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You can binge business wars, the unraveling of Boeing early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.
We forget these heroes. The deeds of the famous Stoics were down to us. Cato, defying Caesar, Rutilius, Rufus, going into exile, Thrasia, defying Nero. Marcus Aurelius on the battlefield. These were great and daring deeds, of course. Lesser known, however, are the deeds of the Stoic women, the defiance and bravery of Portia Cato. The final words of Cornificea. Marcus Aurelius' daughter is just as impressive as the final moments of Seneca.
These are just a few of the stoic women we've heard about. How many countless generations of stoic women went ignored their courage and virtue unreported. Thomas Wentworth Higginson is another such figure we talked about recently. A 19th century translator of Epictetus, he was an active abolitionist and a leader of black troops in the Civil War.
In his fascinating essay on courage, inspired by the Stoics, he makes a similar note of just how many incredible and inspiring examples are left out of the historical narrative, either by neglect or bigotry. Agents of the Underground Railroad, he wrote, report that the incidents which daily come to their knowledge are beyond all Greek
all Roman fame. These men and women who have tested their courage in the lonely swamp against the alligator in the bloodhound, who have starved on the prairies hidden in holds, clung to locomotives ridden hundreds of miles cramped in boxes, head downward equally near to death if discovered or deserted,
and who have then, after enduring all this, gone voluntarily back to risk it over again for the sake of wife or child? What do we pale faces that we should claim a rival capacity with theirs for heroic deeds?" He said. What matter if none below the throne of God can now identify the nameless Negro in the Tennessee ironworks who, during the last insurrection, said he knew all about the plot but would die before he would tell.
He received 750 lashes and died, yet where amid the mausoleums of the world is their carved in epitaph like that. These omissions are not just injustices to the marginalized, but they do a disservice to us too.
We deprive ourselves of stories that would uplift us, of examples that we could learn from. Men and women benefit by knowing of the life of poor Shikato. Just as Americans and indeed all people are better off from learning about Epictetus, a slave in Rome. They also deserve to be inspired by the deeds of enslaved people in much more recent times. These men and women who survived, who resisted, who loved and sacrificed, deserve more than namelessness.
They were stoic in ways we cannot even imagine. They were brave in ways we cannot even comprehend." I talk about some of these lesser-known stoics in lives of the stoics. Obviously, stoics like Agrippiness and Portiaquedo. And then some of my favorite books in the painted porch are like Sharon McMahon's new book, The Small and The Mighty.
I like this wonderful book, The Warmth of Other Suns. I always love stories about heroic people whose heroism I had not even heard of. I'll link to some of those in today's show notes. Check it out.
There's nothing less stoic than disorganization and chaos than winging it. And that's why the stoics develop routines, where they set standards, developed habits, practices. They took the structure of things seriously. Life without design, Seneca says, is erratic.
And so their ability to make order from this chaos, why we organize the trivial parts of our lives is to free up resources to do important and meaningful stuff. We get freedom from the order and the structure. So that's what we're gonna talk about in today's video. I'm gonna share some daily habits, some lifestyle practices, standards and structures set forth by the Stoics that you can use today
get your life in order. When practiced consistently, these are habits that'll help you achieve your goals and make you someone that people can count on and respect. We're going to split this video up into two parts. First part is going to take you through a day in the life of a stoic outlining some of the non-negotiables they're committed to for a well-designed day. And then the second part is going to be some stoic lifestyle principles, high level standards and practices to keep in mind. But we'll give you a more organized and peaceful life.
You have to win the morning. In fact, one of the most relatable parts of Marcus Aurelius' meditations is book five, where Marcus Aurelius has an argument with himself. He says, Don, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself, I have to go to work as a human being. It says, or is this what you were created for, to huddle under the blankets and stay warm? Right, a stoic?
attacks the morning, a stoic wins the morning, a stoic gets up early. And it's impressive when we realized that he didn't have to do this. He didn't really have to do anything. One of his predecessors basically abandons that thrown for an exotic island. The emperor had so much power, so much responsibility, and yet Marcus is practicing a foundational daily habit. He is getting up early and he is getting after it.
Because winning the morning is key to winning the day and winning the life. I want to get up, get my most important things done. I want to get the hard things out of the way while I still have the most energy while I'm still the freshest while I haven't been dragged down into the muck of distraction or frustration or any of those things. So a foundational daily stewards practice is get up early, get after it, don't
huddle under the covers and stay warm. Don't hit the snooze button a million times. Life is short. We got to get up and get after it and we got to get after it early.
