The Daily Stoic - It’s About How You Respond | 7 Habits To Have The Most Productive Week Of Your Life

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

Nobody likes being criticized. Nobody likes it when someone highlights your mistakes. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius tries to remind himself that he has the freedom to take correction and criticism. He knew he didn’t control what the person said or how they said it, but he did control how he handled it. 📕 Book Mentioned: The Journalist and the Murder by Janet Malcolm | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/🎙️ 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 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 dailystoic.com. It's about how you respond. Nobody likes to be criticized. Nobody likes it when someone tears your work apart. Nobody likes it when someone highlights your mistakes. The problem is that this dislike, this aversion, it deprives us of the ability to grow and change and improve. In a recent profile of the writer, Janet Malcolm,

whose book The Journalist and the Murderers, one of my favorites, carried the painted porch, the writer tells a story about Malcolm sending the draft of one of her books to the novelist, Philip Roth. While it would have been preferable, I'm sure, for Roth to be kind and constructive with his feedback, apparently he was pretty ruthless and nasty. Yet Malcolm handled this with poise and detachment. Another writer might have been crushed or paralyzed, the piece reads, but Malcolm simply addressed what she thought were the few useful parts of his criticism and put aside the rest. She scribbled playful and defiant responses to his edits in the margins. What's bugging you, Philip?

She said, with a sad shake of her head. And then later in an unpublished interview, she said, I didn't accept his dislike of the book. Some of his crankiness, she thought, arose from being a man of the 1950s reading about the female experience. But this toughness, this ability to assimilate, cast off disapproval, the piece says, even from a writer she admired

as much as Roth was part of her extraordinary strength. To take this incident with equanimity, to not let it undermine either her friendship or her manuscript, requires a very expansive and shockingly healthy sense of self. In Meditations, Marcus Realist tries to remind himself that he has the freedom to take correction and criticism. He knew he didn't control what the person said or how they said it but he did control how he handled it and that to remain an heir out of spite or protest was crazy. But this takes discipline, it takes poise, it takes a strong sense of self. We are not our mistakes. We are not the manuscripts we hand

in. We are not the caricature that some critic or some well-meaning person might try to reduce us to. The only thing that does say something about us is how we respond to them, whether we let them make us bitter or better, whether we take what's useful and discard the rest, whether we keep going, undeterred, on the path we know to be right. The Stoics are big on habits and routines for a reason. Life without design, Seneca says, is erratic. Epictetus would talk about how if you want to do something you have to make it a habit. Aristotle would talk about this too that virtue isn't something you are or aren't. It's something you do or don't do on a consistent basis. In a world that feels like it's spinning out of control where

everything's crazy, where we're overwhelmed and stressed out, one of the things we can always depend on is our behaviors, our actions. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. Some stoic exercises for you to commit to over the next seven days so you can have a great week. And these are going to be time-tested strategies from the ancient stoics that will help you act and live with more resilience, peace, and productivity. You have to win the morning. In fact, one of the most relatable parts of Marcus Aurelius' meditations is Book 5, where Marcus Aurelius has an argument with himself. It says, At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself, I have to go to work

as a human being. It says, Or is this what you were created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm. Right? A stoic attacks the morning, a stoic wins the morning, a stoic gets up early. And it's impressive when we realize that he didn't have to do this. He didn't really have to do anything. One of his predecessors basically abandons the throne for an exotic island. The emperor had so much power, so much responsibility, and yet Marcus is practicing a foundational daily habit. He is getting up early and he is getting after it. Because winning the morning is key to winning the day and winning at life.

I wanna get up, get my most important things done. I wanna get the hard things out of the way while I still have the most energy, while I'm still the freshest, while I haven't been dragged down into the muck of distraction or frustration or any of those things. So a foundational daily stoic practice is get up early, get after it, don't huddle under the covers and stay warm.

