The Daily Stoic - It’s Impossible For Them Not To Do So | How To Focus Like A Stoic Philosopher

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

They are who they are. Stop expecting them to be anything else.🎥 In a recent YouTube video, we explored why narcissistic leaders like Nero always fail in the end (the Stoics have some great insights on this), and how the narcissistic leaders in power today are bound to suffer a similar fate | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ4gbvjdIao&ab_channel=DailyStoic🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ 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. The Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake presents The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Filled with breathtaking battles, mythical creatures, and unforgettable characters. This new adaptation of C.S. Lewis's classic will mesmerize the whole family. Don't miss this epic adventure, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, this season at the Shaw Festival. For tickets, go to shawfest.com. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation

designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStelic.com. It's impossible for them not to do so. In the end, it doesn't work out for them. In the end, it does more harm than good. But they do it anyway, don't they?

So many people advised Nero against his various schemes. So many people tried to contain him, Seneca among them. But in the end, he did what all narcissists do, which is listen to their delusions and not their advisors. He just couldn't help himself. It is crazy to want what is impossible, Marx realist writes in Meditations, and impossible for the wicked not to do so. This is what Aesop's fable about the scorpion and the frog is about.

It's what so much of the ancient literature tries to remind us of. That cruel people do cruel things, that selfish people act selfishly, that destructive people do destructive things. And yet, we don't listen. We fail to learn the lesson and we get hurt. The world painfully shows us the perils of not heeding this basic warning. The wicked do what wicked people have always done. They are who they are.

Stop expecting them to be anything else. It's one of the hardest things to do in the world. It's hard to do in the modern world, but it was hard to do in the ancient world too. To focus, to lock in on something. To be great, to be successful, to be happy, you have to be able to focus. That is the secret to almost every form of elite performance. Large uninterrupted blocks of focused time. Focus is on you. No one can give it to you. No one can do it for you.

So it's this battle against yourself, against your tendency, against the noise, against what other people are doing, against bad habits and patterns. And that's what we're talking about in today's video. Hard-hitting and time-tested strategies from the Stoics to equip you in that fight against distraction, so you can focus on what truly matters, so you can do what truly matters. so you can do what truly matters. One of the most relatable scenes we get from the Stoics, it comes from Seneca's life. So I'll tell you this story. It's the late first century AD and Seneca is one of Rome's greatest playwrights.

It's one of its most important political power brokers. He's a successful investor. He's a busy guy, but he's trying to focus. He has to write this thing. And there's a million reasons why he can't write. Rome's politics are a mess. His personal life is a mess. And there's just so much noise, right? It is so noisy. Rome was like New York City construction loud. Seneca writing to Lucilius would describe. Rome was like New York City construction loud. Seneca writing to Lucilius would describe what it was like. He says that he can hear the gym next door. He can hear people jumping in the water.

He can hear a pickpocket being arrested outside his window. He can hear salespeople selling their wares. He can hear children laughing. He can hear dogs barking. He's hearing all this cacophony of noise that is preventing him from focusing on this thing in front of him. And so what does he do? He has to tune all of that out.

He says, I have had to toughen my nerves against that sort of thing. He says, I force my mind to concentrate, to keep it from straying to things outside itself. He says, all outdoors can be bedlam, but if it's internal, if it's peaceful in here, you should be good to go. I think sometimes when we think about concentrating, I think about this as a writer, you know, it's like, I want to get out to the country. I want to get quiet. I need everyone downstairs to stop making so much noise. And this is nice when you can get it, but it's also not realistic. The world is noisy. The world is loud. You have to cultivate what Seneca is talking about here. The ability to tune this stuff out. The ability to have peace inside yourself. You may be sure you are at peace

with yourself, Seneca said, when no noise reaches you, when no word shakes you out of yourself, whether it be flattery or a threat, or merely an empty sound buzzing about you with unmeaning sin. It would be nice if the world was quiet, if our kids never shouted or cried, if nobody ever knocked on the door, if they never did construction next door, but that is not realistic.

You have to cultivate the ability to focus inside the noise. I've heard of writers who go to coffee shops because it is noisy. They want to get comfortable with that noise. They want to be able to tune it out. If you can get in the zone anywhere, then you're resilient. Then you're going to be productive. Then you have real focus.

