The Daily Stoic - How To Be Beautiful | Stake Your Claim

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

Ryan discusses how Epictetus defined being beautiful, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. This holiday season, give yourself or a loved one a gift that keeps getting better night after night. Right in time for the holidays, give the gift of better sleep and a present that will keep giving back, everyday of the year. Go to eightsleep.com/dailystoic for exclusive holiday savings. → We hope you join us in the 2022 New Year New You Challenge. It kicks off in a little over a week. 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 before sign ups end on January 1st!Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://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 Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoke podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes 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 stoke, 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.

Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree'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. How to be beautiful. Epic Titus said that the root of beauty was beautiful choices. If your choices are beautiful, he said,

so too will you be. And it's simple and it's true. You are what your choices make you. Nothing more, nothing less. He was talking of true, beautiful human behavior, one imagines, not a physical beauty. But actually, it applies to both. Beauty and either case can't be separated from the process.

The regimen that creates it takes exercise, it takes discipline, it takes sacrifice, takes weeks and months and years. It's the decision day after day after day to get up out of bed early and go for a run. It's how often you pick up the book instead of the television remote, the groceries, instead of the fast food, the journal, instead of the television remote, the groceries instead of the fast food, the journal instead of the phone. It's saying no to cool opportunities and yes to our kids. So if you'd like to look and feel and be better, that gives you a good place to start in your choices. Every single day presents us with plenty of opportunities to make a choice, to in beauty and ugliness, kindness and selfishness, mercy or vengeance,

serenity or anger. There's the little choices we have to make daily, what we eat, how we talk to people, whether you pick up the television or remote or a book, what you think about. And on some days, there's bigger choices. Whether you stand up for what's right, whether you reach down to help someone who needs it, kind of work you do, what standards you hold yourself to. If you want a beautiful life, there's really no escaping it. You have to make beautiful choices.

And the new year is almost here, which is the perfect chance to get back in the habit of making beautiful choices. You know you deserve better. You know you're capable of better. What's it going to take for you to actually ask for it? When are you going to fulfill the potential that is just sitting there? But how about right now?

Because it's possible this year, we're putting it to you here. Stop putting it off till tomorrow, until Monday waiting for it to just happen. Because it won't. Someone has to take control and that someone is you. And one of the reasons that we that I created the New Year New Year challenge, if you've done now every year for four years here at Daily Stoke, is for that person and for that reason to help people create a better life, a new you in 2022.

It's three weeks of actionable challenges presented in an email per day built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoke Philosophy. It's three weeks of waking up each morning, opening the email, following the prompt, making beautiful choice. And I look, it's not the easiest thing in the world that will require three weeks of discipline and sacrifice and following the process, the regimen. But when you see

the results, well, they may just take your breath away. So head over to the daily Stoic New Year New Year challenge. We'd love to have you join us. I'd love you to join me because I do all the challenges myself, honestly, to be perfectly honest, I build them around things I wanna be working on too. So see me in the Discord channel. You'll see me in the video chats we do together. Head over to dailystolic.com slash challenge and join us in the daily stoch new year, new you challenge. It starts soon, stop putting it off,

make the right choice, not later, but now and join us in DailyStokeChallenge. DailyStoke.com slash challenge. Steak your claim. And this is from this week's entry in the DailyStoke Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Steve Enhancelman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon,

and then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand, write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself, and others about them. You can check out the Daily Stalk Journal, Anywhere Books or Sold. You can also get a signed personalized copy from me

in the Daily Stalk Store at store.dailystoke.com. We like to collect the sayings of great writers or of leaders we admire. They often become mantras for us on the path to life, providing guidance and assurance. But as Seneca reminds us, truth hasn't been monopolized. We need to spend some time and effort each week formulating our own wisdom, staking our own claims based on our study, practice, and training. And that's what the daily stoic journal in this podcast has always been about. Reflecting on stoic wisdom and adding our own to it. Senica urged us to blaze our own trail and to take charge and stake our own claim. Well, let's do that.

