The Daily Stoic - This Is How To Capture The Magic | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

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If you want to focus more on your well-being this year, you should read more and you should give Audible a try. Audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks focused on wellness from physical, mental, spiritual, social, motivational, occupational, and financial. You can listen to Audible on your daily walks. You can listen to my audiobooks on your daily walks. And stillness is the key. I have a whole chapter on walking, on walking meditations, on getting outside. And it's one of the things I do when I'm walking. Audible offers a wealth of wellbeing titles to help you get closer to your best life and the best you.

Discover stories to inspire, sounds to soothe, and voices that can change your life. Wherever you are on your wellbeing journey, Audible is there for you. Explore bestsellers, new releases, and exclusive originals. Listen now on Audible. I'm Alice Levine. And now on Audible. stories, it starts at a lavish garden party. Diana meets the dashing fascist Oswald Mosley. She's captivated by his politics but also by his very good looks. It's not a classic rom-com story

but when she falls in love with Mosley she's on a collision course with her family, her friends and her whole country. There is some romance though. The couple tied the knot in a ceremony organised by a great uncelebrated wedding planner, Adolf Hitler. So it's less Notting Hill, more Nuremberg. When Britain took on the Nazis, Diana had to choose between love or betrayal. This is the story of Diana Mosley on her journey from glamorous socialite to political prisoner. Listen to British Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. prisoner. Listen to British Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 who are 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 there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you. This is how to capture the magic. It should be the easiest book in the world to read. It's only, depending on the translation,

a couple hundred pages, which are made up of short passages, making it easy to read in small increments. It's written in a straightforward and accessible style without any complex philosophical jargon. Unlike most books, there's no pretense, no performance, no intent to impress an audience. It's filled with topics that are universal and relevant, like dealing with tough times, being nice to people, waking up and getting to work even when you'd rather stay under the warm blankets.

And yet, so many people struggle with and get frustrated by Marcus Aurelius' meditations. And they have ever since it was first discovered after the emperor's death nearly 2,000 years ago. Just as we can imagine the first reader of meditations trying to make sense of the private thoughts of this great man, today people have questions about where to start and what to take from it. What translation should I get? Should I read it cover to cover or is it better to approach it in bite-sized pieces?

Do you read it once or multiple times? Where did Marcus write it? Why did he write it? Did Marcus mean to come off so dark or dour? Is it important to know about Marcus's circumstances? Who he was writing for? What he meant? Do you need to know the core principles of Stoicism to fully appreciate meditations? We've been working hard here at Daily Stoke for the last decade to try to make Marcus

really successful and practical for people. We even publish our own edition of meditations. But we've also spent hundreds and thousands of hours, not just with his writings, but also with the best experts and translators and students of Stoicism to help make sense of what he meant and what he can do for us. Getting to the bottom of meditations

is the work of a lifetime. And as Marcus would say, of any great work of art, you get something new each time you go to it. Well, that's why we've been putting together what I think is the perfect companion for reading and understanding Marcus Aurelius' meditations. It's this new daily stoic meditations guide. Like a book club or an annotated version

of your favorite book, it's designed to be your personal roadmap through the nuances, subtleties, and complexities of Marcus Aurelius' meditations. Whether you've yet to journey through the nuances, subtleties, and complexities of Marcus Aurelius and meditations. Whether you've yet to journey through the pages or you're intimately familiar with them, this awesome course will enhance your reading experience deep in your understanding and show you how to apply

the same stoic principles and exercises that Marcus Aurelius used to improve his life, to improve your own. And I think you're really gonna like it. I'm super proud of this. This is a course, you take it at your own pace. There's a bunch of video messages from me. We've got recommended articles, videos, podcast episodes.

We've got journaling and reflection prompts. It's not spark notes or a summary. There's no substitute for reading meditations. It's not a shortcut, but it's a guide that will help enhance your understanding, help you really get everything you should get out of it, and hopefully guide you not get out of it, and hopefully guide you not just to read it once,

but time after time after time. So again, whether you've never opened meditations or your copy is filled with notes and annotations, the Daily Stoic Meditations Guide is here to support and enrich your reading experience. And we're gonna keep adding to it. It's gonna get better and better. It's not gonna launch for a couple more days,

but you can grab it now and be the first to get in there. I'm really excited for you to check it out. Go to dailystoic.com slash meditations guide, and I'll link to that in today's show notes. And also I would say if you haven't read Meditations, do grab our edition, we sell it in the Daily Stoic store, the Gregory Hayes edition, but I added some awesome graphics to it.

There's a biography of Marcus in there. It's leather, so it'll hold the test of time well, and I'll link to that in today's show notes as well. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. Right around the fall of 2019, Stillness is the Key was coming out and I was just formulating and going out to sell what would become the Four Virtue series. That's Courage is Calling, Discipline is Destiny, and now Right Thing Right Now,

which you can pre-order at dailystoke.com slash justice. But I gave my first talk back in October of 2019 in Minnesota at the Hutton House, where I was talking about the ideas in stillness and what I was thinking about at that time. And I'm gonna bring you some of that Q&A now. You can listen. I was invited to give a talk to a company called Studio E.

I thought it was a great conversation and I'll bring you that now. So here's me answering some Stillness is the Key related questions. And don't forget to pre-order, right thing right now. Good values, good character, good deeds at dailystoke.com slash justice.