Don't hit the snooze button a million times. Life is short. We got to get up and get after it and we got to get after it early. You have to have a strong mind and a strong body. We tend to project backwards. Today we think of philosophers as academics, theorists, nerds, right? University professors. But that's not who the Stoics were. Certainly, Marcus Aurelius is not just the emperor of Rome. He's a general in the army.

He's trained in wrestling and boxing and hunting. Seneca pushed himself physically. He tried to see how little he could survive on. He did an annual cold plunge. Socrates was renowned, not just for his ability to endure winter temperatures in nothing but a thin cloak. He was also again a soldier and an athlete. He loved to take long walks. He was active out in the world because you have to be. He actually says no citizen has a right to not take

care of themselves physically, to not understand what their bodies are capable of. There's a story about Theodore Roosevelt that I tell in The Obstacle is the Way and in Discipline is Destiny. He's a young boy, but he's asthmatic and he's weak, he's frail and his father comes to him one day and he says, you know, you've got the mind, Theodore,

but you don't have the body. And this young kid, he was about 12, he looks at his father and he says, okay, I will have the body. And this young kid, he was about 12, he looks at his father and he says, "'Okay, I will make my body.'" And that's when Theodore Roosevelt embarks on what he comes to call the strenuous life. You can still visit the house he grew up in and see the gym where he made his body.

And his sister who was watching said, "'This was the first promise that he made to himself, "'and most importantly, he kept it to himself.'" That's something Seneca talks about. He says, "'We treat the body rigorously "' so that it's not disobedient to the mind, strong mind in a strong body. I was visiting my friend Casey Neistat once. Good morning Ryan Holiday. He had all these amazing journals, years and years and and he wrote on the spine, like the date or the year, and I could just see years and ultimately decades of this journaling

practice. It was just a really impressive thing. I was like, this is the culmination of hundreds of thousands of hours of creative thinking and working and experiencing. Honestly, I was jealous. And I said, oh man, I wish I'd done that. And he said, well, why don't you just start now? And I did, and I haven't stopped since.

And I think that's one of the first lessons you need to hear about journaling. Don't think about what type of journal you need. Don't think about how much time you should spend. Sometimes people are like, what's the best pen? Just start, right? You've got notebooks, you went to a conference and they gave you one.

You've got this old half written one you used to keep notes at the office in. It doesn't matter, just start. Just start the practice. One of my favorite journals is this one. I've kept this journal for nine years. This is my first one, which is five years, and I have a second one, which I am four years into.

It's called the One Line a Day Journal. And you just write one, I don't wanna show you what I wrote, but you can see, you just write one line a day journal. And you just write one, I don't want to show you what I wrote, but you can see, you just write one line a day every day for five years. You can see I've put some miles on it, it's falling apart, it's definitely seen better days.

What I love about this journal is that I always have the time to put one sentence down. Sometimes when we think of habits or practices or people we want to become, we get overwhelmed at getting from here to there. And one of the best things we can do is start ridiculously small. One sentence, what did I think about today? What did I do today? What's going on today? Start there. And then you build the practice. If I make time for this and then, oh, I'll pick up this other journal, start something small. And Seneca, whose works revised to us largely in a series of letters, He writes to his friend, Lucilius, he says, each day just acquire one thing that will fortify you

against poverty, against death, against misfortune. Pick one thought to digest each day. That's another easy place to start with a journal. Hey, I'm just gonna think about one thing today. I'm just gonna journal about one little thing, and you build from there. Journaling doesn't have to be this big, romantic, efficient, it doesn't have to be a big thing,

just one thing. James Clear told me he writes his pushups and how much he read each day in his journal. My friend Austin Kleon, who I've interviewed a bunch, he says he keeps a log book and he just writes down a simple list of things that happened each day, just some bullet points. Who did he meet, what did he do?

