This Choice Is Everything | A Cure For Procrastination

Ryan explains discusses the choice that will decide your fate, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Pre-orders are available for Ryan Holiday’s new book Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave - check it out at https://dailystoic.com/preorderAppSumo is the best way to automate all of the busywork that comes with running a business, so you can boost your productivity, scale beyond your skillset, and focus on what matters most to you. AppSumo is the leading digital marketplace for entrepreneurs. Now with awesome tools for authors too. Just go to https://social.appsumo.com/ryan-holiday PLUS: Use code ryanholiday at checkout for $20 free credits (limit first 500, new accounts). Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:36Ryan Holiday?

  This choice is everything. It's a story that goes back to the very beginnings of Stoicism. Xeno has suffered his shipwreck and washed up penniless in Athens. He walks into a bookstore and he hears the bookseller telling a story about Hercules that Socrates was famously fond of. And there in the story, Hercules is, walking a lonely road in Greece. He comes to a fork in the path. Beside each one stands a beautiful goddess. They beckon him. One offers a life of ease, complete freedom, and absence from struggle or want. The other makes no such promises. In fact, she warns there will be struggle, sacrifice, and hard work.

• 1:20Ryan Holiday?

  But, and this is the big but, she says that her path is the path to greatness, to the heroic destiny that Hercules was born to fulfill. Was this real? Did it really happen? If it's only a legend, does it matter? Yes, because this is a story about us, about our dilemma, about our own crossroads. For Hercules, the choice was between vice and virtue, the easy way and the hard way, the well-trod path and the road less traveled. And the same goes for us. We face this choice right now and at every moment. Will we choose the easy life or the virtuous life? Will we choose principles or pleasure,

• 2:04Ryan Holiday?

  distraction or focus, temptation or discipline? Will we be Seneca who fell short? Or Marcus Aurelius who transcended? Will we be Nero? Or a hero. All of my writing and work has been building towards producing something that seeks to answer this question, not just for myself, but anyone striving to reach their full potential personally and professionally. And it's been an incredibly challenging endeavor, but I'm now well underway in what will be a four book series on the four Stilic virtues, which if you remember are courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. Marcus Aurelius called these four virtues the touchstones of goodness, but you might

• 2:46Ryan Holiday?

  look at them as the paving stones of the path of Hercules. And the first book in this series is now available for preorder. It's called Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave. And like my trilogy, The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, and Stillness is the Key, this is a book of ancient wisdom illustrated with stories designed to both inspire and be applied to your actual life. The Stoics believed that a life well-lived was one which always countered adversity with virtue, and they believed in four aspects of virtue: courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. And to millions, these are known as the cardinal virtues, four near-universal ideas adopted

• 3:27Ryan Holiday?

  by Christianity and most of Western philosophy, but they're equally valued in Buddhism, Hinduism, and just about every other philosophy you can imagine. And they're called cardinal, as C.S. Lewis points out, not because they've come down from church authorities, but because they originate from the Latin "cardo" or hinge. It's pivotal stuff, these four virtues. It's the hardware upon which the door to the good life hinges. And none of the other virtues are possible without courage. It's the backbone of the others. And this is why you can't find one good thing that did not require courage. If you wish to do great things, you're gonna need it. And so, the aim of my newest book is how to teach you to conquer fear, or at least

• 4:12Ryan Holiday?

  rise above it in the moments that matter. And I'm so excited to share it with you. I'm confident that it's my best book to date, and I think the blurbs in early reviews already hint that my confidence isn't misplaced. And because I'd like to encourage you to preorder Courage Is Calling right now, I've got a whole bunch of super exciting bonuses, including a signed and numbered page from the original manuscripts that I made as I was writing the book. You can learn about all this over at dailystoic.com/preorder. You can pick up Courage Is Calling anywhere books are sold. And I hope that you do that. You can order it on Audible. You can order it from an indie retailer. You can order it from Amazon. You can order it from me.

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  I don't really care. You can even order signed, physical copies from me as well. But the idea is, if you've gotten anything out of this podcast, out of my work over the years, if you could support the book by pre-ordering, it makes a huge difference when you are putting a book out in the world. The early momentum is so important. So if you could check out Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave, it's out at the end of September, but if you preorder it now, it makes a big difference. You can do that at dailystoic.com/preorder. And here, let me read you some of the blurbs real fast. General Jim Mattis, U.S. Marines and former Secretary of Defense, calls it "a superb handbook for crafting a purposeful life." Matthew McConaughey calls it "an urgent call to arms for each and all of us." And

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  my dear friend George Ravling said Courage Is Calling "dresses us with the proper garments of courage, something we need now more than ever." So I do hope you check it out. Go to dailystoic.com/preorder to pick up Courage Is Calling.

• 5:54Ryan Holiday?

  A Cure for Procrastination. Today's episode is about a cure for procrastination. And I will say one thing before I get into today's episode. If you have been procrastinating, picking up a copy of the new book, which is now available for preorder, I hope you do so. Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave is a book that, like all books, was a battle against procrastination. For me, it was about showing up every day. It was about doing the work, even when it was hard, even when there was other stuff I wanted to do, even when the world felt like it was melting down. Every book, as Steven Pressfield says, is a battle against the resistance. I'm glad to say, well, I can't say that I won, but I do know I came out the other side with

• 6:36Ryan Holiday?

  a manuscript and it is now imminently coming out. And I hope you check it out. We've got a bunch of awesome pre-orders. This is the first book in a series of four books I'm doing on The Cardinal Virtues. It's a big launch for me. I'm so proud of this book. I can't wait for you to see it. You can check it out. Courage is Calling, Fortune Favors the Bold, anywhere books are sold. And we have a bunch of awesome preorder bonuses for you at dailystoic.com/preorder. But let's get into today's episode. To the Stoic, procrastination almost looks like a form of delusion and entitlement. Who is to say you'll even be around next month, next month or next week to deal with it? If it's important, they say, don't wait, do it now.

• 7:21Ryan Holiday?

  As Marcus Aurelius says, if it needs to be done, do it with courage and promptness. And again, courage. 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. 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

• 8:06Ryan Holiday?

  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." 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, which is actually where I'll be writing about courage a bit more.

• 8:49Ryan Holiday?

  But I was actually just working on that courage, on the procrastination chapter yesterday. And this idea that, I really like 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 put a close, I gotta close it up today. I gotta do everything I'm capable of doing today. 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 comes, someone I love pulls up my laptop and goes, "Where was Ryan on that book?"

• 9:33Ryan Holiday?

  It won't be finished, but they'll, 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? It's like, you assign something with someone, that, you know, they've gotta do this, this or that. And then, you know, it's like, "Let's do it on Monday."

• 10:17Ryan Holiday?

  And then Friday, they're like, oh, I couldn't get the file open. 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 going to 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, as, as the procrastination. We tell ourselves we're going to do it. We're just lying to ourselves about when we're going to do it. And I think this, this is why the, the practice of memento mori is so important. If you go, 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.

• 11:02Ryan Holiday?

  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, uh, 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 can be done today, 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. But I hope you're winning the battle a little bit today. I'm proud to say I won the battle enough to get this book out there. I'm happy to tell you about it. Check it out. Courage is calling, fortune favors the brave. Check it out anywhere books are sold.

• 11:45Ryan Holiday?

  You can pick up a copy from me, my bookstore, The Painted Porch, uh, by going to dailystoic.com/preorder. And, uh, I hope whatever it is you have to do today, you take this message seriously and you go do it.