Life

A few years ago I went back to school. Each semester, including summers, I would take a double course load. The goal was to earn my degree in two years. (At one point in 2018 I was taking eight classes simultaneously.) I also worked full-time. Stress was constant and it occasionally felt like panic. I remember thinking, at times, this is too much. I’m not going to be able to do all of this in two years. What if it’s all for nothing?

Around this time I read one of my favorite ideas from Marcus Aurelius: “You can assemble your life action by action, and no one can prevent that.” Even ants and spiders go about their day putting the world in order as best as they can, he chided himself. “And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?”

This floored me. Why was I working myself up by thinking about all the things I still had to do? Why was I exhausting myself with what-ifs?

“Don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole,” Marcus Aurelius told himself. “Don’t try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, ‘Why is this so unbearable? Why can’t I endure it?’ You’ll be embarrassed to answer.”

It was also around this time that I learned “the process” that seven-time national champion football coach, Nick Saban, teaches his players. He found that the average football play lasts about seven seconds. Don’t think about winning a national championship, he tells his players. Don’t think about winning the game. Don’t think about what the scoreboard says. Focus on your inner scoreboard. Focus on executing the current play to the best of your ability. As long as you focus on the inner scoreboard, the outer scoreboard will take care of itself.

In other words: I didn’t have to feel overwhelmed! I didn’t have to think about all the assignments and classes I’d yet to complete. I didn’t have to think about graduating. I didn’t have to think about careers. I didn’t have to work late into the evening! I only had to do two things each day: 1.) Focus solely on the work in front of me and 2.) Complete a few key tasks. That’s it. I could let time, over the long term, do the heavy lifting. I would provide consistent, small steps. Time would turn those small steps into larger accomplishments.

Below is a page from my 2019 planner. For each class, I’d write the assignments and their due dates. My only focus was on completing assignments and submitting them. This kept me focused and gave me the satisfaction of seeing visible progress.

You can do your work as nature requires, Marcus Aurelius said, by working…     

Without frenzy or laziness

Without delving into other’s affairs

Focused like a Roman on the task at hand

While always asking, is this essential?

Calmly, steadily, and with no loose ends.

This is a great example of slow productivity.

It’s also a great example of a classical adage I love: Festina lente…

Make Haste, Slowly

“By any reasonable standard, [John] McPhee is productive,” writes Cal Newport. “He’s published 29 books …. And yet, he rarely writes more than 500 words a day. When asked about this paradox, McPhee famously quipped: ‘People say to me, ‘Oh, you’re so prolific’…God, it doesn’t feel like it—nothing like it. But, you know, you put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart.’”

Author Ryan Holiday is one of the most prolific writers of our generation. He’s written around a dozen books in 10 years (not to mention his countless other business and writing obligations). What’s most inspiring is that he still makes it home every day for dinner and evenings with his family. (After all, he reasons, how successful are you really if you can’t spend a lot of time with your family?)

How does he do it?

He explains that it’s a simple commitment to small, daily habits. “Two hours a day of writing may not seem like much,” he says, “but 2 hours a day for ten years adds up.” When he sits down to work on a book, his goal is not ‘finish the rough draft’, or ‘write until noon’—his goal is simply: ‘Write section 2 of chapter 3’. He doesn’t work on whims. There’s no time for toiling away in open-ended slogs. 

This idea is captured beautifully by Billy Oppenheimer, who recently wrote about Naval Ravikant’s approach: work like a lion. “The way people tend to work most effectively, especially in knowledge work,” says Naval, “is to sprint as hard as they can…and then rest.” Billy adds, “It’s like a lion hunting, [Naval] says: sit, wait for prey, sprint, eat, rest, repeat. The way to work most ineffectively is to work like a cow standing in the pasture all day, slowly grazing grass.”

Asked by his editor how he planned to write his epic novel East of Eden, John Steinbeck replied, “One foot in front of the other … Just get my two pages written every day. That’s the best and only thing I can do.” When his editor joked that he should increase his daily word rate, Steinbeck didn’t find it amusing. “I like to hold the word rate down because if I don’t, it will get hurried and I will get too tired one day and not work the next. The slow, controlled method is best.” He said he would not “permit himself the indiscipline of overwork. This is the falsest of economies.”

When the Duke of Milan questioned Leonardo da Vinci about his seeming procrastination in painting The Last Supper, Leonardo explained, “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work the least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.” In Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg put it perfectly: “You can’t think all your best thoughts in advance.” Success happens when you keep showing up, keep applying pressure.

