The Daily Stoic - Come Back To The Rhythm | A Stoic Idea Worth Tattooing On Your Body

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

Marcus Aurelius wasn’t perfect.With so many responsibilities competing for his time and attention, he was guilty, as we all have been, of letting his good habits slide. The question is: What do we do when this happens?Today, Ryan discusses how Marcus kept his habits in check and how you can, too, as well as the Stoic idea that influenced his newest tattoo, which he got from Andy Pho. Andy is the owner of Upside Tattoo, and he opened a new shop in Hutto, TX in 2022. Follow Andy on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andypho/We’re launching Session 2 of the New Year New You Challenge on February 1st! Enroll now to secure your spot or gift it to a friend.✉️ 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, including the Premium Leather Edition of the Daily Stoic Journal.📱 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 the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy. Come back to the rhythm. Marcus Aurelius wasn't perfect, with so many responsibilities competing for his time and attention he was guilty, as we all have been of letting his good habits slide. Why else would he remind himself to keep returning to philosophy if he didn't occasionally

find himself reverting the old ways in the bad habits? There he is in meditations, reminding himself to return to a simple diet after he caught himself overdoing it a little, reminding himself to get up early and get a move on his obligations, perhaps after sleeping away one to many mornings. Of course, he needed reminders to re-engage with those good habits. He let slack. All human beings do. Despite our better judgment and best intentions, life has a nasty habit of getting them the way, sending us on accidental hiatuses from our hobbies, our good habits, and our resolutions. Then what? Well, some of us start to feel guilty and ashamed about it. We tell ourselves it's proof that it's impossible that it won't work, that we can't change or

grow. We reach a point where we think we might hang it up for good and abandon it entirely. When what we should do is what Marcus said, he said, when jarred unavoidably by circumstances revert at once to yourself, and don't lose the rhythm more than you can help. You'll have a better grasp of the harmony if you can keep coming back to it. The thing about the rhythm is that it doesn't get lost. Only we do. The beat goes on, the right path stands open. We just have to come back to it. We have to pick it up again. It doesn't matter how badly we've messed up, how much we've stumbled, it's still there, it's open for us.

It's not exactly waiting for us, but it continues on ready for us whenever we choose to rejoin. Maybe that describes how your New Year has gone. You had high hopes and higher standards, but you lost it already. Well here's a way back. We're actually relaunching the Daily Stoic New Year, New U Challenge, which I have myself gotten so much out of. Typically, the New Year New U Challenge it starts on January 1, it's the first three weeks of the year.

But this year we heard from a ton of people that came back late from vacation or they procrastinated, they changed their mind or they lost the beat. And they asked if we could bring it back for one more go in January, which we are doing. And we'd love to have you join us for one week only. You can sign up and immediately start the 2023 daily Stoic New Year new you challenge at your own pace. All the Q&As have been recorded

and edited and timestamped. It's three hours of me riffing on a bunch of these important ideas. Plus, as I said, three weeks of challenges that will make you better. The first one is something I've already made a bunch of decisions because of this year. And I've just been loving the different things of the prompts every day. I'm off to do my my challenge today. I'm all hinted you're supposed to go visit something very, very old in town. So I'm heading over to a cemetery across town where I believe the the oldest dating gravestone is something from the 1700s, which is pretty cool. I would love to have you join the challenge. You can do it now. Learn new skills

You'll be more disciplined. You'll challenge yourself this year and hopefully it will help you come back to the rhythm hurt a bunch of great Feedback on it already. I've met all these people in the Q&A, but I would love to have you join. If someone was telling us there's gonna be sad what it ends, I'm gonna be sad that it ends, so we'll probably just do it again.

And I would love to have you join us. You can sign up at ny23.com to take it, or you can just go to dailystoic.com slash challenge registration will close on January 31st. So don't procrastinate. Come back to the rhythm. Let's do it

now together. The daily stoic new year, new challenge round two. If you fall and off, let's come back to the rhythm.

And I'll see you all there. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily stooke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. The greatest thing in the world would need to know exactly what to do in every situation.

