It’s Happening, Page By Page, Day By Day | Be Stingy With Time

It doesn’t feel like much. It’s just a perfunctory part of the morning. A little bit of tidying up, a way to get a little dose of inspiration. A way to keep track of the date. But as you tear the page of that little calendar that sits on your desk–the Daily Stoic version perhaps?!?–it hardly occurs to you what’s happened. You miss it, but it does not miss you. A tragedy has occurred. A death…yours. For an easy way to start the day with a good quote, check out our Daily Stoic Page-a-Day Calendar. The 365 day tear-off calendar features the best Stoic quotes from Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, and others. And this calendar is now perennial! So you can purchase it any month, and use it for any year. Click here to learn more.---And in today's Daily Stoic journal reading, Ryan reminds us to be stingy with our time just as we do with money and possessions. Life is long enough, and its proven to bring us great benefits if we use our time wisely.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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.

• 0:38Ryan Holiday?

  It's happening page by page, day by day. It doesn't feel like much. It's just a perfunctory part of the morning, a little bit of tidying up, a way to get a little dose of inspiration, a way to keep track of the date. But as you tear the page off that little calendar that sits on your desk, and actually I have to tear off the page of today's Daily Stoic calendar.

• 1:01Ryan Holiday?

  As you do that, as you tear it from the top, it may not even occur to you what's happened. You miss it, but it does not miss you. A tragedy has occurred, a death, yours. When we tear off yesterday's page to reveal today, that's what we're marking. Not the fact that we're one day closer to death, Seneca would say, but actually that we have died one day. And those days where you forgot about the calendar and now you're ripping off a few sheets to catch up, that's a week, a chunk of your life, gone, gone, gone. And Seneca would ask, what do you have to show for it? Even if you live a lot of years, even if you go through many such calendars, you ought to hope that you have more to show for it than stacks of torn off pages. You should have something to show for each day

• 1:46Ryan Holiday?

  that you were lucky enough to live.

• 1:50Ryan Holiday?

  And it's funny, I've probably done four, five years of the Daily Stoic calendar. I don't remember exactly when we... Brought it out, which I guess is sort of the point. But every time I tear it, I think, man, yeah, day gone. Or I go, oh, I forgot for a couple of days. Oh, it's been two weeks. Oh, we took a month long summer vacation. I haven't been in the office. And then I've got 30 pages to tear off at one time. As I get here towards the end of the year, there's very few pages left in this calendar. And I'm going to have to start a new one as I tear the plastic off, open the box, slide it on the table. Boom, that's that process happening again. And you only get to do it so many times. So the calendar is great. It's got a little sort of Stoic reminder every day. It's the quote from the Daily Stoic and sort of nice visual form there for you.

• 2:33Ryan Holiday?

  But there's this meta lesson that goes along with it. It's the same one, I think, every time I cut my kids' fingernails. I'm going to get my hair cut tomorrow. I go, yeah, time has passed and I have passed with it. What do I have to show for it? Am I being the person that I want to be? Am I taking that time for granted? Am I assuming that I always get to do it again? Because one day you don't. And that's the message of the Daily Stoic calendar, which you can grab in the Daily Stoic store. Just go to store.dailystoic.com and I'll link to it in today's episode as well.

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  Be stingy with time.

• 3:14Ryan Holiday?

  One of the most common sayings we hear, and you might have said this yourself, is that life is short. And it is, but as Seneca remarked, it's pretty long if you know how to use it. And the first step to that is not giving so much of this time away to other people. Being miserly about our time is a powerful exercise, which can keep us from squandering the one truly non-renewable resource. What in your life consumes a lot of time for no good purpose? What amusements or desires consume our time without giving us a good return?

• 3:52Ryan Holiday?

  As you review that list, make a commitment to doing something about it. Life is short, after all, and you don't have much to spare. Seneca says, "We're all the geniuses of history to focus on a single theme that could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness, the human mind. No person would give even an inch of their estate, or the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay. Yet we easily let others encroach on our lives. Worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person would hand out their money to a passerby, but how many of us hand out our lives? We're tight-fisted with our property and money, and yet we think too little of wasting

• 4:34Ryan Holiday?

  time, the one thing we should all be the toughest misers about." That's Seneca on the shortness of life. "It is not that we all have too short a time to live," Seneca says, "but that we squander a great deal of it. Life is long enough, and it's given in sufficient measure to do many great things if we spend it well. But when it's poured down the drain of luxury and neglect, when it's employed to no good end, we're finally driven to see that it is passed by without us even recognizing its passing. And so it is. We don't receive a short life; we make it so."