We don’t have to trade sanity for excellence. We can take it action by action. We can make haste, slowly.

The problem with most time management systems, says Oliver Burkeman in his amazing book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, is that they don’t work. They tell you that you can get it all done, if only you manage your time just right. With enough preparation and calculation, you can have everything in perfect working order. 

But have you ever noticed how the second you complete your to-do list, it gets filled right back up? You answer an email only to receive another one. You finish vacuuming and now have time to do the dishes. “Productivity is a trap,” Oliver says. “Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.”

The problem is that we think of time as something to master, something separate from ourselves—instead of what it is: the unfolding of one moment to the next, the substance of life. “Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure … and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it,” Oliver says. So we end up filling our time with activities that have some future benefit. It becomes harder to just be, to accept and love the present moment for what it is. “We labor at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life,” said Nietzsche, “because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”

Oliver compares our view of time to an early medieval England peasant’s view: 

“The medieval farmer simply had no reason to adopt such a bizarre idea in the first place. … There was no need to think of time as something abstract and separate from life: you milked the cows when they needed milking and harvested the crops when it was harvest time … There was no anxious pressure to ‘get everything done,’ either, because a farmer’s work is infinite: there will always be another milking and another harvest, forever, so there’s no sense in racing toward some hypothetical moment of completion.”

There will never be some magical day in the future when you will feel completely in control, when everything will be clean and completed, when there will be nothing left to do. We can’t possibly get everything done (in fact, we have to neglect almost everything to get anything done). 

But this is great news.

It means we can stop pushing happiness and contentment into the future. We’re free to relax in the boundless joy of the present moment. “We can enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake,” says Oliver, by “first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain [life of its] value.”

A few weeks ago, my mom bought a frameless glass cabinet on Amazon and I offered to help assemble it. I’m not the best at putting things together, but it looked straightforward enough. Plus, the older my parents get, the more impressed they are by my capabilities. “Let’s see what we got here,” I smiled as I mimed pushing up my sleeves.

I spent the next two hours trying to interpret the instructions. Is this the rubber peg or the neoprene knob? I jumped online to find a YouTube tutorial—or at least a more helpful guide—and got nowhere. I went back to the instructions that came in the box and read them all the way through, hoping to get an idea of where to start by understanding the overall picture. Still nothing. 

I told my parents I was sorry, that I didn’t know where to begin—but Courtney would (my wife can put together anything). So, the following weekend, Court and I went to their house, determined to assemble the cabinet. She looked at the directions and admitted they were vague. But sure enough, an hour later, she had it put together. “How did you know to put that screw there to start?” I asked. “That’s the only thing I could make sense of,” she replied. “If I don’t know what the next step is, I just start doing something. Eventually, it all comes together.”

A few years ago, I was chronically distracted. I won’t bore you with the details, but I remember having a list of all the things I wanted to do—earn my degree, start a blog, change careers, change myself, buy a house—and feeling completely overwhelmed because I thought I had to do all of them immediately. I was focusing on everything, so I wasn’t progressing in anything.

Then I read the advice Derek Sivers said he would give his 30-year-old self: Don’t be a donkey. I realized I didn’t have to (and couldn’t possibly) do everything at once. All I had to do was focus on one thing at a time.

In Tools of Titans he explains,

“Don’t be a donkey . . . I meet a lot of 30-year-olds who are trying to pursue many different directions at once, but not making progress in any, right? They get frustrated that the world wants them to pick one thing, because they want to do them all: ‘Why do I have to choose? I don’t know what to choose!’ But the problem is, if you’re thinking short-term, then [you act as though] if you don’t do them all this week, they won’t happen. The solution is to think long-term. To realize that you can do one of these things for a few years, and then do another one for a few years, and then another . . . don’t be a donkey. You can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience.”

It’s human nature to procrastinate. But here’s the thing: we don’t procrastinate indiscriminately. We procrastinate doing the things that would have the biggest impact on our life. (That’s why we don’t procrastinate on things like checking our email or brushing our hair). When the urge to procrastinate is strongest, it’s usually a sign that it’s something we should lean into. 

Steven Pressfield calls this urge Resistance.

“Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it’s the easiest to rationalize. We don’t tell ourselves, “I’m never going to write my symphony.” Instead we say, ‘I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.’”

It’s important to note that Resistance is inside you. It has no power except for the power you give it. 

And there’s only one way to make it powerless: sit down, and do your work.