I’m pretty sure the best answer to every problem can be encapsulated in one simple dictum.
You can use this dictum to meet all your problems, regardless of what they are, and create the best possible outcomes.
You’re not going to like it. It has different forms, but here’s one:
Do what has to be done, when it has to be done, and do it that way every time.
This is truly infuriating advice. The mind sputters and objects.
Objection 1: This doesn’t tell me anything! How do I know what has to be done? That’s the whole problem.
It’s really not the problem. Almost always you know what has to be done.
Just ask yourself what a wiser person would do, and notice that (a) you usually know, and (b) you are trying to not do that.
And that’s the real problem. The unwise part of the mind always hopes that this time, and every time, you can do something easier (and worse) than what really has to be done.
This unwise part wants you to make the phone call later, not now, which you know amounts to choosing a slightly worse future for you and the other party. It wants you to go to bed at a stupid time and live on less sleep. It wants the worst for you, or at least to deny you the best.
Objection 2: Seriously though, this advice has no content at all. It doesn’t say what to do.
Again, you know what to do, and you can just do that.
Occasionally, you need to deliberate about your response. So do that: deliberate, decide, and act accordingly. If you need to Google something, consult someone, or list pros and cons, that’s the thing to do.
Nine times out of ten you already know what to do. Your hesitation is almost never about not knowing.
Objection 3: Every time? That’s an impossible standard. How can I possibly follow this advice?
Well, you only need to follow it this time.
Follow it next time too – but worry about that next time.
Doing the right thing often causes spikes of trepidation, frustration, or discouragement, but mostly it feels like a relief. For once you’re not trying to get away with anything.
The answer to any tough moments is to follow the dictum again.
Avoiding what has to be done feels miserable. The world is against you, you’re against yourself, you know you’re creating future problems, and it feels bad.
Objection 4: Come on now, there has to be another way.
Aha! The existential problem addressed by the dictum is beginning to show.
Listen to what you’re saying: there has to be some way forward other than doing the right thing. Anything but that!
The great human curse isn’t that we are bad, but that we deny what’s true and obvious. It simply cannot be the case that I should do the thing I should do! There must be some mistake!
The mind insists that reality must be wrong. If you accept reality, then what? Well, you have to conform to reality, which means you have to change.
The dictum tells you exactly how and when.
Objection 5: I’m not uh… good enough… wise enough… I’m not… skilled enough to follow this dictum. I can’t live up to it. I’ll just be disappointing myself all the time.
The dictum doesn’t ask anything of you that you can’t give. It calibrates itself perfectly to your capabilities.
It doesn’t say “bench press 300 pounds” or “make everyone happy.” It says, “put your phone away and go to bed,” or “lace up your runners,” or “fix this mistake now so you don’t have to do it Saturday.”
All these things you can do.
Objection 6: But I’ve defied the dictum my whole life. How do I change all that?
You don’t have to. The dictum only applies to right now, which is the only time you can do anything.
Objection 7: Ok, you’re right. This is an important truth to reckon with. I will try to wrap my head around this and start Monday.
Is that doing what has to be done, when it has to be done?
Objection 8: Please leave me alone. Your advice is making me miserable.
You already know what’s making you miserable, and what to do instead.
The truth was always there, always known deep in your heart. It permeates the universe. Only the human mind can push it away.
Objection 9: Wait, is this like a spiritual thing?
Yes, exactly. You are getting a glimpse of Truth, Logos, Dharma, God. That which is everywhere present and fills all things. You can turn away from it, deny it, get mad at it, but you can’t really live without it.
The dictum, once its truth penetrates the mind, will force you to recognize your entanglement with the transcendent moral order behind everything — the mysterious, unceasing thing ever-beckoning you towards good, despite your hesitations. Meeting the unwavering truth like this is scary, but it will liberate you if you embrace it.
Objection 10: Whoa. I have some thinking to do.
