The Daily Stoic - Be Tough On Yourself and Understanding To Other | Reignite Your Thoughts

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Ryan talks about why you must continually hold yourself accountable, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.For ONE WEEK ONLY, you can sign up and immediately begin the 2022 Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge at your own pace. It’s 3 weeks of actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. Just go to https://dailystoic.com/challenge to sign up.Blinkist takes top nonfiction titles, pulls out the key takeaways and puts them into text and audio explainers called Blinks that give you the most important information in just 15 minutes. Go to Blinkist.com/STOIC to start your free 7 day trial and get 25% off of a Blinkist Premium membership.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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 another episode of the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epititus Markis, really a Seneca, then some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wendery'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. Be tough on yourself and understanding to others. Remember that stoicism isn't about judging other people. It's not a moral philosophy you're supposed to project and enforce onto the world. No, it's a personal philosophy

that's designed to direct your behavior. This is what Marcus Aurelius meant when he said, be tolerant with others and strict with yourself. Be open to the idea that people are going to be fools or jerks or unreliable or anything else. Let them be. That's their business. That's not inside your control. But you have to be disciplined with yourself and your reactions. If someone acts ridiculous, let them. If your acting ridiculous, catch the problem, stop it, and work on preventing it from happening in the future. What you do is in your control. That is your business. Be strict about it. Leave other people to themselves. You

have enough to worry about. Reignite your thoughts, and I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoke 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly. My co-author and translator, Steve Enhancelman, you can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoke store, over a million copies of the Daily Stoke and Print Now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it.

It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the best. So it's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store. That daily stoke back home as well. But let's get on with today's reading. Your principles can't be extinguished unless you snuff out the thoughts that feed them for it is continually in your power to re-ignite new ones.

It's possible to start living again, see things anew as you once did. This is how to restart life. That's Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, 7-2. Have you had a bad couple of weeks? Have you been drifting away from the principles and beliefs that you hold dear? It's perfectly fine. It happens to all of us. Had couple weeks, have you been drifting away from the principles and beliefs that you hold dear? It's perfectly fine, it happens to all of us. In fact, it probably happened to Marcus, that's why he scribbled this note to himself.

Perhaps he was dealing with difficult senators, or having difficulties with his troubled son. Perhaps in these scenarios, he lost his temper, became depressed, or stopped checking in with himself. Who wouldn't? But the reminder here is that no matter what happens, no matter how disappointing our behavior has been in the past, the principles remain unchanged. We can return and embrace them at any moment. What happened yesterday, what happened five minutes ago is in the past.

We can reignite and restart whenever we like. Why not do it now. I think it's pretty lovely that although Marcus seems like this impossible idea, this philosopher, king, this magnificent, pureless human being, several times in meditations, he talks about picking himself up when he fails. He talks about getting back up when you fail because he did fail. He fell short a lot, right? He must have. He writes this in meditations. He says that we shouldn't feel exasperated or defeated or despondent because your days aren't

packed with wise and moral actions. He said, but try to get back up when you fail to celebrate behaving like a human, however imperfectly and fully embraced the pursuit that you've embarked on. Like he's saying that not to you, but to himself because like you, he fell short. He screwed up. I'm to give you a little tease of the book that I'm working on right now. I'm working on this book about self-discipline. And I think, again, we think of self-discipline like someone who's in great shape, someone

who's sticks to a diet, someone who has good health. We think of them as perfect. That's really not what they are. They actually part of that is having the highest standard, falling short, and then not writing yourself off or giving into that new thing, right, to be able to come back to the habit, to reset, to recommit when one falls short. I'm going to end up telling the story of Floyd Patterson, who's the first heavyweight champion to lose the belt and get it back up. Up until that time, every heavyweight champion who had lost, that was it.

They went into a downward spiral, they lost their confidence, whatever they lost their commitment, they never climbed back up the mountain in Floyd Patterson was the first one to do it. It's only happened maybe like three other times since. But we want to say, what the hell? Does it even matter? We throw in the towel, we quit because we screwed up or we fell short. But I think what Marcus is saying is like,

look, you can screw up, you can fail. But you, or like things can knock you off your block. Like life can happen to you. You don't control that, but you always control whether you get back up, whether you come back to it or not, right? He says, we can't be extinguished, only we can snuff it out.

To me, that's what he's saying, that we always have the power to come back to it, to start a new, to restart, to recommit. So, you know, maybe you're doing the new, your new challenge with us right now. Maybe you've already fallen short on some of your resolutions. Maybe you relapsed. I don't know. Maybe you lost your temper this morning.

I don't know. But you have, you can come back to it, right? You can start living again. It's in your power to re-ignite, to come back to it, to pick yourself up when you fail to celebrate behaving like a human being, to fully brace the pursuit that you've embarked on. Don't be exasperated, Marcus, to say, don't be defeated. Don't be despondent.

You're not perfect. No one thinks that you are. It was silly to expect that you could be. I like the advice from Oprah where she says, like, just because you ate one of the Oreos doesn't mean you have to finish the sleeve, right? Like, pick yourself back up. Don't snuff it out. Don't quit. Don't quit on yourself. Keep going. Keep going. Don't give up. That's what today's message is. Reignite. Come back to the philosophy philosophy, recommit to it. I know you can do it. Let's have a great year together. We're relaunching the daily Stuart new year

new U challenge. In the past, it's always been a live challenge for the first three weeks of the year. You either got on or you missed it. But this year we've decided we wanted to help more people. We got so many requests about it that we felt really excited to do it. And we wanted to help people avoid quitting on themselves and falling back to their old easier, more convenient, bad habits.

So for one week only, you can sign up and immediately begin the 2022 new year, new U challenge at your own pace. We recorded edited time stamps, my live Q&As. That's three hours of me answering questions on a wide variety of topics, including how I applied stuicism to my own life. My goals, my practices, my lessons from the challenge this year. We talk about what to do when you're overwhelmed and you've taken on too much ways to rethink your habits, routines when life gets too chaotic.

And so much more, you get the benefit of all the other people who've been through the challenge and what they've learned and shared as well. And additionally, the new year, new year challenge participants get 21 custom challenges delivered daily that will help you stop procrastinating, gain clarity on the life you want to live, learn new skills, quit harmful vices, make amends, be more courageous, break destructive thought patterns. I was saying in the run-up to the challenge that I felt like

this 2022 new year new challenge was our best challenge yet. Well now you don't have to take our word for it. We've been blown away by what people are saying and you can see that in the challenge. And anyways, I'm honored to share this with you. I'm excited to bring it back for this one week period. Never done it before. I hope you like it. And I'd love to see you join that course of people who are making changes. You can sign up at dailystilic.com slash challenge.

Again, this is just for a week. If you procrastinated earlier in the year, if you told yourself you were gonna get around to it, you missed it. Well, you got a second chance. You've been given a do-over, a reprieve for the new year, and we'd love to have you take advantage of that. You can sign up at dailystilic.com slash challenge,

and as always, if you're a daily stoke, life member, that's dailystiliclife.com. You get this challenge and all the challenges that we have planned for the year for free. So check that out, dailystokelife.com and of course dailystoke.com slash challenge. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily stoke early and add free on Amazon music,

download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. as talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Cotopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discussed their entire journey from day one,

and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges and how to lead through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app.