Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation

designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life.

Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of

history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example,

and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.

For more, visit DailyStoic.com. No, not later, now. It's sitting there unopened in your inbox. It's there on your call sheet to return. It's there on your to-do list to look at those numbers. And it's going to keep sitting there because you refuse to look at it. You put it off, you procrastinate, you tell yourself, as Seneca says that all fools do, that you're just not ready to start yet. You could do it today, as Marx really says, but yet again, you choose tomorrow. Why? It's not going to be any easier later. It might not also be that difficult right now.

That's the funny thing you find about the stuff you put off. When you finally get around to it,

you realize you've been dreading something that was actually pretty simple that only took a few minutes.

Sometimes you find the email you didn't want to open turns out to contain nothing at all,

just the other person telling you they need some more time to think it over and that they'll get back to you. What stoicism trains us to do

is to have the willpower to bite the bullet to one, two, three, four, five, jump, to do the thing

that some part of us doesn't want to do. By training ourselves from cold plunges and lifting heavy things

to having tough conversations and starting the project we've been dreading, we are building an

override switch that allows us to push through resistance, through excuses, and our lazier impulses.

It helps us become the person who does the thing now and not later. Now is for certain.

Later is a lie. It's only going to get harder the longer you wait. Stop putting it off. Do what you need

to do. Look, you're not going to do.

Look, your body has this performance superhighway.

That's the 60,000 miles of blood vessels that deliver oxygen and nutrients to every cell.

This is your cardiovascular system.

Maybe you learned about this in school or on an episode of the Magic School Bus, but it's the foundational system that powers everything we do. And elite athletes

and longevity experts, they invest directly in their cardiovascular system since healthy blood flow

...