Thank you. Thank you. Hi. Hi. So speaking of young people, I'm curious about, you mentioned a toddler in your life. So how do you find that stillness when you have small children around you, regular racists,

asking for a friend? Yeah, so I have a three-year-old and a four-month-old, so it's a bit nuts at home, but what I try to think about is that it just sort of is what it is. I think a lot of the stillness comes from expecting it to be a different way. You know, expect. It's like, it's not that the house is messy that's causing you anxiety.

It's that you think it should be clean, right? Or that you think other people's house is clean, right? And so somehow you're a failure because yours is not right or It's that you told yourself. We're gonna get there at 2 so now It's causing you distress and anxiety that they fell asleep at 159 as you were pulling up. It's going okay You know so now we're gonna now I'm gonna sit here in the car for the next hour. That's not so bad right It's it's deciding. I think what I try to work on on myself, I'm not great at it, it's like I don't actually need to be anywhere, I don't need to do

anything, I just need to do this, whatever it is. And so I think what kids are a good reminder of, if you let them be, is that sort of letting go and going with the flow and not needing things to be this way or that way, not comparing yourself to this or that. And just, I was reading a book and someone was telling me, the author was talking about how when he had his son, someone sent him an email and said, welcome to the world of unavoidable reality. And that's not so bad if you decide to submit to it. The problem is if you decide that the unavoidable reality is something you can challenge or change,

and then so you're sort of impotently fighting against this thing. And I think sort of giving up that need for control is a big part of it for me. You know that notion that the phoenix rises from the ashes? Mm-hmm. notion that the phoenix rises from the ashes. It seems like when you're in that, when you're in that space, is when you don't have the presence of mind to be still and to take advantage of that in an empowering way. Yeah. I'm wondering if this is the kind of thing you can fake it until you make it or what your thoughts are about that. Yeah, I do think about that. My first book in the series

that this book is a sort of part of a trilogy for it, it's this idea of the obstacle is the way, right? And what the sort of premise is, when you look back at your life, all the really difficult, painful, unpleasant things you went through, you can see in retrospect, we're taking you to wherever you were going to end up, right? You see like the breakup that you went through was obviously for the best, the failure that you had was teaching you something, and in retrospect you wouldn't change them, right? But in the moment you were so convinced

that you could change them and you should change them and that you must fight against them, you must resist them, and that was the source of a lot of that unhappiness and that misery. And so I mean, look, it doesn't magically take the pain of it away but I try to zoom out and go how am I going to think about this in the future? Right? And if I'm going to be happy about it in the

future or if I'm at least going to be resigned to it in the future or not angry about it in the future, why can't I just skip this part? Right? Like why do I if I know that at the end of the day, this isn't gonna matter that much to me, and that I was taking it too seriously, or I was too upset about it in the moment, but maybe that helps take 20% of the edge off. It doesn't magically make you feel better,

but it can soften some of that. So that's one of the things that I think about. Hey, Ryan. Hi. First time caller, long time listener. I can only imagine how much criticism Kennedy would have suffered spending 13 days being still finding a solution to the Cuban Missile Crisis. In our current day and media environment,

is that even possible? Is that solution simply unplugging, not letting anybody penetrate your space, just not caring what people say? Well, I think it's about deciding what forms of information you're going to let influence your decisions or your thinking. Like, I can't imagine it's healthy for anyone to watch five hours of cable news per day,

but the idea that the President of the United States is watching that much, you know, it's like, I don't even think that people on Fox and Friends think people should be watching Fox and Friends. The idea that the most powerful person in the world is watching it is really alarming, right? I'm not talking about this politically, I'm just talking about like, if you're really, if a lot is weighing on your decisions, what you should probably not be thinking about

is the minutiae, the breaking, the tiny things, you should be thinking really big picture. And I think that's what Kennedy managed to so successfully do. Look at you, you're in an election cycle, He'd made a bunch of mistakes early on. But the military was sort of unanimous about its opinion. Both houses of Congress were pretty unanimous that he should listen to the military. But what Kennedy was able to do was really zoom out. What Kennedy was thinking about in the missile crisis

was not the interaction he had with Khrushchev a few months earlier. He's not thinking about how this is gonna affect the elections in a couple months. He was thinking about a book he'd read called The Guns of August about the outbreak of World War I, and what he was thinking, what he said to himself is, nobody is gonna write

that book about what I'm doing right now. So here you have a guy who's obviously breaking news from the breaking reports and fresh from the field intelligence from the CIA and from the military. He's obviously looking at all this information but he's primarily looking at it from a lens of like what happened 50 years ago and what mistakes did those people make and how am I rooting my decisions now in the lessons learned from that crisis? And so I think it's about sort of zooming out

and making sure that you're focused on the information that really matters, that has some level of historical significance or truth that stood the test of time, not whatever the sort of latest tweet or the latest opinion from the latest person. So I think, yeah, look, certainly if this happened today, it probably wouldn't happen

over 13 days. But hopefully, whoever is weighing crises like this is slowing down and really thinking about what matters and not just thinking about how many retweets this is going to get. 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. Do you want to hear about the $100 wedding dress that just saved Abercrombie? Or the tech acquisition that was just like Game of Thrones? Or the one financial equation that can solve climate change? Then check out our daily podcast, The Best One Yet, or as we call it, T-Boy. This is Nick.

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