If your focus is dependent on external circumstances going your way, I'd argue that's not really focus at all that you are a fair weather focuser, if you will. The point is, we possess the focus, we possess the peace, the quiet, it is not about the environment. It's not about the sound machine, or the earplugs or the beautiful countryside that you're retreating to, you have to be able to focus anywhere and everywhere. I've done some of my best riding in the airports. I've done some of my best riding

while they're doing construction in my office. You have to be able to focus in any and every place. In meditations, Mark Strelius had a little test for himself. He was sort of critical of his lack of focus lately. We're going a million places all at once. And he says, look, if someone stopped you and asked, what are you thinking about? He said, would you be able to give a clear and concise answer?

He says, you have to be able to winnow your thoughts down, have some internal discipline in your mind, so that if somebody asks you that, you can answer. oh I'm thinking about this, I'm focused on that instead of trying to be everywhere all at once. Now look, obviously the mind wandering and curiosity, this can be helpful and sometimes that's where ideas and inspirations come from. But attention is a very powerful and even priceless resource and how are we directing it? How are we spending it? That is the critical question. And there's a reason that so

many industries and people and media companies and trends and ideological movements, there's a reason they are trying to fight for that. There are reasons they are vying for what military strategists would call the the battle space that is in your mind. This is the most valuable empire. This, they want your attention. They want to be able to direct you to think about this. What about this? Why aren't you feeling insecure about this?

Why aren't you worried about that? What about this? What's gonna happen here? They wanna take up your mental bandwidth. This empire between your ears is the most important real estate on the planet. If you cede control of it, then you're not in control of your own life.

It makes you easy to manipulate, easy to mislead, easy to distract, easy to make a mark for something. And look, the designers who worked on your phone, who worked on this algorithm that maybe even brought you this video, people are paid a gobsmacking amount of money to keep you watching, to keep you scrolling,

to direct your mind a little bit this way or a little bit that way. And this comes at the expense of your ability to focus and lock into what you want to be thinking about. So if you are not directing your mind, if you are not directing your thoughts, it's worth asking who is, what is. And so you must assert command over

yourself. That's what the Stoics say, that no one is fit to rule who is not first master of themselves. If you're not leading your thoughts, what is leading you? So we have to grab the reins of our mind, set up boundaries against these distractions. We have to tune out so we can tune in. And that's what Stoicism is, I think, that the image of the gladiator stepping into the arena of the mind, dominating that battle space, controlling their own mind, asserting control of that great empire, rather than letting someone else do it, letting someone else direct or control you.

One of the more famous passages in meditations is Marcus Relius at the opening of Book 5, talking about struggling to get out of bed in the morning. At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself, I have to go to work as a human being, right? And he says, well, but it's nicer here. He says, oh, what do you put here to feel nice to huddle under the blankets? No, you are not. That is not why we are here.

But I think there is something special and quiet about the mornings. I think there's a reason most high performers, most people who get a lot done tend to rise early. And the reason they do is that it's not just quieter in the morning, but you are fresher in the morning. In Discipline is Destiny, I tell the story of Toni Morrison. She said she had to wake up and get her writing done before she heard the word mom for the first time.

I like getting up, getting after it before anyone else has shown up at the office, before I've had any meetings, before I've had to eat. I just want to get up and get after it. I feel like focus is a finite resource, but it's renewable in the sense that we get a fresh load of it each day. And so to me, focusing on your deep work, your focus-based tasks, front-loading them in the day is really important.

That's another thing I talk about in Discipline is Destiny, the idea of doing the hard things first, right? Doing the thing that requires the deep work and the focus first. I'm not gonna be able to bring as much focus to bear on whatever I'm doing at 2 p.m. I'm not gonna be able to do it at 6 p.m. I'm not gonna be able to do it

after I've just had a taxing phone call and a meeting, and then I ran an errand, then I was waiting for something. The fresher I am, the more focused I am. So I wanna do it straight away. How you manage your media consumption or your information consumption connects to this. So if the first thing you do when you wake up

is check your phone, is turn on the news, is start talking to people, start responding to emails, you are choosing to spend your focus on that. One of my rules is I don't touch my phone for the first one hour that I'm awake, because I want to use that for focus on family, and then I want to use that focus on my creative tasks. So deciding how you spend your focus,

