This Is How You Release Your Anxiety | Quality Over Quantity

Welcome to the The Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. You worry, you get stressed, you want to get there early, you want it to go well, you don't want anything bad to happen to your loved ones, to you, to anyone. In the tunnel vision of your anxiety, these are all the things that you can think about. They consume you, they change you, they overwhelm you.

But can you right now in the calm of morning when you are not anxious, take a minute to step back? Think about what your anxiety costs you. Think about it honestly and painfully. Think of the arguments it's created. Think of the dead time it left you with at the airport. Think of the things it made you say no to, the things that might have been so much fun. Think of the reputation it gave you. Think of the damage it has done to your relationship.

to your self confidence, to your ability to enjoy life. One of the most wonderful passages in meditations is where Marcus Aurelius looks at his own troubles with worry and fear and says, Today I escaped my anxiety, or rather I discarded it. For it is within me. Your anxiety is within you. Worse it is eating at you and harming you. It does not make your life better. No, it comes at the expense of life.

Which is why we must, as best we can, let it go, not let it control us, not let it take from us the things that we can never get back. I just heard this stat that shocked me, given that I uh Hear from the sales staff at my publisher quite a bit. The stat is sales teams spend about 50% of their time on admin work instead of selling, relationship building, closing deals.

Which means they're not selling, right? And that's where today's sponsor comes in: Pipe Drive. It's a simple, intelligent CRM tool for small and medium businesses. Pipe Drive was built from the ground up to strip away that manual work, that stuff that's wasting their time taking your sales team away from doing the thing you pay them to do, which is sell stuff. They've got smart automations to handle repetitive tasks, and you can even customize these automations to fit your unique sales process.

Plus they've got AI features that will analyze your pipeline, flag stall deals, surface what needs attention, and tell your team what to do next without them having to go look for it. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join over the 100,000 companies already using pipe drive. And right now when you use R link, you'll get a 30-day free trial. No credit card or payment needed. Just head over to pipedrive.com slash doick to get started. That's pipedrive.com slash doic.

to be up and running in minutes. Being an effective leader is difficult, right? You gotta keep your ego in check. You gotta know how your business works, how the team operates for peak effectiveness. But most leaders are making decisions about their teams based on assumptions and not reality. And that's exactly the problem that today's sponsor, Scribe, was built to fix.

Scribe Optimize passively captures how your team works across approved business apps, and it uses AI to automatically surface workflows, inefficiencies, and improvement opportunities. No interviews, no manual discovery, no extra work for your team. Scribe is trusted by eighty thousand plus enterprises, including nearly half of the Fortune five hundred.

Scribe Optimize follows work across every tool involved. If someone starts something at Salesforce and finishes it in a completely different tool, it tracks it the whole way. And Optimize shows you where your biggest inefficiencies are with AI powered recommendations on how to fix them, so you're not just identifying problems, you're getting clear directions on how to improve. The kind of visibility that used to take months now is always on.

And Optimize only works on applications your admin improves so no personal activity is captured and no one's privacy is at risk. If you want to see what Optimize could look like for your organization, visit scribe.how slash stoic s-c-r-i-b-e. dot how slash stoic

Quality over quantity. Today's entry comes to us from Seneca's On the Tranquility of Mind, 9-4. He says, What's the point of having countless books and libraries whose titles could hardly be read? through in a lifetime. The learner is not taught but burdened by the sheer volume, it's better to plant the seeds of a few authors than to be scattered about by many.

You know, there is no prize for having read the most books before you die. Even if you were the most dedicated reader in the world, a book a day even, your collection would probably never be bigger than a small branch library. You'll never even come close to matching what's stored in the servers at Google Books or keep up with the hundreds of thousands of titles published on Amazon each year.

What then if when it came to your reading and learning you prioritized quality over quantity? What if you read a few great books deeply instead of briefly skimming all the new books? Your shelves might be emptier, but your brain and your life would be fuller. And you know, I get this question a lot. People go, How many books have you read? Or how many books do you own?

The answer is I I don't actually know, because this isn't what I think about. And sometimes you'll read about some historical figure or some rich person that I have over thirty thousand books or you know, he amassed a library of five thousand books or whatever it is. I just don't think about it that way. It's not who cares how many you read? Seneca has a great line somewhere in one of his letters where he talks about, you know.

So you've drank a bunch of fancy wine. You you just acted like a a sieve or a sponge. It it went right through you. Right. And and if you're thinking about quantity, you're missing the point. The point of reading is one, to absorb and retain and become better for the information. But two, um The point is to get better as a human being. And it may well be that rereading, uh, Seneca talks about lingering on the works of the master thinkers. Um

This is really important. And and it was hard for me. It was only a few years ago that I really started making the conscious effort to to not just read more, but to reread more. Um, the reason we reread is that we're getting something out of uh the book that wasn't there the first time that we didn't see the first time. Um it's probably a lighter ecological impact too. But but the point is by rereading, uh we are getting better. But You know, you don't get an extra book to put on the shelf.

You don't get to go to the bookstore and pick something up. You have to sit with something you already have and you have to really enjoy it. Angers, focus on getting better. Focus, don't it's it's also not about speed reading, just trying to churn through as many books as possible. It's about the experience. I I I talk about this too when people ask me about speed reading. It's like

Nobody tries to have sex faster. Nobody tries to get through their meals faster, right? Nobody tries to get through their kids' childhood faster. No, important, powerful, meaningful experiences you want to enjoy. You want to slow them down. You want to savor them. And I think reading is that as well. So take your time, don't rush through, don't get caught up in ego. Don't think that this is some sort of race.

It's probably, you know, a bit gauche to to even talk about how many books you have. I honestly don't know. I know I have more than I need, I know I have more than I've read. I know there's lots more that I want to read, but that's as far as I'm gonna get as far as quantity goes. I am much more focused on quality, and so should you. As Truman says, not all readers are leaders, but all leaders have to be readers.

You can check that out at dailystoic.com/slash reading. Uh, but anyways, get out there, get reading. Just don't think of it as a race. It's not a race. It's about doing it well, not doing it the most or doing it the best. It's about doing it well for you. And uh