The Daily Stoic - There Is No Better Time Than Now | Ask DS

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

At last the day came and you made a New Year’s resolution that would get rid of the whole base evil. And then the next year came around and you were doing the same old evil thing. Can you remember the surprise and disappointment that gripped you when you discovered that…after all that you had done through your resolutions to get rid of it—the old habit was still there? And out of amazement you found yourself asking, “Why could I not cast it out?”So we’ll leave you today by putting a challenge in front of you. For the last four years, we have been doing what we call the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge—a set of 21 actionable challenges, presented one per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. These aren’t pie-in-the-sky, theoretical discussions but clear, immediate exercises and methods you can begin right now to spark the reinvention you’ve been trying for. We’ll tell you what to do, how to do it, and why it works.From these challenges, you will:✓ Learn to stop procrastinating and avoiding the change you truly desire✓ Build new habits that form a strong foundation for change✓ Abandon the harmful habits that are dragging you down✓ Strengthen your character, becoming a more virtuous version of yourselfAnd above all: You will find out just how much you are capable of.Every morning, the email arrives in your inbox, and it presents you with a choice. You can do the harder thing, you can do the challenge. Or you can follow the drift of least resistance—you can open the email and leave it at that. Or worse…you can ignore this call right now and not sign up at all. Which way will you go?In today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan talks stoics and answers questions in part 2 of 3 Q&A for 60 students at The United States Military Academy (USMA), also known metonymically as West Point or simply as Army. West Point is a United States service academy in West Point, New York. It was originally established as a fort, since it sits on strategic high ground overlooking the Hudson River 50 miles (80 km) north of New York City. It is the oldest of the five American service academies and educates cadets for commissioning into the United States Army.The 2024 New Year New You Challenge officially begins on Monday, January 1st. Stop delaying. Head over to dailystoic.com/challenge and sign up NOW! Let’s go.✉️ 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.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well on Thursdays we not only read the daily meditation but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow stoics. We're trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with daily stoic life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when they're

happened to be someone they're recording. But thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you. There is no better time than now. We all have vices, we all have flaws, we all have things we know we want to change, but what happens? Nothing happens. This is true for everyone, even Martin Luther King, Jr. One day, King said, we tell ourselves, I'm going to rise up and try this evil out.

I know it's wrong, it's destroying my character and embarrassing my family. But then, he says, at last the day came and you made a New Year's resolution that would get rid of that evil. And then the next year came around and you were still doing the same old thing. Can you remember the surprise and disappointment that gripped you when you discovered that? After all that you had done through your resolutions to get rid of it, the old habit was still there, he said, and out of amazement, you found yourself asking, why should I not? Why could I not cast it out?"

Seneca reminds us that all fools have one thing in common. They're always getting ready to start. They're always getting ready to change, and then, and then, and then, they never do. They never do the work. And rooting out evil in your life takes work. Same with losing 5 pounds, quitting smoking, breaking the smartphone addiction, drinking less, reading more. And to that end, it's worth repeating epictetus's question.

How much longer are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself? You must stop, delay,, you must get started. Today, right now, a new year is upon you. Is there a better time than now? No, there is not. So let's go. I'm looking for the last five years. I've been struggling with my own issues, as I think everyone has. And I come around to the New Year's and I try to make it commit my try to challenge myself to actually do something about the things that I want to change. And that's where the New Year New Year challenge came. The Daily Stoke New Year New Year challenge.

It's 21 actionable challenges. One per day built around the most timeless wisdom in Stoke philosophy. They're designed to help you do what King was talking about, what Epic Titus was talking about rising up, driving out the bad, taking action to become the person you're capable of being. It's not theoretical stuff, but to become the person you're capable of being. It's not theoretical stuff, but real practical action stuff you actually have to do. And yes, challenges that are hard. That's the point. That's what we're trying to start the year off with. And I'd love to see you do that with me. I'd love for us together to be reflecting a few months from now. A year from now, I go, I did it. I cast it out. I'd love for you to join us. You can

sign up right now at dailystowoc.com slash challenge. Or if you're thinking about doing daily stoke life, you can join that. And you get this challenge for free as part of that membership. So I'd love to see you either in dailystowoc.life at dailystowoc.com or just do this challenge. Start small. Don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. dailystowoc.com slash challenge. I'll see you in there. I told this story before, but the first Airbnb I stayed in was 15 years ago.

