The Daily Stoic - It’s A Very Timeless Thing | A Cure For Procrastination

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

Marcus Aurelius was not like you at all. Yet…we can tell from Meditations that Marcus Aurelius was also just like us.🎙️ Listen to David Hernández de la Fuente’s interview on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, & Wondery💡How to Read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (A Daily Stoic Guide) is designed to help you get the most wisdom and very best tools Stoicism has to offer and apply them to your life. 📕 Pick up your own Premium Leather Edition of Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Gregory Hays Translation) at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/✉️ 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 FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audiobooks in the car. Instead of having that be dead time, we want to use it to have a live time. We really want to help their imagination soar. And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories,

self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audio books without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app.

And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing right now on Audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30 day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing right now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. 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. It's a very timeless thing. In one sense, he was as unlike you as is even possible. He was born to a rich family 18 centuries ago.

He was selecting by a dying and childless king to succeed him, made part of a chain of adoptions that would make him the most powerful man in the world 23 years later. He was worshiped as a god. He also buried nine children. He led an enormous army. He had the power of life and death

over millions of subjects. He was a high of life and death over millions of subjects. He was a high priest in a time of primitive cults. Marcus Aurelius was not like you at all. How could he have been? The past is a foreign country, they say, and Marcus Aurelius existed in a remote, exotic corner thousands of years ago. He was not like you at all.

Yet. This is a guy who struggled to get out of bed early. This was a guy who loved his wife and also had to deal with gossip that she was unfaithful. This was a guy who loved to go hunting and horseback riding. He also enjoyed plays and poetry. He got mad about stuff. He liked playing pranks.

He had close friends and mentors. We can tell from meditations that Marcus Aurelius was also just like us. David Hernandez de la Fuente, a Spanish classicist and translator of Marcus, a recent guest on the podcast, I'll link to that. He says that the man's writings reveal the picture of a man with two voices coexisting, one that doubted and suffered, while the other acted as a teacher, offering comfort and certainties. Marcus Aurelius was a guy with the same inner dialogue as us,

the same struggles as us, the same battles as us. This was a very different man from a very different time, yet he was also still essentially a human, still essentially us. He has so much to teach us. He shouldn't be so relatable yet, somehow through the peculiarities of meditations, as we've said before, he somehow is.

It's a remarkable twist of faith, and also a very timeless thing. If you haven't read meditations, you absolutely should. My favorite translation is the Hayes translation, the Modern Library. I've got a paperback of it at the Painted Porch, but I also put out our own edition, that leather edition, that's the one I read every day. I'll link to that.

And if you're like, hey, I really want to read meditations, but I don't know where to start or I want a book club. Well, let's all do it together. We have this really cool, Haley Stoke course on how to read meditations and what you should take out of it. I think it's one of the best courses we've done. You can check that out.

And if you join Haley Stoke Life, you can get it for free. a bunch of awesome stuff to check out. Just do your job and do it well. Today's episode is about 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 Mark Cirillis 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. 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 in the mind and 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 Mark Cerullis 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 Mark Cerullis again, Meditations 822, you get what you deserve. Instead of being a good person today, you choose instead to be one tomorrow.

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 got to close it up today today. I gotta do everything I'm capable of doing today. I 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 are impressed but really you budgeted some extra time there. 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 this is why 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 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. If you want to come see me talk, if you want to see me get over some of my own stage fright, and you want to ask questions and hang out a bit, I would love to see you. I'm doing events in London, Rotterdam, and Dublin in early November. And then after that, Vancouver and Toronto. This is all basically the 12th through the 20th.

So it's gonna be a busy November for me. So grab tickets, ryanholiday.net slash tour. Both the events in Australia sold out. So these will sell out also. So grab your tickets. I'll see you all soon. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music.

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