and when you spend it, and when you are freshest, is just a really important part of this. When Marcus Riles was talking about, you know, asking yourself, is this thing essential? I think another way to think about that is whether it's essential for you. It might be essential in terms of needing to get done, but is it the best use of your focus should you be doing it? One of the questions I ask myself when I'm thinking about focusing something is, is this

something that only I can do? Is this something that I am uniquely suited to think about or focus on? And if it's not, it still might be important. It just needs to be delegated. And we can imagine Mark Sturlus is one of the most important, powerful people in the world. How does he get all the things that need to get done done? And how does he protect and conserve his resources where they really matter? One of the things he says he learns from Antoninus is his ability to use experts, his ability to get things done with people, to collaborate, to delegate. You know, a micromanager is another way of saying someone who's really bad at focusing.

They're focused everywhere and thus nowhere, right? That's the problem with micromanagers is that they are missing the forest for the trees. Their job as a leader, as the head of the organization is to see the big picture and they are too focused on all these individual things or they're too focused on things that are below their view that somebody needs to focus on, it just can't be theirs. I remember one time when I was at American Apparel,

I looked down and I saw that the founder of the company directing traffic in the parking lot. Now the parking lot was a problem, it was an inefficiency, and he can notice that problem and say, hey, I need someone to handle this. But it's a bad use of his focus to be like, this car goes here and this car goes there, right?

And the ability for the leader to know what to focus on and to allow other people to focus exclusively on something, to lock in on something, while you take a more high level view is also really, really important. Seneca talks about tranquility or peace as this sense of the path that you're on, and he says, not being distracted

by the paths that crisscross yours, he says, especially the paths of those who are lost. And knowing what task, what piece of information, what news, what career trajectory someone else is on that doesn't pertain to you and to be able to focus on you, hey, I'm taking this step and this step and this step. This is the direction that I am going. That is essential.

And if you don't have that, you will end up very, very lost. One of my favorite lines from Senegal, he says, if you do not know what port you are sailing towards, no wind is favorable. So if you don't know what you you are sailing towards. No wind is favorable. So if you don't know what you're trying to do, if you don't know what you're trying to become, if you don't know what success looks like, if you don't know what matters, it's very hard for you to know what to focus on and not focus on. Knowing what to focus on is, I think, a product of having a big picture view of where you're

trying to go. Otherwise, all these other things are gonna come up, right? If you've ever seen the Eisenhower Matrix, he's talking about how there are urgent things and important things. And knowing what's urgent and what's important is really important, because if you don't, the urgent things are gonna demand your focus,

because they're there, they're happening right now, and you're gonna neglect focusing on the things that are going to demand your focus, because they're there, they're happening right now, and you're going to neglect focusing on the things that are actually important. And you're going to miss the really essential things which are both urgent and important. And so the idea of knowing what wind is favorable, knowing where you are trying to go, knowing what you are aiming at,

this is the most essential thing to have real focus and clarity about. When I have trouble focusing, when I'm noticing diminishing returns in my work, when I notice myself getting distracted, one of the things I do is take a walk. There's an old Latin expression, it is solved by walking, and we can imagine how busy and noisy it was where Seneca was talking. One of the things he could have done is gotten up and gone for a walk. He said, you know, the mind must be given over to relaxing, wandering walks. Moving is often a way I have found

to focus deeper. I'm putting one task aside and then by walking my mind is able to lock into something else. Again we can imagine how noisy and loud it was in Rome but how quickly one could get away from that by taking a few steps. Look it is hard to find a philosophical school in which walking was not a part of it. Kierkegaard said that he would walk miles and miles a day. It's where he would do all his thing. Actually I talk about this in stillness is the key too. I'll tell you. Writing to his sister-in-law in 1847, he said, above all, do not lose your desire to walk.

Says every day I walk myself into a state of wellbeing and walk away from every illness. Says I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. Tesla discovered the rotating magnetic field walking through a city park in Budapest. Nietzsche said that the ideas in one of his books came to him on a long walk. Hemingway would take long walks. Darwin took long walks. Steve Jobs took long walks. Martin Luther King would take a one hour walk through the woods every day to commune with nature. And Whitman and Ulysses S. Grant would see each other in Washington, D.C.

out for long walks. Whitman would talk about this in Song of Myself. He said, Knowest thou the joys of pensive thought, joys of the free and lonesome heart, the tender gloomy heart, joys of the solitary walk, the spirit bowed yet proud, the suffering and the struggle. There's something meditative about walking. There's something clarifying about walking. There's something that allows on the one hand, thoughts to just pop in your head and another for you to put serious brain power

towards whatever the thing that you're focusing on. When I have writing problems, that very chapter in stillness is the key. I wrote in many ways on walks. So we have to get up, get out, go for a walk. It's how we solve problems. It's how we lock in. It's how we focus.

