The Daily Stoic - Love What Your Nature Demands of You | Stake Your Claim

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 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, visitdailystoic.com. Each morning, you wake up and life presents you with an opportunity. It's an opportunity to show up, to make a difference, to become the best version of yourself.

Starting point is 00:01:05 But then what do you do? You hit the snooze button. You stay under the covers a while longer. You get a late start on the day and suddenly all your plans get pushed back. You chastise and berate yourself. You start to feel like you'll never catch up, like the potential life you envision for yourself will remain elusive out of reach. Almost 2,000 years ago, Marcus Aurelius was the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man on the planet, and he faced this exact dilemma.

Starting point is 00:01:33 He found himself making excuses that it was nice and warm under the covers, as he told himself. So you were born to feel nice, he writes in meditations, instead of doing things and experiencing them? He looked outside himself to the birds, the plants, the ants, all of which were going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order as best they can. So what was his problem?

Starting point is 00:01:57 Why couldn't he get out of bed in the morning and do the same. You don't love yourself enough, he said, or you'd love your nature too and what it demands of you. And you could say that each year presents the same opportunity, right? Chance to show up, to make a difference, to become the best version of yourself to do what you need to do. The world needed Marcus Aurelius to become the person we admire and study today. It required conscious and consistent effort on his part. It required him to challenge himself, demanded that he woke up each morning and got to work on his individual tasks, putting the world in order as best he could. You are no different and you know it. You have the ideas. You've made the

Starting point is 00:02:42 plans, but you haven't acted. So let's do it now. Now is the best time to start. Not Monday, not when life feels easier or more convenient. If you wait for the perfect moment, it'll never come. Someone has to take control someone and that someone is you. The question remains. How? Well, we created the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge to answer just that to help you create a better life, a better you, to help you show up and challenge yourself today. Since August, me and the Daily Stoic team have been developing these challenges. One per day built around the best, most timeless Stoic wisdom, is 21 challenges in a row to kick off a new you in a new year. And this year's challenge is new stuff designed to help you stop procrastinating. learn new skills, conquer insecurities, be more generous, appreciate the world around you, become the best version of yourself. And these aren't pie in the sky theoretical discussions, which the Stoics loat, but clear immediate exercises and methods you can start right now. We'll tell you exactly what to do, how to do it, why it works. We'll give you strategies for

Starting point is 00:03:46 maintaining this way of living not just for the rest of the year, but hopefully for your whole life. Because this version of you, the one that you know is there, is what the world needs right now. Just like the dancer was born to dance, the social climber for status, the miser for money, you were born for something too. Is helping others less valuable to you, Marcus Wright, is not worth your effort? You know the answer. You know what you're capable of. You know you weren't born under the covers to stay nice, to let another year pass by,

Starting point is 00:04:13 not being what you're capable of being. And the Daily Steelech, 2026, New Year, New Year Challenge starts on January 1st. Don't procrastinate. Don't put it off. I want to see you in there. I'm going to be in there with you. You can sign up right now at daily stoic.com slash challenge. Creatine isn't just for building muscle.

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Starting point is 00:06:42 Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. W-A-Y-F-A-I-R-com. Wayfair, every style, every home. stake your claim. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoke Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living by yours truly and my colleague Stephen Hanselman, who I also wrote the Daily Stoke with. You can actually get signed copies of the Daily Stoke Journal in the Daily Stoke Store at store.dailystoke.com or we've got copies here at the painted porch, my bookstore in Bastrop, Texas. We like to collect the sayings of great writers or of leaders we admire. and 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.

Starting point is 00:07:42 And that's what the Daily Stoic Journal and this podcast has always been about, reflecting on Stoic wisdom and adding our own to it. Seneca 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 from Marcus. The first from Seneca's moral letters, it's disgraceful for an old person or one inside of old age to only

Starting point is 00:08:22 have the knowledge carried in their notebooks. Zeno said this. What do you say? Cleante 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 337. And then in 3311, Seneca says, won't you be walking in your predecessor's footsteps? I surely will use the older path, but if I find a shorter and smoother way, I'll blaze a trail there. The ones who pioneered these paths aren't our masters, but our guides. Truth stands open to everyone. Hasn't been monopolized. And then Marcus Aurelius Meditations 3.5, he 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

Starting point is 00:09:14 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, a popularizer of Stoicism, I rely quite a bit on the ideas from the Stokes. That is what the Daily Stoak 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,

Starting point is 00:09:57 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-Cleon approach, a 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 stoicism and amorphati, 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. And he talks about the idea of amorphati. And it struck me just how deeply connected that idea was with stoicism. And it's something I integrated in my own

Starting point is 00:10:46 books, and that became popular. Now it's, I see people going, hey, you know, the Stoics 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 understanding you can't listen to this. I mean, I think it was Cleanthes put together one of his books, and he quotes so much from the play Medea that he said, this is Clianthe's Medea. He included almost the entire book in all the quotations that he'd use. 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

Starting point is 00:11:33 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 a shame. I think it was Nassim Taleb. Again, I'm 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

Starting point is 00:12:19 shouldn't agree with everything the Stoak, 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 marginalia in 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 the reading process is a bit of an argument. 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've got to be comfortable agreeing as well as

Starting point is 00:13:06 disagreeing, and it's in how all that shakes out that 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 Seneca 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

Starting point is 00:13:57 your own original voice. And that's what Stoicism is about. And I'll talk to you soon. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to The Daily Stoog podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you. Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going.

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The Daily Stoic - Love What Your Nature Demands of You | Stake Your Claim

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