¶ Intro / Opening
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Welcome to the
The daily stone.
Four key stoic virtues courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.
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¶ Embrace Change and Daily Progress
This is the day to change your life. We have a new day in front of us. A new sun has risen. We can be anyone, we can be anything, we can do it anew. Have to do it the way we've always done it. It's a tragedy, Marcus Real says, to cling to being the person.
Always been
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Held over to
Wait, it hasn't been differently. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. How to have be a great person, how to be a new person, and what the Stoics can tell us about doing precisely
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Nobody likes getting up early, not even Mark Srealis. In meditations, he talks about trying to get up early and he has this fantastic conversation with himself. He goes, but it's warmer under the covers. And he says, is that what you were put here to do? To huddle under the blankets and be warm? He says, but it's nicer here.
He says, is that what you were meant for? To feel nice? He says, no, you have a nature, you have a job, you have obligations. He says we're all put here for a purpose. We have a nature. We have a duty and we have to go and we have to do that. And the morning is the best time to do stuff to get stuff done. So that's That's why the Stokes tried to get up early. I say tried because they didn't always do it, and it wasn't always easy, and they didn't always like it. They tried to do it anyway.
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Doing hard things
Good for you.
long hikes, long runs, challenging yourself, pushing your limits, center. Doing the things you don't want to do. you did after. Skill, the ability to push yourself a little bit further to hold that allow us to practice that. muscle that says hey I'm in charge hey I push myself hey I'm comfortable being uncomfortable Those challenges, I seek them out. I do hard things. Not just that I can do hard things, but I do hard things on a regular That's what it's about.
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The purpose of philosophy is not about getting to some magical place of enlightenment. It's not about these epiphanies, these life-changing, transformative moments. That's not how it works. Seneca writing to his friend Lucilius talks about how look if you can just acquire one thing a day, says something that makes you a little stronger, makes you a little wiser, less focused on things that are outside your control. As long as you can
insure way towards truth, he says that's what it's about. So today, let's think about what have we acquired? What's something we've learned? What's something we've added to our quiver or our toolkit? That's what the path to wisdom is. Step by step. In fact, Zeno, the founder of Sociism, says exactly that. He says, well-being is realized by small steps, but it is no small thing.
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¶ Master Habits and Consistent Effort
The Stoics say you have to stop being a slave today. There's a story I tell in Discipline is Destiny about Richard Feynman. One day it's like 10 o'clock in the morning, he's out for a walk, and he feels this pull. He wants to have a drink. And he never saw himself as an alcoholic, never had this.
problem with alcoholism, but he he was deeply uncomfortable with this drive, this pull to do something that was coming from a part of him that he didn't control. And the Stoics say that's something you have to be really suspicious of. Seneca says slavery isn't just this legal status. He says everyone's a slave. He says someone's a slave to their mistress. Somebody's a slave to money. Someone's a slave to power and attention. And he said, those people might be literally free.
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In Discipline Session, I also tell the story of of Eisenhower. He's told by his doctor that his smoking habit, he'd smoked like four packs a day for 40 years. It was substantially hurting his health. He says, okay, and he and he I love this. He says, I gave myself an order to stop.
Smoking and he stopped smoking cold turkey like that. It's gonna be harder for some people, easier for some people, but the point is you gotta give yourself that order. You have to say who's in charge? This habit, this addiction, this vice that I have, that this thing that I want, or am I
In charge. I the boss, or is it the boss? And that's what Feynman was reacting to, that's what Seneca was reacting to, that's what Eisenhower's reacting to, and ultimately that's what Epictetus is reacting to in the same court as Seneca. He looks around and he goes, I'm I'm a slave, but I'm freer than these people because I'm in control of my habits. I decide what I do and what I don't do and we have to give ourselves that power.
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The best piece of advice that Lou Gehrig ever got came when he was a a young minor league player. struggling, was in the middle of a slump. He was losing his confidence. He was losing his passion in the game. The Yankees dispatched a an old seasoned manager or coach up to see him in Connecticut and they said, look, the most important thing a baseball player can understand, Lou, is that you can't be good every day. Right? What matters is that you show up.
