As a teacher, I hear students lament the frustrations of procrastination all the time. Just last week I asked some of my classes during a whip around what they want to improve on this semester. The most common answer was beating procrastination. Of course, teenagers aren’t the only ones who battle this problem. Steven Pressfield wrote a beautiful book about it called The War of Art. He called the problem The Resistance.

Fellow writer (and Pressfield friend) Ryan Holiday provides a helpful perspective on procrastination in the three sentences shared below. Whereas Pressfield frames procrastination as fear dressed in all of our endless distractions, Holiday goes a bit further and says it is arrogance. Together, they show both the inner and outer faces of the same issue.

I couldn’t save this quote into my second brain fast enough. It gets to the heart of the matter for me because it relates to the core Buddhist idea of impermanence. When I remember that nothing is guaranteed, not even tomorrow, it makes the decision to start today feel less like a burden and more like a responsibility. It is a fact that we could die at any time. Karma can shift on a dime. Most of us don’t think about that fact very often (that’s a whole other topic). Thus, Holiday is spot on; to put something important off because you think you will have time later is arrogant. It’s also true that if you lack the will and the discipline in the present, what’s to say you’ll have it in the future? For me, this shows up most clearly when I put off my short little home weight lifting protocol. I tell myself I’ll do it in an hour, but half the time it never happens that day.

Readwise, the app I use to capture these quotes while I read, allows you to pick favorites that they email to you every Sunday. This is one of those favorited Sunday quotes for me.