Let the pages in your own journal, your own writing, reflect the insights you've learned through your own experiences. Let the inspiration you've taken from the Stoics help you create your own exercises, reminders, and perspectives. Then we have two quotes from Seneca and One for Marcus. The first from Seneca's moral letters, it's disgraceful for an old person or one inside of old age to only have the knowledge

carried in their notebooks. Zeno said this, what do you say? Clienti said that, what do you say? How long will you be compelled by claims of another? Take charge and stake your own claim, something prosperity will carry in its notebook. That's Seneca Moral Letters 33-7. And then in 33-11, Seneca says,

Won't you be walking in your predecessors footsteps? I surely will use the older path, but if I find a shorter and smoother way, all blaze a trail there. The ones who pioneered these paths aren past honor masters, but our guides, true stands open to everyone. It hasn't been monopolized." And then Marcus Relius meditations three five says, don't act grudgingly or selfishly or without due diligence or be a contrarian. Don't overdress your thoughts in fine language. Don't be a person of too many words or too many deeds. Be cheerful, not wanting outside help or the relief that others might bring.

A person needs to stand on their own, not be propped up. I mean, obviously this is something I think a little bit about as a writer, popularizer of stochicism. I rely quite a bit on the ideas from the stokes. That is what the Daily Stoke is. And it's funny. I'll see comments from people. They'll say like, well, you're just quoting other people. What do you have to say?

But then, of course, when I say what I have to say, if I don't make enough nods to the Stokes, people go, well, who's this guy? You should just read the originals. And so it's a delicate line that I walk. But I think it's analogous to the line that we all walk, which is smarter, wiser people came before us. And they said, they picked so much of the low-hanging fruit. But we have to, I think, use kind of the Austin Client approach of steel-like an artist take from here and there and there and there. And it's in the taking and the synthesis and

the arrangement that we make something new. For instance, it's funny now I watch people talk about the relationship between stosism and a Morphati, but I know I'm the one that made that connection explicit and popular because it was something I was introduced to when I was a research assistant on Robert Green's book with 50 Cent. He talks about the idea of a Morphati and it struck me just how deeply connected that idea was with stoicism and it's something I integrated into my own books. And that became popular. Now I see people going, hey, you know the Stokes never really said a Morphati.

That's from Nietzsche, not from the Stokes. I know, but I made the connection. And so the idea then of relying on these ancient ideas, but not relying so much, or too much, not being dependent on them using just the right amount. But also understand, you can't listen to this. I mean, I think it was Client these put together one of his books and he quotes so much from the play Medea that he said, this is Clienthe's Medea. He included almost the entire book in all the quotations that he'd used. And I guess at some point, if I keep doing this,

I'll have quoted from every single passage from Marcus Aurelius. But the arrangement that I do it in is different. The reading I have is different. And my interpretation might be different than your interpretation, which might be different than the interpretation that even I myself might have made a few years ago. So we put our own spin on these things. We make them our own, right? And to not do that, to not do that is also shame. I think it was in a steam to let get him quoting, but he says, most of the quotations you make should be of people you disagree with. Now, I would disagree with the idea of most, but the point is, if all the quotes that you have that you use that you write down are just ones that you accept that you agree with, you're probably

not being critical enough. You're not challenging enough. And so I want to push you to do that too. You shouldn't agree with everything in the stoke, say, you certainly shouldn't agree with everything that I say. You should be blazing your own path. And that's something I think about even as I'm doing Marginelia and the sides of the books that I read is like, am I just unthinkingly agreeing with everything I said or I think it's better if it's a it's a reading process is a bit of an argument. And if you agree with everything that I say, that means probably you're not thinking enough for yourself, but also it means I'm probably, you know,

not being courageous enough. And what I say, I'm not pushing the envelope enough, I'm not being honest or vulnerable enough. So you got to be comfortable both quoting and carving your own path. You got to be comfortable agreeing as well as disagreeing. And it's in how all that shakes out that we have, we have our original say, but we have our original voice. And Seneca does say that. Again, quoting, noting the irony, Seneca says something like, how do you prove that you really understood these masters? It's by putting their thoughts into your own words. And you see that illustrated in the Stoics, the sort of constant illusions or reframing or tightening of sort of Stoic mantras or ideas

in one's own voice, one's own expression. And to me, that's partly what journaling is. I'm writing the ideas down, writing them down in my own voice, putting my own spin on them, staking my own claim, as Senaika says, as we wind up this year and we go into the new year, I hope you can put a stamp on this new year,

you can stake out your own claim, claim your own original voice. But that's what Stoicism is about. And I'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. You just go to dailystoke.com slash email. So check it out at dailystoke.com slash email. 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. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm that Belly-Six. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Disantel, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build-up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans formed the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the

infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app.