And again, this is kind of priming the pump. So I said I use the one line a day, that's easy. I also just use like a random Moschino or random notebook that usually I got this at some conference or something. And so sometimes what I'll do is like, again, I don't want to show you my journaling, but I usually write on this page, this is where I do some freeform journaling,

but here, this is where I write how much I ran, other workouts I did, how far I walked. It's just something that lets me get started, right? So don't overthink it, just do it. The one thing all fools have in common, Seneca says, is they're always getting ready to live. They say, oh, I gotta wait for things to go back to normal. I gotta wait for the right conditions.

I gotta do this first, I gotta do that. I'll do it tomorrow. I gotta wait for the right conditions. I gotta do this first. I gotta do that. I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it in the morning. And where does this get them? It gets them nowhere. It gets them nothing. They never do it. I'll do it tomorrow is the biggest lie in the world.

You could be good today, Marx really says in meditations, but instead you choose tomorrow. What the Stoics try to do is, if something is worth doing, they wanna do it now. They wanna get started now. They're disciplined enough and also humble enough to know that there's something entitled about procrastination.

It assumes that you have the discipline and the time and the opportunity to do it later. And we don't know that for sure. The graveyard of lost potential, we might say, of wasted time and wasted years is people who needed to do something else first. Putting things off is the biggest waste of life, Seneca wrote.

He says, it snatches away each day as it comes and it denies us the present by promising us the future. He said, the whole future lies in uncertainty. Live immediately. I think he's saying, do it now. Get rid of, I'll get to it later from your lexicon. Do it now. This quote from Marcus Aurelius, right? He's saying, yeah, you got to get up early when you have trouble getting out of bed in the

morning. But why do so much of us have trouble getting out of bed in the morning? And look, if you're someone like that, you want to get up early, but you struggle, you hit the snooze button a million times, you just cannot drag yourself out of bed in the morning. At The Painted Porch, we carry a book. I actually think it's the perfect book for you. Discipline in the morning is easier when you've been disciplined at night. Seneca talks about how, look, the mind has to be given over to relaxation. He talks about taking wandering walks, but I think sleep is a big part of this too. Turning the brain off, you know, letting it reboot,

letting it reset. He said, you know, if you don't do this, he says, eventually the mind will break as surely as the anvil breaks the hammer. Like you can only stretch yourself so far. You can only put so much on yourself before, not only you get to the point of diminishing returns where it starts to be counterproductive. You know, the Stoics talk about this idea of memento mori.

It's funny, we'll say, oh, I'll sleep when I'm dead, but you are hastening that very death by not taking care of yourself. The secret to sanity and success is sleep. And this requires discipline to put down the phone that you're scrolling on, staying up late, reading terrible news or watching stupid videos. It takes discipline to put that away and to go to sleep. It takes discipline to manage your schedule

and prioritize your health. It takes self-awareness to know, hey, I'm too tired. I'm not thinking straight here. I gotta call it a day. I gotta think about this and make a decision about it tomorrow. I'm not in a good. I got a call today. I got to think about this and make a decision about it tomorrow I'm not in a good place to do this right now in one of his letters Seneca talks about this man He says he's a cautionary tale. He said this man has never seen the sunrise or the sunset

He was saying that this guy is just working himself to the bone. He said it's so funny, right? We all fear death We don't want to die. He says, but these people are burying themselves alive, burying themselves alive in triviality, in work, in bad boundaries. And it's that vicious cycle that's trapped so many successful and smart people. This is so great. He says, let's lengthen our lives.

