No, Not Later. Now. | How To Read Like A PRO

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, 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 dailystoic.com. No. Not later. Now. It's sitting there unopened in your inbox, it's there on your call sheet to return, it's there on your to do list to look at those numbers, and it's gonna keep sitting there because you refuse to look at it. You put it off, you procrastinate, you tell yourself, as Seneca says that all fools do, that you're just not ready to start yet. You could do it today, as Mark Sroul says, but yet again you choose tomorrow. Why? It's not gonna be any easier later. It might not also be that difficult right now. That's the funny thing you find about the stuff you put off. When you finally get around to it, you realize you've been dreading something that was actually pretty simple that only took a few minutes. Sometimes you find the email you didn't want to open turns out to contain nothing at all, just the other person telling you they need some more time to think it over and that they'll get back to you. What stoicism trains us to do is to have the willpower to bite the bullet, to one, two, three, four, five, jump, to do the thing that some part of us doesn't want to do. By training ourselves from cold plunges and lifting heavy things to having tough conversations and starting the project we've been dreading, we are building an override switch that allows us to push through resistance through excuses and our lazier impulses. It helps us become the person who does the thing now and not later. Now is for certain. Later is a lie. It's only gonna get harder the longer you wait. Stop putting it off. Do what you need to do. So on Monday, I had a talk. I was flying to Florida for a talk, but I took the kids to school. I worked at the office, and then I picked them up from school. We went to Whole Foods, did our weekly grocery shopping as, the boys and I do every week, and then I drove, we met at a parking lot near the airport. I handed my wife the kids and all the groceries, and then I flew to Florida, flew home, and then, when I got back the next night, I made myself a sandwich from the groceries that I had just bought. And actually, the week before, I I took them to Whole Foods for a weekly thing, and I had …