What matters is that you try your best, but you're not always going to be at your best. And when you think about his streak, there's obviously a lot of terrible games in there. A lot of games where he was physically present, but the level of performance wasn't there. You learn this as a writer. It what matters is you show up. If you're sitting around waiting for inspiration,
If you're expecting every day to be productive and perfect, you're gonna be terribly disappointed. That's why there's this writing rule, just a couple crappy pages a day. It's that there's a minimum and that there's a day. That you do it every day that you meet this minimum. You're not expecting the maximum of yourself, you're expecting the very least.
that you meet the minimum. Now sometimes you totally exceed the maximum. Sometimes you really are feeling it. Sometimes it's amazing. But what matters is that you show up. What matters is you do it. What matters is you keep the commitment.
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¶ Prioritize What Is Essential
I'm not saying it'll solve all your problems, just most of them. I'm not saying it's the most philosophical thing you can do today. I'm just saying it's something that all the philosophers try to do every day. Look, what I am saying is that you should should go for a walk. It'll make everything better. It always does. It relaxes you, it calms you down, it gets you outside, it gets you moving. It both slows the mind down and gets it moving. Seneca
The Stoic philosopher said that we should take wandering walks. He said so the mind might be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing. Nietzsche actually said that only ideas had by walking have any worth. So why aren't you doing it? Why are you sitting there? Why are you watching this on the couch or at your desk? You need to get moving. You need to get
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So in my office I have two pictures of my kids and in between those pictures I have this Other picture that a sports psychologist once sent me, it depicts Oliver Sachs in his office, the great doctor and writer. Sachs just had in his office right behind him a giant sign. So it's capturing this great writer, this great thinker in his element and a reminder that he needed while he was in there that he has to say no.
It's so easy to say yes, but we have to remember that everything we say yes to is a no. It's saying no to someone or something else. And I try to remind myself that when I get random emails, when I get cool invitations, when I find myself getting distracted or or whatever it is.
When I'm saying yes to that'cause I don't want to be rude,'cause I don't have enough willpower,'cause I think I can squeeze it in, I'm saying no to the two most important people in my life. So saying no is hard, but it's also essential. And that's why I have that reminder. And
It's a very stoic idea in in meditations Marx really says ask yourself in every instance is this essential? He says because most of what we do and say isn't essential, but when we eliminate the inessential, he says we get the double benefit of doing the essential.
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Bill Belichuk, greatest football coach in history, tells his players, do your job. Look fellas, it's just about doing our job. Marcus Realis asks himself that same question in meditations. He says, what is my vocation? It says to be a good person. That's the job at the end. End of the day to be a good person, to do good things, to make a positive difference in the world for yourself and the people around you.
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¶ Transform Obstacles, Value Time
Around the fourth century BC there is a Athenian merchant and he suffers a shipwreck. He he loses everything in the shipwreck. No one would say that that's good. No one would say that that's positive. But Zena would say that he made a great fortune when he suffered a shipwreck because it drove him to philosophy. He chose for it to mark a new chapter in his life. He went through the the door that life opened
for him. He would create Stoicism out of this disaster. It was good because he made it good. He turned it into something. This is what the Stoics mean when they say that the obstacle is the way. They're not saying it's wonderful that you were robbed. They're not saying It's wonderful that your spouse cheated on you. It's not wonderful that
there was a hurricane or a fire or a natural disaster. None of this is is good in that sense, but it can be good if you choose to make good out of it. That's what stoicism is. We don't control what happens We control how we respond to what happens. We have the ability to make this thing good with the response that we take, with the action.
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Concentrate like a Roman, Marcus Real says. Concentrate on doing the thing in front of you as if it was the last thing you were doing in your life. I think about that pretty often. It's not that you're gonna die tomorrow for sure, but that it could be the last time you send this email. It could be the last time you have
This conversation. It could be the last time that I sit down to write or that I sit down to make a video. So am I gonna be fully present? Am I gonna concentrate? Am I gonna do my job? Am I gonna meet the standards of my people, of my profession, of my family, whatever it is? Am I gonna concentrate?
trait like a Roman, am I going to do it like this thing matters, like I might not get another opportunity to do it? To me that's the test, that's the standard to try to meet every day that you are lucky enough to be alive.
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It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we make it short by acting as if we have. Forever, by putting things off until tomorrow, by doing things that we shouldn't do. He says it's insane. We we protect our money, we protect our property, and then we are. foolish with the one thing that can't be replaced, the one thing they're not making any more of. He says, Don't
Spend your time on anything that's not giving you a return. And of course, he doesn't mean that financially. He means how are you going to spend this limited amount of time that you have here on earth? How are you going to protect that valuable? resource. How are you going to make good choices? courageous choices, disciplined choices. Memento more death isn't this thing that's at the end, Seneca says. It's happening now. The time that passes belongs to death, so how will you spend your life?
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