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 With Today: Seize It
Understanding carpe diem is easy. Living it is harder.
Ryan Holiday Follow
Feb 14 · 10 min read

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Y
ou’re alive right now. In front of you sits just a handful of hours before
the day is through. What tomorrow has in store, you cannot know.
Piles of problems could be dumped on you. A surprise call from the doctor
could change everything. You could wake up with the u and spend the
next week in bed. You could not wake up at all.

This leaves you with a few options for today: You can muddle through, you
can worry about all the things that might happen, or you can seize the day
—here and now. The right choice is obvious, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

The famous Latin phrase carpe diem, or “seize the day,” has stared at us
from co ee cups and motivational posters for as long as we’ve been alive.

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 Longer, in fact; it’s from a poem written in 23 B.C. We’ve been struggling to
follow this simple anodyne command basically since the beginning of time.
It was hard for the ancients, and it’s hard for us.

What is cool, however, is that since right around Horace’s time, smart
people—especially the ancient Stoics—have been developing strategies for
how to seize the day. They’re not magical solutions, but they do help. They
work if you work them. So let’s get to it.

Get up early
I was 19 years old and in college when I rst read Marcus Aurelius’
Meditations. As an underclassman, I found myself stuck in an early class I
could never seem to get motivated for. The opening passage of Book V
struck me as particularly appropriate:

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to
work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do
what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this
what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”

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 —But it’s nicer in here…

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing
them? …

—But we have to sleep sometime… Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as
it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit.

It’s just so lovely. The most powerful man in the world chiding himself for
wanting to stay in bed. A guy reluctant to get out from under the blankets
and put his feet on the cold oor—just like the rest of us. But he knows you
can’t seize the day lying down. Dante had a similar line: “Beneath the
blanket is no way to fame.” You have to get up. And, ideally, you have to get
up early.

Getting up early gives you a win before you actually have to do anything. It
also allows you to start working before the distractions and interruptions
start. I get up around 6:30 a.m., and by 9 or 10, I’ve already gone for a walk,
had breakfast with my family, and written enough that I can count the rest
of the day as a bonus.

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 Do it now
There is procrastination—the habit of putting things o until the last
minute—and then there is what most of us do. We tell ourselves, “Oh, I’m
de nitely going to do it, but not right this second.” “I’ve got time later in the
week,” we insist. Or we kick the can in the name of e ciency and tell
ourselves we’ll do it when we’re doing some other thing. As Steven
Press eld writes, “We don’t tell ourselves, ‘I’m never going to write my
symphony.’ Instead we say, ‘I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going
to start tomorrow.’” We might even think it’s better to postpone because
we’ll be better rested or more prepared. But waiting just increases the
chance we don’t do it at all. Life always intervenes, and we might not be
lucky enough to have a tomorrow.

As Seneca writes in The Shortness of Life, “Putting things o is the biggest

waste of life: It snatches away each day as it comes and denies us the
present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is
expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today… The whole
future lies in uncertainty: Live immediately.”

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 You can’t predict later, so the present moment is your best opportunity to
answer those emails, read that book, get in that workout. Don’t waste it.

Put devices away

Seneca wrote constantly about time. One of his most compelling
observations is that people are protective of their money, their property,
and their possessions, yet careless with the one thing they can’t get back:
time.

“It’s not that we have a short time to live,” he said, “but that we waste a lot
of it.” Can you imagine what he would say about the fact that today people
spend, on average, more than ve hours per day on their mobile devices?
That’s 76 days a year—nearly 11 weeks—staring into an abyss of
distraction.

In his book Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport explains that the people who
design devices and social media platforms are not your friends, and you are
not their customer. Instead, you are the product they are selling to
advertisers, apps, and data providers.

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 The average user engages with their mobile device more than 2,600 times a
day. What if, even just a dozen of those times, we reached for a journal and
a pen instead? Or a book? Or our work? Or a loved one? There are few
problems we couldn’t solve, few things we couldn’t do, if we spent those ve
hours being productive instead of addicted and distracted.

Don’t try to be perfect

One of the reasons we have trouble getting stu done (or getting started) is
we expect perfect conditions or hold ourselves to impossible standards. As
Churchill said, perfection may also be spelled P-A-R-A-L-Y-S-I-S. If you want
to seize today, you’re going to have to be content taking it as it is, as you are.
“Don’t go around expecting Plato’s Republic” was Marcus Aurelius’ line. And
when you come across brambles in the path, he said, go around. If your food
tastes bitter, throw it out. The point is to keep moving, to start making
progress.

Productive writers know that a rule of four crappy pages a day is how you
create momentum and get through writer’s block. Don’t expect or demand
awless work from yourself — just demand work, period. The dancer Twyla
Tharp’s morning ritual is about getting out onto the street and into the taxi

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 — the rest (the time at the gym, the practice, the inspiration) takes care of
itself.

Embrace change
“Some lack the ckleness to live as they wish,” Seneca wrote, “and just live
as they have begun.” It’s so easy to get stuck in patterns. To feel terrible
because we’ve had a bad couple of days. To mope about our failures and
mistakes. To live in our daydreams instead of reality.

Life is too short not to change, not to try, not to take risks. It’s also too short
to keep doing things the way you’ve always done them if those methods are
no longer working.

My wife and I live on a little farm in Texas, and it’s always interesting to
hear people’s reactions. They say stu like, “I’ve always wanted to do
something like that,” or mention that it’s their dream to live in the country.
My wife and I did not win a special license from the government that
exempts us from living in town. No one gave us permission. We just moved.

