The Contest Is Now

Most people will die without ever starting to live.

If you're not careful, you will live your life on fast forward, and it will be over before you ever hit play.

This is a potential trap that the wisest who’ve ever lived have long been aware of.

Thousands of years ago, Seneca warned, “The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”

Around the same time, Marcus Aurelius said, “It is not death that a man should fear, but rather he should fear never beginning to live.”

We’re awake and thinking about breakfast. We’re eating breakfast and thinking about the first thing on our to do list. We’re working on the first thing on our to do list and dreading the call we have in an hour. We’re at the gym and thinking about what we have to make for dinner. We’re eating dinner and thinking about getting to bed in time to do this all again tomorrow.

None of these things on their own are glaringly important. They don’t stand out or seem to demand our full attention. But combined, they’re our entire day. And those days quickly add up to comprise our entire lives.

It’s a constant struggle to remember that our life is now. That it’s happening today. We get it in our heads that it’s just a little off in the future. We can easily spend an entire life about to begin to live.

“Remember that the contest is now,” the stoic philosopher and teacher Epictetus told his students.

We think we can just speed through the monotonous. We'll just zone out for this; we'll go on autopilot for that. But that time you're killing is your life. That is your contest.

We trick ourselves into believing that some future version of ourselves is going to emerge and have all the time and will power in the world. Today, I’ll sleep in and eat McDonalds, but just you wait, in two weeks I’ll be on the way to a six pack and starting a rival to Amazon.

It’s bullshit.

“If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off 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,” Epictetus continued.

Epictetus was trying to instill a sense of urgency. The contest is now. Your life is now. It’s today, it’s this moment. If you don’t like it, if it doesn’t look like what you imagine, it’s still yours.

You can feel on the inside, that this isn’t really me. This isn’t how I see myself or want to live. But it’s how you’re living! This is you. This is your life, it’s happening. And the only way it changes is if you do something.

Being More Aware of the Contest

Developing “presence” has become a great marketing term that has sold a lot of books and tickets to seminars guaranteed to change your life. But what does it mean?

It means how aware are we of each minute of our day? How often is your attention in the same place as your body? It’s innately human for the mind to be running into the future anticipating potential problems. The ability to think about the future is the biggest distinction between the human brain and those of other mammals.

When we’re constantly allowing our mind to run into the future or back to the past, we’re committing two mistakes. The first is that we’re missing out on the present. Not in some hippy kind of way, but in a literal sense. You’re not paying full attention to whatever is it you’re doing. Which means you’re likely to be making another mistake you’ll be looking back to at some time in the future, when you’ll again be taking yourself away from the current moment.

The second mistake is that all this worrying and predicting about the future or past has no impact on it. We’re missing out on our life that’s taking place in front of us in exchange for some imaginary sense of control over the past or future. If you’re going to be worrying, worry about never living, not the future or the past.

To remember the contest is now, we need tools to help cultivate a sense of awareness, a sense of presence. There are many, but here are a few.

Meditate: Often talked about, but it’s been around for thousands of years for a reason. It’s the opportunity to bring yourself in and at least notice what you're paying attention to. Maybe you're stuck in a tedious and repetitive situation, but at least you can be conscious while you do it.

Visual Reminders: Some people go all in, they put a message they know they need be reminded of in the form of a tattoo. The author Ryan Holiday did this with two messages that eventually ended up becoming the titles for his books: The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy. A less intense option would be writing reminders of things you need to hear in a place where you’ll see them.

Journal: Taking the time to be still in the morning and write out your thoughts helps you check in with yourself. A few prompts:

What stressful situations will you face today? How do you want to handle them? How do you not want to handle them?

What would make today great?

What would I do to make today horrible?

How would the type of person I want to become handle this?

Exercise: It's almost impossible to not be present when you're doing something high intensity and difficult. When all of your energy is focused on hanging on and wondering if your chest is about to explode, it brings you into the moment. Maybe you do have to zone out for a few to bare it, but it keeps bringing you back. Let your mind drift too far and you fall off the treadmill or drop a barbell on your head.

None of these things are magic bullets, they’re hard and you won’t want to do them more than you will. Doing hard things makes everything else easier. Voluntary suffering prepares us for involuntary suffering.

You’ll be tempted to blow them off to get to the next thing. But that temptation to skip them is your reminder of how much you need them. The contest is now.

What to Strive For

How acutely aware can you be that your life is right now?

The contest is now and you're going to die. These are two concepts that the stoics played off of each other. The contest is now and don't forget that you're mortal. These are two things we're in constant need of reminding.

I don't make this point with hopes that you’ll live impulsively. I'm fully in favor of having goals and a future you're working towards. But you have to be working towards it, you can't just be imagining it. And while you're working towards it, you have to remember that you're someone today.

We all want it now. Feel that and move on. Don't be miserable today with the plans of being perfectly content in the future. Work towards being that person today. The person who can be content, yet wildly aggressive and intense in pursuit of their goals is the person who has staying power.