The Daily Stoic - What Are Your Panic Rules? | Don’t Mind Me, I’m Only Dying Slow

Episode Date: December 2, 2021

Ryan explains how you should think about panic, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. If you’ve never donated to GiveWell’s recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to $250 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. Just go to GiveWell.org and pick podcast and enter DAILY STOIC at checkout.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 Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in 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, really a 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. 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 Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. What are your panic rules? It's easy to know what you should do. It's easy to decide what you want to do. The problem, as always, is that life gets in the way of these well-laid plants. Other people get in the way. Friction, apathy, inertia, indecision, all get in the way. Less need, the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams, explained to me on the Daily Stoke podcast a while ago, that inside the Rams organization, they talk about having panic rules.

What do you do when everything gets mixed up when the other team calls and audible, when the coverage is confusing, when the play breaks down and there's havoc on the field, and the play clock is running down, and the play call hasn't come in yet because the headsets aren't working. When there's chaos and your brain is panicking, Sneed said, go to your panic rules, slow down and go to your panic rules. And this isn't just an on the field thing, as a GM Sneed go to your panic rules. And this isn't just an on the field thing. As a GM's need has to have panic rules too.

Like when a player gets in trouble, when there's a controversy, when there's attempting high risk, high reward player who hits the waiver wire, when somebody wants to renegotiate a contract, when he's being savaged in the press. If you don't have panic rules, you're liable to make panic decisions. You're liable to do something emotional, something short-term, something that violates your principles and hurts your cause. Stoicism in theory is a philosophy. As a practice, it might also be seen as a set of panic rules. Just that you do the right thing is an amazing pithy and prescient panic rule straight from the mouth of Marcus Aurelius. The rest doesn't matter, he concluded. He's

saying don't get distracted, don't overthink it. Don't be let astray. In a language of football play to the whistle, stick with your man, no, your assignment. Remember, you always have the option of having no opinion. Another panic rule from Marcus' writings, meaning that when things are crazy, you should step back. Wait until you've made up your mind before you say or do anything. Don't just add your judgment on top of things based on reflex.

If life was easy and perfect, we wouldn't need panic rules, but it isn't. Things are complicated, they go awry, We get mixed signals. We get overwhelmed. And when that happens, we must always revert at once to our panic rules. The key is to make them really simple, so simple that we can't screw them up. And then once we've gotten ahold of themselves and gotten through them, less might say, we can huddle up, catch our breath, call the next play, Less might say we can huddle up catch our breath call the next play and hopefully do better next time and Look I've got one of the daily stoic challenge coins This is the amorphatic one, but the idea I think even on these challenge coins is there sort of a panic rule

In brass in your pocket a reminder. Hey something happened. What's my basic principle? What is the most core thing that I believe don't wanna forget, there it is. So you can check those out, of course, as always, at store.dailysto.com. Don't mind me, I'm only dying slow. Let each thing you would do or say or intend, if you like that, of a dying person. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 2-11. 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 and 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 sellers. 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. Have you ever heard someone ask, what would you do if you found out you had cancer? The question is designed to make you consider how different life would be if you were suddenly given just a few months or weeks to live. There's nothing quite like a terminal diagnosis to wake people up. But here's the thing, you already have a terminal diagnosis. We all do as the writer Edmund Wilson put it Death is the one prophecy that never fails

Every person is born with a death sentence each second that passes is one. You'll never ever get back Once you realize this it will have a profound impact on what you do and say and think Do not let another day tick away in ignorance of the reality that you are a dying person. The all are. Can today be the day we stop pretending? Otherwise. You know, actually today's entry don't mind me. I'm only dying. So it comes from the title of one of my favorite songs by the singer songwriter Jackie Green. Who I go way back with if you haven't listened to it, it's great. You can check it out on Spotify.

But this idea that we are dying every day, this goes to the core of Senaqa's teachings. You know, he says we're dying every minute, dying every day, because the time that passes belongs to death. So even put aside the fact that, you know, you do have a terminal diagnosis, we all do, and that we could go in at any moment, even if I could tell you for certain that you would die at age 81, or whatever the actuary tables say,

it doesn't change the fact that as Senaika says, the time that passes belongs to death, because once it occurs as it's tick, tick, tick, ticking away, even as you listen to this, as I'm recording, I'm looking down at my Zoom H6 recorder and I'm watching the red numbers of the clock go 22, 22, 23 to 22, to 23, to 24, as time passes, I'll never get those seconds back.

You won't ever get those seconds back. But I think that you just spent them on something valuable and that me saying it, something valuable, because it's a reminder that time is passing. And if we lose sight of this, we end up wasting this precious resource we have as we kill time as we waste time time is killing us time is wasting us and That's why the exercise of momentum worry is so important. That's why the Stoics practice it That's why the Stoics talk about it. That's why I

Have this momentum worry coin on my desk, why I carry it in my pocket. The idea, as Mark has said, that you could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think is just so important. It puts things in perspective. It reminds us of the stakes, right? That signing up to do this thing you don't really want to do,

that you don't have to do, that you know, is pointless to do them slowly or or pointlessly to do them half-assedly to do something you don't need to do. This is to give up something you will never, ever get back to just let the phone suck in your attention. And two hours later you realize you just wasted all this time scrolling through TikTok or whatever. That's to waste your most precious resource, right? To let time transpire, to delay or defer a dream or a thing that you needed to say or do, to say, I'll get to this later, I'll pursue what is important to me later, I'll step up and do this later.

You might not get later, and now is now, now is your time. That to me is what Memento Mori is about. It's both humility, but it's also a form of empowerment. It's a reminder of the stakes. It's a reminder that we only get to do this once. That we only get so much time. And that again, there is no guarantee that it'll be 80 years. Could be 34 and a half years for me, right? Could be one more day for you.

COVID floats, remains floating in the air. I hope you're all vaccinated. I hope you the air. I hope you're all vaccinated. I hope you're safe. I hope you're being smart. But even so, you can do everything right. And just like you can do everything right, get hit by a bullet falling from the sky or a bus crashing up over a sidewalk or you can be the victim of a random terrible crime, right? Life is merciless, statistics are merciless, they are random. Even if in the aggregate they are in our favor, doesn't matter to you, the individual. So do not waste time, do not take life for granted. Let each thing you would do, say or intend, as Marcus really reminds us, be like that

of a dying person. I've got a bunch of memento mori reminders. As I said, I have this chunk of a tombstone that sits on my living, that sits on my bathroom counter and then I of course have the memento mori coin. We also have a meemento Mori pendant and I've got a Memento Mori print the hour the the dance of death print in my office that hangs that immediately at I that hangs very ominously at eye level. It's a great

reminder you can check all that stuff out in the daily stoke store of course or just write it down on a piece of paper, stick it on your computer monitor and as Shakespeare says check it three on a piece of paper, stick it on your computer monitor. And as Shakespeare says, check it three times a day. 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. Hey there listeners!

While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Codopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground

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