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 If you want to have a di erent life, if you want to realize your dreams,
you’re going to have to take action and accept change. If you want to travel,
that means selling some of your stu and hitting the road. If you want to
own your own business, you have to quit your job. Not in the future. Not
when someone takes care of all the details. Now.

Don’t leave things hanging

Wellington’s rule for himself was to do the business of the day in the day. He
didn’t leave things hanging or half done. He nished what he started. He
didn’t have 13 projects in various stages of completion.

Marcus Aurelius and Seneca talk about balancing the book of life each day,
or living today as if it was a complete life in and of itself. Knowing that you
have to complete things, that you can’t just start and stop, helps you
prioritize. It helps you decide if each action is important. It makes you say, If
I am going to do this, I am going to do it right.

Following this rule keeps my to-do list short. I include only things I am likely
to do, and I derive great satisfaction from tearing up a completed list at the
end of the day. It also help me manage my bigger endeavors. To me, a book

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 is not an enormous project, but a series of smaller ones. Technically my next
book won’t be done at the end of each day, but I will have nished writing
the individual chapter or section I sat down to tackle. And it will be the
absolute best I could do.

Banish fear
Eleanor Roosevelt had a great rule: We must do the thing we cannot do.
And if you look at her life, she more or less followed it. She conquered her
shyness and became a leading public gure. She overcame sexism and
preconceptions about the role of a First Lady — a job she never wanted — to
turn it into a powerful pulpit for good. She was an embodiment of that
famous line from her husband about how the only thing to fear is fear itself.

You can’t seize the day if you are scared all the time. You can’t get the most
out of life if you are afraid of taking risks. All the good stu you want in life
— or today — is on the other side of the reservations and fears that have
been holding you back.

The Stoics wanted us to know that we are capable of far more than we
know. We can do far more than anyone else thinks. We have great strength

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 and power within us, if only we choose to seize it and ignore that
can’t/don’t/won’t/shouldn’t voice in our heads. Whether you look at the life
of Marcus Aurelius (which was marked by countless betrayals and setbacks)
or the tortuous ordeal of James Stockdale (which was a nearly inhuman
trial), you see men and women doing things no one thought they could do.
Things that, at the outset, even they probably didn’t think they could do.
The same is true for you today.

Don’t defer your happiness

Even in ancient times, people fell for the mirage of retirement, the idea of
some far-o future where suddenly they would have what they desired and
nally live the way they wanted. As Seneca wrote:

You will hear many people saying: “When I am fty I shall retire into leisure;
when I am sixty I shall give up public duties.” And what guarantee do you have
of a longer life? Who will allow your course to proceed as you arrange it? Aren’t
you ashamed to keep for yourself just the remnants of your life, and to devote to
wisdom only that time which cannot be spent on any business? How late it is to
begin really to live just when life must end!

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 Now is now. If you can’t be happy with who you are or what you have (or
the time you have), it’s not going to happen. The things you want are
attainable. More money or fame or power is not the answer. Living in this
moment is. Working yourself to the bone so you can buy a speedboat and a
lake house when you’re older is crazy.

That’s not to say you should be reckless or irresponsible. But don’t trade
your today for the hope of a tomorrow that moves further away the harder
you chase it.

Demand the best of (and for) yourself

My favorite expression is “How you do anything is how you do everything.”
I love it because it dispenses with the lie that the task in front of us doesn’t
matter, or that certain things are beneath us. If we’re doing something, it’s
important. And if we’re going to do it, we should do it right. The person who
says, “I don’t care about this job,” “I don’t care about this phone call,” or
“None of this says anything about me” is not living in the moment, but in
their head or ego.

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 The better approach is to be present and do your best at everything. If
you’re not going to try hard right now, in the moment, when will you?

I love this call to arms from Epictetus, a philosopher who survived slavery to
become in uential enough to teach emperors. Even so, he was still pushing
himself to be better and live up to his principles:

How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself? You
have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have
endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to
refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy but a full-grown
man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things o and always
deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice
that you are making no progress but you will live and die as someone quite
ordinary. From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making
progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside.

Memento mori
The most powerful exercise in Stoicism is the most intimidating because it
requires us to focus on the most unpleasant thought: our own death. That

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 might seem morbid or even counterproductive. If we’re going to die, why
does today even matter?

Existence matters because it’s nite. Once the sand goes through the
hourglass, we can’t put it back. Death gives our time on this planet meaning
and urgency.

In my pocket, I carry this Memento Mori medallion. On the front, it has a

skull anked by a ower and an hourglass. Life. Time. Death. On the back, it
has this quote from Marcus Aurelius:

You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and
think.

I never leave home without the medallion. It inspires me. It challenges me

to be better and not to take tomorrow for granted, because it isn’t a given. It
reminds me to put away my devices. It reminds me to take the task in front
of me seriously, because it might be the last time I get to do it. It reminds me
to demand the best of and for myself. Because if not now, when?

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 Today could be the last day of my life. It could be the last day of your life. It
could also be the best day of our lives.

Seize it.

Self Improvement Productivity Self Habits

19.4K claps

WRITTEN BY

Ryan Holiday Follow

Bestselling author of ‘Conspiracy,’ ‘Ego is the Enemy’ & ‘The

Obstacle Is The Way’ http://amzn.to/24qKRWR

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