The Daily Stoic - When Weakness Turns Your Ego Up | A Simple Way To Measure Our Days

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

So it goes for ego. To the untrained eye, it can be mistaken for confidence. The person’s self-centeredness, their certainty, their entitlement—this seems like the way that only the most important and gifted person in the world could get away with acting. In reality, the person doesn’t feel that way inside at all. On the contrary, they feel very small. Nero, for instance, demanded that enormous audiences celebrate his greatness. This was also the same emperor who banished a poet from Rome for being too talented, and thus a threat.-And with today's meditation on the day's Daily Journal excerpt, Ryan reminds us that as we get older we should get better at not taking it taking it for granted, living each day as a representation as the person you aspire to be. For the last five 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. 21 challenges designed to set you up to be able to say, whatever happens in 2024 and beyond, this is precisely what I trained for.. Demand more of yourself in 2024. Prepare for whatever is ahead. Head over todailystoic.com/challengeand sign up NOW!✉️ 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.

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www.coho.ca for more details. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcasts. On Friday we do double duty not just reading our daily meditation but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words in to works. When weakness turns your ego up, there are some things that look like strength but aren't. An aggressive mean person can seem strong, but oftentimes

they aren't. It's an act. All cruelty, Seneca wrote, springs from weakness. The bully almost invariably has been bullied. And so it goes for ego. To the untrained eye can be mistaken for confidence. The person's self-centeredness, their certainty, their entitlement, this seems like the way that only the most important and gifted person in the world could get away with acting. In reality, that person doesn't feel that way inside at all. On the contrary, they feel very small. Nero, for instance, demanded that enormous audiences celebrate his greatness. This was also the same Emperor who banished a poet from Rome for being too talented and thus a threat. We have to be wise enough to recognize these signs of weakness in our leaders and our bosses and the people that we look up to.

Most of all, we have to recognize it in ourselves. Confidence is quiet. It doesn't need to be celebrated or worshipped. True strength and power are restrained. They are not easily threatened. They don't need to make themselves felt, except for in the most extraordinary circumstances. Ego is not just the enemy, it is the canary in the coal mine. It is a sign that you're going in the wrong direction. You're not as good or as strong or as secure as you think you are. Ego is the enemy. I got a tattoo on my arm,

and of course I wrote a book about it, which you can grab signed copies of here at the Painted Ports, or at store.dailystoward.com. And we have the ego is the enemy coin, which I know plenty of people carry around with them. I've seen coaches hand them out to their teams. You can check all that out at store.dailystoward.com. A simple way to measure our days. This is the December 15th entry in the daily

Stoic. This is the mark of perfection of character. Mark Surrealius says in Meditation 7-6-9, to spend each day as if it were your last without frenzy, laziness, or any pretending. The Stoics didn't think that we could be perfect. The idea of becoming a sage, the highest aspiration of a philosopher, it wasn't realistic. This was just their platonic ideal. Still, they started every day trying to get a little closer to that mark. There was so much to gain in the trying. Can you actually live today as if it were your last? Is it even possible to embody completeness or perfection in our

ethos or character effortlessly doing the right thing for a full 24 hours? Is it possible to do it for even a minute? Maybe not. But if trying was enough for the stoics, it should be enough for us to. And I think as we get older as we go through life, we should get better at this, better at not wasting our time, better at not taking it for granted, better at rejecting the busyness or the chaos, delasiness and the procrastination, ceasing to pretend or try to impress other people or other things that don't matter. But being content and contained within ourselves, concentrating like a Roman, as Marcus really says in meditations, facing the day with responsibility and poise and dignity and self-control, doing what has to be done, control, doing what has to be done, doing it well, right? Doing the things that have to be done, but not the things that don't have to be done. Focusing, living, loving, living

each day, not just as if it was your last, but as a complete day, as a representation of the person that you want to be that you aspire to be. And I look back on my days and my 20s, and I see I wasn't as good as it as I am now. I look back at my teenager. I was even more ridiculous. Look back when my kid was one. Now there's six. You know. I feel like I'm getting better at it. That's what progress is not perfection of character that we're after, right? But it is about perfecting, improving, making strides in our character.

That's what we're after. That's what we're doing here. And the fact that we don't have that long should put an exclamation point on all of it, it should hang over it like the sort of damacles, put it in perspective, let you know that you can't waste a minute of it. That's what we're meditating on in this final month of the daily stoic. And it's also what we built the daily stoic new year and new year challenge about, which is gonna start in a little less,

and which is gonna start in roughly two weeks. Again, I'm not promising you perfection through it. I don't think anyone can be perfect, but we can get better. We can be a little less frenzied, a little less lazy, have a little less pretending. We can be more in line with the ephemerality less lazy, have a little less pretending, we can be more in line with the ephemerality of life, do the things that really matter.

And I hope you join us in the challenge. You can sign up now at dailystoward.com slash challenge. Speaking of laziness, procrastination, busyness, it's always funny. I watch and wait. People get to the very last minute, right? They hear me talk about it on the 15th. And then they say, oh, yeah, I meant to sign up for that, and then the email is frantically on the first.

Hey, you know, I want to sign up as a two late, as a two late, as a two late. That's one of the things we don't want to do or be like. So if you're thinking about signing up, will you join us now? And I look forward to seeing you all in the Daily Stoke, New Year, New Year Challenge, send up at dailystoke.com slash challenge.

And let's measure our days, let's measure who we are this upcoming year by how unfriendly we are, how diligent we are that is to say not lazy, a little pretending we do, and do we spend each of those days as if we were fully aware of how unpredictable and non-guaranteed the future happens to be. 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 We can't see tomorrow, but we can hear it. Tomorrow sounds like hydrogen being added to natural gas to make it more sustainable.

It sounds like solar panels generating thousands of megawatts, and it sounds like carbon being captured and stored, keeping it out of our atmosphere. We've been bridging to a sustainable energy future for more than 20 years. Because what we do today helps ensure tomorrow is on. And bridge. Life takes energy.