The Daily Stoic - You Can’t Stop Here | No Blame, Just Focus

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. You can't stop here. When Junius Rousticus handed the future emperor of Rome a book, it came with an implication. A true philosopher, a true leader, Rusikist, and says it could not be satisfied just getting the gist of something. they had to understand it inside and out. None of the lessons that Mark Surrealus took from Epictetus, the book that Rusticus gave him in his mid-20s,

Starting point is 00:00:42 would have been possible without first listening to this lesson. He not only inhaled the book, he clearly went over it, over and over, until it seeped into his very soul. That's why Meditations is filled with quotes from Epictetus. That's why Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world managed to stay sane, despite the inherent insanity of his position. Now, maybe you've read Epictetus. Maybe you've been meaning to. But chances are you haven't treated it like Marcus did, like Rousticus expected, like Epictetus deserves.

Starting point is 00:01:18 In these writings, actually, Epictetus's lectures were recorded by another student and Aryan. we have the life experiences of a man who spent 30 years as a slave. We also get his firsthand familiarity with temptation and corruption and vanity, having an owner who worked in Nero's court. What Epictetus learned and went on to teach others was profound and enduring. He taught that true freedom comes from recognizing what lies beyond our control and focusing only on what is up to us. He came to see that the most powerful empire is ruling over ourselves in living a life of virtue

Starting point is 00:01:58 even in a world of corruption, darkness, or misfortune. Marcus Aurelius was not satisfied just getting the gist of Epictetus's powerful teachings, and you shouldn't be either. You can see it in meditations. The same ideas appear again and again on anger, on difficult people, on dealing with death, on doing his duty when nobody is watching. not because Marcus had mastered them, but because he hadn't. He kept returning to Epictetus because the work was never finished.

Starting point is 00:02:25 Revert at once to yourself is the note of a man still trying. And that's what Rousticus had given him, not a book to finish, but a lifelong practice to return to. Now, Marcus was lucky. He was lucky in many ways, as the emperor of Rome, but he was also lucky that he had Rousticus as his guide to Epictetus. And we tried to capture some of that in what we're doing this month for Daily Stoke. We're doing a deep dive into Epictetus. And we built, just like we did Marks Realis Month a few months ago, we built Epictetus Month. It's built around our How to Read Epictetus guide.

Starting point is 00:03:05 All the best wisdom from Epictetus, everything we've learned, hundreds of hours of researching and writing, interviewing experts about Epicetus, distilling, translating his ideas. and I'd love to do this deep dive with you, because if the work changed Marcus's life so much, how might it change ours? I know it changed mine. I'm working on this book now about Stockdale. I know how it changed Stockdale's life. And this month, if you buy the How to Read Epictetus Guide,

Starting point is 00:03:34 you can not only get a copy of Epictetus's writings for just a few bucks. You'll also gain access to our online discussion community where we're going to go through the book and the digital guide together and talk about all Epic Titus's guides on August 26th. We're doing a deep dive live session about it together. Can I ask me questions. I'm going to ask you questions. This is going to be awesome.

Starting point is 00:03:55 We're going to be talking about Epicetus all month. I'd love to have you join us. I'll link to it in today's show notes. And I hope to see you on August 26th as we're talking about Epicetus. Every time you look at your phone, there's another chaotic headline. You almost feel like you have to be glued to your screen to keep up. But saving for your future doesn't have to be this hard because wealthfront helps you tune out the noise and earn more with a high-yield cash account and sophisticated, easy-to-use investing

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Starting point is 00:05:54 You want as few intermediaries and as few sort of artificial blocks between you and what you're trying to do or what you're trying to say or who you're trying to reach as possible, right? You want those one-on-one interactions. And I don't know if you've seen this app whatnot, but it's live shopping. So sellers have direct access to their customers in real time, where people are seeing your face and not a website, not a logo. What Not is the largest dedicated live shopping platform beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury, fashion, even cookies. People who sell those things are building real thriving businesses on whatnot. Anyone can sell, whether your business is big or small, just starting.

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Starting point is 00:07:28 Epictetus's discourses, 3.22. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for resistance to the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa for 27 years. For 18 of those years, he had a bucket for a toilet, a hard caught in a small cell, and once a year he was allowed a single visitor for 30 minutes. It was vicious treatment meant to isolate and break down the prisoners, and yet in spite of that, Mandela became a figure of dignity within the prison. Though he was deprived of many things, he still found creative ways to assert his will. As one of his fellow prisoners, Neville Alexander, explained to Frontline, Mandela always made the point, if they say you must walk fast, insist on walking

Starting point is 00:08:09 slowly. That was the whole point. We are going to set the terms. He pretended to jump rope and shadow box to stay in shape. He held his head higher than the other prisoners, encouraged them when times were tough, and always retained his sense of self-assurance. That self-assurance is yours to claim as well. No matter what happens today, no matter where you find yourself, shift to what lies within your reason choice. Ignore as best you can the emotions that pop up, which would be so easy to distract yourself with. Don't get emotional. Get focused. What I always find so amazing about the stories of Nelson Mandela, Rubin Hurricane Carter, a Epictetus, a James Stockdale, is not only how they managed to comport themselves, the dignity and poise and resistance and

Starting point is 00:08:57 fortitude they underwent in the prison, which was incredible and feet of human survival. But as I get older and I've experienced things and I've been slighted or wronged, frustrated, I'm even more impressed with how they behaved after, the forgiveness that they offered, the lack of resentment or bitterness that they carried, the way they brought people together. They could have come out of the prison like Bain in Batman, right? It could have been the origin of a villain story, right? But it was the opposite of that. You think even Martin Luther King, you think of the horrible things the end of way, you think of Gandhi, you think of how unjustly they were treated, how how people took things from them, years that they would never get back.

Starting point is 00:09:45 Time with their family, they would never get back, broke down their bodies and the way that Epictetus experienced under torture or Stockdale experience under torture. You think of John McCain, not being able to lift his arm a certain way for the rest of his life. They were deprived of so much, but they chose not to see it that way. Hurricane Carter famously doesn't ask for reparations after he leaves prison. He doesn't even want to admit that that had been taken from him. He was in control. And I just think of the incredible poise and strength and pride and all the stowed virtues.

Starting point is 00:10:18 And I'm putting pride in there deliberately, like their carriage. This is who I am. You cannot break me. I decide. That to me is just the essence of stoicism. I hope none of us are ever tested in such a way. And I hope Stockton is the only one who tests Hepatitis' theories in the modern world in the laboratory, so to speak, at that love. But each of us, we have a period in a marriage or we have a bad boss or maybe is how you think about the pandemic.

Starting point is 00:10:47 We have these periods of our life where we were subjected to something that we didn't like. And we could be angry about it. We could sow division afterwards about it. We could get even for it. But instead, we focus on our reason choice. We focus on being good and decent. We don't hang on to anger or resentment or envy or regret, as Epicetus says. but we maintain that dignity.

Starting point is 00:11:12 We don't perpetuate the same injustices that were perpetuated upon us. And we show, as Marks really says, that the best revenge is to not be like that, to be better, to make a better world where hopefully something like what we just went through doesn't happen again, or at the very least doesn't happen because of anything that we say or do.

The Daily Stoic - You Can’t Stop Here | No Blame, Just Focus

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