The Daily Stoic - This is All You Need | The Most Secure Fortress

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

Ryan explains why the desire to persevere and keep going is all that we need, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.Pre-orders are available for Ryan Holiday’s new book Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave - check it out at https://dailystoic.com/preorderLinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stood Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. 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. on music or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 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 Epititus Markis 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. This is all you need. We can imagine Epictetus stripped bare by his fate, his freedom stolen from birth, his leg broken by a sadistic master hobbled ever after. And then as a bonus, he's exiled from Rome.

We can imagine stockdale and similar straits shot down, isolated, tortured. There must have been moments when they didn't think they could make it. There must have been moments of incredible pain, of fear, of despair. They had been laid flat by life, deprived of nearly everything. Yet they both retained the one thing that can never be taken from a person. The thing that can only be relinquished. As the lyrics say, crack of dawn, all is gone, except the will to be. Remember what Victor Frankl said that no matter what happens, we always possess the ability

to decide what we make of our condition. The stoic decides as long as they're living whether they'll carry on our will to be our inner Citadel can never be breached by outside forces It can be betrayed. It can be surrendered, but it cannot be broken. All we need is that then All we need is the understanding that desire to keep going to persevere to commit a stocked-ailed did that if we survive We'll turn this into something. Everything else can go, but if that remains, we'll be fine. The most secure fortress.

Remember that your ruling reason becomes uncomfortable when it rallies and relies on itself, so that it won't do anything contrary to its own will, even if its position is irrational. How much more uncomfortable if its judgments are careful and made rationally? Therefore, the mind free from passions is an impenetrable fortress. A person has no more secure place of refuge for all time. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, 848. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoke, 366 Meditations on Wisdom,

Perseverance in the Art of Living by yours truly. My co-author and translator, Steve Enhancelman, you can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoke store, over a million copies of the Daily Stoke in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the best cellist.

It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoke.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. Bruce Lee once made an interesting claim. A fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, he said, a fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

When we repeat an action so often, it becomes an unconscious behavior, we can default to it without thinking. Training in the martial arts or combat is a deeply thoughtful study of movement. We sometimes think of soldiers as automatons, but what they've actually built is a steady patterns of unconscious behaviors. Any of us can build these. When Marcus says that a mind can get to a place

where it won't do anything contrary to its own will, even if its position is irrational, what he means is that proper training can change your default habits. Train yourself to give up anger and you won't be angry at every fresh light. Train yourself to avoid gossip and you won't get pulled into it. Train yourself on any habit and you'll be able to unconsciously go to that habit and try on times.

Think about which behaviors you'd like to be able to default to if you could. How many of them if you practiced only once? Let today be twice. Stoicism is linked to what they call cognitive behavioral therapy, which, as I understand, is one of the few forms of therapy that has demonstrably proven results. And I've done my share of it as well. The idea being that the mind has sort of patterns, loops that it goes into. And every time we do this, we're reinforcing the loop. And if it's a bad loop, every time we break it, we're training the opposite. So I think today's message is really thinking about how you've trained your

mind, what you've practiced, what habits you've built in, what patterns you default to, and what do you need to work on, right? I think about what Dr. Frankl says when he says, between stimulus and response, there is a space, and in that space we choose how we need to be, but of course that space is as big or as small as you've trained it to be, right? The person who can think, who can use that space is someone who's self-aware, who has some control over themselves. And the vast majority of people

have no space because they've trained themselves that it's stimulus response, stimulus response, stimulus response, which are just sort of emotionally reactive. That's, I don't think how you want to live even if it is how you are living. So today, I just want to leave you with this idea that you train the mind like any other muscle. You train yourself, my wife and I are working on this with one of our kids. Your kids do something, they knock something over, they do the opposite of what you ask them to do, they bite or

can they do the things they do because they're kids. And then you have a response because you don't like it because it triggers something in you because you're worried about them because you don't want that glass to break, you know, whatever it is. And then the two of you or the three of you, you get in a loop, families have patterns too. There's also the sort of intergroup dynamic where this stuff happens. And it becomes a feedback loop. When we notice that our son does stuff to get attention,

even though that's bad stuff, that we don't want him to do. And so we're having to see, okay, when he does it, what's our response? Because we don't, can't really control him, right? I mean, obviously you can control your kid. But what I mean is that our actions are much more in our control and have a greater influence than just how we try to force someone else to do something. So we're thinking about how do we create the incentives, how do we create the pattern, or how at least do we not create disincentives or create the wrong pattern in how we react. We're trying to spend a lot of time being overly positive, really nice, give him lots and lots of attention

so he doesn't do exactly what we don't want him to do to get attention. Just a little insight I've been thinking about as in this today's entry really hit me with that and I'm sure some of you parents can relate. The idea is the patterns, what are you practicing, what loops are you stuck in, and then how can you get in good loops where you respond to things the right way? That's also what this is all about, and with that, let's talk to you soon. My newest book, Courage is Calling Fortune Favors the Brave is now available for pre-order. We've got a bunch of amazing bonuses. You can get signed copies, of course. I'm so proud of this book. General Jim Mattis is called a superb handbook for crafting a purposeful life.

Matthew McConaughey called it an urgent call to arms to each and all of us. I do hope you check it out. It's my first in the four virtue series Courage Temperance Justice Wisdom. Courage is calling Fortune favors the brave. If you want to out, it's my first in the four Virtue series Courage, Temperance Justice Wisdom. Courage is calling Fortune favors the brave. If you want to pre-order it, I'd really appreciate your support. Go to dailystoic.com slash pre-order. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the daily Stoic early and add 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's 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 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 Add Free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today.