Many take their amusement at the beginning, putting off anxiety to the end; but the essential should come first and accessories afterwards if there is room. Others wish to triumph before they have fought... Another is just about to make his fortune when he disappears from the scene. Method is essential for knowledge and for life.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The order in which you do things is itself a decision, and many people get it backwards, taking their ease and amusement first and pushing the essential, demanding work to a later that may never come. The result is a life lived in the wrong sequence: the fortune almost made just as time runs out, the fame-bringing study left for last and so never done, the triumph celebrated before the fight that would have earned it. The counsel is method: put the essential first and let the accessories follow if there is room, rather than spending the best of your energy and years on the pleasant and the trivial while the important waits. This is not a call to grim delayed gratification for its own sake; it is a call to sequence a life so that the things that matter actually get done, and get done in time.
Practice
- Put the essentials first and the amusements after; the pleasant things left for later crowd out the important ones that needed the best years (maxim 229 plans the whole arc).
- Do not celebrate or rest on a triumph before you have actually fought for it; the win announced early is the win never earned.
- Sequence your life and your work with method; the fortune almost made as time runs out is usually a fortune begun too late.
Use this when
- Use this in planning long arcs: a career, a body of work, a life, where the order of things decides whether the important ever gets done.
- Use it when you notice yourself doing the easy, pleasant tasks first; that reflex is exactly how the essential gets postponed to never.
Ignore this when
- Don't swing into all work and no ease; the counsel is about sequence, essentials first, not about deleting amusement entirely (maxim 247 protects time for ease too).
- Don't apply rigid method where life needs spontaneity; the rule targets chronic postponement of the essential, not every pleasure taken early.
A picture of it
Putting the pleasant things first, a young professional spends his best early years on the enjoyable and the low-stakes, telling himself the serious study and the hard building can come later. Later arrives with less energy and less time than he assumed, and the fame-bringing work he deferred is now a mountain he is too tired to climb, the fortune he meant to make begun too late to finish. A method he never applied, essentials first and amusements after, would have cost him nothing but the order of his years. He had triumphed in his own mind before he ever fought, and the fight, when he finally reached for it, had mostly moved on.
Do not begin life with what should end it. Essentials first, amusements after, and never celebrate the triumph before the fight.