The Daily Stoic - How Could It Possibly Help You? | Test Your Impressions
Episode Date: April 8, 2025It’s a book that was never meant to be read. So why has Meditations by Marcus Aurelius endured and influenced across so many centuries? And what makes its ancient wisdom still relevant to t...he modern problems we face today?🎉 Celebrate Marcus Aurelius' Birthday this month by reading Meditations with us and the Daily Stoic community. On April 26th, 1905 years after the day of his birth, Ryan Holiday will host an invite-only LIVE Q&A to talk about all things Marcus Aurelius and Meditations.Get 20% off with a Meditations BOOK & GUIDE bundle. Join the LIVE Meditations Q&A with Ryan Holiday by purchasing before April 26th: dailystoic.com/meditations 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow 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.
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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. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2000 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 DailyStalag.com. How Could This Possibly Help You?
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 Louis 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 Rilius 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 2000 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 have you.
And Meditations in 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 depths,
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 hours,
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
because we're gonna do a book club discussion
and Q&A about it on April 26th,
which is Marcus's birthday.
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 story.
And then I'm excited to say that I wrote a new foreword
for the Gregory Hayes translation,
which is coming out in hardcover and paperback,
I guess, audio book and ebook.
If you haven't read Meditations, you want to read this.
I think that's really exciting.
You can grab that.
I think it'll do well.
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
dailystewick.com slash meditations to check it out.
Test your impressions. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection
on the art of living, which I myself just worked on this morning.
I do the journal every morning.
One of Epictetus's key teachings was all about testing our impressions, any experience, perception
or circumstance that was in front of us.
And he uses a key verb to emphasize this practice
10 times in discourses and once in the opening
of the Incaridion.
And the word carries the meaning of the assayer,
one who tests fine metals and coins
to verify their authenticity.
In one of the most memorable uses,
Epictetus compares our need to test impressions
to what is done with coins and how the skilled merchant
can hear a counterfeit coin cast upon a table
just as a musician would detect a sour note.
So this week, go through the process
of assaying everything that comes before you,
assuming it all to be counterfeit or misleading
until we can prove otherwise.
And you know, it's funny,
I think I've really first wrapped my head around this idea
of to assay or the word assay, because at Cerro Gordo,
you may have heard my interview with Brent Underwood,
who's one of my long time,
I guess he was formerly my intern
and great guy who works at Brass Check,
he's one of the partners and he's helped build Daily Stoic
and someone I talked to on the phone almost every day.
And a few years ago, he bought this ghost town
in the mountains of Southern California called Cerro Gordo.
And he's been trying to sort of turn it into this resort.
But anyways, when I went out and visited,
he showed me this building and it's called the assay office.
So the miners would pull this silver out of the ground
in the ore or whatever.
And sometimes they'd, I don't know exactly how it works,
but they would take it to this office.
And this is where like the guy with a brain,
the dispassionate observer,
the money man would test it and let them know like just what they found, how rich
it was, how valuable it was, what percentage it was this or that or this.
This was like the filter through which all the rocks pulled out of this
mining town were filtered through.
And just cause you thought it was valuable, it didn't matter unless the essay
office came through and said, boom, boom, boom, and stamped it and gave it,
you know, another funny little thing is that the brothel
was located immediately next door.
So you'd find out you'd just become a rich man.
And then of course you'd go do your business.
But the idea is you have to put everything to the test.
And that's what Epictetus is saying.
He says, when it comes to money
where we feel our clear interest,
we have an entire art where the tester uses many means
to discover the worth, just as we give great attention
to judging things that might steer us badly.
But when it comes to our own ruling principle,
we yawn and doze off, accepting any appearances
that flash by without counting the costs.
That's from Discourses 120.
And then he says in 2.18, first off,
don't let the force of an impression carry you away.
Say to it, hold it up a bit and let me see who you are and where you are from.
Let me put you to the test.
And then in in Caribbean, he says, from the very beginning, make it your practice to say
to every harsh impression, you are an impression and not at all what you appear to be.
Next examine it and test it by the rules you possess.
The first and greatest of which is this,
whether it belongs to the things in our control
or not in our control,
and if the latter, prepare to respond,
it is nothing to me."
So look, if you went and got your rocks tested
at Saragorda and they found out to be worthless stones,
you wouldn't be like,
but I want them to be what they are.
I'm gonna continue to pretend, right?
You wouldn't spend money that you just found out
you don't actually have.
So this process of testing one's perceptions
and one's facts is a really essential part of the process.
You can't just go through life
pretending things are what they are
or taking them at first glance
because there are so many factors at play
from cognitive biases to your upbringing
to just misleading appearances.
You have to put everything to the test.
You have to see things as they actually are.
And this process of assaying everything
that's in front of you is a key stoic exercise.
And I hope you can build on this practice this week.
Slow down, take a minute, put it to the test,
see if it's real or counterfeit,
see if it's what everyone else wants you to see.
Or as Mark Cerrella says, see what is really there.
Hey, it's Ryan.
Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast.
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