So how do we know that Marcus Rios got up early? We know he got up early because of another foundational daily practice, the journal. That's what meditation is, the journal of the most powerful man in the world. In the list of people ancient and modern who practice the art of journaling is almost comically long and it's fascinatingly diverse. We have Oscar Wilde and Susan Sontog, Queen Victoria, John Quincy Adams, Emerson, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Sean Green, the baseball player, Mary Chestnut,
Brian Coppelman and Niss Ninh, Franz Kafka, Ben Franklin, and countless others. Some people journal in the morning, some did it sporadically. Some like Da Vinci kept their notebooks on them at all times. The idea is you've got to make time and space for reflection. Not sometimes, but
every day. Seneca, the stoke philosopher, talks about how he did his writing and reflecting time in the evening. He said, when darkness had fallen and his wife had gone to sleep, he examined his entire day, says I go back over what I've done and said I hide nothing from myself.
and I passed nothing by. And then he would go to bed and he said he found that the sleep which follows self-examination was particularly sweet. You got a nice evening journaling routine. It leads right into a good night of sleep and then an early wake-up. Foucault, who was a big fan of the Stokes, would talk about this ancient genre of writing notes to themselves. He actually called the journal a weapon for spiritual combat, a way to practice
philosophy and purge the mind of agitation and foolishness to overcome difficulty, to silence those barking dogs in your head, reflect on the day that's passed. Take note of things that struck you throughout the course of the day, to feel wisdom flow through your fingertips and onto the page. Anne Frank writes in her beautiful diary about how paper is more patient than people. That's why journaling is such.
an important daily practice. Life is frustrating. Life is confusing. Life is overwhelming. And on the page, we can slow the mind down. We can find a way to peace. We can ask ourselves tough questions. You know, where am I standing in my own way? What's a step I can take towards getting better? Why am I so worked up on this? What blessings can I count? Why do I care so much about these people? What am I avoiding here? Why are my fears deciding what I do or don't do? Journaling is, as Julia Cameron said,
kind of spiritual windshield wipers, a break from the world, a framework for the day ahead, a way to break down and analyze the day they just had. And it may well be the most important thing you do, and that is why the Stoics did it every day.
we all have to be readers. The foundation of stoicism comes from a prophecy from the oracle of Delphi. A young Zeno is visiting the oracle and the oracle tells him, you will become wise when you begin to have conversations with the dead.
And it's not until many years later that he ends up in a bookstore and Athens and he hears the bookseller reading some of the dialogues of Socrates, a man who had died some years previous. And that's when it hits Zeno. Books are a way to have conversations
the dead. We are talking to people who are no longer with us benefiting from their wisdom. So the Stoics are readers. You just have to be. Seneca talks about how we have to linger on the works of the master thinkers. Not just read, but read and reread and reread.
That's what a book like Meditations is about. It's a book you don't just read once, but a book you are reading on an ongoing basis. So part of your stoic practice, your daily stoic practice, has to be making time for reading and for wisdom. And this ties in well to the journaling practice. You read, you journal about what you're reading, you go out and experience things that's informed by what you're reading, or it directs you to things that you should read.
So, still it makes time for reading, but not just any book. There's a joke. Epictetus, here's one of his students, bragging about reading some obscure philosopher who is particularly dense, and he says, you know, if they had been a better writer, you have less to brag about.
And so the reading that we do, it shouldn't be to impress people. It's not to check a box. We're reading for information we can use in our lives. General James Mattis, a modern-day stoic talks about how if you haven't read hundreds of books, particularly about what you do for a living, about your space, he says you are functionally illiterate. We don't want to learn by trial and error, that which we can learn from the trials and errors of others.
We have to read every single day, it's a basic stoic practice. We have to treat the body rigorously. When we think of an ancient philosopher, when we think of a philosopher generally, we don't tend to think of an athlete, we don't think of someone who's strong and tough, we tend to think of a nerd. We think of a turtleneck university professor, an old guy in a toga, but the philosophers were active Socrates, wasn't
just a soldier who was brave in battle. Socrates was also known by his friends as someone who could wear a thin cloak in wintertime. He was tough. He liked to harden himself against the elements. Seneca was not only active, a big walker. He took these cold plunges every day. When Nero went to kill Seneca, he found that he had trouble finding an opportunity to poison him because Seneca was subsisting on food he could forage for himself out in the woods.
The point is, the Stoics were active. They were outdoorsy. They were not simply your bookish philosopher. Actually, when I was introduced to the Stoics, the same day I bought Mark's Realist's Meditations, I bought this book called The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. It's an amazing book. I tell this story in the obstacles the way Anne disciplined his destiny.
Theodore Roosevelt was born a sickly young boy. He had asthma and his interests were academic. He liked to be inside. He was nearsighted. And one day his father sat him down and said, look, Theodore, you've got the mind, but I don't think you have the body.
