Why you should procrastinate more.

If you visit The Daily Stoic’s website you’ll find the podcast’s awesome past guests: Matthew McConaughey, Malcom Gladwell, Tim Ferris, Danica Patrick, Charlamagne Tha God for crying out loud…and me. (Host Ryan Holiday prudently left my unfamous name out of the episode’s title, referring to me instead as “Persuasion Expert.”)

But as I say in my latest book, whenever I feel intimated I remind myself that I’ve read Aristotle. Have they read Aristotle? I don’t have to be wise as long as Aristotle’s icy-hot wind is at my back.

In this excerpt of the podcast I sing the praises of procrastination, argue over whether discipline is that important, and agree that writing bad first drafts offers a ramp to good writing.

(See this post for the preceding excerpt.)

Jay

I needed something stupid and pointless in order to experiment on myself to see if I could convince myself it was possible. All right, none of that involved discipline. That was sheer fun, like a word nerd kind of fun.

Ryan

Well, that doesn’t involve discipline because you haven’t done it yet. You’re just the idea of doing it.

Jay

I hadn’t done it, exactly. But that was part of setting myself up. So not doing what I was supposed to be doing was the first step.

And Aristotle actually writes about this. I call it the ramp; he doesn’t, but the idea is that you begin at such a low angle, to the point where you’re just almost procrastinating. The very first thing I was doing was setting a goal, a very well defined goal.

Okay, now how am I going to do it? That’s planning. The biggest problem I had was time, as we all have.

So I decided I would create my own time zone. And my name is Jay, so I decided to call it Jaylight Saving. And again, here’s something that’s rhetorical, that doesn’t involve discipline, which is that if you can make your audience, including your own soul or you as the case might be, smile or laugh, you’re putting yourself into a more persuadable state. Behaviorists call it cognitive ease. Aristotle calls it receptivity. So I was making myself receptive just by making myself laugh at this stupid idea of my own time zone.

Of course, the problem with that time zone is no one else is in it, except my wife who gets up early. So I did it by waiting, which is a great thing to do if you don’t want to discipline yourself. Procrastinate. And every good writer—I’m gonna ask you if you do this—is a brilliant procrastinator. You’re really good at doing things other than writing.

Ryan

Deciding what day I’m gonna start, which is never today. It’s starting this on my birthday, you know, or whatever. That’s what makes you a successful writer.

Jay

That’s part of the whole ramping process. So I waited until the daylight saving changed in the fall to give, you know, the government granted me an hour of the day. And then the next year I did the same thing.

Now in the meantime, I was really starting to do the PT and the workouts and stuff until finally I spent a year training. Now one of the things I did was to reframe the very idea of suffering. And it started with this doctor giving me hundreds, literally hundreds of dextrose, sugar water shots, to kind of flood the zone of my nerves.

I won’t explain why; it’s gross. But I decided while I was lying there sweating on this table that this was part of my training. And once more, I wasn’t training to run up a mountain yet. I was training to suffer. And you know, the sophists believe that suffering was an actual skill, your ability to suffer.

Ryan

Certainly the Stoics would agree with that more than the Epicureans.

Jay

They would. Yes, that’s true. The Epicureans would do everything they could to avoid suffering. You’re absolutely right. But that being said, to me, none of that was discipline at all. There was a desire that came from this wonderful silly goal.

The other thing that I found was I wanted to be prepared for a higher order of failure. And you’ve written about this, which is this idea that this was literally an impossible goal. I had to convince myself that it was possible while at the same time realizing that failure, which would come from obstacles beyond my control, a very stoical principle, would still put me ahead.

Like, imagine if I could run again. It wouldn’t matter if I ran up this Mount Moosilauke in New Hampshire. But I would be able to enjoy myself running. I could ski again. All the delights I used to have.

Ryan

But so you did all these rhetorical tricks to persuade yourself and to make it less intimidating and whatever. But at some point you had to both do the training and then do the run. Isn’t that discipline?

Jay

Well, okay, I’m still procrastinating here. So the very first thing I did was to sit down and read. So I took my Jaylight Saving hour of the day, which became four in the morning, and I began my training by reading physiology books.

So, and this is part of changing my identity and getting in touch with my far superior soul, superior to my daily self. So I was looking at what Aristotle calls my phronesis, I translate it as craft, it’s often called practical wisdom. Like whether you know what to do, whether you can solve a particular problem where you have not just the book learning, but the experience.

Well, okay, I’d been running, I’d trained in the past, in my youth. But I thought, I wanna know exactly what’s going on with my body, especially an aging body. So I started reading journals, I started, and none of that was training. I was deliberately avoiding doing the actual PT and exercise.

Ryan

But you did train at some point, right?

Jay

Yes, weeks later, I started doing really easy things like foam rolling and yoga and stuff. And actually, the physiology reading was so difficult that I found yoga way easier. So in a way, the ramp kind of leveled itself a little bit.

All right, then gradually, it became not such a big deal. I was getting bored with yoga, which I hate. So I decided to start, the PT I was supposed to be doing, which is painful, I started doing that more, because that sure beats yoga.

So each step of the way, I was trying to keep the angle of that ramp as short as possible. Okay, but still, you’re right. There was a degree of discipline, but I wouldn’t call it that because at the moment I started doing that, I would start feeling sorry for myself and thinking, I’m not doing that.

This is actually kind of fun and interesting. I have my own time zone. I have read about physiology, and I’m learning all kinds of cool stuff, which is super fun. And then on top of that, I’m actually, I’m going to end up at the top of that mountain, even though I was still doing just like basic PT stuff.

Ryan

What is interesting, because I think we tend to think of discipline as a physical thing, right? So discipline is the running, the lifting weights, the not eating the foods or whatever, doing the flossing, but often times the discipline, I would argue, is in what you’re talking about, which is the persuasion and how we think about it and how we frame it. Like, there’s a writing rule I love, which is like two crappy pages a day.

That’s the ramp. So if you go, I have to write this book and I have to do it in two months, and that’s, you know, five thousand perfect words a day, you’re just, you’re going to despair and not do it. But if you just say, hey, I just need to make a small contribution today, I just got to show up.

And by dramatically lowering the stakes, or as to use your analogy, the angle of the ramp, then you just do it. And oftentimes you end up doing more than you thought, or you’ve tricked yourself into thinking that you’re not doing it when, in fact, you are doing it, because you finish a book by showing up every day and just writing a little bit, and then you edit it and refine it and you get where you want to go. But to me, that is an act of discipline also, because what you’re doing is sort of going, well, here’s the level I would be thinking about, here’s what I would be doing.

But by sort of outthinking or overthinking around it, I’m able to come up with, I’ll give you an example. I think also flossing is gross, it sucks. It’s a habit that’s hard to start, especially when you got to get the little box and pull out the thing and wrap it around your fingers and go like this.

And then it’s like somebody invents the little shticks or they invent, and then all of a sudden they’ve taken a thing that was difficult and they make it 40% easier. And now the discipline required to “do, it’s like work smarter, not harder, right? And I think that deciding to work smarter, the work that you did knowing, it’s like knowing myself, if this is just sheer physical training, I’m not going to have fun, I’m not going to do it, I’m going to be miserable.

And so you did a considerable amount of mental work to think around that, to then just get yourself to a place where you are doing the training necessary to do the thing that you want to do.

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