The Daily Stoic - Why Discipline is Destiny | A Cure For Procrastination

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

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Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wondering's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. There's nothing that's changed my life in this world more than books. I think you understand that about me. For more 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

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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 X-Mayot, Chris Bosch, and Barry Weiss, those who are live now, and they're more to come, check it out at Blinkist.com. Why Discipline is destiny. It's next 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-mastory. When we say that discipline is destiny, this is what we mean. That discipline is both predictive and deterministic. It predetermined that markets 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 the Fourth, sadly even Marcus' own undisciplined son, Comedis, 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 discipline people do well and undisciplined people fail, we know life is more complicated than that. 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, that 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 in 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, then 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. 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 pre-order bonus. We've got signed copies at dailystoke.com slash pre-order. You can even get signed to 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 signed a 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 book 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 dailystoke.com slash preorder would mean a lot to me. Check it out dailystoke.com slash preorder for discipline is destiny. Sash pre-order for discipline is destiny. 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 really 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,

nalling 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 Marx, really. 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 Surreali 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's Reel is 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. I got to do everything I'm capable of doing today. I got to 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, 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 with someone, you know, they've got to do 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. You often find that people, and this is where that idea of the resistance comes in, people delay getting started. Stephen 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. We put off the start date over and over 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 practice of momentum or 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 Stokes 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. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoog 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 a couple 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. Hey, Prime Members, 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. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different

iconic celebrity feud. From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans formed the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by

their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondery App.