It was actually expressing a timeless bit of wisdom, this idea of mensano, incorporation or a strong mind and a strong body. And young Theodore looks at his father and he says, okay, I will make my body. And this is where we get the active, outdoorsy, adventurous Theodore Roosevelt, the man who embraced the strenuous life. And you know,
After he was president, he took this journey down the Amazon on an unexplored river. And you know what he brought with him? He brought a copy of Marcus Aurelius' meditations as well as Epictetus' handbook. So, the stoic philosopher is active. Marcus Aurelius hunted and wrestled. There was a stoic boxer. There were stoic runners. Roosevelt tried to get a couple of hours of exercise in a day as president.
So what do you think Teddy would have thought of our sedentary digital lives, our excuse that we're too busy or too tired or that we weren't born that way? We're meant for so much more. Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus, said obviously the philosopher's body should be well prepared for physical activity.
Because often, he said, the virtues make use of this as a necessary instrument for the affairs of life. He says, we must train ourselves, discipline ourselves to cold and heat and thirst and hunger, meager rations, hard beds and avoidance of pleasures and patience under sufferings. He says, from this, the body becomes strengthened and becomes capable of enduring hardship. It's ready for any task.
A daily practice for the Stoics had nothing to do with reading or writing, but getting out there, getting active, getting after it, retreat the body rigorously, Seneca says, so that it's not disobedient to the mind, mensana and corporasano, strong mind in a strong body.
So in addition to their daily practices, there were some sort of philosophical conceptions or beliefs that helped the Stoics live well-ordered productive lives.
And the first is that they try to avoid procrastination. The one thing all fools have in common, Seneca, says, is they're always getting ready to live. They say, oh, I got to wait for things to go back to normal. I got to wait for the right conditions. I got to do this first. I got to do that. I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it in the morning. And where does this get them? It gets them nowhere. It gets them nothing. They never do it. I'll do it tomorrow is the biggest lie
in the world. You could be good today, Marx really says in meditations, but instead you choose tomorrow. What the Stoics try to do is, if something is worth doing, they want to do it now. They want to get started now. They're disciplined enough and also humble enough to know that there's something entitled about procrastination. It assumes that you'll have the discipline and the time and the opportunity to do it later. And we don't know that for sure.
The graveyard of lost potential, we might say, of wasted time and wasted years is people who needed to do something else first. Putting things off is the biggest waste of life, Seneca wrote. He says, it snatches away each day as it comes and it denies us the present by promising us the future. He said, the whole future lies in uncertainty. Live immediately. I think he's saying, do it now. Get rid of. I'll get to it later from your lexicon. Do it now.
Marcus really said a pretty simple recipe for a better life. He said, if you seek tranquility, do less. He said, the question we have to ask ourselves with everything is, is this essential? And he says, because when you eliminate the inessential, you get the double satisfaction of doing less better.
So much of what we do, what we spend our days on, what we spend our lives on, we don't need to do. We do it out of habit. We do it out of guilt. We do it out of laziness. We do it out of not wanting to seem rude. We do it because we think we have forever or we have unlimited time. And then we wonder why our heart isn't in it. We wonder why we don't have time to do the actual important things. If we could do less inessential stuff, we'd be able to do what is essential
better and we get that tranquility that Marcus Aurelius is talking about. We have to cultivate the power, the ability to say no, the ability to prioritize, the ability to eliminate. If we want tranquility, if we want productivity, it's about more wood behind fewer arrows. It's about really sticking with the things that are important and eliminating the inessential and the unnecessary.
There was a Greek word that we get from the Stoics, cosmiotis. And this is about order. This is about keeping things clean. When I'm feeling overwhelmed, when I'm feeling behind, I often look down at my desk and go, of course I feel this way. Of course my life is this way. Look at it. This is a metaphor. Gretchen Rubin, who I've interviewed on the Daily Stoke podcast, has this great line. She says, outer order, inner calm.
So one of the things we have to do is get our stuff organized, keep things clean and simple and elegant. Like, what does your desktop look like? Your digital desktop and your actual desktop? Are you drowning in papers? Is your office a mess? Do you have a million unread emails? Is your phone filled with alerts?
Creating order and systems, eliminating noise and interruptions, creating order from the chaos of life is key to protecting that sort of stoic sense of purpose and direction and clarity. Seneca talks about how, look, sometimes life is messy and chaotic, but to needlessly be plunged into that.
is irresponsible. So how do we create order and structure in our lives? How do we set up systems? How do we automate things? If everything in your life is dependent on willpower, is dependent on constant excavations, you're going to be exhausted. So you've got to create order and systems. You've got to keep things clean. You've got to stick with systems and structure or you're going to get overwhelmed.
