The Daily Stoic - It's About Intensity Not Magnitude | What's Up to Us, and What's Not Up to Us

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

Ryan explains why you should linger on the works of the master thinkers, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.For a limited time, the Daily Stoic ebook is $1.99 in the US and UK this week only. We have a premium leather bound version available at dailystoic.com/leather. The new Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. You can add the Cover to any mattress, and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. Go to eightsleep.com/dailystoic to check out the Pod Pro Cover and save $150 at checkout.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 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 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 host of Wundery'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. It's about intensity, not magnitude. The Stoics knew we should listen more than we talk, that we should be avid readers and consumers of wisdom. And maybe that's why you've kicked off this year with a reading goal. I'm going to read 50 books this year. I'm going to read a book a week, a book a month, every book on this best nonfiction books of all time list, one book by every author on that greatest authors of all time list.

And the Stokes would admire this energy, but there's also a reason that Marcus Aurelius and Seneca both caution themselves about their desire to read as much as possible. Both of them would have nodded in agreement to Schopenhauer's line that intellect is a magnitude of intensity, not a magnitude of extensity. Seneca compared it to trying to heal a wound or form an intimate relationship. You wouldn't keep switching ointments or constantly come and go. And the same thing must hold true to people who never said about acquiring an intimate acquaintance with any one great writer or skip from one to the other paying, flying visits to them all, he writes, nothing is so useful that it can be of service in

mere passing. So he says, we must extend our stay among a select few writers, those whose genius has stood the test of time, whose works have proven to nourish and cultivate great minds. This of course informed my idea for the Daily Stoic, while it itself is not a work of genius that's not what I'm claiming, it's pretty remarkable that despite standing the test of more than 2,000 years, the great quotes of the Stoics could only be found spread out over many different works. And this was the whole point of the Daily Stoke

to finally put them in one place, to create a kind of survey course of the philosophy that a person can follow every single year. And it's been incredible to see the success that the book has had since its release in 2016. It's now sold more than a million copies. It's in dozens of languages. It's spent more weeks on the bestseller list

than any other book about stilicism ever. And that's why in celebration, and to help encourage another year of stilicism, the e-book for the Daily Stilic is 199 in the US, and it's on sale in the UK, too. And you can pick one up right now, anywhere that you buy your e-books. And of course the success of the book is a reflection of Seneca's point.

If you really want to get something out of your reading, you must linger among a limited number of master thinkers and digest their works. And it's a testament to the power of the stout teachings and the mastery of the stokes. There are other great one-page, a day books out there too. I love a bunch of them. I love Toll's Toys, a calendar of wisdom, Robert Green's The Daily Laws, Ali Astherees, a poem for every day of the year. But the idea is to find a way of thinking the school of wisdom a subject matter and dive deep into it. Read and reread Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus linger in their company and as their intellect infuses with ours, we are changed forever. Make that your goal this

year. Don't pick some large and arbitrary number of books to read. Don't pay flying visits to every author on this or that list, instead think about intensity. And look, if you haven't read the Daily Stoic, 366 meditations on wisdom perseverance in the art of living, I love that you're listening to this podcast. The book is this podcast, but the original. It's how I kicked this whole thing off. I wrote the book in 2015 and 2016. It's got original translations from all the Stoics. And I think it's worked for a reason.

I'd love to have you check it out. It's a $1.99 on Amazon, as I said, as an e-book. iBooks 2, anywhere you get e-books in the US. It's discount on the US and the UK. Also, but we also have a leather bound edition. If you've read the book a couple of times and you want to invest in something a little more heavy duty that'll stand the test of time,

you can check out the leather edition at dailystalk.com slash leather. Or if you just want the cloth bound lay flat version, the standard hardcover, you can pick that up anywhere books are sold and also at store.dailystalk.com and I'll sign your edition as well. So I hope you start this year off reading and rereading particularly the daily stock,

and if you've been meaning to pick up the e-book, well, it's $1.99 for a reason. What's up to us and what's not up to us? And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Steal of Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman.

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 Stoke Journal anywhere, books are sold. You can also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoke store at store.dailystoke.com.

Epic Titus' handbook, the Incaridian, begins with the most powerful exercise in all of Stoicism, the distinction between the things that are up to us in our control, and the things that are not up to us. It is this, the dichotomy of control that is the first principle in this entire philosophy. We don't control many of the things we pursue in life, yet we become angry, sad, hurt, scared, or jealous when we don't get them. In fact, these emotions, these reactions are about the only thing we do control, and that is a lesson to remember for this entire year. And if you could do that, you could consider it a year well and philosophically

lived. The chief task in life is simply this, to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil, not to uncontrollable externals but within myself to the choices that are my own? Epicetises, discourses, two-five. Some things are in our control while others are not. We control our opinion, choice, desire, aversion, and in a word, everything of our own doing. We don't control our body, property, reputation, position, and in a word, everything not of our own doing.