Definitely. This is all very heavy. But you know what to do in the meantime, and every time.
How to live by the dictum in real life
I’m getting a bit cheeky here but I think I’ve made my point.
Living by the dictum is harder than anything, but paradoxically, nothing else creates so much ease and freedom so quickly. It exposes reality-denying habits like an x-ray machine, helping you drop them one by one as you see their absurdity.
The simplest tactic for living by the dictum is to say it to yourself a lot:
Do what has to be done, when it has to be done, and do it that way every time.
Say it when you’re driving, working, gathering laundry, scooping the litterbox. It points the way, from every moment.
Sometimes the mind rebels. It wants no part of this responsibility to recognize reality and act accordingly. It lashes out with absurd ideas: “We’re getting drive-thru on the way home,” it says. “I don’t care that a Big Mac meal is $13.99 now, and that we have leftovers in the fridge.”
The willful mind commits these acts of spite, then it feels bad and vows to change.
But by a certain point the cat’s out of the bag — the unwise part of the mind has glimpsed the Truth. All it can do is act out in spite of itself. The dictum is the answer to all of it.
I’m not good at living the dictum, but I can’t deny its necessity anymore. The only advice I have is not to treat it like a “wagon” you can fall off and get back on later. It’s not like a diet. It’s an ever-present light to see by.
You can return to it in a single moment, no matter what’s happening, with the smallest possible act.
***
When are you going to start?
Each of us is putting off goals and dreams we consider essential to who we are.
We push them into the future, as though a better, more serious version of ourselves will take care of it someday.
In your heart, you know it doesn’t work like that.
You can do these things, but you have to approach them in a way that conforms to reality.
The way to pull off a big thing (for real) is to turn it into small things – sub-half-hour tasks – and start doing them immediately.
This is what One Big Win is, if you’ve never tried it.
***
I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
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OMG, David – that’s the best advice you have ever given!!
Giving it is easy… now, can I follow it? :)
David, I’ve been your reader for many years (we even had a zoom conversation once), and like several times before, I feel that you have exactly read my mind once again with this article.
I have had this inkling several times, including recently, that in difficult situations where I’m stuck and puzzling over what to do, actually the right thing to do is not shrouded in mystery, as the mind keeps saying. It’s actually quite obvious. In fact, it’s so obvious that once I see it, I hate that it’s so obvious, because I have some kind of resistance towards that answer. And usually it is that I am too lazy or too scared of doing the right thing. But it’s lame for the mind to plainly acknowledge that, so it manufactures a shroud of mystery and says, ‘oh my, what a dilemma, life is such a complicated enigma, how do I figure out what to do in this situation?’ The problem is often not that I don’t have the answer, actually it would feel almost better for that to be the case, than to acknowledge that I know the answer, it’s obvious, but I don’t like it because it is demanding some difficult effort from me.
Somehow it feels relevant to share an experience I had recently. I live in Brazil now, and I met an Irish guy who went to an ayahuasca ceremony in the evening, but didn’t like how he started feeling, and tried to escape the place by scaling the wall, and it was a whole thing. He told me, ‘I took ayahuasca, and would take it again, because I want to have more self-realization. But I didn’t like to take it at night. There were many negative energies swirling around in the dark there, I didn’t like the experience.’
Here is what I think of it. The reason that there is much about ourselves that we don’t know, and it takes psychedelics to pull it out, is because at some point we ourselves decided to hide it from consciousness. This is because there is something painful or difficult about remaining aware of it. So the mind itself puts up barriers against knowing more about itself. That’s why it’s not surprising that the process to uncover this self-knowledge is often deeply uncomfortable. If the mind could just have more self-knowledge any time it wanted, and the process was only happy and fun, like plucking a low-hanging mango, it would just do it, and we would not need these psychedelics. The reason that we don’t have that self-knowledge is because we have hidden it on the other side of a barrier of discomfort and pain.
