The Daily Stoic - Seneca's 8 Tips For Mastering Yourself

Episode Date: February 27, 2022

Seneca was a power broker, a playwright, and a Stoic philosopher. These 8 lessons will teach you to become a better master of yourself, just like Seneca was striving to do.Learn more about Seneca: https://dailystoic.com/seneca/→ Get Seneca's 'Letters from a Stoic'→ Get a signed copy of Lives of the StoicsSign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck 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 Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time

to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. I've talked about this many, many times, but Ceneca remains ever fascinating to me. I think he was the most complicated, the most human of the still eggs. I've loved James Roms biography dying every day, which is on the pain of the porch. You can check out. I had him on the podcast, not once, but twice, if I recall correctly. And I go back to Sennaka because Sennaka, I think, is the most accessible and personable as far as writing about the teachings of Stoicism. And then he also is the most simultaneously relatable

and inscrutable in a matric of the Stoics, right? He is considered one of the wisest men who ever lived and then somehow he finds himself working for Nero. How does that happen? And so, stoicism, the philosophy, we might say, is very clear, very flawless, but the stoics themselves were deeply flawed and deeply complicated individuals. And I think that's why Senica is so important, because he allows us to see reflected back in ourselves, maybe flaws, maybe weaknesses, maybe ambition

that we have in ourselves that can be very dangerous, that we have to understand, we have to figure out how to channel, how to control. And so in today's episode, I wanna talk about Senaqa and I wanna talk about some tips for mastering yourself from Senaqa with the important caveat as always that Senuka Although he talked about it quite eloquently and perfectly

Struggled as we all do to get there himself But here we are eight tips for becoming a master of yourself from Senuka Hope you're having a great weekend and enjoy and enjoy. There's a bunch of difficult things I try to do every day. I try to take a cold shower. I get up early, I intermittent fast. I try to do a really hard workout every day. I try to push myself physically so I can be better mentally.

Sena said, we should treat the body rigorously so it's not disobedient to the mind. That's why I still seek out challenges. That's why you should go do hard things. Don't live an easy, soft life. Seek out challenges. Three times in Santa Claus's life, he's devastated. He comes down with tuberculosis. Justice's legal career is taking off.

And he has to spend 10 years convalescing. He comes back just as he begins to make it in politics. He's exiled by the emperor and in late in life he's exiled by another emperor. Repeatedly, Seneca is tried. He says fortune behaves as she pleases. But what does he do in each one of these circumstances? He focuses on how he can respond. He makes good out of it. The Stokes practice, negative visualization. Senaika says the unexpected blow lands most heavily. Part of the reason Senaika's able to endure this

is that it's not a surprise. He says the most unacceptable excuses, I did not think it could happen. You must always think of what can happen and then you must always focus on how you're gonna respond to what's happened. You don't choose your parents. Seneca says, but the truth is you do get to choose who's child you want to be.

This is extra true because Seneca's brother chooses to be adopted and changes his name to Gio. He actually appears in the Bible. But the idea for this to be honest was you decide who's descendant you're going to be, who's footsteps you're going to follow in. This is also true with your friends. I saw this great meme that says, you can't change your friends, but you can change your friends. Who are you going to surround yourself?

Who are going to be the influences in your life? Who are the role models that you put up, where the statues you put up? My office is filled with statues of people I admire, pictures of people that I admire because they remind me who I want to be like, whose footsteps I'm following in, whose example I'm trying to emulate. So your influences matter, the proximity effect is real, you become like your friends, you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. This is all a way of saying that you choose whose children you're gonna be, you choose what influences

you're gonna have in your life. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellissi. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud.

From the buildup, 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 form 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 podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wonder App. The purpose of philosophy, Senaka, says, is to make you better. He says it's to scrub off your flaws, not to make you more judgmental or make you feel superior to other people. It's called self-discipline. Nobody else signed up for it.

You signed up for it. You're learning and you're steady and your self-improvement. You have to be sure that you're applying this only to yourself. The purpose of all this is to make you a better master of yourself. It's not to make you condescending or patronizing or controlling other people. It's called self-discipline for a reason. It's your discipline over yourself. You'll leave everyone else in their mistakes and their way of doing things to them. Being great at something requires concentration, it requires elimination. Seneca says he who is everywhere is nowhere. If you want to be great at

whatever it is you're doing it means focus. Everything you say yes to means saying no something else but conversely when you say no to other things when you say no to the inessentialist oak say it allows you to say yes to double down on what truly is essential. So what are you saying no to so you can say yes to what matters? Seneca said that the body must be treated rigorously so that it is not disobedient to the mind. So the idea, training I just did, my sprints and my kettlebell workout for Sunday.

The idea is who's in charge? The little voice in your head that's telling you to quit or the willpower that says, I'm gonna finish this, I have more in me. In running your training, your tea pace, to push your average threshold higher, you wanna get to a point where what was one's hard for you is now easy or average.

And that's why we train physically, mentally, spiritually, so that when adversity does come we're ready when the voice in our head tells us to quit. We know we don't have to listen. Dana Kuzn interesting philosopher because again he's not an academic he's a playwright, he's a Roman senator and he writes in this letter to a friend who one of his dear friends he writes a letter about how he should think about death. And he says that the mistake is that we think of death as something in the future, something we're moving towards as time is passing.

In fact, he says death is happening right now, the time that's passed is owned by death. Instead of thinking that, for instance, I would be lucky enough to live into my late 70s, I should think instead that I've already died 32 years, right? Senaika says we are dying every day, we're dying every minute, you're dying sitting here listening to me talk, so I hope it's worth it. But we have to get better at managing this precious resource, Senaika is saying that we,

we fritter away our time, meanwhile we strongly and strictly guard our property and our money. But what's more renewable? You can always buy more property. You can always earn more money. What you can't ever do is find or create more time. Seneca says happy is he who makes others better. I think that's what Astoec is also. Not just a role model, but an inspiration. someone who makes others better by the example that they set, by the work that they do, by the good they do for their community, right?

That's what Astoecism is about. Epicetizes don't talk about your philosophy, embody it. You make others better by being your best self, but this is the benefit. You also make yourself happy because you see the good that you're doing in the world, in the people around you. And this is why the Stoics are working so hard all the time. Sanika, one of the wisest people who ever lived, he said, look, you don't need to go to school,

you don't need to be a genius, you don't need a tutor, he said, you just need to find one thing every day that makes you better, a story, a quote, an idea, something that makes you better. That's how the path to wisdom is walked. Every day for five years, I've written this daily Stoic emails, totally free, but it's built around that idea, just one Stoic quote, totally free, but it's built around that idea. Just one Stoic quote, one story, one insight every single day that will make you a little

bit better. I get better for writing it. People get better for reading it. I hope you check it out. 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 add 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 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 Wondery, 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.