The Daily Stoic - There Is No More Or Less Time | Don't Let Your Attention Slide

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

Three years removed from those eerie and strange days of the early pandemic, one thing that strikes us is how much time we seemed to have then. People were picking up hobbies, slow cooking elaborate meals on the groceries they could get. People found their jobs that used to keep them late at the office could be finished in a couple hours. People were reading philosophy and zipping through books. There was no business travel, no long days on the road. The days blurred into each other, but there seemed to be infinite space for chatting with friends and family over Zoom, catching up on TV series we missed.It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. But it sure felt like there was a lot of time.Today, with life back to ‘normal,’ all that seems very far away.---Andy in today's Daily Stoic excerpt reading, Ryan discusses why holding your attention on what really matters in a world full of media that is constantly trying to pull it away is a crucial part of maintaining a happy and healthy.📔 Check out The Painted Porch to order a copy of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.✉️ 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, including signed copies of Discipline is Destiny.📱 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.

It's funny, I talk to lots of people and a good chunk of those people haven't been readers for a long time, they've just gotten back into it. And I always love hearing that and they tell me how they fall in love with reading, they're reading more than ever, and I go, let me guess, you listen, audio books don't you? And it's true, and almost invariably, they listen to them on Audible. That's because Audible offers an incredible selection of audio books across every genre from bestsellers and new releases to celebrity memoirs. And of course, ancient philosophy, all my books are available on

audio, read by me for the most part. Audible lets you enjoy all your audio entertainment in one app, you'll always find the best of what you love, or something new to discover, and as an Audible member you get to choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog, including the latest bestsellers and new releases. You'll discover thousands of titles from popular favorites, exclusive new series, and exciting new voices in audio. You can check out Stillness is the key, the daily dad I just recorded. So that's up on Audible now. Coming up on the 10-year anniversary of the obstacle is the way audio books. So all those are available and new members can try Audible

for free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash daily stoke, a text daily stoke to 500 500, that's audible.com slash daily stoke, a text daily stoke to 500 500. The Dell Technologies Black Friday in July event is on with limited quantity deals on top business PCs with Windows 11 Pro. Save on select Vostro laptops with built-in OS recovery, fingerprint readers and antivirus protections.

Plus, you can save on select latitude laptops with a wide range of built-in privacy collaboration and connectivity features. Enjoy unmatched productivity and connectivity with incredible savings on our best tech. Get free shipping and special financing with Dell Business Credit. Dell Technologies recommends Windows 11 Pro for business. Find the right tech for your needs by calling a Dell Technologies Advisor at 877-Ask Dell. That's 877-Ask Dell offered to business customers by WebBank, who determines qualifications for in terms of credit. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the daily stoic my book 366 meditations on wisdom perseverance in the heart of living which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator translator and a literary agent Stephen Hanselman. So today

we'll give you a quick meditation from the stoics with some analysis from me and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works. There is no more or less time. Three years now from those eerie and strange days of the early pandemic, one thing that strikes us is how much time we seem to have that. People were picking up hobbies and we were trying to get rid of them.

We were trying to get rid of them. We were trying to get rid of them. Three years now from those eerie and strange days of the early pandemic, one thing that strikes us is how much time we seem to have that. People were picking up hobbies, slow cooking elaborate meals on the groceries they could get. People found that jobs that used to keep them late at the office could be finished in a few hours. People were reading philosophy and zipping through books. There was no business travel, no long days on the road. The days blurred into each other, but there seemed to be infinite space for chatting with friends and family

over Zoom, catching up on TV series that we'd missed. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but it sure felt like there was a lot of time. Today, with life back to normal, that can all seem very far away. Where did all that time go? How are we suddenly so much busier? There are still the same 24 hours in a day, but somehow we're rushed. Everything is sped up. Those hobbies, those meander and catch-ups and the calls have fallen away like the COVID case counts. What gives? Sure, part of it is how the world got paused, but most of it is much simpler. In the midst of a crisis, a lot of things fell away. We had clarity.

Marcus Reales would say that the essential question of life was to ask ourselves whether the things we were doing were, in fact, essential, eliminating the inessential created room he said to do the essential things better. We still have the same number of hours in the day, but our sense of clarity is gone. Our priorities have slipped. We're saying yes to things that the lockdowns and protocols and flattening the curves said no to for us. And much of this stuff is wonderful, seeing friends in person, taking our kids to and from school, for example. But a lot of it is not. A lot of it is waste. A lot of it is inessential. We can go back to living in that moment anytime we like. We have all the time in the world we need to be productive,

philosophical and purposeful. We just have to seize it. We just have to be disciplined about it. And that is what discipline is destiny is all about, which you can grab anywhere, books or so. We've got some sign copies in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. You can also grab sign copies if you ever

swing by the painted porch here in Bastard, Texas, my little bookstore on Main Street, Texas. But if you haven't read Discipline, it's destiny. It makes a great audiobook, ebook, whatever, but I hope you like it. Don't let your attention slide. It's April 21st, this is today's entry from the Daily Stoic. 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. Is it possible to be free from air, not by any means, but it is possible for a person to be always stretching to avoid air. 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 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 he really had time to focus and study. Attention matters. 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. Part of what EpicTidus 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 when I'm talking about focus. Epictetus basically says, is anything improved by inattention? Does anything get better by only half focusing, does that ever produce good work? And the answer is no, it doesn't. Attention is everything. Attention is the prime resource. It's, 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 in the case of Facebook, trillion dollar businesses on top of it. Attention is the most scarce resource 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 Asenica says is always 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, and he wrote two great books, which I highly recommend digital minimalism and deep work. You can check out deep work in the Pain of Porch books, or 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, Kyle 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, for instance, as I was recording this, because I forgot to put my phone on, on Do do not disturb it, 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, 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 is in 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 Epititus is saying, is it possible to never do that? No, right? It is impossible to be free of error to always be locked into, never be distracted, 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's 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. 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 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 ring tone 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 can listen to the Daily Stoke early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty.

So, if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondery that shares a refreshingly honest

and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently?

And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wonder e app. or Wendry app.