The Daily Stoic - 8 Stoic Don'ts For A Better Life

Episode Date: June 5, 2022

“If you seek tranquillity,” Marcus Aurelius said, “do less.”And then he follows the note to himself with some clarification. Not nothing, less. Do only what’s essential.Ryan Holiday's 8 Stoic don'ts will help you determine the things are essential, and those that aren't. Follow these tips today and everyday. This is the simple recipe for improvement and for happiness. So much of what we think we must do, so much of what we end up doing is not essential. We do it out of habit. We do it out of guilt. We do it out of laziness or we do it out of greedy ambition. And then we wonder why our performance suffers. We wonder why our heart isn’t really in it. But if we could do less inessential stuff, we’d be able to better do what is essential.InsideTracker provides you with a personalized plan to improve your metabolism, reduce stress, improve sleep, and optimize your health for the long haul. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store. Just go to insidetracker.com/STOIC to claim this deal.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most

importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. All the stoics were active in life trying to make a difference, trying to have a positive impact on the world. They were suspicious of the pen and ink flusters of people who just wrote about stuff, who

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Stop. You know, stoicism isn't just what we do. It's also what we don't do. Epic Titus said you could define stoicism in two words, persist and resist. Some things you do. Some things you have to resist doing. And in today's episode, that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to give you some stoic don'ts. Mark Sures talks about how so much of what we do and say is not essential.

And then when you eliminate the essential or you eliminate the destructive, it leaves room for the essential and the constructive. That's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. Eight stoic don'ts that will help you find not just what is essential, but help you act essentially, decently, productively, effectively, etc. And I hope you like the subset. Generally, stoics aren't trying not to be afraid of things, but of all the things that

Astoic tries specifically not to fear, it's change. Mark Serio says, all things are born from change, right? Everything good that ever happened to you in your life came from change. Astoic doesn't fear change because they're prepared for stuff, because they know they can handle anything. Mark Serio says, what am I going to do about tomorrow? He says, I'm going to meet it with the same weapons that I met today, right? Knowing what you're capable of, knowing what you can handle means you don't have to fear change, you

don't need to cling to make everything the same, and part of the stoic idea of indifference. It doesn't mean you don't care, but it means you're good either way. So because the preparation of stoic does, they don't need things to be a certain way. Stoic doesn't have to have a preference about how things are going to go tomorrow, whether it's going to be rainy or beautiful, whether it's going to be hot or cold, whether people are going to love them or hate them. They know what they're supposed to do. They can handle anything.

So Stoic doesn't fear change. Does it have preferences? Right? Because we don't need to. We can handle anything that life throws us. A lot of stuff happens every day, every minute. But here's the thing, most of it doesn't matter, right? Marcus really says, you're better off not giving small things more attention than they're

worth. Basically, don't sweat the small stuff, right? The stuff that's not up to you, the stuff that doesn't move you closer to where you wanna get in life, the stuff that distracts you from what you actually should be doing, you have to tune it out. We talked about this in one of the other videos,

the idea that you don't have to have an opinion about this. It doesn't even have to register with you. You can ignore it, you can stay focused on what matters. You can ask yourself, is this essential? Does it matter? And if it doesn't, what do you do? You ignore it. When someone criticizes me, I do this exercise from Marx. He says, think about this person. Think about what they just submitted to. Think about who they are, think about what they're addicted to, think about what they've ever accomplished. And what you realize is that this person who's opinion, you are about to let supersede your own evaluation of yourself and your work. He's actually worse than meaningless. They're like the opposite of who you're trying to be.

So it's good that they don't like what you're doing. You don't want their approval. Focus on what you think, focus on who you want to be as he says, we love ourselves more than other people. But then for some reason we care about other people's opinions more than our own. That's insanity. You got to focus on who you are, on your own internal scorecard,

on your sense of self. That's what you measure yourself against. Not the nonsense of other people, not the worthless opinions. These people who quite frankly, you don't respect anyway. sense of other people, not the worthless opinions, these people who quite frankly you don't respect anyway. A stoic doesn't need to get even. Marx really says the best revenge, it's to not be like that.

And this is a person who experienced coups, who was lied about, who was attacked constantly, right? So the best revenge is to not be like the person who wronged you. Seneca says that we get angry about things, but how ridiculous that is. He says you never return a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog. Right? A stoic understands that by nature of what we do, who we are, we're going to get attacked, we're going to get criticized.

People suck, they're going to hurt us, they're going to do things, but what a stoic doesn't do, what you have to stop doing is need to get revenge, need to get even, need to get even, need to get your pound of flesh because someone did something to you. You're fine, you weren't harmed by it, you're gonna be alright and you can let it go. People wake up and what's the first thing they do, they check their text messages, they check their email, they basically make themselves an item on someone else's to do is. The quality of their day is determined about what so and so

Tweeter or what message came in or what the latest breaking piece of news is and that's no way to live Brooks really says you have to stop being jerked around like a puppet you have to slow down You want to be in control of your morning? You want to be in control of the inputs that are coming into you? You don't want to be starting the day from behind. You don't want to be starting from this place of freneticness. You want to be in control. So I think it's really important that you start the morning

off right, that you start your day off right, and that you don't let things coming in determine the quality of your day, the quality of your life. There's a great story about Napoleon, who famously wouldn't read his mail until three weeks after it arrived. He knew that most problems will resolve themselves, but if you're checking constantly, if you're so reachable, you'll be inserting yourself into things that you don't need to be inserted

on, you'll be spending time on things that will resolve themselves. You can imagine Marcus really is doing a similar strategy, or epic Titus, or Seneca, the idea of responding to everything in real time to being on top of everything in real time, not only is this not a recipe for productivity, it's a recipe for misery too. You have to be willing not to know every single thing that's going on, to not be so reachable that anyone can interrupt you

in your concentration at any time. Follow Napoleon's advice, sleep with your phone in the other room, leave your phone in the other room and you're going to do something important. Don't be so reachable. You don't have to let this get to you, Mark's realises. You don't have to let it upset you. You always have the option to have no opinion, he says.

You can just let it go, you can let it drift by like clouds as the Buddhist talk about when they talk about thoughts. You don't have to let it sink in. Don't have to let it harm you. You don't have to let it get you riled up. You don't have to get worked up. You don't have to respond. You can just let it go. I want you to know that. Don't have to let this get to you. You can just let it go. Let it go. Epic Titus says that when you look outside yourself for approval, you have settled, you've handed over your happiness or your autonomy. Meaning, and this is such a critical stoke, I deal with when we talk about what's in our control,

what's not in our control, how you should judge yourself, whether you're getting better, whether you're a success, whether you're rich, whether you're whatever it is, it can't be determined by other people. What you've done is hand over your life on a platter to other people. Obviously, this is wonderful when people are celebrating you and saying you're awesome, but what happens when that turns? All right, what happens if the crowd is wrong?

What happens if the times that you're in are valuing the wrong things? So, Epictetus is saying that you want to look inward, you want to create your own standards, your own scorecard for what's important to you. So, ASTILIC doesn't look to outside sources, outside people, outside benchmarks for their success, for their happiness, for the self-worth, you find that internally. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day, check it out at dailystoke.com slash email.

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