The Daily Stoic - How Many Are Left? | Impulse Control

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check 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.

If you want to focus more on your well-being this year, you should read more and you should give Audible a try. Audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks focused on wellness from physical, mental, spiritual, social, motivational, occupational, and financial. You can listen to Audible on your daily walks. You can listen to my audiobooks on your daily walks. And stillness is the key. I have a whole chapter on walking, on walking meditations, on getting outside. And it's one of the things I do when I'm walking. Audible offers a wealth of wellbeing titles to help you get closer to your best life and the best you.

Discover stories to inspire, sounds to soothe, and voices that can change your life. Wherever you are on your wellbeing journey, Audible is there for you. Explore bestsellers, new releases, and exclusive originals. Listen now on Audible. Hello, I'm Emily, one of the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. Some of them hit the big time overnight.

Some have to plug away for years. But in our latest series, we're talking about a man who was world famous before he was even born. A life of extreme privilege that was mapped out from the start, but left him struggling to find his true purpose. A man who, compared to his big brother, felt a bit, you know, spare. Yes, it's Prince Harry. You might think you know everything about him, but trust me, there's even more. We follow Harry and the obsessive, all-consuming relationship of his life. Not with Meghan, but the British tabloid press.

Hounded and harassed, Harry is taking on an institution almost every bit as powerful as his own royal family. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Wandery+, on on Apple podcasts or the Wandery app. Welcome to the daily stoic podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient stoics illustrated with stories from history, current events and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it. How many are left?

Their names stick out to us. The athletes we remember peeking in our teenage years. The athletes we remember our favorite teams drafting. The first politician we voted for. The first author whose books we eagerly read as they came out. Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live has talked about how everyone's favorite era of SNL

is the years they were in high school. The stars are burned into their minds, the best characters impossible to forget. What's haunting though is to think about where all these all time greats are now. Is it hitting you that the athletes who are once your age in their prime, when you were in your prime, are now all retiring or retired? Even most of the coaches are gone.

All those people who came into the world with you and have already left it, Marcus Rilius noted in Meditations towards the end of his life. Life is a procession of people leaving the stage, having their moment and then that moment ending. We talked a while back about the song lyrics, which notes that all the stars of classic movies are dead now. We've mentioned Seneca's shock when he sees the trees planted in his boyhood starting to wither and die.

The same thing that happens to athletes in an unusually sped up way is happening only slightly more slowly to us. The 15 minutes of fame of our favorite celebrities is just a magnified version of our own brief professional peak before a decline and a replacement. We are not exempt. If anything, we are more vulnerable, our legacy is less pronounced. And it should humble us, give us perspective, and also give us a sense of priorities.

Be here now. Enjoy it while it's here. Memento mori. And I carry that coin. Got one on my desk here and I've got the Memento mori ring, which I wear as I go out. That's the idea for the stoics, a reminder that what happened to them will happen to you. There's even a famous gravestone that says,

what you are I once was, what I am you soon will be. It's just an important, powerful Stoke reminder. You can check it out, stork.dailystoke.com. ["The Stokes"] If something is making you upset, write it down and look at it. What happened? Who caused it? Now think about your reaction. What did you say?

What did you feel? Did this make it better or worse? Marcus Aurelius' emperor clearly had many people and causes to be upset. He also had real power and authority. Even so, we find that he would tell himself, you have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength. So too with what has happened to you.

You did not control what happened, but you do control which impulses you will follow in the wake of it. And this is this week's meditation in the Daily Stoic Journal titled Impulse Control. I do hope you check out the journal. It's a little journal I do every morning. We have three quotes here to go along with it. Epictetus says, We must discover the missing art of ascent and pay special attention to the sphere of our impulses, that they are subject to reservations, to the common good, and that they are in proportion to actual worth. It's Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, 1137. I just love that you have Marcus Aurelius quoting Epictetus. You say good fortune used to meet you at every corner, but the fortunate person is the one who gives themselves a good fortune.

And good fortunes are a well-tuned soul, good impulses, and good actions. That's Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 536. Frame your thoughts like this. You're an old person. You won't let yourself be enslaved by this any longer, no longer pulled like a puppet by every impulse, and you'll stop complaining about your present fortune or dreading the future. To me, journaling is just such a great way to do this exercise of impulse control. I usually do it in the morning,

but you could do journaling at any time, but I think, what are you upset about? Why are you angry? What are you holding onto? What's that thing inside you that you really wanna say to that person? Say it on the page first. Anne Frank talks about how paper

is more patient than people. Sometimes I find that the thing that I was writing down, I hadn't quite worked it out yet, and if I had said it the way I was thinking on the paper, it would not go well. Or I find that having said it once, I'm done. I don't need to mention this to anyone. It's probably better that I keep it to myself. So to me, journaling is really a way to work out some of those urges. Just because you think something doesn't mean you need to say it. I'm always amazed at these athletes who,

after a loss, rush in the locker room and tweet something as if, dude, you're not gonna be in a small metal tube with the person you just talked shit about for the next eight hours, as if you don't have to show up to work with them every single day. You need to develop this emotional impulse control, but that doesn't mean you just stuff it down

and you don't deal with it. You gotta deal with it on the pages in the journal. That's the idea. You let it out. It's a place to do some spiritual combat, but it's also a place for your ideas, your competing impulses, your competing opinions to battle themselves out, to fight for that limited space.

So spend some time with your journalized therapy. That's what it's there for. And if you're not taking advantage of it, chances are you are just taking those feelings out on other people or you're taking them out on yourself. And that's not a good way to go through life. So use the journal as an instrument of impulse control. It's gotten me out of trouble time and time again.

I can think of a moment when one of my books was coming out and I got sort of royally screwed over by a journalist. I wouldn't even say screwed over anymore. Let's just say someone did something to me that was quite unethical and quite petty and annoying. And actually the prompts in the Daily Stoic Journal, it caught me day after day. It was like three prompts in a row.

I didn't rush into saying something. I was gonna wait a few days. And at the end of the three days, at the end of the journaling, kept it to myself. And even now, I don't need to tell you the specifics. I've moved on and it saved me some headache, probably saved me creating an enemy for no reason. And then I can move on and I hope you can do the same.

["Spring Day"] Hey Prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Do you want to hear about the $100 wedding dress that just saved Abercrombie? Or the tech acquisition that was just like Game of Thrones? Or the one financial equation that can solve climate change.

Then check out our daily podcast, The Best One Yet, or as we call it, T-Boy. This is Nick. This is Jack. And we pick the three most interesting business news stories every day for the perfect mix. 20 minutes each morning, you're going to feel brighter. We call it pop biz, don't we, Jack? Where pop culture meets business news. So whether you want to kick off a conversation with your buddies, or you're going for that promotion at work, or you just want to know the trends before your friends, feel brighter

by starting your morning with us every weekday. Listen to The Best One Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your pods. You can listen to The Best One Yet ad free right now on Wondery Plus. For more deep dive and daily business content, listen on Wondery, the destination for business now.