And look, it doesn't just have to be walks. I find swimming helps me focus. I was on my bike this morning running to, the idea is sometimes getting moving, getting out and away from certain distractions, but also just getting in a different environment. It just helps us focus. And I think there's something about, you know, what we're evolved to do as nomadic people

who covered large swaths of territory over the course of our lives, that we are meant to be in motion. And you know, a drive can help. Doesn't just have to be under your own power. I like the extra physical benefit of it. But the point is get moving, get in motion, and let that lull you into a place of focus. Thoreau once said that to a philosopher, all news is gossip. Now, obviously, look, some news is important. There's just this problem we have told ourselves that to be an informed smart person you got to

be informed about everything that's happening all over the world at every moment. Then we wonder why we don't have any energy left to do our job. We wonder why we're fried. We wonder why we can't focus. We're spending our focus frivolously on things that have nothing to do with us, on things that we can't influence, on things that we already know enough about. Epictetus said that if we want to improve, we have to be content to be seen as foolish, like we have to be able to be bad at things, and then we also have to be able to be seen as clueless about some things. It can be a little awkward or embarrassing. You're at a dinner and everyone's talking about some news story and you're like, I don't, wait, what happened? I don't

know about it. Or to be out of the loop on some new TV show or new trend. Again, this can be a little awkward, but you should take that as evidence that you are tuning out a good amount of stuff that you are tuning in to what matters to you, that you are locked in. Steven Pressfield tells this story in The War of Art. He finishes a book, he walks over to his friend's house and he hears the news about Nixon resigning. And he realized

he'd been so focused, so locked in, he missed the whole Watergate scandal. If you're not missing out on some stuff, if there's not things that you're not following that you feel a little sheepish or embarrassed when you hear people talk about or out of the loop, that's a bad sign. You should be hearing that. You need to be so focused you are tuning some things out that you are missing out on some things. If you're gonna have FOMO, it shouldn't be about random news or trivia. Your FOMO should be missing out on the creative potential

that you have inside of you, on the results of the focus or the locking in or the resources that you're not putting towards the thing that really matters. Unless you're a CIA officer or you're running a hedge fund, you don't need nearly as much real-time information as you think that you do. Let events settle.

Get to it when you get to it. Focus on information that's gonna have staying power. Try to be disciplined about the inputs that you allow in. Because I think the ability to think clearly is not just about intelligence or discipline. It's about how much space it's about, how much time you have to spend on the stuff that matters. You have to be able to understand and harness the power of filters, creating barriers, creating a little bit of a bubble around yourself.

So only the things you want to let in come in. So what I'm saying is think about putting your news diet on a diet. What can you eliminate? What can you stop following? What notifications can you turn off? What can you unsubscribe from? What can you leave till later?

What group chats can you take an Irish goodbye from? How can you deliberately step away and give yourself permission to be out of the loop? If you wish to improve, you must be content to be seen as clueless about some matters. That is as clear as it gets. Obviously, when we think of focus, one of the contexts we think about it is this sort of deep work context of like locking into this task. But focus is the contexts we think about it is this sort of deep work context of like locking into this task.

But focus is also, I think, about what's in your purview and not in your purview or the focus that you are bringing to something you are looking at to make it clear or unclear. So sometimes the Stoics tell us that we want to zoom out, right? We want to zoom the focus out. Mark Srivastava talks about taking Plato's view, seeing everything from above. And by taking this different perspective, by focusing on the world or a problem differently, it looms less large, it causes less anxiety, it allows him to see it clearly. Now other times the Stoics are going to tell us to zoom way, way in, focus on this thing in front of you, like it's the only thing that matters. But this idea of just in the way that I might do it

with this camera that I can adjust the focus in or out to make the image clear or less clear, to go closer or further away, this is really a big part of stewardessism, the playing with the lens that we look at things with. And that sometimes we want the wide angle lens and sometimes we want the up close and personal lens. And that this ability to sometimes focus

only on what's in front of us and other times to see that whole big picture and how that reduces some of the things that we can now no longer see, right? When you take the 10,000 foot view, a bunch of stuff gets really, really small, and that's by design. So I don't just want you to, when you're like, hey, how can I focus?