I was looking for places to live when I wanted to be a writer and we stayed at this house, I think outside Phoenix. And then when I bought my first house here in Austin, I would rent it out when South by Southwest or F-1 or all these events. My wife and I would go out of town and we'd rent it and it helped pay for the mortgage and it supported me while I was a writer. You've probably had the same experience. You stayed in an Airbnb and thought, this is doable. Maybe I could rent my place on Airbnb and it's really that simple. You can start with a spare room or you can rent your whole place when you're away. You could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it. Maybe you set up a home office during the pandemic and now you don't need it because you're back at work. Maybe you're traveling to see

friends and family for the holidays. While your way, your home could be an Airbnb. Whether you could use extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home could be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. Give yourself the gift of coho and take some of the sting out of your holiday spending this season. Get instant cash back and earn up to 5% interest on your entire balance on Canada's highest rated financial app. Coho lets you earn cash back, earn high interest on your account, build your credit history

and so much more. You can also get 20 bucks off when you make your first purchase using the code DailyStoic20. That's 20 bucks when you make your first purchase using the code DailyStoic20. Join over 1 million Canadians and sign up for your free trial now. Download the Coho app today or visit www.coho.ca for more details. Hey, it's Ryan. So back in March, who I gave a talk at West Point, virtually, I spoke to this mass media and American politics class, which I was very honored to do. They'd actually assigned to my book Trust Me I'm Line, which is

inconceivable to me that back when I was writing that book in my little apartment in New Orleans, Louisiana, that it would be part of the curriculum at the preeminent military school in the world. Basically, all of this would have been unreal and unbelievable to me. And so in today's episode, I'm bringing you a chunk of that Q&A with some of the cadets. And I hope you enjoy. It's always a privilege for me to talk to the young men and women in uniform or soon to be in uniform. And I've always liked talking to college classes.

So here's me talking Stoicism, media, politics, bunch of stuff that's all happening in the world. And I hope you enjoy this little chat. Back on your website from earlier, I remember seeing temperance, moderation, self-control, I was like, oh, discipline, that's a new word. So that's interesting to kind of know like that's kind of how it's morphed.

Well, in the preferred translation of Mark's real estate, I love the Gregory Hays translation, he tends to render it as self-discipline or sometimes does. That was a decision that ultimately I made. There was a bunch of different ways I was going to title or present that book. I was going to talk about self-discipline or that's what this is going to be the packaging. Or I was there's a there's an Eisenhower quote that I love that's in the intro of the book, but he says freedom is better defined as the opportunity for self-discipline, right? And to me, that captures what the virtue of software, Cine, or discipline, or self-discipline is really about that. It's the things that you can do but choose not to, right?

Military discipline is, I think, different than the virtue of discipline. The discipline that is imposed on you, right? Or drilled into you is, of course, very important. Is it the same as the virtue of discipline? I don't know. My argument in the book is that we're talking about about the discipline that you enforce on yourself.

And oftentimes when I sign the book, I underline just the word self, because I think it's so easy to think of discipline as this sort of standard to which we hold the world and ourselves as opposed to what I think it rightly is, which is the standard that we hold ourselves to. This going back to the very basis of stoicism, the dichotomy of control, you control yourself, you don't control other people.

And so discipline is a virtue that primarily emanates from inside the house, so to speak. And it's interesting, like, because thinking about Aurelius, he has these lines, I forget where it is, but he's saying when someone is mean or rude, that's just their job, like that's their fate, which is very different than from how he reflects on his own sort of, what he seems to think of as like failings or struggles. sort of what he seems to think of as like failings or struggles. In terms of like my students with the, you know, as they're learning discipline, you sort of that external discipline force on them, what might they take from like the virtue of discipline and sort of carry forward?

Well, to go back to that idea from Marcus, I think Marcus' best line about this idea is tolerant with others strict with yourself, right? And I think that's a great way to think about it. As far as the discipline that we are instructed in or taught in or pick up as part of our profession, I'm not saying there's no value in it. There's of course an immense amount of value, and especially when you're young, this is part of how you are trained in things. So it becomes a muscle memory. You're being taught to do something that's perhaps not natural or not the way that most people act or think because what you're trying to do is inherently not natural, right?

Military discipline is there to support you and edify you in the most unnatural moments that there are, right? Whether we're talking about combat or moments of sort of stress or very high stakes. And so being instructed in that virtue early on, being taught the discipline, you know, it becomes sort of a part of you. I learned to write as the research assistant for another writer and that discipline, that practice, the way that my mentor, Robert Green, did that is today the way that I do it. Now I now have the ability for that to be self-discipline as opposed to external discipline and I have the ability to tweak and adjust and put my own spin on things, but I'm still more or less following the same practices that I learned when I was 19, 20,