Thank you again David for another beautiful article. Hope you are doing well. Any time you want to visit me in Brazil, you are most welcome!
Hey Neel. Good to hear from you. Whether psychedelics are involved or not, one of the most difficult things for a human being to do is simply be with our experience as it is. Just sitting in a meditation hall is incredibly difficult. The mind always wants to do something *with* the experience. It has to change it, manage it, transform it, hope for something better — anything but abide in the truth of the moment just as it is. I think that the degree to which we can open to and accept experience as it is is a measurement of wisdom. Psychedelic experiences that go bad (maybe all experiences) seem to step from the unwillingness to simply have the experience that is occurring. Something deep in us wants to control the uncontrollable, and the result is suffering.
Yes. I have done this for short periods of time, like for a week. The results are amazing, and yet I quit doing it. It feels like you have no choice, yet I realized that sometimes, you don’t know what to do. It is at those moments you truly have a choice. How often does that happen? Maybe 5% of the time. In my opinion, the major activity of humans is rationalizing doing what we want, rather than what we know is the right thing. When you do what you know you should do, the result is strange. I call it reverse paranoia, the world is out to do good things to you. Things just happen. Some people call it god. Some people think that the knowing what to do is god speaking to them. I don’t know. I do know that that voice is usually the quietest one in my brain, but if I stop and listen, it is usually there. But like you say, all you have to do is the right thing, right now, because there is only now anyway. Everything else will work itself out.
Agreed that we are absolutely bent on rationalizing temporal desires despite what the wiser part of us says. That battle between base desire and our our capacity for self-sacrifice / communion with the greater has been described in many ways and seems to lie at the center of every religion.
I was always confused when people talked about a benevolent universe or an all-loving God but now I get it. I think it’s a pretty reasonable way to model the way things seme to work.
Things don’t always work that way.
Yes, sometimes the universe/god seems to be actively helping you, and when that happens it feels magical and wonderful.
But what should a person do, when the magic stops? What if a person does tackle the 95% of the problems in their control, yet the other 5% does not “work itself out”?
Because you know, sometimes this is exactly what happens. Sometimes, for whatever reasons, the universe does not decide to magically solve your problems for you.
So what should a person do then? Blame themselves? Blame the universe/god? Ignore reality and continue to believe those problems will magically solve themselves eventually?
Pick up a copy of The Enchiridion. It may prove very helpful to you.
Again, there’s no way to shield yourself completely from suffering or hardship. Regardless of what is visited upon you, there is always a wise way to respond and unwise ways to respond. The goal of life cannot be to solve all of your problems or get everything you want because nobody comes close to doing that. Stoicism, Buddhism, Christianity and presumably other traditions make the goal wisdom, and suffering what you must, not getting what you want.
I completely agree.
This is precisely why I have a problem
with empty promises like “if we just deal with the things in our control to the best of our ability, then the universe will magically take care of the rest for us.”
That was the statement I responded to on this specific thread. And part of being a Stoic is accepting that life doesn’t always work that way.
Objection 4 and Objection 7.
“The mind insists that reality must be wrong. If you accept reality, then what? Well, you have to conform to reality, which means you have to change.”
Ugh. I can’t tell you how much I hate that this is reality. I have been delusional all my life. I want to thank you, but honestly I’m annoyed you have brought it to light. I think I’m going to go eat some chips, dammit. I’ll do this later.
It is bittersweet in a way. When we really consider how things really work we run up against walls we can’t move. That said, if it’s our refusal to conform to reality that is the entire problem, this insight does illuminate a much better way to live than banging against the wall.
This is spot on.
I just mentioned this idea, or a related one, to a family member yesterday, posed like this: “If you *had* to do [x], what would you do? And do that.”