It's not just about how can I lock onto this task and be more productive. I'm thinking about focus also in terms of like, hey, if I'm too focused on this, I'm going to be miserable and anxious and frustrated. But if I look at it maybe a bit more historically, I'm going to calm down a little bit. I'm going to see some opportunity. I'm gonna see the challenges for what they are. I'm not gonna be as worried about it, right? So when we're thinking about focus, we're not just thinking about, hey, I wanna focus,

I wanna get work done. But it's also about the perspective that we look at the events of the world through. It's very easy to get caught in the trap of doing more and more. We accumulate responsibilities, we accumulate duties, we accumulate tasks in the course of our life, in the course of our career. We are much better at adding than we are at subtracting. But we have to do this. Marcus really said, if you want tranquility, if you want effectiveness, you have to ask yourself this critical question. He says, you have to ask yourself, is this thing that I'm doing essential? He says, because most of what we do and say is not essential. But he says, when we eliminate the inessential,

we get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. One way to increase your focus is to eliminate the number of things that you are focused on. He who is everywhere is nowhere, the Stokes would say, if you are trying to focus on a million things a million different times throughout the day, you're going to struggle. But if you're focused on a few important tasks, few important topics, then it's easier to marshal that focus. And we're going to have to be ruthless in that pursuit. Seneca described most Romans as living in a kind of busy idleness.

He said, if you asked them what they were doing, they'd say basically, I don't know, stuff, all the stuff that I have to do. But what he was concerned about was the way that our days and our lives just fill up with tasks and stuff and responsibility. Because we're so good at adding and we are really bad at subtracting.

It is impossible to focus on more than a few things. So we have to ask ourselves, have I eliminated the inessential things so I can have more focus for the essential things? If you wanna add more to your plate, let's start by subtracting. If you wanna add more to your plate, let's start by subtracting. If you wanna get more done, let's first try to do less. We have a sign here in the daily stoic offices

that I borrowed from Per Se, the famous restaurant, one of the most famous restaurants in the world. And the sign just says, a sense of urgency. That's what a great chef, a great waiter, a great organization has, a sense of urgency. They're not just sitting around. It's not that they're rushed, but they're also not wasting time.

And I think a great person needs this, a sense of urgency. But it can be hard, right? When we have so many things going on, when we're confused about the best way to do it, when we're not sure the best order to do things, when we don't wanna screw it up, when we think we have until later. And we, and what the Stoics remind us though,

is that we might not have till later. Remember, Mark Cerullius is saying that he wants to concentrate like a Roman. He says concentrate on this as if it is the last thing you are going to do in your life. And this idea of memento mori, this meditating on our mortality is a really key way to help us focus.

You could be good today, Marcus writes in Meditations, instead you choose tomorrow. But we choose tomorrow because we think we have tomorrow. I quote Samuel Johnson in the memento mori chapter of The Obstacle is the Way, "'When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.'" Right, you wanna know what's essential

and what's not essential? Look at it in the light of a cancer diagnosis. Look at it in the light of a meteor headed towards Earth. Look at it in the light of your own biological clock ticking. We say we have more time than we do. We say that we have till tomorrow. And we tell ourselves this lie that I don't have to focus on it now. It doesn't matter. But it does matter. It does matter. And so many of these other things just profoundly don't matter. So let's make sure we're directing our resources properly. Let's do this thing as if it's the last thing

we are doing in our life. Or if we were in the last minutes of our life and we wouldn't do this thing, well, that tells us something about it. It tells us to not do it, to stop focusing on it. Again, the idea isn't to act with frenzy or haste here, but with deliberate speed, with purpose, with the concentration of a Roman,

the clarity of a person who understands not just that tomorrow isn't a guarantee, but understand what matters and what doesn't. The work that we are capable of, the things we need to do, they are waiting on us and they are waiting on our focus on our full attention. Every day I send out one stoic inspired email, totally for free, almost a million people attention. love to see you there. If you liked 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.

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