Even more the things in our control are by nature free, unhindered and unobstructed. While those not in our control are weak, sl, unhindered and unobstructed, while those not in our control are weak, slavish can be hindered and are not our own. Epicetetus is in queridian 11. We control our reasoned choice and all acts that depend on our moral will. What's not under our control or our body and any of its parts, our possessions, parents, siblings, children or country, anything with which we might associate. Epicetus is discourses 122. So here we are, a new year.

I think it's worth repeating today the serenity prayer. You don't have to be religious in plenty of people in recovery and not religious, but the prayer works. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. And what I love about that, the serenity prayers, it feels like one of the most timeless observations ever, so it's a prayer.

So it must go back like thousands of years, like who said it? St. Augustine, Martin Luther, was it one of the popes? Was it Jesus himself? No, it was Reinhold Neiber in 1932. It spread very, very rapidly, but 1932. I just loved the idea that, that, you know, think of all the things that had been invented before 1932. I mean, people are still driving cars from 1932. They're classic cars, but like all the things, I mean, I'm talking to you from a building

that was built in 1880 something. So it was 50 years old when that prayer was composed. But that's because the wisdom in it is timeless. And it's not just timeless in the sense that like, yeah, that's true. But it's like, it's an ongoing, continual struggle, right? We always are focused on things that are not in our control. Sometimes we fail when something is in our control. We don't want to step up and deal with it. And it takes wisdom to know the difference, to know what is up to us and what's not up to us. And that's what EpicTidus is talking about. It goes really what's up to you, right? The things you own, you don't really own your reputation, not really you,

you know, your money, even people you love, you don't control them, you don't control how long you have access to them, you don't control what they think of you. All you really control is what you think. You don't even fully control your own body, he's saying, right? And I mean, anyone who got COVID over the last eight months, anyone who's, you know, had a health scare or cancer or mental illness even realized like, you don't even fully control your own body or your own mind, but what we control for the most part is our own choices.

We control how we react to these things, right? Even if you have a mental illness, right? Whether it's, whether you're struggling with depression or bipolar or, you know, you don't control the illness, but you control whether you seek treatment for it, you control whether you follow the treatment for it, you control the adjustments you make in accordance to the illness, right? We control how we respond. And that's just

it's a lesson worth repeating every single year because it's true every single year, and it will be true as long as we are human beings. Don't control what happens to us. We control how we respond. That's Stoicism and we should try to respond well. We should try to respond with courage and justice and wisdom and temperance. Now this idea that we don't control what happens. We control how we respond. That's still a system. It's simple, but it's so hard. I mean, it's so hard, but we've got to realize, look, when we're I've been saying this on some of my talks recently, it's like, if you have 100 energy points and you spend 10 of those energy points blaming, 10 of those energy points feelings, sorry, for yourself, 10 of those energy points, wishing things were otherwise, that's 30% of your available energy that you are not spending on doing something about the problem, moving the ball forward

or focusing on some new area or new opportunity instead. Right? I don't know about you, but I'm not smart enough, capable enough, brilliant enough, naturally talented enough that I can afford to waste 30, 40, 50, 80 percent of my energy as people often do on things that don't matter where it's not making a difference. So, we focus on what's up to us and what is up to us are our ruling reason, our choices, our thoughts, our opinions, and then to a certain degree, the actions that we take, we control our response, And then to a certain degree, the actions that we take, we control our response, not what happens.

We don't even control necessarily the outcome of those responses or actions. But again, we control what we think about them, we control the willpower we bring to them, control the virtue that we try to apply. That's what stoicism is about. Happy New Year, everyone. Let's get at it.

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 Stoke early and 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.

Ah, the Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for. FTX Founder's Sam Bankman Freed lived that dream life, but it was all funded with other people's money, but he allegedly stole. Many thought Sam Bankman Freed was changing the game as he graced the pages of Forbes and Vanity Fair. Some involved in crypto saw him as a breath of fresh air from the usual Wall Street buffs with his casual dress and ability to play League of Legends during boardroom meetings.

But in less than a year, his exchange would collapse. An SPF would find himself in a jail cell, with tens of thousands of investors blaming him for their crypto losses. From Bloomberg and Wondering comes Spellcaster, a new six-part docu-series about the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of FTX and its founder, Sam Beckman-Freed. Follow Spellcaster wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to episodes Add Free on Amazon Music.

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