The Daily Stoic - It’s Time To Quit | Stake Your Own Claim

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

Dwight Eisenhower gave himself the order.Quit smoking.It had been a 38-year habit, and he knew it was time. His health was on the line. His ability to be of service was in jeopardy. So he quit. After 38 years of smoking, he quit—cold turkey.“The only way to stop is to stop,” Eisenhower would tell an aide, “and I stopped.”🎓 Sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge to create better habits in 2023: https://dailystoic.com/challenge✉️  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.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stokeic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics,

from Epipetus Markus, Relius, Seneca, then some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works. Hi, I'm David Brown, 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 time to quit. Dwight Eisen you would tell an aid, and I stopped. This story is in discipline and destiny. It's also the basis of one of the best days in the Daily Stoke New Year New Year challenge which is coming up here very, very soon.

And it's there because the Stoics were big on this idea of quitting cold turkey, of quitting anything that has a pull over us. No man is free who is not master of himself. Epictetus tells us. That's why Seneca talked about how everyone was a slave to something, even slave owners were slaves to the institution of slavery. He said some people were slaves to a mistress, to ambition, to attention, to be to anything. But self-mastery is the only true form of freedom.

Being able to control your thoughts, your actions, your emotions, that is liberty. That's what we're after. And the break of a new year is the perfect time to make a clean break towards freedom. What are you hooked on? What do you have trouble doing without? What has gained control over you? At the core of stoicism, at the core of self mastery is an instinctive aversion,

anything that masters us. We must be the boss. We must be able to quit, cold turkey. And if you're ready to make clean break, we created the 2023 New Year New Year challenge, or you, for me, I'm going to be doing it there alongside you. The 2023 New Year New Challenge is 21 actionable challenges. One per day over the first three weeks of the year, built around the theme of ascending to what's beyond our control and

getting to work and season control of what is in our control. And it's built not only around the best of stoke wisdom, but my experience is the experiences of thousands of stokes who've done the challenges over the year, plus psychology and a bunch of other awesome experts we consulted. You're going to learn a bunch of new stuff in here, new skills, how to be more disciplined, build relationships, break destructive thought patterns, gain clarity, make progress, and much, much more. I'd love to see it in the live Q&As we do throughout the challenge. I'd love to see you check enough boxes in the calendar as we go. I'd love to see it in the group Discord channel where we have accountability partners and we make new friends all this stuff.

where we have accountability partners and, you know, we make new friends, all this stuff. To learn more and reserve a spot in the 2023 New Year, New Year challenge, head over dailystoke.com slash challenge. Join me, a bunch of other stokes, getting better this year, challenging ourselves from the outset. And I can't wait to see you there. Stake your own claim. This is the December 22nd entry in the Daily Stoic. 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. It. DailyStoke.com And our quote today comes to us from Seneca moral letters 33 For it's disgraceful for an old person or one insight of old age to have only the knowledge carried in their notebooks Zeno said this, but what do you say Clienti said this? What do you say?

How long will you be compelled by the claims of another? Take charge and stake your own claim. Something posterity will carry in its notebook. Mewzing in his own notebook about the topic of immortality, Emerson complained about how writers dance around a difficult topic by relying on quotes. I hate quotation, he wrote, tell me what you know. I'm gonna tell you a little backstory about that in a second.

Seneca was throwing down the same gauntlet some 20 centuries before. It's easier to quote to rely on the wise words of others, especially when people you're deferring to are such towering figures. It's harder and more intimidating to venture out on your own to express your own thoughts. But how do you think those wise and true quotes from those towering figures were created in the first place? Your own experiences have value. You have accumulated your own wisdom too. Stake your claim, put something down for the ages in words and also an example. So I was maybe like 20, 21 years old. I was writing for the college newspaper and I'd written this review and I

published it and did okay. And then actually heard from the person I was reviewing in it. And they were like, you know, they gave me some feedback and I said, hey, could we really get on the phone? I would really, I just want to grow as a writer, can you give me some feedback? And they're going through it and he was pointing out all the quotes in it. And he gave me that Emerson quotation for the first time. He said, well, he said Emerson said something like,

I hate quotation, tell me what you know. And that lesson has stuck with me in all of my writings. Yes, I talk about the Stokes. My writing is influenced and is in many ways an attempt to introduce the Stokes people. But one of the passes that I do on my own books, as I go through them, I write them just, what do I want to say?

What's my, you know, what's my supporting arguments? Like, how do I want to illustrate it? And then I go through and I go, where am I over relying on quotes here? Where can I get rid of them? Where am I over arguing things or not telling you what I know, but telling you what someone else knows. Speaking of quotes, there's a rule I heard from Nisim Taleb where he actually said,

you should only quote people when you disagree with them. The point is make your own arguments on your own merits. But I think this is a really important part of the stoic practice. If you think about what meditations was for Marcus, right? It's not him arguing stoicism to the public. It's him arguing the Stoics to himself. So he does use quotes from time to time, but he's not really having to think that much about

attribution, and he's not really trying to think about publication or the audience at all. He's just thinking about what does he need to hear? What does he know to be true and what needs to be said? What does he need to be reminded of? And I think it's important that we understand that stoicism, the study of stoicism, is not a one way street. It's not just downloading the information

from the originals, from me, from other people, it's also putting your own spin on it. It's disagreeing with them. It's adding your own view. Stoicism should be better, different, added to as a result of you having studied and learned about it. That doesn't mean you're all going to publish bestselling books or articles or videos. It's all going to be well known. But make your own contributions. Put your own spin on it. Feel free to disagree, feel free to argue, feel free to push back, feel free to add. I feel like

one of my weird contributions to socialism was the connection between socialism and Nietzsche, the idea of a Morphati. I brought that in to also with the help of Robo Green, but I brought that together. And that's a practice of stoicism that, you know, did not exist before, or an explicit connection that did not fully exist before. In lives of the stoics, I put all the stoics, their biographies in one place. In the daily stoic itself, I combined the stoics in a way that they'd never been combined before. And I made arguments that some people disagree with. I made statements that are, I think are true, but not again, not everyone agrees with, but they didn't exist before. I put my own spin on, I put my own stamp on it, which is

what you and everyone listening needs to do, not just with words, in fact, with words least of all, most of all, with our actions, with what we do, with who we are. So that's today's message from the Daily Stoic. I hope you enjoy it. Just a reminder, we're getting close to the end of the year. The Daily Stoic New Year, New Year Challenge is almost ready to start. Don't wait until the last minute. Don't procrastinate.

I'd love for you to sign up now, dailystoke.com slash challenge. I'm going to be in there thousands of stokes from all over the world are going to be in there. I think this is our best one yet. We've done it for five years now. This is our fifth one. It's going to be awesome. I'd love to see you in there. Sign up dailystoke.com slash challenge. Remember also, if you sign up for daily stoke life at dailystokelife.com, you get this challenge and all the challenges totally for free. So I'll see you on Jan 1 when we get rolling into this thing. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies

of all my books in the Daily Stoke store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The obstacle is the way. You go as the enemy, still in this is the key. The leatherbound edition of the Daily Stoke. We have them all in the Daily Stoke Store, which you can check out 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.

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 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 Fried was changing the game as he graced the pages of Forbes in 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, and SPF would find himself in a jail cell, with tens of thousands of investors blaming him for their crypto losses. 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 ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today.