He says, cut the night short, save some of that for the day's business. So as I'm prioritizing sleep, I'll give you two I think important rituals because yeah, stoicism is rising early getting after as Marks was talking about, but the evening is important too. And if you're working until you drop dead of sleep, what you're not doing is putting the day up for review as Seneca said, taking a

few minutes reflecting putting time in your journal thinking about what you could have done better where you fell short who you want to be the next day the evenings also when I take a little quiet time to do some reading I like to sit up in my bed and read the stoics I have this copy of meditations next to my bed and I I pick up this book that I've had for so many years I flip through it and I always find something in it. We can imagine Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world, writing in the midnight dimness, as one historian described it. These little notes to himself,

having this continuing that great conversations with the ancients. He's talking to Epictetus, he's talking to Zeno, he's talking to Cleanthes and Chrysippus because their words survived to him. And that evening ritual, where we have a little discipline, we don't stay up too late, we don't get sucked into our screens,

we don't drink until we pass out, but we have some discipline at night that allows us to be the person who rises early, who tackles the day, who does what their nature demands, and does it with sanity and self-control. It's the opposite of something that's so popular today. A lot of people talk about positive visualization, but they don't talk enough about negative visualization,

imagining what could happen so you can be prepared for it. Siddiqui talks about how the unexpected blow lands heaviest and that the thing that a leader can never say is, oh, I didn't think that would happen. You have to think about it because if the leader's not thinking about it, if you are not thinking about it, who is? And if nobody's thinking about it, who's preparing for it?

Who's coming up with plan B? Who's toughening yourself up? Who's doing the work so that you can handle this? Sometimes people think that negative visualization or thinking about bad things can manifest them into happening. Marx really talks about this he says, but do you fear that thinking about reaping wheat is going to make that get reaped? No, of course not, right? Like, no one's scared of talking about

other potentialities. We just have this superstition when those things involve us. And you got to put that aside. You got to think about the things that could happen. Seneca talks about if you're going on a shipwreck, think about a shipwreck. Think about pirates. Think about weather delays, right? Think about choppy water, right? What are you going to do if that happens? How are you prepared for that to happen? How can, at the very least, you not be surprised if that does happen? Because it's a very normal thing that happens all the time. And by the way, things that have never happened before,

they happen all the time too, so you gotta be ready. For the Stoics, the idea was that nothing happens to a wise person contrary to their expectation because they're not naive, they are aware, they are informed, they have wisdom. And wisdom is a sense of the possibilities in a given exchange, interaction, event, outcome have wisdom. And wisdom is a sense of the possibilities in a given exchange, interaction, event, outcome, process. You got to know what could happen and you got to be ready

for that to happen. There is one thing that doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, powerful or powerless, healthy or unhealthy, young or old. Eventually, inevitably, we all die. It's the one prophecy that never fails. It's the great equalizer. It's the one thing that we cannot escape. But we are free to use this, to get clarity and urgency and perspective from it.

Epictetus says, you have to set before your eyes every day death and exile and everything else that looks terrible. He said, especially death. He says, and when you do this, you will never again have a mean thought or be too attached to anything. I think when people think of this momentum

or a practice of meditating on mortality, that it's about kind of detachment, about not caring about other people or things. There's actually an exercise that Mark Ceruleus talks about in meditations that he gets from Epictetus. Epictetus said, as you tuck your child in at night, you should say to yourself, they will not make it until the morning. That we should do one of the hardest things to do in the world, meditate on the mortality of our children, is that how hopeless and resigned we're supposed to be? Is that a product of Epictetus being a slave where children could be taken from you? Or is that a product of him living in a world

where people died suddenly for no reason? No, I don't think so. I think what Epictetus is saying is to give you the freedom to enjoy that moment that you are in. He's saying slow down. Don't rush through this. Don't tell yourself that you have an unlimited amount of these with this person in the future because you don't know that you do, right? So the freedom comes from embracing the moment, appreciating it, and only the perspective of our mortality can fully give us this clarity. I know it sounds dark, sounds uncomfortable and it is but that is life.

It is a fact and we have to face it and we can't run away from it and when you keep this darkness in mind it also allows you to appreciate the light, the ordinary moments, the wonderfulness of existence, again, even amidst the depravity and the evil that Epictetus would have seen up close. It allows you to appreciate the ordinary. It allows you to be present. It allows you to live while you are alive. And that is the most important freedom that there is.

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