The Daily Stoic - Do You Have One Of These?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, it's Ryan. I am recording this on my wife's phone, not at the office, at home, because it was a long crazy day of the office. We called each other. She was driving home. I was driving from picking up the kids and we said, what are we going to do for dinner? And that's when I remembered we had Hello Fresh in the fridge. Hello Fresh is the number one meal kit in America, making home cooking easier with chef-crafted recipes and fresh ingredients delivered straight to your door. In this fall, they're serving up even more to love. This isn't the Hello Fresh you remember, but it's bigger. It's doubled its menu. It's healthier. They've got a healthier menu, including 15 high-protein recipes each week, and it's tastier. You can get steak and seafood recipes delivered every week for no extra cost.

Starting point is 00:00:44 Discover new seasonal produce each week, from leeks to broccoli to Italian eggplant and more. As I said, we love HelloFresh because they curate meals that are not only easy to make, but they are delicious. The best way to cook just got better, go to hellofresh.com slash stoic 10 FM to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. One per box with active subscription. Free meals applied as a discount on first box. new subscribers only varies by plant. That's hellofresh.com slash stoic 10fm to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. Welcome to the daily stoic podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life.

Starting point is 00:01:40 Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit daily stoic.com. Do you have one of these? One of the most interesting things you come to understand about meditations is how unoriginal it is. It's largely made up of short quotes and passages from other writers. On one page we see Marcus Aurelius using a metaphor from Panateus. On another, he's quoting Epictetus from memory and then riffing on something he's heard from Rousticus. Here he is quoting a lost line from Euripides' play. You shouldn't give

Starting point is 00:02:45 circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don't care at all. Here he is quoting Chrysippus, and then it's Socrates, and then Homer and Plato, and Heraclitus and Democritus, and then Aristophanes and Pindar and Hesiod, and on and on and on. In a way, Meditations is really Marcus Aurelius's commonplace book, a place where, for centuries, even before Marcus, lovers of books and ideas have collected observations, quotes, ideas, diary entries, and anecdotes that they wanted to preserve. In fact, it was Gerta who said that a collection of anecdotes and maxims is the greatest treasure for a man of the world. He said, we can draw on them not just in conversation, but in moments of crisis. Montaigne's essays filled with so many quotes read as if they might

Starting point is 00:03:33 have been torn directly from his commonplace book. Emerson referred to his journals as his savings bank. And it's true, many of his best talks and writing first appeared there. Anne Frank filled her diary with passages from biographies and history books she was reading, celebrating sentences she liked and anecdotes that meant something to her. Look, the Daily Stoic itself would not exist without my habit of collecting stories and quotes and ideas on four by six note cards, which I learned how to do as a research assistant. Every one of those cards is a story, a quote, a lesson, a moment I wrestled with in insight. Those cards become chapters. Those chapters become books. Sometimes those become daily stoic emails and episodes. The Daily Stoic is here because of my

Starting point is 00:04:23 commonplace book. And if you're not keeping one, you're missing out. Whether we're beginning some creative work or we're trying to solve some complex problem, we should never be starting from zero. Invariably, at some point in our lives, we will have seen or heard or read something that could be of use in this situation. The question is, will we remember it? Will we have access to it? So whether it's in a journal like Marcus, a diary like Anne Frank, or index cards like me, you should keep a commonplace book so that in the end it can keep you. And the new book, Wisdom Takes Work, has a whole chapter about how to keep a commonplace book, the power of journaling, and the power of clarifying your thinking on the page. I'm really proud of this new book. It's

Starting point is 00:05:09 out now. Thanks to everyone who's been supporting it. It's meant a lot. And if you haven't read it, you can grab it at daily stoic.com slash wisdom. Thanks, everyone. they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with premium, you can listen to every

Starting point is 00:06:15 episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free, no interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for. And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism, and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20% off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.

The Daily Stoic - Do You Have One Of These?

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