Why Discipline is Destiny | A Cure For Procrastination

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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.

• 0:33Ryan Holiday?

  There's nothing that's changed my life in this world more than books. I think you understand that about me. If it weren't for books, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast. I wouldn't have a job. We'd be in different places. And so if you're thinking about reading something and you're not sure what it's about, you want to get more than just the gist out of it, well, then I think you should check out Blinkist. Blinkist offers the best selection of nonfiction books. They pull out key takeaways and put them into 15-minute text and audio explainers called blinks for an immediate moment of meaningful inspiration. Blinkist has more than 5,500 titles across 27 categories and also produce shortcasts, which is their approach to podcasts. Thanks to Blinkist, you can access valuable knowledge and great ideas quickly. And the Daily Stoic is now available as a shortcast on Blinkist,

• 1:17Ryan Holiday?

  which you can check out some of our episodes there. We worked directly with Blinkist to pull out the most important, interesting, and actionable information. And they put it together with their award-winning sound design. You can check out their first episodes with Ex Mayo, Chris Bosh, and Barry Weiss. Those are live now, and there are more to come. Check it out at blinkist.com.

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  Why Discipline is Destiny. It's next to impossible to know what adversity or what good luck will fall in someone's lap. Will they be able to handle it, whatever it is? Will they rise to the occasion or be corrupted or destroyed by it? As it happens, this is easy to predict. Look at Marcus Aurelius. He was gifted with all sorts of incredible things. Power, money, great teachers. How did he manage to remain good, though, when so many others, from Nero to Tiberius, had been broken by those same exact gifts? The same way that he managed to not be broken by the incredible adversity of the Antonine Plague. It was his discipline, his temperance, his moderation, his self-awareness, his balance and his self-mastery. When we say that discipline is destiny, this is what we mean.

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  That discipline is both predictive and deterministic. It predetermined that Marcus would not only be a great emperor, but a great man too. Just as it assured that the final chapters for the cautionary tales of history, King Alexander, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, King George IV, sadly even Marcus's own undisciplined son, Commodus, would be self-inflicted destruction. And so it goes for all of us. If you want to know why things are the way they are in your life right now, your discipline got you there. If you want to know how things are going to go for you in the future, your discipline will take you there. It's not simply that disciplined people do well and undisciplined people fail. We know life is more complicated than that.

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  The maxim means that the traits of discipline predict the kinds of actions we will see. The undisciplined person may succeed, but it will be an unstable, chaotic success. The unrestrained will end up unraveling the institutions around them. The lazy will end up missing some critical piece of information that cost them. The overly passionate will take it too far and pay for it. The arrogant will ignore the people and the warnings that could have saved them. Who we are, the standards we hold ourselves to, the things we do regularly, our personality traits, in the end, these are all better predictors of the trajectory in our lives than talent, than resources, or anything else. And these tell us how we'll respond to the future swings of fortune, which is ultimately all we need to know.

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  "Most powerful is he," Seneca said, "who has himself in his own power. Most powerful is he who is disciplined, because discipline is destiny." And that's the aim of the new book, Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control. And it's about trying to help you harness the powers of self-discipline. I've got my first copies of it here on my desk. I've been signing these books like crazy as part of the preorder bonus. We've got signed copies at dailystoic.com/preorder. You can even get signed manuscript pages that helps produce the book. You can get the Spotify playlist I made when I was writing the book. You can even get bulk copies for your team or your group. I would love for you to help me by supporting this book. And you can do that at dailystoic.com/preorder.

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

  It would mean a lot to me. Check it out, dailystoic.com/preorder for Discipline is Destiny.

• 4:45Ryan Holiday?

  A Cure for Procrastination.

• 4:50Ryan Holiday?

  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.

• 5:32Ryan 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." 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."

• 6:15Ryan Holiday?

  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 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 I love pulls up my laptop and goes, where was Ryan on that book? 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.

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  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 to someone, you know, they've got to 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. 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.

• 7:44Ryan Holiday?

  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. 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.

• 8:29Ryan Holiday?

  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. And I hope whatever it is you have to do today, you take this message seriously and you go do it.

• 9:00Ryan 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.