Stoics like Ryan Holiday encourage us to imagine death always looming over our shoulder. He even sells a coin you’re supposed to carry around in your pocket so you can touch a skull every time you reach for change. Ryan’s written a lot of valuable books and is an inspiration, but I just can’t imagine such a morbid practice being a great injunction to life.
You can understand the purpose of this: To remind us that we have limited time, and get us to consider whether we're making the most of our days here.
It wasn't just the stoics who used death as their motivator. For centuries, humanity has framed death as the solution to avoiding procrastination. The Zen Buddhists took meditating on death so far, that they even made paintings of decaying corpses so as to force themselves to overcome temptation and focus on pursuing enlightenment.
THE PROCRASTINATION CURE THAT MAKES YOU PROCRASTINATE
If that works for you, great. After all, it was an encounter with a corpse outside his walled garden that spurred Prince Siddhartha to become the Buddha in the first place.
But for me it just feels oppressive, and creates much anxiety, which is a leading cause of procrastination in itself. For those of us who regularly jump down rabbit holes so as not to face the big bad deadline that's rapidly approaching, pointing out the grim reaper that's just behind it can only make the urge to escape worse. While fixating on non-existence can lead some to enlightenment, it has also lead many others to nihilism and self destruction.
DO AS THE DAOISTS
Instead, I propose a different solution: design processes that you love which will allow you to enjoy the obvious, if mundane, things that constitute so much of our lives. If your ambition is to be a writer, make learning the craft of writing fun. Want to get healthy? Pursue the art of good cooking and find a sport, martial art, or dance that you enjoy. And if you want to live the “good life”, start by feeling the pleasures that come with doing something nice for others.
I’ve talked about Chuang Tzu’s Cook Ding, the expert chef who made butchery into a dance and did it so well he never had to sharpen his cleaver. You can bet Ding had a process he loved. One that involved contemplating the most obvious things: What's the most obvious way to cut meat? The most obvious way to keep your knife sharp? The most obvious way to keep doing what you love? As little forcing as possible.
This falls in line with much of the research today surrounding how successful people achieve so much: rather than being goal-oriented, they are process-oriented. They’re not trying to will great monuments to their genius into existence. They resist the hubris that says it’s possible to make a mark that death and time can’t eventually rub out. Instead, they just look for ways to love what they do, and do more of what they love.
HOW CONFUCIUS LEARNED TO SWIM
Chuang Tzu’s story of Confucius and the old swimmer highlights a similar point. On a walk by the rapids, Confucius encounters an old man who goes over a waterfall with ease and comes out the other side unharmed. His secret? Going with the flow.
“I just follow the Course of the water itself” [said the old sage,] “without making any private one of my own. This is how I tread the waters.”
Had the man fixated on the rocks in his way, or tried to swim against the currents carrying him along, he would surely have been dashed against the boulders or drowned. It’s his ability to let go of any desire to control his time in the river that saves him.
THE GREATEST NEGOTIATORS ARE PLAYING A GAME
Negotiation expert, Herbie Cohen has helped everyone including statesmen, captains of industry, and hostage rescuers successfully broker deals. His secret? Herbie believes in caring, but not that much. To the best negotiators, the art of the deal is not a life and death struggle upon which everything hangs, but a game to be played well–no matter what the stakes.
A NEW MEMENTO TO MEDITATE ON
Finding ways to enjoy the small and simple pleasures of your everyday routine process might not seem like much, especially to those of us raised by the media to believe that everything must be a monumental struggle, preferably wrapped up in 90 minutes over a 3-5 act structure. But the truth is that everything that’s truly great takes time to build. It is equally true that no matter how many achievements you pull off before you die, none of them will last forever.
So instead of the capitalism-obsessed, neo-Stoic notion that we must squeeze every ounce of productivity possible out of our lives before our appointment with the scythe-wielding skeleton in our minds’ eye, let’s replace this morbid meditation with another.
A quote from Percy Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias, told to the narrator by a traveller who witnessed what was left of all that glory the great Pharaoh worked so hard to achieve:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
"…rather than being goal-oriented, they are process-oriented." And that process is Dao.