Would You Be Mad At This? | A Cure For Procrastination

People will inspire you one moment and utterly disappoint you the next. You can’t let this confuse you.📚 Books mentioned: The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living by Ryan Holiday: https://store.dailystoic.com/The War of Art by Steven Pressfield | https://www.thepaintedporch.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 Facebook 📢 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 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?

  Would you be mad at this? Would you be upset that someone isn't tall? Or would you accept it? Certainly, you understand that certain people are drawn to art and others to science or engineering, that some love country music and others love dense history books. Yet, you're surprised when someone is rude to you or when someone holds a retrograde opinion or fails to say "thank you" or spouts crazy conspiracy theories. As if such things aren't, as Marx realist points out in a famous pseudo-mathematical proof and meditations, as if they aren't a statistical probability, as if there wasn't going to be someone, somewhere, who thought or acted like that. The point is that different people have not just different interests, but also that a diverse world is going to have

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  a diverse array of different kinds of people. Some will be wonderful and kind. Some will be annoying. Some will be that mob of people shouting at little kids trying to integrate a public school. Some will be volunteering to help starving children in countries far away. Some will contain multitudes, like the people who fought bravely against fascism in World War II and then came home and held up fascism in those public schools that the mobs were gathering around. People are complicated. People are contradictory. People have limitations and flaws. People will inspire you one moment and utterly disappoint you the next. The person who disappointed you, who you disagree with on nearly everything,

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  may one day surprise you with some moment of principled bravery, and then go right back to being the things you dislike. You can't let this confuse you. You can't let it disillusion you either. You shouldn't let it make you upset. You have to learn how to take it in stride, which is not the same as accepting or agreeing. Because the more it throws you off your game, the more power it gives them, the more power it takes away from you. A Stoic doesn't waste energy wishing people were different. A Stoic uses their energy to stay steady, to stay good, to stay in control. Because in the end, the only thing you control is you.

• 3:14Ryan Holiday?

  A cure for procrastination. To the Stoic, procrastination almost looks like a form of delusion and entitlement. Who is to say you'll even be around next month or next week to deal with it? If it's important, they say, don't wait, do it now. As Marcus Aurelius says, if it needs to be done, do it with courage and promptness. Procrastination seems to make things easier, but it damns us to a low-grade, gnawing state of anxiety. Is that how you want to spend this week? Any week, your last week? Ask yourself, what am I avoiding? What can I handle today instead of tomorrow? What can I do promptly and bravely right now? And then we have one quote from Moral Letters from Seneca and two from Marcus Aurelius.

• 3:59Ryan Holiday?

  From Seneca, "We have anything that must yet be done virtue can do with courage and promptness. For anyone would call it a sign of foolishness for one to undertake a task with a lazy and begrudging spirit, or to push the body in one direction and the mind in another, to be torn apart by wildly divergent impulses." It can be done well, it can be done well now. That's the idea. And then Marcus Aurelius says, "This is the mark of perfection of character, to spend each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, laziness, or any pretending."

• 4:31Ryan Holiday?

  And then Marcus Aurelius again, Meditations 822, "You get what you deserve. Instead of being a good person today, you choose instead to be one tomorrow." You know, this idea of this four virtues series, the first book is courage. So it's funny, you know, they're saying, "Do it with promptness and courage." That's the first virtue. The second virtue is the virtue of self-discipline or temperance. I really liked this frame of reference, thinking about procrastination as a form of arrogance. Who says you'll be around to get to it tomorrow? Who says you can afford to put it off? And so as I'm writing, I tell myself, "Look, I don't know what's going to happen. All I know is that I gotta close it up today. I gotta do everything I'm capable of doing today.

• 5:16Ryan Holiday?

  Gotta wrap it up, give my best, do my best, do as much as I can, so that if I do die tomorrow and someone I love pulls up my laptop and goes, "Where was Ryan on that book?" It won't be finished, but they'll see that my stuff was in order, that I got as far as I could, that it wasn't a scattered mess, that I hadn't been putting stuff off, that I hadn't been waiting until later. I think I'm proud to say that as a writer, I've never missed one of my publisher deadlines. In fact, I almost always deliver early. That's, I think, one key to procrastination. Set good deadlines, generous deadlines, that you're capable of beating, and then work every day. And so you beat them, people are impressed. But really, you budgeted some extra time there. I think that's something that strikes me when I deal with people who procrastinate, right?

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  It's like you assign something with someone, you know, they've gotta do this, this, or that. And then, you know, it's like, "It's due on Monday." And then Friday, they're like, "Oh, I couldn't get the file open." And they're like, "What have you been doing the last week, right? You should have known that the file didn't work the second you started this project." And so you often find that people, and this is where that idea of the resistance comes in, people delay getting started. Steven Pressfield says, "It's not that we say, 'I'm never gonna write the novel.' We say, 'I'm going to write the novel tomorrow,' right? So we put off the start date over and over as the procrastination. We tell ourselves we're gonna do it. We're just lying to ourselves about when we're gonna do it." And I think this is why the practice of memento mori is so important. If you go...

• 6:46Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know if I have tomorrow, but I do have right now. I do have 20 minutes that I can dedicate to this. I do have an hour that I can dedicate to this. I can have that conversation that I needed to have with the person. I can close this, this thing off. I can get caught up on this or that. Don't do it later. Do it now. Cross it off. Anything that could be done tomorrow must be done today. That was MacArthur's rule as well. The Stoics and successful people forever have been battling against procrastination and the resistance. It's a fact of life. That's why Pressfield calls it a war of art. I hope whatever it is you have to do today, you take this message seriously and you go do it.

• 7:30Ryan 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.