The Daily Stoic - Are You Ready For Combat? | Clarify Your Intentions

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

It’s not for posterity that the Stoics sat with their journals. It wasn’t whiney self-indulgence either. They weren’t cataloging their achievements or pouring out their fantasies. They were doing important work.📙 For a limited time, you can purchase The Daily Stoic ebook for only $1.99 on Kindle✉️ 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.

Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stoic, 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Enhancelman. And so today we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the stoics from Epititus Markis, Realius 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. [♪ Music playing in the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon

music. Download the app today. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree'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. Are you ready for combat? It's not for posterity that the Stoics sat with their journals. It wasn't whiny, self-indulgence either. They weren't cataloging their achievements

or pouring out their fantasies. They were doing important work. Many years ago in a fascinating essay, The Philosopher Foucault, described journaling as a weapon in spiritual combat. Porting Seneca and Epictetus as examples, he explains that writing constitutes a test and a kind of a touchstone.

By bringing to light impulses of thought, it dispels the darkness where the enemy's plots are hatched. For the Stoic's philosophy wasn't just this thing that you read, nor given the immense difficulty of the Stoic ideals, was it something that one magically lived up to in moments of stress or strain? No, it required a lot of active training and practice, the most effective form of which was done as Marcus Aurelius did in the pages of meditations, meditating on the ideas over and over and over again until he absorbed them.

As Foucault writes of this process, we begin by going from philosophical meditation to the activity of writing and from there to training and trial in a real situation, a labor of thought, a labor through writing, a labor in reality, he says. Reading and writing and experiencing life become a kind of feedback loop where he says the meditation precedes the notes which enable the rereading, which in turn re-initiates the meditation. It's quite a beautiful cycle. You read the daily stoic or meditations, you struggle, you journal about the struggle in the daily stoic journal, or you apply what you've journaled about to your struggle. You reread your journaling and it teaches you new lessons to journal about and use in future struggles. It's truly a virtuous cycle. But of course this process can only happen if you do the work, if you make time for the journaling and the writing, if you submit to the cycle. Too often we're unwilling to do that. We claim we don't have time. We're too self-conscious. We don't have the right materials nonsense

start today now Couple quick pieces of news about philosophy and of journaling Number one the daily stoke is 199 as an ebook right now. I'll link to it in today's show notes It's 199 as an e-book in the US, in the UK. That's Kindle, that's iBooks, wherever you get your e-books, you can get it for 199, that's pretty cool.

And we have the Daily Stoic Journal, which you may know about, it came out quite, it came out a few years ago, but I don't know if you can hear that. That is my addition of the Daily Stoic Journal with this awesome leather cover that we just rolled out. On the front, it says, make time. It's got the four virtues courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom on the front. And it's got epictetus's reminder stamped in the leather every day,

and night, keep thoughts like this at hand, write them, read them, allow, talk to yourself, and others about them. We worked with this amazing tannery up in Minnesota that's been in business for over a hundred years This this cover should last you a lifetime for sure I've been using it the last couple months. I'm on my fourth or fifth year of the journal But some my first year with the cover and I hope to last many many years with it You can get the cover and the bundle for 50% off if you check out store.dailystoke.com and pick up the daily stock for $1.99 right now or pick up the new journal and I'll see you tomorrow. Clarify your intentions.

This is the January 5th entry from the Daily Stoke. I am holding the cloth bound edition. We have a leather bound edition, but also exciting news at this very moment. If you haven't read the Daily Stoke, it's $199 on Amazon right now as an ebook in the US and the UK. Let's as cheap as it'll ever be. If you want to pick up as an ebook or give it as a gift, you can grab that. I'll link to it in today's show notes. Or, of course, you can grab the leather edition at store.dailystone.com. But today's entry starts with a quote from Seneca. He says in on tranquility of the mind, let all your efforts be directed to something. Let it keep that end in view.

It's not activity that disturbs people, but false conceptions of things that drive the mad." And then I write, law 29 of the 48 laws of power is planned all the way to the end. Robert Green writes, by planning to the end, you will not be overwhelmed by circumstances, and you will know when to stop. Gently guide fortune and help determine the future by thinking for ahead. And as it happens, the second habit in the seven habits of highly effective people is begin with an end in mind. Having an end in mind is no guarantee that you'll reach it. No stoic would tolerate that assumption, but not having an end in mind is a guarantee that you will. To the stoics, false conceptions are responsible not just for disturbances in the soul, but

for chaotic and dysfunctional lives and operations. When your efforts are not directed at a cause or a purpose, how will you know what to do day in and day out? How will you know what to say no to and what to say yes to? How will you know when you've had enough when you've reached your goal? When you've gotten off track, if you have never defined what those things are, the answer is that you cannot. And so you are driven into failure or worse, into madness by the oblivion of direction lessness. One of my favorite quotes from Seneca and actually, Montana quotes it as well, he

says, you know, if you know know not what port you are sailing to, no wind is favorable. If you don't know where you're trying to go, if you don't know what the end is, if you don't know what you want your life to look like, what you want this project to look like, if you have it defined what success is to you, you're going to have a real hard time,

not just getting there, but making every individual decision in the course of your life. When I consult with people that's one of the things I ask them almost always, especially authors, I go what does success look like to you. Because so often we just go well I want what that person has and that person has and that person has and that person has where we go, oh, what, what, what other people are doing? That's what I want, right? This is what Renatio writes says, we don't know what we want, so we want what other people want. We just sort of default to the defaults. And we haven't actually thought about how that fits for us, what that means to us, what that actually looks like. If we'll actually be happy with that thing that we're sacrificing and working so hard for.

So when you clarify your intentions, when you get clear about what you're trying to do, who you're trying to be, who you wanna be, when you get there, you're gonna be in a tough spot. And so at the beginning of a year, it's a great time to think about that, to think about who you wanna be,

to think about what you wanna do, to think about what success looks like and define it concretely, abstractly but concretely. You know the reason Robert talks about planning all the way to the end is he talks about this isn't just a problem of somebody at you know step zero not knowing where to go. But this is the person who on step 99. Does it stop after one more step they go through that they keep and they turn, they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, they go too far, they go past the mark they aimed for. So you plan all the way to the end,

so you're not taken to excess, so you're not distracted, and so you know how to plan what to do, you know what's important. You don't know where you're sailing, no wind is favorable, right? You can't ask for directions to a destination you haven't defined. So today here at the beginning of the year,

let's spend some time defining precisely that. Our intentions, our goals, what success looks like to us. And it's fun to be starting the Daily Sto again. Like I said, it's $1.99 on Amazon right now if you haven't given it a shot. If you have given a shot, if this is you starting the book again, the Leatherbound edition will, will stand the test of time a little better. I think hopefully my copy will be with me and long enough to give to my own children. And hopefully the same is true for you. All right, talk to mom.

Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoke Store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The obstacle is the way. You go as the enemy, still this is the key. The leather bound edition of the Daily Stoke, we have them all in the Daily Stoke Store, which you can check out at store Stoic early and ad free on Amazon music.

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