performance. That's partly why we have the Daily Stoic Podcast. I want to learn from other people who are really great at what they do. I want to incorporate their habits, their practices, their thinking, not all of it, but the stuff that makes sense for me, the stuff that makes me better. I want to incorporate into my life. And that drives a lot of the questions that I've asked on the podcast. But in today's episode, I wanted to bring you a little bit of a best of some essential productivity tips that I think are aligned with, or if not outright derived from Stoic

• 3:17Ryan Holiday?

  thinking, from some of our most interesting guests on the podcast. And I'll bring that to you now. Enjoy.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  This is an area that I've started to do some digging around in researching my book, which is this idea that when we think of our future selves, we endow our future selves with superhuman abilities, like, "Oh, I'm feeling a bit tired right now, but tomorrow, my tomorrow self is not going to feel tired at the same time, and therefore I'll do this thing tomorrow." Or eight months from now, you know what? Of course, I'll be able to do all these things. How hard can it be? It's just a, you know, it's just a talk. I've done these a lot. And that is a big part of what causes procrastination for people who suffer from it. Oh, this idea that tomorrow me is Superman, whereas today me is normal, and therefore I will put this thing off.

• 4:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, Steven Pressfield says that nobody says, I'm never gonna write my symphony. They say, I'm gonna write it tomorrow. Not only do we think we're gonna have superhuman skills in the future, we think we'll have unlimited time in the future. But in fact, we'll be just as constrained eight months from now as we are today. Nothing ever clears off of your plate. If you had to think about like, what are the biggest tools for you as far as being more productive? If someone's like, I'm just a mess, where would you start?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  For me, I found that actually just optimizing for what's fun has been the single biggest hack for my productivity ever. And so now my, my advice for most people if they're struggling with productivity is find a way to make it fun. In terms of specific tools for getting more done, single biggest tip I found is something I came across in a book called Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. They call it the daily highlights. I think similar to Gary Keller's idea of the one thing, like, what's the one thing I actually want to do today? And honestly, if, if I could actually just do that one thing that's most important to me every single day for 365 days, that would completely move the needle on my productivity.

• 4:58Ryan Holiday?

  Life without design is erratic. That's from Seneca. So it's all about routine for me. So every day looks almost exactly the same for me, whether it's the weekend or it's a holiday or it's a hard working day. And so my day is with a couple of key things. I wake up early. I don't use the phone for the first 30, 40, 50 minutes I'm awake. I do my big creative task first. I spend some time with a journal. I only have three things scheduled in my calendar every day. No more tasks are allowed to be scheduled in the calendar. Then I do some form of heart strenuous exercise. I try to be done with work and at home with my family by five. At the, at the absolute latest, we do dinner with the family every day, kids in the bath every day. Then I read my kids to sleep every day and that's the perfect day.

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  Before I was an author, I learned a system. Now, I probably, if I'm being honest, there's nothing magical about the system that I learned from Robert Greene. It's that I didn't make it up myself. It's that he was like, here's how a book is made. Here's how a writer does what they do. Interesting. And because I was following a system, I've adapted myself to the system and it's pulled product out of me as opposed... opposed to me reverting to whatever like the lowest impulse or drive is. I think systems allow us to make good decisions.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  One aspect where you can be useful if you're managing people is to say, let's actually be crystal clear about what are the things we do. Let's actually think about each of these things and say, how do we want to implement it? How do we want to keep track of the information relevant to this? How do we want to communicate about this thing? Answering those questions is it's like a small example, but answering those questions about the processes you come back to again and again can exponentially make the work more effective. Because when you don't answer those questions, you fall back on defaults. Defaults are often lowest common denominator. And in the world of work, for example, the default is often just, we'll just rock and roll on Slack or we'll rock and roll on email and kind of figure things out on the fly, which is a cognitive disaster. It's a terrible way to try to organize brains to actually produce value in a systematic manner.

• 7:03Ryan Holiday?

  The secret to productivity, but most of all happiness, is to not be so reachable. We have our phones, we have emails, we have watches, we have 50 different social inboxes, and then we wonder why we never get anything done. Seneca says, if you want to improve, be content to be seen as ignorant about some matters. You can't always know what's going on. You can't always be reachable. Napoleon famously would wait three weeks until he opened his mail because he knew that most issues would resolve themselves. If you are always reachable, if you can be gotten a hold of in a moment's notice, you will not be focused on the big important things. You will not be doing your work and you will not be philosophical.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  On my podcast, I use this phrase, facing the productivity dragon. You can see, here's what's on my plate. And if it's terrible, it's terrible. And you see the exact extent of the terribleness. This is, look at all these things I'm committed to when they're done. I can't make these pieces work. This is I'm way overcommitted. But a lot of times I think when we get overloaded, we flee. But you got to face the productivity dragon at some point.

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  If you get drafted, you're playing professional sports and then you can't figure out how to deal with the pressure, how to be in charge of your training, how to communicate, how to learn the playbook. You're not going to make it because the stakes are too high, the competition. Is too stiff, you have to go, all right, I am way in it. I'm going to figure out a way to survive. What you can't fall prey to, and this is what most people do, is magical thinking or entitlement. Cause both those things will kill you.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  So I think there's like a nice thing to pull out of there is yeah, it's not about what's my dream job? How do I get it? It's like, how do I get started? And really systematically building skills, being responsible, being good, figuring out how to get better, ratcheting up, ratcheting up, ratcheting it up, until you get to a level where now you can actually reach whatever that window is you're trying to get through. And then you make the aggressive jump.

