What Are You Spending Your Time On?

Ryan explains the importance of guarding your time above all else, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Get the Daily Stoic Page a Day Calendar in the Daily Stoic Store! 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.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  What are you spending your time on? You pull it out of the fridge to throw it away, some food that expired two weeks ago. It's time to renew your car registration. You have to rip out a few pages of the calendar, maybe the Daily Stoic calendar, as I did this morning, because you were away from the office for a few days. What are you looking at here? That expiration date, that pile of pages from the calendar? This is time. Time elapsed that you'll never get back, but more than elapsed, right? You spent that time on something. What happened in the two weeks since the milk went bad? What do you have to show for the year

• 1:08Ryan Holiday?

  these registration tags have been on your car? Seneca said that we should never spend an hour of our time without knowing what the return was. He says, "We can't waste the time. We can't let life just happen. We can't let the pages fall from the calendar. The days tick by because we'll never get them back. They belong to death now." This isn't to say that you have to spend every minute working or focused exclusively on productivity. On the contrary, you have to live. You have to know what you're spending your life on. You have to be aware, or you will be caught unawares. And you know, it's funny, actually, the entry in today's Daily Stoic calendar,

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  which I have here on my desk and I'm about to tear off, it's a quote from Marcus Aurelius. He says, "Let each thing you would do, say, or intend to be like that of a dying person."

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  And that's the tear-away page. And I'm gonna keep that one because I love it. And I've had this calendar on my desk for the last two years since we started making them. People love them. You can check it out. These are the Stoic quotes from each day's page in The Daily Stoic. You can check that out at store.dailystoic.com.