The Daily Stoic - This is How You Have To See (and Respond To) Things | Becoming An Expert In What Matters

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. This is how you have to see and respond to things. You just got the news. You just figured out that something isn't possible. You just failed. You just got passed over. Marcus Reelis wrote about moments exactly like this in meditations. Something happened.

Starting point is 00:00:32 He writes, good. It was meant for you by nature, he said, woven into the pattern from the beginning. Instead of lamenting it, instead of fighting it, instead of wondering why it went this way, instead of that way, he's saying we have to embrace it. See it as something happening for you and not to you. Life is short, he writes that. It's all there is to say. So try to be a good person.

Starting point is 00:00:57 Try to do good, to do the right thing. Don't waste time complaining. Don't waste time wishing or hoping. Remember, he says, it was woven into the pattern from the beginning. So get to work. That's actually what we've been talking about all month here. This is Meditations Month at Daily Stoic. This is the month Marksumelius was born,

Starting point is 00:01:18 so we just kind of do this deep dive into meditations. And we're kind of doing a book club about meditations, which I'd love to have you join. If you haven't read meditations, you don't know where to start, or maybe you read it, you put it down, you didn't totally get it. I think this would be an awesome place to start. And at the end of the month, right after Mark's Reelis's birthday,

Starting point is 00:01:37 we're all going to dive in and do a discussion of it together. It's going to be awesome. I can't wait to see you in there. You can sign up right now. And you get it for free if you buy our leather edition of Meditations. Anyways, I'm excited to see you in there. DailyStoic.com slash meditations. I'll tell you about my journey with the book.

Starting point is 00:01:59 This is something we really worked hard on, and I think you're going to like. I'll see you in there. Thanks. If you're selling online or out of a storefront, it's a full-time gig for you or a side hustle. You know the challenge. It's not easy. It's a lot of work. You're hoping that people find your listing. You're waiting for them to walk in. Well, What Not flips that. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you got. They ask questions, and they buy it. And they keep coming back. What Not is the largest dedicated live shopping platform beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury, fashion, even cookies.

Starting point is 00:02:42 Sellers can build real thriving businesses. Whatnot buyers spend more than an hour a day in the app and they're not just browsing, they're bidding, they're buying, they're coming back, and you can go live and show off your products to those people and turn what you love into real income. People selling on Whatnot sell 10 times more than other major marketplaces because you're not just listing products, you're building real connections with your buyers. And for a limited time, WhatNot will match your first $150 in the first month. Visit Whatnot.com slash sell to start selling W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. What-N-O-T-com slash sell. If you're running a business, you know the deal with most CRMs. They are packed with a bunch of features you're never going to use, clunky interfaces,

Starting point is 00:03:25 and you spend a bunch of time just trying to find the basic info and then you stop using them. Well, that's where today's sponsor PipeDrive comes in. It's a simple sales CRM tool for small and medium-sized businesses. Pipe Drive brings your entire sales processes into one dashboard, giving you a crystal clear, complete view of the sales process, as well as customer information. So you stay in control and you can close more deals faster. And it all centers around the visual sales pipeline

Starting point is 00:03:51 where you can see every deal, what stage it's in, and what needs to happen next. Pip Drive is powerful enough to scale with your business, but simple enough that your team can actually, use it right now on day one. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. Right now, if you use the link, you'll get a 30-day free trial, no credit card or payment needed. Just head over to pipe drive.com slash stoic to get started. That's PipeDrive.com slash Stoic, and you can be up and running in minutes.

Starting point is 00:04:24 Becoming an expert in what matters. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic, April 14th. Believe me, Seneca says, in On the Shortness of Life, it's better to produce the balance sheet of your own life than that of the grain market. The things that people manage to become experts in, fantasy sports, celebrity trivia, derivatives and commodities markets, 13th century hygiene habits of the clergy. We can get very good at what we're paid to do or adapt at a hobby we wish we could be paid to do. And yet our own lives, habits, and tendencies might be a complete mystery to us. Seneca was writing this important reminder to his father-in-law, who, as it happened, was for a time in charge of Rome's granary. But then his position was revoked for political purposes. Who really cares,

Starting point is 00:05:17 Seneca was saying, now you can focus that energy on your inner life. At the end of your time on this planet. What expertise is going to be more valuable? Your understanding of matters of living and dying or your knowledge of the 87 bears? What will help your children more, your insights into happiness and meaning, or that you followed breaking political news every day for 30 years? I've said this before, but obviously being an informed citizen in a democracy is really important. But people seem to think that Being an informed citizen means watching a lot of MSNBC or Fox News or spending a lot of time on Twitter. But what you see with these folks is they know a lot of trivia, but they fundamentally don't understand human nature. They fundamentally don't understand right or wrong or virtue or the things that

Starting point is 00:06:09 actually matter in life. Heraclitus said something like this. He says, you know, these people study all these books for all these years and they fail to realize that day and night are one. What I take from that is he's saying is that they're missing the big people. picture. They're missing the eternal deep truths of life in exchange for the trivia. You know, they run a great business. They understand these events in fiction or art or sports or whatever it is, but they've fundamentally not come to grasp the truths of existence. And I think even what I love about stoicism is that stoicism isn't big arcane, abstract questions, but practical ones. It's about understanding the balance sheet of one's life, as Seneca was saying.

Starting point is 00:06:56 It's about understanding their self, understanding their emotions, understanding people. I think what Seneca is saying is that we often understand everything but ourselves. We ask all the little questions instead of the couple big questions. Like, why am I here? What's important to me? What's right? What's wrong? And that's such a shame.

Starting point is 00:07:20 Philosophy is supposed to be practical. philosophy is supposed to push us to understand ourselves and humans, right? Like the amount of people that focus on this or that, and then just fundamentally don't understand how psychology works or fundamentally understand how, like, the very system of government works, they're just tied up and stuff, right? And they haven't thought about what the thing they're talking about would actually mean. So we talked about this before about how certainty and arrogance is the root of,

Starting point is 00:07:51 of real ignorance. And I also think it goes for, what are you going to choose to know about? Trivial, ephemeral things, we're going to probe the deeper questions. You're going to probe yourself. You're going to look inward. Markis really says, throw away your books. Now he says this in meditations. And I don't think that meant, you know, then go watch the gladiatorial games. I think he meant throw away your books and sit there and think. Sit there and get in touch with yourself. sit there and really examine, think about the things you've already learned. That's what we're talking about. And it's just another sort of deeply powerful question from Seneca.

Starting point is 00:08:30 As the Stoics, tell us always, become an expert in the things that matter. Focus on the things that matter. Ask the questions that really matter. Lead the trivia and nonsense to everyone else. 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

Starting point is 00:08:57 episodes in the couple of 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.

The Daily Stoic - This is How You Have To See (and Respond To) Things | Becoming An Expert In What Matters

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.