• 8:58Ryan Holiday?

  That's interesting too, and I relate to it, which is weird because I'm someone who has like a calling. Like I, I am a writer, I love writing, that's my passion. At the same time, there's lots of other stuff that I do and I like doing. What, what they all have in common, I would say, is that I like to be in control of how and when and why I do them, right? And so to me, that's where it comes down to this idea of autonomy. And then sometimes I'll talk to people and they'll be so much, so successful, 10 times more successful than me, a hundred times. And I'll look at their life and I'll be like, that sounds awful because they're in so little control of their life, you know, they've got a car waiting for them downstairs. They're scheduled down in the five minute increments.

• 9:40Ryan Holiday?

  You know, to me, I think what I actually like of all the things that I do is the ability to focus deeply on it. So whether I'm investing in something, whether I'm, you know, working outside of my farm or whether I'm writing, what I like is not the specific content, as you're saying, but it's, it's the ability to concentrate and really give myself fully over to it, not knowing that I have seven minutes to finish this task or else I'm going to get in trouble.

• 10:12Ryan Holiday?

  I found myself saying these words like, "I can't want this for you more than you want it for yourself." So what do you do when you are a fan of someone, you do want them to be successful, you are rooting for them, but they seem to be stuck in some sort of trap of self-doubt, or fear, or laziness, or entitlement? How do you get people to rise to their level of potential or excellence?

• 10:39Speaker 03

  So you shake them up. But shaking them up isn't necessarily a negative. Sometimes it's around, it's about putting them in the right context so that they're able to succeed at a higher level. I work with lots of college golf teams. And one of the things I like to do is I like to take the teams, a couple of weeks before they have a big tournament, I like to put them on a course that everyone's going to shoot 63 on. And then they go like, "Wow, like that felt really good." Damn right. And by the way, it's not going to be like that in a couple of weeks, so that's the last time we're going to do that. But I want to pump you up. I want to shake you up. I want to get your confidence as high as I can get it, as an example. Or it might be that I just need to put you in a situation where you can demonstrate your skills and your skills will be more rewarded, not just by me, but by other people. I want to create a context by which you can come to see yourself differently, or at least

• 11:24Speaker 03

  see yourself more like I see you. I'll tell you this, I'll give you an example. I have a very talented person in our team, and for whatever reason, she goes in and out of confidence. Well, I had a very honest conversation with her the other, about two or three weeks ago. And she was shocked by it, by the way. And I'll tell you how it ended up. But what I said to her, I took a chance, and I said, "You know, I feel insulted by you." And she said, "What do you mean?" I said, "I have all this confidence in you, more than you have confidence in yourself. But what you're telling me when you lack confidence in yourself is that I must be stupid, that my confidence is unfounded, that I must not be a good judge." She said, "It never occurred to me that you could be insulted by my lack of low confidence." And I go, "I think the world of you and have invested a tremendous amount of resource, and here you are undermining yourself, and you're basically calling me stupid."

• 12:09Speaker 03

  And she said, "Seriously?" And I said... Not completely, but mostly.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  And I said, you gotta stop it. And believe it or not, that was the thing that shook her up. And now she goes, listen, if Randall thinks that that highly of me, I better start getting on the, on the train. But at the end of the day, you gotta shake people up because you can't let them stay in this place where they are underperforming based on what they're capable of because they simply lack a view or a perspective or a context by which they can assess themselves more objectively.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Number one thing I tell the young people I talk to, they're like, I have my first job and I want advice. I was like, you can't ever drop the ball on something. It's just, you have to say, this is not an option. If something comes onto my radar, it can never be an option that I just like, I'm just gonna let that one go. Cause I'm like, everything will fall apart if that's who you are. You're gonna be constantly bothered by the people above you because they don't trust you to get things done. You will never build a foundation on which you can take a next step up. So you should put all of your energy, reading David Allen, like reading me, like figuring out everything you can to make sure you have very good full capture and organization systems that you're diligently reviewing, nothing gets forgotten. Like the number one thing you can do in your first two years of employment, it's gonna earn you the ability now going forward to start crafting your job more and more towards what you like.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  I mean, I tell people, here's a hack, like one of the things you should do early on in a new job is say, uh, great, I will get this to you on Wednesday. And then whether or not you have time to get that done by Wednesday or not, write them on Tuesday afternoon and say, Brian, I'm sorry, I said I was gonna get this to you Wednesday, the schedule got a little tight, so it'll, it's gonna be Friday morning, I apologize. And then, and then deliver on Friday morning. Even if you could have delivered it on Wednesday, because it shows that you are on top of your stuff. It's more important that people realize like Cal is on top of his stuff, he knows what's on his plate.

• 13:55Ryan Holiday?

  And to me, the opposite of that, what's like the death sentence is when they're like, hey, I'm gonna get this to you by Friday. And then you're like, okay, cool, I'll see you Friday or whatever. And then like Thursday night, you hear, what was the password again? And then you're like, ah, you haven't touched it. And now there's problems, now you need help. You have just shown me or whoever you're working for, that you're not only not on top of it, you don't feel obligated to be on top of it.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  That's like my number one advice: refuse to ever drop a ball.

• 14:24Ryan Holiday?

  If you want to learn more about Stoic philosophy, totally for free, you can sign up for our Daily Stoic email. It's one free email every morning, the best of Stoic wisdom, dailystoic.com/email.