• 5:16Ryan Holiday?

  Or as I've also heard it rendered by Seneca, "It's not that life is short, it's that we waste a lot of it." And this all comes from his wonderful essay on the shortness of life, which you should absolutely read. It's a very powerful essay. It's worth rereading a couple of times a year, to be quite frank. But I was thinking about this recently. I'd serve two good examples. Number one, I'm trying to get this television delivered, and anyone who's been trying to buy furniture or televisions or anything recently knows just how messed up the supply chains and logistics are. But anyways, it was supposed to come, and then it didn't come, so I messaged the people, and then it was supposed to come the next day, so I messaged the people, and then they

• 5:59Ryan Holiday?

  were supposed to message, then again, then I had to contact Amazon about it, and then they said they were gonna do it, but I got passed. Anyways, I'm spending time after time after time. And then at some point, someone promised me a $200 credit on this TV, which is, you know, free $200, not bad, but...

• 6:17Ryan Holiday?

  It occurred to me that one, I'd already objectively spent more than $200 of my time on this thing, like if what an hour of my time is worth. But also, if you just asked me, hey, would you spend $200 more on the TV? And not have to go through this, I would have taken that option as well. And, and I had to, I'm having to, I had to wrestle with, how much energy am I going to spend trying to get this $200 credit? That may or may not ever exist, the TV from these people may or may not ever, to chase down. And so, of course, if someone stole $200 from me, I'd be very upset, right? If they'd overcharged me $200 for this TV, I'd have been upset.

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  But I'm willing to spend $200 of my time to either get this credit or to get this TV, right? And that's what we do, we waste our time. We, we value money and property, as Seneca is saying. But time is this like thing that we assume we have an unlimited amount of, because no one, I don't know, it's just crazy. And then I, I think about this with the bookstore, which I, I, I love and I'm so proud of, but people come by and they want to say hi, you know? And I think sometimes people think it's rude that I won't run downstairs to see everyone that's, that's here, and I can't do that, right? Because not only do I have work, but if I did that for every single person, I would never have

• 7:43Ryan Holiday?

  time, I'd never have, I, I'd, I'd use up all my time. I could spend almost the entire day doing that. And so when Seneca talks about being a miser, a miser, if you're not familiar with that word, miser is like someone who's tight-fisted with money, it's like a cheap person. But he's saying you have to be cheap with your time. You can't give it away. Yes, you should be kind and, and treat people well, and not be rude about it, and not be self-absorbed, but you have to be a bit of a miser with your time, because you, you're gonna have to hurt people's feelings, or not give them everything they want.

• 8:23Ryan Holiday?

  When you say no, you're gonna have to say no sometimes. And that's not fun. But I always try to remind myself, who, when I'm saying no to one person, I am also saying yes to something else. And conversely, when I'm saying yes to some inquiry, I'm also saying no to someone or something else, right? And that's just the struggle that we're on. And if you have kids, if you have a spouse, if you have work that's important, if you have potential you're trying to fulfill, if you're just trying to get better at yourself, it's gonna mean being tight-fisted with your time. It's gonna mean saying no to people. And that's just how it goes. That's just how it goes.

• 9:05Ryan Holiday?

  And so I would urge everyone to take a minute, value, try to think about what an hour of your time is, is worth, right? Try to think about things that you can take off your plates and get that time back. But then think about what you are frivolously spending your time on, and if that's worth it. What are the rote tasks, the things that you do, the things that you go, ugh, you put off and you dread doing them? What are those things? Why are you still doing them? Do you need to be doing them? And at the end of your life, when you go, man, that flew by. I wish I had just one more day to do X, one more hour to do X, right?

• 9:48Ryan Holiday?

  Are you gonna look back and be like, well, I am, I am glad that I spent X many hours doing this? Think about your commute, right? How many hours you're gonna spend doing that? Think about how many hours you spend in meetings. Think about how many hours you spend on ridiculous trivialities, right? I think what, what I like to point out, like Senator, his thing about neighbors is like, yeah, if your neighbor's encroached on your property, you would object. But if your neighbor came over and just wanted to gossip about nonsense, you would indulge that, right? And that's not a good idea. You have to be miserly with your time. Not selfish, not, not, not cruel, not indifferent to other people's time, of course, but, but a bit miserly with your own time. And

• 10:34Ryan Holiday?

  They sting you with it, as they said. And I'll cut this episode short, so I'm not taking up too much of your time. But you get the point.