21 years old about how writing works, how reading works, how thinking works, how research works. You learn these things early on, you pick up habits until they become just sort of part of who you are. You know, sort of thinking about the discipline and then, you know, them in particular as soldiers I believe 80% is the number that go into combat arms from West Point and that can be quite, you know, life or death struggles where split second decisions really make a difference. In terms of like stillicism, what might that sort of help them? Well, you know, I spoke at the Naval Academy a few months ago and right as I was coming up there,

I was reading Walter Lourdes' incredible biography or sort of, I guess it's not really a biography, it's a narrative nonfiction book, but he's one of the great nonfiction writers of all time. He wrote a book about the sinking of the Titanic, and then he wrote a book about the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Pearl Harbor one being called a day of infamy. And he has this section in the book where this guy, I'm forgetting his name, he had literally just graduated from the Naval Academy. And he's on his first posting on a ship in Pearl Harbor, and they're being bombed. They're sort of trapped below deck, taking cover, and the guy that's on the deck shooting the machine gun

is killed, and he has to send someone up to fill that spot. And he says, in an instant, I understood everything they were teaching us inapolis, the training and the drills and the gold braids and the plebe week. And you know, all he was like, I understood it in an instant because he asked these people to go and they went, right? Like he was sending them into the worst environment you could possibly send a person in to fill

in for a person who had just been killed in a surprise attack that no one yet even fully understood on a ship that was literally on fire. And so, in that moment, he understands the discipline, right? And I think we can understand this in more casual situations in our life. We practice things, we prepare things. And so we can, in moments of stress or difficulty big or small, we wanna things, we prepare things. And so we can in moments of stress or difficulty

big or small, we want to be able to say what Epictetus said the purpose of philosophy was. He says, you want to be able to say in any and every situation, this is what I trained for. That's what philosophy is about. That's what Stoicism was about. So Marcus Aurelius is suddenly thrust into absolute power where he's worshipped as a God. And he says to himself, no role is so well suited to philosophy as this one. He's basically saying, this is what you trained for. And it's why it's one of the exceptions where that absolute power does not corrupt absolutely. And so we can think about this in military situations.

You can think about this. I was driving here today and my seven year old was acting insane. And, you know, I had to say to myself, you know, what good is this philosophy you're studying? If you're going to lose your temper at a scared child, right? And so the whole point is this is what you chain for. This is what it's all about whether you're, you know, having to go, you know, overde deck in the middle of a surprise attack or you're just trying not to get upset by the traffic that you're stuck in or you're trying not to react to the self-destructive fashion

after you just got passed over for a deserved promotion. This is what the philosophy is really about. One letter we read by Sennaka, he talks about the sort of external habits of like sleeping on the ground, wearing dirty clothes, not getting haircuts, stuff like that. So he's talking about like the sort of the physical habits that people might show. Do you think, like does modern stillism have, or do you have any sort of habits like that that stem from

the mental? Yeah, so that practice from Senaika, I think it's really important, you know, he's not being blase about poverty. The reason Senaika is practicing this poverty, he said was to be able to say to himself, is this what you're afraid of? And so later, I mean, I think it's too late in Senaqa's case, but later when he has to go to Nero and say, you can have it all back.

You can have, you can confiscate my entire fortune, but this is beyond the pale for me and I'm out of here. That's why Senaqa was practicing those things, right? So he wasn't afraid. And I interviewed, in this room, I interviewed Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who was an Air Force veteran who did multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we were talking about, you know, the fear that so many congressmen and women have

or had about losing their job, about not being a congressman or a congresswoman anymore, a senator anymore, and how that prevents them from doing what they obviously know is the right thing. And for him, his point was, you know, if I'm going to be willing to, he says, you know, send men or women into combat, life or death situation, I have to be willing to risk my job when I think that that's, but that is a, I can imagine risk, like his practice risking his life is formative in the ability to risk your job. I'd love for that to be a more transferable skill than it was. It doesn't seem like the combat veterans have always done the right thing

over the last couple of years politically. But the idea of practicing these things physical, I'll give you an example, I told you at the beginning of this that I wasn't feeling really good. I got a horrible bout of food poisoning, I wish I woke up with on Saturday. And I had a talk last night that I did in person that was too late to reschedule a cancel. And part of what I thought about was like,

look, when I get up and run, I don't feel like doing it, right? It's hard, but I know that there's the limits in my head and what I feel in my body and what I'm actually capable of. And that this is gonna be 40 minutes on stage, I can easily do that. I might pay for it later, as we often do with exercise or physical activity,

but I know what I'm capable of, and I know that I've cultivated the muscle that does the thing you're capable of, but uncomfortable with doing. And I think that's a big, big part of the stoic practice. I'm sure all of us can relate to the running. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes,

that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode. 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 ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. and bridge, life takes energy.