In a world of social media and instant gratification, shamelessness and awfulness, we need boundaries more than everybody. You know, like minding your own business, keeping your private life private, not oversharing, not letting people drag you down, not getting entangled in other people's dysfunctions or entangling them in yours, being strong enough to communicate what you like and just like respecting other people's space and preferences.
It's like basic stuff, but it's pretty rare these days. We're surrounded by overshares and hot messes, doormats, drama queens, busy bodies, pushovers, gossip mongers. Boundaries are about drawing some lines around yourself. Healthy borders that help determine what you share and what you want, what you let in, what you don't, what you focus on, and what you don't.
Actually, one of the opening passages in Meditations is about this very idea. Marcus really starts book two. He says, when you wake up in the morning, tell yourself the people I will deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, and jealous and surly.
But he's not just saying, hey, the world is going to be awful. He's saying this is what boundaries are about. He says, but I won't let them implicate me in ugliness. He says, none of them can hurt me. And I think what boundaries are about creating space, creating buffers.
So not everyone and everything has access to your mind. This is the still concept of an inner citadel. Things that are outside us can't be allowed to touch us. The news of the world, the annoying coworker, the noises coming in. One of Seneca's letters, I open still and this is the key with this, is Seneca trying to concentrate in work
In the midst of a very busy and noisy room where people were always trying to get at him, where he had to tune out a lot of distraction. And so the ability to have these boundaries to be self-contained, self-sufficient is just a key stoic practice to having a well-ordered and well-functioning life.
So you might think if the stokes were all about routine and structure and order that they were really rigid. And it might seem contradictory for me to tell you that they're not, right? There's a video about organizing your life, and here I am telling you this idea of formlessness. But formlessness comes to us from the Great Robert Greene, he says it's the most stoic law of power.
And again, that might not be what you think of the stokes as the stokes were all about rules and structure and discipline. But life is unpredictable. There is so much outside of our control. If you need things to be a certain way, if you can't adapt and adjust, you're going to have a hard time. In Meditations, Marx really says that adaptability is the ability to look at what life deals you and say, yes, that's just what I was looking for.
So yes, we have our preferred way of doing things, but we can handle them however they are. Kato was one of the most vaunted and towering of the Stoics, but he never gave an inch on anything even in the face of the most unrelenting pressure, and this
In the end made him not so effective politician. He refused compromise in every form. He insisted on tradition down to the letter, and that rigidity became a kind of fragility. We need the ability to adjust and embrace change. One of the Queen's mottos, which I loved, was if things are going to stay the same, then things are going to have to change.
My routine has changed so much since I had kids, since I moved to Texas, since I became a writer. Different phases and seasons of my life my routine is always changing. But these overarching principles, these deeper ideas, these commitments, that allows me to shuffle those things around but still hold true to the same basic concepts.
Epictetus was once asked by one of his students, like, what he was supposed to do. And Epictetus didn't have an answer for him. And the student finally said, no, you've got to tell me what to do. And Epictetus said, it would be better if you asked me to help make you adaptable to circumstances. That's what we have to ultimately be as stoics. Adaptable to any and all circumstances, no matter what's going on in the outside world. We find ways to be productive and efficient and focus on what's essential inside of them.
And the last, final, and I think most brief thing the Stoics use to shape their days and lives is a reminder of how short life is. You could leave life right now, part of this says in Meditations, let that determine what you do and say and think. Seneca's view was even more of a paradigm shift. He says, don't think of death as this thing in the future that you're moving slowly towards. He says death is happening right now. It says the time that passes belongs to death.
So as we decide how to structure our days, whether to procrastinate or not, what order to put them in or not, to do things or not, we have to remember. We are purchasing these things in front of us with our most precious resource, our time, something we can never get back. And so we have to be present, we have to prioritize, we have to be humble, we have to be flexible because life is short. Memento more, you could go at any moment, let that determine what you do and say and think and how you live.
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New year, new resolutions. And this year, on the Best Idea Yet Podcast, we're revealing the untold origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. And we promise you have never heard these before. Ever wonder how the iconic Reese's peanut butter cup was invented? Because it was by accident. HB Reese, a former frog salesman. True story. Stumbled upon the idea after accidentally burning a batch of peanut. Classic. Proving that sometimes our best ideas arise from what seemed like our biggest mistakes.
And Jack, did you know there's a scientific explanation why humans crave that surprising combo of peanut butter and chocolate? I didn't! But it sounds delicious. It is delicious. So, if you're looking to get inspired and creative this year, tune in to the best idea yet. You can find us on the Wondering App or wherever you get your podcasts.
And if you're looking for more podcasts to help you start this year off right, check out New Year's New Mindset on The Wondering Out. Who knows, your next great idea could be an accident that you burned. This is Nick, and this is Jack, and we'll see you on the best idea yet.