I take it you have something you want to do, this year or with your life, or you would not be reading a newsletter like this one. I also take it you have reasons for not having started yet, and that a good number of them are real. The Stoics had the same reasons. What I find useful about them is that they never pretended otherwise, and still found a way to act while the reasons were standing.
Nearly every excuse I have made for not doing something was true, and that is what made it so hard to get past. I really was tired. The timing really was bad. I did not know enough yet, and there was a fair chance the thing would not work. We are usually told that excuses are lies we tell ourselves, and the cure on offer is to stop lying, toughen up and accept no excuses. That advice has never worked on me for long, and I think the reason is that it gets the facts wrong. You cannot shame a true statement into being false, and the tiredness is still there when the pep talk is over.
So it seems more useful to start from the other end and admit two things. The reasons not to act will always outnumber the reasons to act, and a good share of them will be true. Once you accept that, the question changes from how to get rid of them to what to do while they are still standing there.
The numbers are lopsided for a simple reason. When we want to put something off, one good reason is enough. But when we want to begin, we somehow feel the need to answer every objection first. And one is always available, because anything worth doing takes time and effort, might fail, and has to begin on some particular day that is no better than the days around it. Those four facts give you “I’m too busy,” “I’m too tired,” “it might not work” and “this is a bad week for it,” and they come free with every plan you will ever make.
This is why waiting for the reasons to run out does not work, and why arguing with them does not work either. You answer one and the next steps forward. You may even win every round, and it will not matter, because the part of you that wants to stay put has no need to win the argument. It only needs the argument to go on until the evening is over, which means the debate itself is the delay.
What goes wrong happens one step later than we tend to assume. An excuse is nearly always a true statement with a conclusion attached. I am tired, so not today. I have no money, so I cannot start. The first half is a fact, and the second half is a decision that has borrowed the fact’s authority.
Think of it like rain in the forecast, which is accurate and still only tells you to take a coat and leave ten minutes early. It has nothing to say about whether you go. A true reason works in the same way. It tells you what you’re up against, and sometimes that means changing the plan or waiting. But knowing what stands in your way is not the same as knowing there is no way forward.
Epictetus, who himself had difficulty walking, puts this in a single line of the Enchiridion.
“Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will.”
He tells his students to say the same of everything that happens to them, and they will find that each obstacle is in the way of something else and never in the way of themselves. He is not denying the leg, which he walked on every day. What he refuses is the step from “my leg is lame” to “so there is nothing for me to do.”
Cleanthes arrived in Athens with four drachmas and a wish to study philosophy under Zeno, and he had a long list of reasons to give the idea up. He had no money, not even enough to buy paper. He had to earn a living, which left him no time. And he was a slow learner. Every one of those things was true and none of them went away. What they changed was his method. He hired himself out to water gardens at night so that his days were free for lectures. He took his notes on oyster shells and on the shoulder blades of oxen. He kept at it for nineteen years, and when Zeno died it was Cleanthes who took over the school.
Some obstacles are of a harder kind, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise. An illness, a parent who needs daily care, or a debt that takes every spare coin can make a thing impossible in the form you had planned it. The answer in those cases is a different route or somebody’s help, and it is never more force applied to the same plan. Cleanthes did not try harder to afford paper, after all. He went and found shells.
The method that comes out of this is short, and it begins by taking the reason seriously. Write it down as a full sentence. Then agree with it, in writing, without adding a “but” at the end. I am tired, and that is true. This matters more than it looks, because the argument is where the evening goes, and there is nothing left to argue about once you have agreed. Then ask what the smallest thing is that can still be done today, by a tired person with forty minutes. It will not be the whole plan. It might be one page, or one phone call, or ten minutes with the thing open on the desk in front of you.
Zeno used to say that well-being is attained by little and little, and is nevertheless no little thing itself. I think the small step earns its place for a second reason as well. It shows you that the conclusion never followed. You were tired and you did something anyway, and tomorrow, when the same reason turns up and is just as true, you will know from experience how much it can and cannot decide.
The list will be as long tomorrow as it is today, and a good part of it will still be true. Some people have more standing in their way than others, and some obstacles demand a different route altogether. But the people who find a way forward rarely do so because every reason against it has disappeared. They take the forecast seriously, make what adjustments they can, and go out anyway.
Stay stoic,
SW
Thanks for reading this far , I genuinely appreciate it.
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The Stoic Answer to Anxiety
Epictetus opened his lecture on anxiety with a question that still sounds a little odd.
I just had to wait. Maybe six months, maybe a year, but alas, I wasn’t ready for that either. Your point that the second half of an excuse is “a decision that has borrowed the fact’s authority” works for staying put too: a good case for waiting is still a decision to wait. Does Diogenes Laertius say why the slow learner, and not a quicker student, ended up leading the school after Zeno?