People want to argue with other people, or ignore other people’s often correct recommendations, as a proxy for arguing with, and/or ignoring, reality itself. And as I’ve also said to various family and friends before, you can ignore the truth of what I am saying, but if what I am saying is indeed true, then you cannot escape the consequences of ignoring this truth. You can ignore or dismiss me and what I say, but you can’t escape the consequences of reality itself. That is what people try to do frequently (i.e. the “objections” you listed).
People in the Bible did this all the time, to various prophets and up to and including Jesus Himself: they would kill the messenger of God as a proxy for killing the message or voice of God Himself. I’ve preached on this idea, in a sermon called “Killing the Voice of God in Your Life” – people try to kill the voice of God in their lives by not attending church, not reading their Bibles, not attending to their conscience, and/or not listening to wise godly seasoned/mature people in their lives who try to advise them on how to live godly, wise lives. and such individuals do indeed succeed in killing the voice of God in their lives, such as in biblical times literally, or in the modern day by eliminating avenues for God to speak to them. but what they cannot eliminate are the consequences of ignoring and/or dismissing God, and such consequences will come.
how someone responds to the idea you’ve posed (and as I’ve riffed on) is a great measure of their character. I have found that most people, most of the time, flatly refuse to face it at all, either in a life or spiritual context.
thanks for this, David. while I understand you to not be personally religious (sorry if that’s wrong), your work is incredibly valuable in so many ways (I’ve been reading avidly since 2016!) and I have recommended it to many people.
“If you *had* to do [x], what would you do? And do that.”
This is a great way to frame it. Often I’ve wished that I had no real choice but to do the right thing. One can even create this situation — there are times when I give a friend of mine a wad of cash and tell her not to give it back unless I can prove that I’ve done a certain thing by a certain time.
I have become more religious over the past few years, because despite my skepticism about the sorts of claims many religious people make, the overall pattern described by scripture is just too apt to ignore. I attend a Romanian Orthodox church and will be received later this year. The first part to break through to me was Cain’s refusal to make wholehearted sacrifices to God, and his subsequent resentment of God. When I read it I said in my mind, “Whoa — I *am* Cain.” This struck me as not just analogous to my life but 100% true, because Cain is actually my last name.
The first time I started reading this I had to stop midway and go back to doing what needed to be done :D
Hey Marty. Glad you made it back to finish it! :)
David, there are times where objection #1 is 100% valid. Sometimes a person has no freaking clue how to progress on a problem, after years of attacking it from various angles. Even when you are completely certain that the problem is *solvable*, you may still have no idea how to get from here to there.
I’m saying this from personal experience. There are times where you are genuinely *stuck*. Situations where you’ve already done all the obvious preliminary steps and spent years researching and experimenting, and you have reached a point where you are at a total loss regarding what to do next.
In such situations, this so-called “dictum” is completely useless. Okay, so I need to do “what’s need to be done”? Splendid. just tell me how the heck I am supposed to figure out what’s need to be done, and I’ll be on my way. ;-)
Doing what has to be done does not necessarily mean knowing how to solve your problem. Some problems aren’t soluble at all, but that doesn’t mean there’s no right thing to do. In cases where you are utterly stumped, what has to be done may be to sit with uncertainty, to seek advice, to pray, to wait, to take your best guess and go ahead with it. It is in these moments we are often tempted to do things that are clearly NOT the thing that has to be done — ignoring it, drinking it away, lashing out — and that discernment still needs to be made.
See, when you put it that way, that’s useful advice. It’s useful because it’s specific and actionable.
But just saying “do what you must.” is completely and utterly useless for those people who are at a genuine loss of what to do with there predicament.
Try to put yourself in such a person’s shoes for a moment. Imagine you are struggling with a major problem that cannot be swept aside. Whether it’s a major illness, a suffering child, a huge debt or an imminent divorce. You are completely overwhelmed by the situation. You have no freaking clue what to do.
You pray, of-course, but no epiphany comes. You seek advice, but every expert tells you something different. You’ve tried to simply let it go, but you realize that ignoring the situation would be just as bad as drinking your problem away, because it is *your* responsibility to fix the problem.
