The Daily Stoic - How Can This Improve Your Life? | The Color of Your Thoughts

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

Why has Meditations by Marcus Aurelius endured and influenced across so many centuries? And what makes its ancient wisdom still relevant to the modern problems we face today?Reading Marcus Aurelius can change your life, but only if you know how to read his work 👉 Head here now to grab your Meditations book and guide bundle | https://store.dailystoic.com/collections/meditations🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/🎥 VIDEO EPISODES | Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. It was never meant to be seen by prying eyes. It certainly wasn't meant to be published as a book. It was written in an antiquated foreign language full of ancient philosophy that until recently few had ever even heard of. and the man doing the writing lived a life unimaginably different and distant from yours. Why would you bother reading a book like that? How could it possibly affect and improve your life? Yet this is a book that Frederick the Great reportedly rode into battle with in his saddlebags, as did four-star General James Mattis, who carried it with him on deployments throughout the Middle East. It's a book that American presidents have read and raved about it is a book.

that Robert Lewis Stevenson, the great novelist, described as unlike any other. It's a book that actresses and musicians and entrepreneurs are still reading to this day. So why has meditations by Marcus Aurelius endured and influenced across so many centuries? And what makes its ancient wisdom still relevant to the modern problems we face today? It's because in meditations, Marcus attempts to answer the questions we all end up asking ourselves at some point. What's the good life? How do I live it? How do I stop running from pain and misfortune and start dealing with my problems? How do I learn how to treat other people when they can be so petty and miserable and annoying? How do I treat myself better too? And Marcus Reelius answers these

questions with clarity and wisdom in meditations. In fact, he gives us a kind of guidebook for living, a set of rules to live our life by practical exercises that made him a better person and can make you one too. That is why people have read meditations for the last 2,000 years. That's why it's the favorite of presidents and prisoners, men, and women, soldiers, and activists, entrepreneurs, and everyday people. But as Heraclitus said, you can't step in the same river twice because the river changes and so of you. And meditations in the that way is a book you're supposed to read more than once. And while meditations can be easy to read, it's also the work of a lifetime to explore its vast deaths, which is what we've been working on

over here at Daily Stoke for the last couple of years. We've been trying to create like a kind of a guide to meditations, a companion to help you make your way through the book, not just once, but over and over and over again. And we've spent hundreds of thousands of ours, not just with the text itself, but also with experts and translators and biographers and students of Stoicism to help understand what each phrase and idea and concept in it means. And we put that together. It's called How to Read Marcus Aurelius. It's a guide we've done. And we're relaunching it. We're going to do a book club discussion and Q&A. So anyone who takes the course can participate in that. And if you haven't read Meditations, we've got a great edition.

We've got a leather edition in the Daily Stoic store. I think that's really exciting. So you can grab that. I think you will enjoy it. It's really awesome. I'll link to all this in today's show notes, obviously. Or you can just go over to dailystoic.com slash meditations to check it out. These AI tools are super powerful.

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where AI is always optional and private. If you're running a business, you know the deal with most CRMs. They are packed with a bunch of features you're never going to use, clunky interfaces, and you spend a bunch of time just trying to find the basis. info and then you stop using them. Well, that's where today's sponsor Pipe Drive comes in. It's a simple sales CRM tool for small and medium sized businesses. Pip Drive brings your entire sales processes into one dashboard, giving you a crystal clear complete view of the sales process as well as customer information so you stay in control and you can close more deals faster. And it all centers around

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The Color of Your Thoughts. This is the Daily Stoic entry for April 1st. Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold and thought for the human spirit is colored by such impressions. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 516. If you bend your body into a sitting position every day for a long enough period of time, the curvature of your spine changes. A doctor can tell from a radiograph or an autopsy, whether someone sat at a desk for a living.

If you shove your feet into tiny narrow dress shoes each day, your feet will begin to take on that form as well. And the same is true for our mind. If you hold a perpetually negative outlook soon enough, everything you encounter will seem negative. Close it off and you will become close-minded. Color it with the wrong thoughts and your life will be died the same. I wanted to show Gregory Hayes' translation of that same quote.

you guys will like it. He says it interesting too. He says, the things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts. Color it with a run of thoughts like this. He says, anywhere you lead your life, you can lead a good one. But lives are let at court. Then good ones can be. Things gravitate toward what they were intended for. What things gravitate towards is their goal. A thing's goal is what benefits it. It's good. A rational beings good is unselfishness. What were we born for? That's nothing new. Remember? Lower things for the sake of higher ones and higher ones for one another. Things that have a consciousness are higher than things that don't, and those with the logos still higher. Really what meditations is, is an example of

Marcus Aurelius trying to die his soul with good thoughts. He's trying to write every day these little mantras, these little reminders of what he believes, of who he wants to. be of what life should be. You know, people believe in the law of attraction, this idea of, you know, like, of course, the law of attraction is bullshit. It was created by con artists to trick people. Not saying that, but I am saying, if you are a negative person, you are going to see things negatively. If you are a positive person, you are going to see things positively. Being positive doesn't attract positive things in your life. It does allow you, however, to see positive in situations that other people see negative.

Even the idea of the obstacle being the way. Marcus Aurelius is not saying life's going to be rosy and fun and awesome. Marcus is saying life's going to roll obstacles in your path. But if you have this kind of stoic optimism, if you've died your soul with the right thoughts, you'll be able to find the good inside that. So what I try to do in this podcast, what I try to do in my own life,

what I try to do with the tattoos on my arm, is die my soul with the right thoughts, literally die my skin with the right thoughts, to be a reminder. It's why I made the Daily Stoic medallions, why I carry the four virtues one and the Memento Mori one in my pocket. I want these things to be a part of me. I want them to be mantras. I want them to be reminders. I never want to lose track or sight of them. It's what I try to do in my journal.

I know all this stuff intellectually, but it's taking the time to write them down on the page, to write it down for the thousandth time, for the fifth year in a row, whatever it is. It's the practice. It's the dying. It's the reminding. It's the going over. This is what shapes us.

This is what makes us who we can be. I hope you can do that. I hope you're getting what the point of this practice is. Even if you've heard me say this stuff before, that's the point. It's supposed to come back through you. It's supposed to be the practice of it. So we're dying ourselves repeatedly with the right thoughts.

We're not trying to magically. make the world something different than it is, but we're trying to make ourselves different inside that world because that's what we control. So I hope you die your soul with some good thoughts today. I hope this meditation helps you do that a little bit. Our soul is died by the color of our thoughts. We are died by the impressions. Our life becomes what our mind makes it. Our life is what our thoughts make it. That's what stoicism is. I hope you follow that today. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to The Daily Stoag podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it.

It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.