The Daily Stoic - The Who’s Who of Who’s That | Balance The Books Of Life Daily

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

Eternal fame doesn’t even last. So what should we prize instead? 📕 Pick up your own Premium Leather Edition of Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Gregory Hays Translation) at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📓 Grab a signed edition of The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living: https://store.dailystoic.com/✉️ 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.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audiobooks in the car. Instead of having that be dead time, we want to use it to have a live time. We really want to help their imagination soar. And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories,

self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audio books without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app.

And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing right Now on Audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome to the Daily Stoic 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 stoic 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. The who's who, who's that? Marcus Aurelius' meditations is full of names. Not just in his debts and lessons at the beginning

where he names Varus and Sextus and Antoninus Pius, but also throughout the book where he mentions Heraclitus, Epictetus, Helvidius, Priscus. These names, they're all put together. You could say they make for a veritable who's who of who's that to quote the Taylor Swift song. The names aren't utterly unfamiliar, perhaps fewer familiar to you,

but the vast majority have been lost to time. And that's because 2000 years have passed. That's because the Roman Empire is no more. That's because people move on pretty quickly. Which was Marcus Aurelius' intended point, and it's also the process of history proving him right. Words once common and used now sound archaic, he writes, and the names of the famous dead as well. Everything fades so quickly, turns into legend, and soon oblivion covers it. And those are the ones who've shown, the rest unknown, unasked for. He says they're forgotten a minute after death.

Marcus Aurelius mentions his predecessors. He mentions kings and conquerors. He mentions powerful people, important people. Yet by 160 AD, many were already going the way of Ozymandias, half buried by the desert and the decades. Their immortal reputation increasingly worse for the wear. What is eternal fame, Marcus asks? Emptiness. It doesn't even last. So what should we prize instead? Well, we need to do good. We need to tell the truth, to be our best, to accept what happens

and prepare to be forgotten as everyone who came before us eventually was, as Marcus is himself to nearly 99% of the world. And look, Meditations is the definitive text on self-discipline and personal ethics and humility and self-actualization and strength, but it's shockingly not well read. Maybe you've heard of it, but never actually cracked it because it seems old and dusty and unfamiliar.

But we made a really cool version. My favorite translation is the Gregory Hayes translation. I think it's the best. So we got the rights and we make this awesome leather-bound edition, one that will hopefully stand the test of time, let you pass that wisdom on from one generation to the next. And if you are trying to make sense of this somewhat archaic distant book, we've got a really cool course called How to Read Mark Sturris Meditations, a daily Stuart guide.

If you get them together, there's a bunch of savings. I'll link to that in today's definitely check it out. This week's entry from the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 days of writing and reflections on the art of living. It's our companion to the Daily Stoic. Balance the books of life daily. One of the reasons we journal is as a way of gathering up life's experiences, its insights, its frustrations, its unexpected struggles and triumphs and more. And in all of this, we are making a reckoning

of our progress on life's way. Seneca, whose father-in-law was in charge of keeping the books on Rome's granary, liked the metaphor of balancing life's books each day. Rather than postpone, our impulse each day should be to bring things as much as possible to completion. Why? Because we never know what tomorrow might bring. Epictetus too would tell his students that the important thing was that they had begun, begun to practice, to learn, to get better. So give yourself some credit this week for the journey that you're on and reflect on how far you have

come and how far you have left to go. And we have three quotes, two from Seneca, one from Epictetus. Seneca says, let us prepare our minds as if we'd come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life's books each day. Life's greatest flaw is that it is always imperfect and a certain portion of it is postponed. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time." And that's from Moral Letters 101. And then Seneca, and he's writing this to his father-in-law. He says, believe me, it's better to produce the balance sheet of your own life than of

the grain market. He says this on the shortness of life. And then Epictetus says, I am your teacher and you are learning in my school. My aim is to bring you to completion, unhindered, free from compulsive behavior, unrestrained, without shame, free, flourishing and happy, looking to God and things great and small.

Your aim is to learn and diligently practice all of these things. Why then don't you complete the work? If you have the right aim, and I have both the right aim and the right preparation? What is missing? The work is quite feasible, it is the only thing in our power. Let go of the past. We must only begin. Believe me and you will see. I was thinking about this idea of keeping life's books with the fact that I just finished my fourth go-around

on the Daily Stoke Journal, and I know some of you have been on that path with me as well. So as I cracked open a fresh one, that was pretty cool. And I'm about to finish my first go-around all the way through of my five-year, one-line-a-day journal. So I've been doing it every day for five years. Just to have that finished is like an incredible and cool experience. And to think of the reflection

that went into this. And so, you know, when we talk about journaling, it's not just a sort of a cathartic thing. It's not just a moment of stillness in the morning or the afternoon or whenever you happen to do it. To me, the power of it is recording your progress as you go. When I look at some of the things that I wrote five years ago, when I think about what I was going through five years ago, right? I just, I am proud of myself for the work

that I have been putting in on myself. There's a great line that's not in today's entry, but Epitita says, he says, some people delight in improving their farm, me, I delight in my own improvement day to day. And I think that's what the journal is really capturing is that day to day, that work that I've been putting in. And listening to this podcast is a little bit of work.

Your journaling is a little bit of work. The reading you're doing is a little bit of work. The conversations you're having with a spouse or a friend or the Daily Soak Life group, that's a little bit of progress. And all of this, it might not seem like much as you're doing each individual thing. But as George Washington might say,

many mickels make a muckle or as Zeno said, well-being is realized by small steps but it's not a small thing. And so as we chip away at this stuff, as we make a little bit of progress, it might not feel like much today or in the moment, but cumulatively it is adding up. It is taking you somewhere and that is not to be underrated. And yeah, when I did the journal four years ago now, I didn't know where it would go. I didn't know how it would work.

I didn't have this kind of daily journaling practice like prompt based, but it's been a wonderful addition to my routine. And I've heard from so many people who've had the same experience. And anyways, it's been wonderful. I hope you can do more than just follow along with the podcast, but you can grab a version of it yourself. Hey, it's Ryan.

Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic 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 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.

If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey. Did you know that after World War II, the US government quietly brought former Nazi scientists to America in a covert operation to advance military technology?

Or that in the 1950s the US Army conducted a secret experiment by releasing bacteria over San Francisco to test how a biological attack might spread without alerting the public? These might sound like conspiracy theories, but they're not. They're well-documented government operations that have been hidden away in classified files for decades. I'm Luke Lamanna, a Marine Corps recon vent, and I've always had a thing for digging into the unknown. It's what led me to start my new podcast, Redacted Declassified Mysteries. In it, I explore hidden truths and reveal some eye-opening events, like covert experiments and secret operations that those in power tried to keep buried. Follow redacted, declassified mysteries with me, Luke Lamanna, on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

To listen ad-free, join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app.