And now, with this image in mind, reread your article. How would you feel?
I don’t have to imagine that I’m struggling with an extremely difficult problem. My entire life is a struggle and I know overwhelm and existential pain as well as anyone. Nowhere did I say anything about sweeping aside your problems. No matter what is visited upon you, the dictum applies. The more overwhelming it is, the more important it is not to lose sight of it.
I read something earlier today on Ermine’s Simple Living in Suffolk blog contrasting a predicament without a solution with a problem that has a solution.
Sully Sullenberger for example found himself in a predicament when a flock of geese took out all the engines of the plane he was piloting. That was a situation with no solution – there was no way any of those passengers were going to make it to Seattle (I think that’s where it was headed iirc) on that flight, but Sully nevertheless took decisive positive action and all those folk ended up drawing breath the next day.
Not a solution but probably the best outcome possible, faced with that particular predicament.
Another great post David. Thanks for sharing. This made me think that resistance is often more informative than the problem itself. When the next step is clear but we’re still not moving, there’s usually something worth understanding beneath that hesitation.
That’s a good point. Why am I trying so hard not to do the right thing? That’s a great refrain too.
My shadow self must be a middle-schooler because boy howdy did I not like reading this. I am someone who gets a WHOLE lot done… but often at the cost of getting the most important thing done. This advice is now taped to my monitor. Wish me luck. (In the meantime, I’m telling my inner teenager about all the cool things that have happened since the 80s and disappointing her because no, no hover cars or female presidents yet. She has a lot of feelings.)
Good luck. It’s amazing how much we can get done when we’re trying to avoid the one thing
Ouch. Reminds me of my regular battles that I relate to Jonathan Haidt’s “Elephant and Rider” metaphor. I know what a wise-rider Dennis would/should do, but I allow my “unwise mind,” the emotional elephant, to take me elsewhere.
Thanks for sharing your spiritual journey. Would love to hear more. Your words here also reminding me of Paul in Romans 7:15: “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Ouch again.
I’m starting to see how so many secular frameworks mirror traditional frameworks for saying the same thing. For years I understood all of this through the lens of evolutionary psychology, which I think is a valid framework, but it points us to the same structure that has been understood by the wise for thousands of years and expressed in various forms. Romans 6 and 7 is maybe my favorite part of all the epistles.
David, I think you’re missing a word in your last section:
> Each of is putting off goals and dreams we consider essential to who we are.
Really enjoyed the post. Cheers.
Thank you, fixed!
This seems to explain at a granular level the dictum:
Bad habits are easy to form but hard to live with; good habits are hard to form but easy to live with.
Also, Nike’s “Just Do It”, and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” (to doing what you know not to do).
Great advice, echoed everywhere.
No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.
Thank you for the interesting read on an important subject.
It seems your approach to overcoming challenges and human transformation is “right action, every time”, correct?
This is similar to what I understand about Buddhism and the path to enlightenment; “right action”, “right thought” and so.
I think that is what they mean by the “right” or “wise” elements of the eightfold path, yes. We at least know when it’s not right or not wise, and often are tempted to do that.
“Do what has to be done, when it has to be done, and do it that way every time.”
Feels like the second two parts are completely unnecessary.
“Do what has to be done.” That’s it.
When it has to be done? Now is the only time you can do it, so that’s the when. There is no other when.
Do it every time? There is no other time.
All you need to say to yourself is “do what needs to be done.” The rest is distraction.
There is a bit of a redundancy in the phrase on the verbal level, yes. But I like it because it accounts for two sneaky ways to try to get out of it. The second part, “when it has to be done,” undermines the first sneaky move, which is to tell yourself that you *will* do what has to be done, but not quite yet. The second sneaky move is that you feel like you’ve “earned” a break from the dictum because you’ve been so good.
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