So, recently, Vitaliy Katsenelson, CFA, who is a writer and investor had a Substack post that really resonated with me.
And by recently, I mean yesterday.
Anyway, in it Vitaliy said that “Each Day Is a Separate Life.”
You wake up and you are born. You go to sleep and that’s the end of the day/life. You get it, right?
This concept isn’t new. It comes from Seneca, this ancient philosopher and thinker in the Roman Empire, 2,000 years ago, who was rather hyper focused on thinking about wealth even though he was one of the richest people of his time. And who knows? Seneca probably took it from someone else.
Seneca was a thinker and a clerk and a politician and a writer. So, like a lot of us, he did a lot of things.
What matters to us on the podcast today is what Vitaliy took away from Seneca’s writings and that’s the concept of time.
He writes,
“After reading Seneca, it is impossible not to want to retake control of the most important, irreplaceable gift you are given as a birthright – time. But how do you do this? I borrowed my practical solution from Seneca: ‘Begin at once to live and count each separate day as a separate life.’ “‘Each separate day as a separate life.’ What a brilliant idea. A life bookended by sunrise and sunset. A day is a perfect, meaningful measuring unit. I can look at each day and evaluate how I spent it. If I achieve mostly perfect days, then they’ll spill into a perfect life. ”Every January most of us set New Year’s resolutions. Though we don’t think about it that way, we really treat each year as Seneca’s separate life. Except that a year is so long that we forget about our New Year’s resolutions by March.
We writers (and other humans) waste a lot of time thinking about writing, procrastinating about writing, and doing things like cruising social media, that don’t help us actually write.
We only have a limited amount of time in each day. We waste a lot of it. “What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years lie behind us are in death’s hands,” Seneca wrote. His advice according to Vitaliy, “Hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.” Think of each day that you write as a new life as a writer. If you spend that day, not writing, what does that mean? If this was your final day would you want to create? Would you want to share stories? Or would spend that last day arguing with other people in town about curb cuts and bad parking jobs?
As Vitaliy writes, “The goal is not to change our activities but to change our state of mind as we carry out those activities. You don’t want to stop thinking about or planning for tomorrow; instead, as you think about tomorrow, remember to appreciate today. Or as Seneca puts it, ‘Hurry up and live.’” Try it for a week maybe. Just one week commit to a couple of things:
- Live the day like it’s your last
- Wake up in the morning thinking about what matters to you.
- Write something or create something on each day. It doesn’t need to be finished. It doesn’t need to be perfect.
A lot of people ask me (Carrie) how I produce so much. How much? I’ve written over a million words for our daily newspaper this year. And that’s just our newspaper, right? Well, secret number one is that I have a Shaun. But secret number two is that I expect to never have enough time to get all I want to get done out there.
Prince was a little like this too, but u...
