Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Seven Stoic Strategies to Be More Disciplined. Number one, it starts in the morning. Mark Stewart says, at dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, you want to huddle under the blankets. He says, ask yourself, is this what you were put here to do? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? No, you were meant to do your duty. You were meant to do your job. You were meant to make a positive difference in this world. Get up and get after it. Two, focus on the little things. Zeno says that well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing. Sometimes we get intimidated. We get overwhelmed by all the things that we have to do. And really what we have to do is the next right thing. Make the right choice in front of you. Do that little thing. Do it well.
Which is the third one from Mark Spillius. It says, concentrate on this task in front of you like a Roman. Do it like it's the last thing you are doing in your life. If it's not worth doing, why are you doing it? And if it is worth doing, it's worth doing well.
And three, remember that you are something that is worth doing well. Epictetus said, look, some people will try to cultivate their farm. Some people try to make money. He says, I try to cultivate my own improvement day to day. He saw himself as the canvas. He saw himself as the project. He wanted to be better than he was yesterday. And that should be what we're striving for, right? Again, well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing. But you've got to stop putting this off, which leads us to the next one. Number four, Seneca said that the one thing all fools have in common is they're always getting ready to start, right? They tell themselves the biggest lie in the world, which is I'm going to do it later. I'm going to do it tomorrow.
You could be good today, Martino says in meditations. Instead, you choose tomorrow. Why? Don't be good later. Be good now. Number five, Mark Stabilis' self-improvement journey survives to us in the form of meditations. He's writing these little notes to himself every day about how he wants to get better, about trying to hold himself accountable. He's putting himself up for review. And this kind of daily journaling process is itself an important discipline, but it will help make you more disciplined because you're able to track your own progress. You're able to look at yourself with a little bit of distance. Six, look, life is not easy. It is hard. So it's good to do hard things to practice voluntary discomfort, as the soics say, so that when you are uncomfortable, that's not an unfamiliar feeling. You shouldn't be caught off guard by that.
Seneca talks about how we treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind. Challenge yourself, push yourself, do hard things. And finally, number seven, let's use memento mori as fuel, not fear, right? Understanding that you're going to die someday, that life is short, should give you urgency, should give you priority, right? A daily reminder of it isn't morbid. It is the fastest and most effective cure for procrastination. So there still have so much to say about discipline, but these are some great ones to start with.