The Most Important Things You Need To Stop Doing

Ryan Holiday (0:00)

We are not the first burnout culture. Every culture that has ever existed has worked too hard, has been too stressed out, has wanted to get away from it all. You see this in the writings of the Stoics. Two thousand years ago, Seneca talked about this very place, the Bay of Naples, which is where the rich Romans would go to escape the stressful lives they had made for themselves. They wanted to see the country, they wanted to tour the old sites, they wanted to lay at the beach. But what Seneca understood and what I want to talk about in today's video are some better strategies for building balance in our lives. Because it's not feasible to go on vacation all the time. It's not feasible to live in a fantasy life. And as Marcus Aurelius says in Meditations, we have within us all the things we need at this very moment to feel peaceful, to feel good, to feel still, to get to that place of ataraxia, which is exactly what the Stoics aspired to do.

If you want more tranquillity in your life, you have to do less, Marcus Aurelius says. And the magical thing when you do less, when you eliminate the inessential, when you stop saying yes to things that don't matter, when you stop getting caught up in busywork and nonsense, he says you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. Your creative work, getting outside, gratitude, all the things that matter in life, you do better when you do less stuff. So much of what we do, it's because we think we have to, because other people are doing it, because we're afraid to say no. No, you have to do less, because when you do less, you do more better.

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, when 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, do it as if it matters, 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.

David Epstein (2:14)

You just made me think of this new study that came out in science, or really a meta-analysis, which is one of the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world that looked at careers of, I think it was about 26,000 athletes, musicians, and scientists. And their main finding was that the things that led to peak youth performance were negatively associated with peak adult performance. So if you wanted the best youth performance, you specialize early, basically and really narrowly. And if you wanted the best adult performance, you start broader. So the Nobel laureates in the study, for example, progressed more slowly in their careers than peers because they were more interdisciplinary early on. So they got ten years more slowly, all this. You know, the athletes tended to have a sampling period.

And they cited a lot of the studies that I cite in range, and plus some newer ones. But there were three main buckets that they divided the benefits into.

One was what you were mentioning, match quality, the degree of fit between the thing you picked and who you are. And first of all, the more things you've tried, the better is going to be your match quality. And that's hugely important for performance and your sense of fulfillment. The second bucket was generalized learning advantage when you've done sort of a variety of different things. Like if you've played three different attacking sports, for example, that's where you have to judge bodies or balls. You'll have an advantage for learning subsequent skills after that. It's like kids who are bilingual have some advantage for new languages. And the third was resistance to physical and psychological injury, basically resistance to burnout and overuse and injury. And it wasn't even about the total volume of activity you were doing, it was about like diversifying it. So those were kind of three main buckets that just came out in this like kind of blockbuster science report.

Ryan Holiday (3:48)

Well, this athlete said to me once that her coach, she was pushing herself too hard in practice, he was like, do you want to be fast now or you want to be fast later?

SPEAKER_3 (3:54)

Yeah, it's tough.

Ryan Holiday (3:55)

And it's like, do you want to be the best at 17?