The Old Way Is Not The Only Way | Don't Let Your Attention Slide

Ryan talks about why you should be open to change, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day. 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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  "The old way is not the only way." Cato went down in history for his ardent defense of Rome's old ways, the mass maiorum. The Republic wasn't perfect, but he was willing to die for it. And this sacrifice, this commitment to it, enshrined his place in history forever. As it happens, this was a family business. The Catos had long been defenders of Rome's traditions. Cato's father did it, his grandfather did it, his great-grandfather did it. And that's partly how the Republic was able to last so long. It's why any institution endures. Some significant group of people are willing to protect and defend and live by its values. But there is a little historical irony in the Cato family

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  that reminds us that the old ways are not always perfect and that that's why we can't always resist change. Put aside slavery, put aside brutal wars of conquest and unequal political representation, all equal parts of the old ways that the Catos defended. And think about this. Although Cato the Younger became one of Rome's great Stoic philosophers, if his great-grandfather had had his way, that never could have happened. As I write in Lives of the Stoic, "When one of the first Stoic philosophers from Greece first lectured in Rome as part of a diplomatic mission in 155 B.C., Cato the Elder, Cato's great-grandfather, was horrified. 'Who are these academics with their new-fangled ideas?' He was saying, 'Who are these foreigners corrupting the youth?'

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  To Cato, philosophy was decadent and pointless and self-indulgent." And he suggested it be banished from the city forever. Little did he know that some five generations and 75 years later, it would be precisely this philosophy that girded his great grandson in one of the most important moments in Rome's history. Had Cato the Elder banished philosophy, there'd have been no Cato the Younger. And in fact, if there had been more Stoic philosophers in Rome at that time, perhaps they could have defeated Caesar and protected Rome better. The old ways are not perfect. We have to remember that. We have to be open to change, to new ideas, to new influences. We can't appoint ourselves as arbitrary enforcers of what culture is, of what people are allowed to do. And while there are certainly many things to learn from the old ways

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  and no shortage of old ways worth keeping, we can't keep every little thing as it was, not if we want to protect what really matters.

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  Don't let your attention slide.

• 3:13Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of the Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the bestseller list. It's just an awesome experience, but I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. "When you let your attention slide for a bit, don't think you will get a grip on it whenever you wish. Instead, bear in mind that because of today's mistake, everything that follows will be necessarily worse.

• 3:57Ryan Holiday?

  Is it possible to be free from error? Not by any means, but it is possible for a person to be always stretching to avoid error. For we must be content to at least escape a few mistakes by never letting our attention slide." That's Epictetus's Discourses. Winford Gallagher in her book Wrapped quotes David Meyer, a cognitive scientist at the University of Michigan. Einstein didn't invent the theory of relativity while he was multitasking at the Swiss Patent Office. Because in truth, it came after when you really had time to focus and study. Attention matters. And in an era where our attention is being fought for by every new app, every website, every article, every book, every tweet and every post, the value of attention has only gone up.

• 4:42Ryan Holiday?

  Part of what Epictetus is saying here is that attention is a habit, and that letting your attention slip and wander builds bad habits and enables mistakes. You'll never complete all your tasks if you allow yourself to be distracted by every tiny interruption. Your attention is one of your most critical resources. Don't squander it. There's a quote I was using from Epictetus in my new book about discipline, where I'm talking about focus. And Epictetus basically says, is anything improved by inattention? Does anything get better by only half focusing? Does that ever produce good work?

• 5:21Ryan Holiday?

  And the answer is no, it doesn't. Attention is everything. Attention is the prime resource. It's, you know, you know how you know attention is worth something? Because of all of the people who are not just competing for it, but building multi-billion dollars, or in the case of Facebook, trillion-dollar businesses on top of it. Attention is the most scarce resource in the world. This is based on our time, first and foremost, right? It's based on this non-renewable resource, which is our life, which, as Seneca says, is always tick, tick, ticking away. You've got to think about your attention as something to protect, something to spend wisely. And as my friend Cal Newport, who I've had on the podcast a bunch of times,

• 6:03Ryan Holiday?

  and he wrote two great books, which I highly recommend, Digital Minimalism and Deep Work. You can check out Deep Work in the Painted Porch bookstore. Love it. I'll link to it in today's episode. But to me, Deep Work is the ability to focus, to control your attention, to lock it in on something and not be thrown off it, not be pushed off of it. Basically, Cal says, if you think you're a good multitasker, you're bullshitting yourself, because you're not. Nobody is a good multitasker. You think like you're switching between tasks, like, like, for instance, as I was recording this, because I forgot to put my phone on do not disturb, I got a spam call. And you might have noticed that little glitch where I was talking, and even though it only took me a half second to turn it off,

• 6:46Ryan Holiday?

  it's going to take a second longer than I would like to admit for me to come back to being fully engaged. In this conversation that we're having. Now thankfully, this isn't a super taxing thing to do, but imagine that I did that a lot of times over the course of writing a book. Imagine if I did that a lot of times over the course of my relationship with my kids, which we all do. It takes a toll. It adds up. The more you can focus, the more you can lock in, the less you can let your attention slide, the better. As Epictetus is saying, is it possible to never do that? No. Right? It is impossible to be free of error, to always be locked in, to never be distracted.

• 7:28Ryan Holiday?

  But we must be content to limit it as much as possible. Everything that follows from that place of distraction, from letting your attention slide, from focusing on the wrong thing, from letting yourself get riled up, letting yourself get sucked down the rabbit hole, letting yourself go into doom scrolling mode. What comes out of the other side of that is not as good as the alternative. The conversation you have is not as good. The work that comes out of is not as good. The connection between you and your kid, or your wife, or whomever is not as good. When you let your attention slide, there is a cost. That switching, it creates a residue. It creates a lag, creates a glitch, and it adds up. You have to understand that. It adds up. So lock in, create boundaries.

• 8:13Ryan Holiday?

  Like, that's what the do not disturb mode on the phone is for. It's why I usually put it face down in the other part of the room. It's why I don't have alerts on my phone. It's why even the fact that it was only vibrating on the table, it was less disruptive than that super loud ringtone that can sort of pierce the silence of a room. You gotta create focus. You gotta create space. You can't let your attention slide. Your attention is the most important thing. You only get this moment once. Don't waste it being distracted. Don't waste it by being only half-present. You have to focus.

• 8:50Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the stoa, the stoa pokile, the painted porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about like today's episode, you could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic meditations over the weekend, just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best of meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts.

• 9:34Ryan Holiday?

  And this is the best part, all our Daily Stoic courses and challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial totally for free. Check it out at DailyStoicLife.com.