This Is How To Live Well | Don't Let Your Attention Slide
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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.

It's one of the most haunting paintings you'll ever see. More than 11 feet wide and 8 feet tall, painted in rich but dark oils, Eugene Delacroix, a student of the Stoics, captures Marcus Aurelius at the end of his life. A plague has devastated Rome. His troubled son stands in the wings, unlikely to rule well. Marcus has had a hard life, filled with adversity, not meeting, as one historian noted, with the good fortune he deserved.

Yet he strived to do right and to be good. He escaped imperialization, in his words, avoided being Caesarified and dyed purple by the power of his position. He kept the faith, kept his empire going, doing his best.

And now, weak and frail, the end was here. He knew, as he would say to his bodyguard, that the sun was setting. With his last breaths, he is said to have grabbed the attention of his friends who are shown weeping and gathered round in the painting. Why do you weep for me? Marcus asked them. They should be thinking of the plague and all the lives that it claimed. They should be focused on getting their own affairs in order.

And while these words and the words that Marcus said to his bodyguard were his actual final words, the last lines in Meditations are worth musing on today as they are as beautiful and haunting as that great painting.

As Gregory Hayes renders them, you have lived as a citizen in a great city, five years or a hundred. What's the difference? The law makes no distinction, Marcus writes. And to be sent away from it, not by a tyrant or a dishonest judge, but by nature who first invited you in, why is that so terrible? Like the impresario ringing down the curtain on an actor, but I've only gotten through three acts. Yes, this will be a drama in three acts. The

The length fixed by the power that directed your creation and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine. So make your exit with grace. The same grace that was shown to you.

As I detail in Marcus's chapter in Lives of the Stoics, which is actually in the back of the leather-bound edition of meditations that we have in the Daily Stoic store, the life of Marcus Aurelius is one that teaches us how to live well. And because he lived well, Marcus's story is also one that teaches us how to go out well, with grace, with strength, with empathy, with the comfort from knowing that he lived a good life as a good man.

Maybe you've read meditations front to back a dozen times, but if you haven't studied his life, his last words, his example, you must.

We're calling April Marcus Aurelius month here, Meditations Month, because it's Marcus's 1905th birthday. And so we've just been doing this deep dive into meditations. We have this awesome step-by-step guide, sort of a course about meditations. If you've been interested in reading the book, we're going to be doing a live Q&A as part of that course on April 26th, which is for everyone who has purchased it. I did a new forward to the paperback edition of Meditations and...

the hardcover, which you can grab at store.dailystoic.com. And then of course, we have our leather bound edition of meditations. If you want one that will stand the test time and you can bundle all that stuff together. I'll link all of that in today's show notes or just head over to dailystoic.com slash meditations.

Don't let your attention slide. It's April 21st. This is today's entry from the Daily Stoic, which you can check out in the Daily Stoic store. 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 error? Not by any means, but it is possible for a person to be always stretching to avoid error.

for we must be content to at least escape a few mistakes by never letting our attention slide. That's Epictetus' 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 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. And 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 Epictetus 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 correctly.

If you allow yourself to be distracted by every tiny interruption, your attention is one of your most critical resources. Don't squander it.

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. 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, or 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, as Seneca 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 Painted Porch bookstore. 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, Cal 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 do not disturb, 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 isn't 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 less you can let your attention slide, the better. As Epictetus is saying, is it possible to never do that? No, right? It is impossible to be free of error, to always be locked in, to 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 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'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 ringtone 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 have to focus. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic 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 the 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.

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