Epic Titus was asked by a student, what should I do? And he said, don't ask me what you should do, ask how to be made adaptable to circumstances. I'm Ryan Holliday, I've written a number of books about stoic philosophy I've spoken to the NBA and the NFL, sitting senators, but I'm also just a regular human who tries to apply stoic philosophy in my actual life. And there's a couple of key stoic practices

that are basically true in each and every situation that I try to constantly be reminded of so I can apply whatever I'm doing, whoever I'm with, whatever is going on. I actually have them tattooed on my arms. In today's episode, I want to walk you through those tattoos, why these mantras, which in Sanskrit means sacred utterance, why I have these reminders on what they mean, how I apply them, and how maybe you can apply them in your own life. And actually, I just got a new stoke tattoo today, a great stoke

tattoo artist here in Austin, Texas, his name is Andy Foe. He just set up a new shop in Hado, which is about 45 minutes from my bookstore here. He came out and gave me a four virtues tattoo on my wrist here. So I'm going to show you what that tattoo process looks like, but I also want to show you why I have these reminders and what they need to be. The impediment to action advances action, but stands in the way it becomes the way. Basically what he's saying is that each and every situation we face in life is an opportunity to practice virtue or practice excellence in some form. Perhaps not the excellence we wanted, perhaps not what we intended to do,

but nevertheless an opportunity to step up, to grow, to learn, to change, to adapt, to be the kind of person that stills isn't want to be. After I got obstacles the way, which is when I was writing my first book on soap philosophy, the next book I did was Ego's the enemy. And when the obstacles away came out, it started to do very well. My career was taking up. I'd always been this kind of young kid who was ahead of my years, who was successful, who was doing well.

People wanted me to go places I was being written about. Things were going well, but I was very cognizant of the fact that Ego, as Cyril Connelly famous said, sucks us down like the log grab me. Epic Titus famous, he says, you cannot learn that, which you think you already know. Ego being this thing that gets in the way

between you and what you're capable of being between you and doing your best, between you and relationships, between you and objective reality. And so I wanted to remind her, particularly as my career trajectory continued upwards, that I wasn't special, that I wasn't important,

that I needed to focus on the process, I needed to do the work, I needed to do the work, I needed to ignore results entirely in focus, as Epictetus says, on what I control, which is what I put in in meditations, Mark, just really talks about how, when you tie your success to what other people say or do, that's insanity.

Is the sanity is tying it to your own actions, your own sense of self, to your own values. your own actions, your own sense of self, your own values. Sometime in the summer of 2019, I was working on the third book in that trilogy, which was stillness is the key. Stillness being, when I think about what makes me happiest when I do my best work, I'm not frantic, I'm not busy, I'm connected, I'm locked in. In meditations, Mark's realist talks over and over again about being present, Stoics and the Epicurians that this word ateraxia, not being disturbed internally or externally, being able to tune out what's going on around you and lock into what's in front of you. Mark's Rewis uses the image of the rock and the ocean, the waves are crashing over it,

but it stands still, and he says, eventually, the waves fall still around it. And I know that seems more like an Eastern ideal, though it's funny because the obstacles way, there's also a zen expression, the obstacles, the path. These mantras are universal, they appear in all the different stoic schools, even in religions, be still and know that I am God, right? Like slow things down, lock in tune out

what's going on around you. So you can imagine this is the summer of 2019, stillness comes out, I'm just finishing up the tour, going back to normal life, the pandemic happens, the world becomes both very still and very busy and noisy and scary all the same time. What we all had to do was reevaluate our lives, reevaluate our habits, reevaluate what was important,

find a way to be at peace and focus on what we control within that insanity. And so one very, very minor downside of the pandemic was that I couldn't go get a tattoo for the next series I was starting, which is the four virtues series. The four virtues actually I have in here. What's the story?

I encourage temperance, justice, wisdom. These are the cardinal virtues, actually, of Christianity and of stoicism. And when I think about the obstacle is the way. When Marcus says that everything is an opportunity to practice virtue, that's what he's talking about. Every situation, even if it's not what you plan, even if it's not what you wanted, even if it's not what you expected, it's a chance for courage. It's a chance to learn. That would be wisdom.

It's a chance for temperate, self-discipline, moderation. Often it's an opportunity for justice to make things better for other people, to see what other people need, to do what is right. So I wanted a vivid reminder of that. Actually, the Daily Stoke logo you've probably seen in our logos, it is the images of the poor virtues, Sophia for wisdom, which is an owl, a lion for courage, the scales of justice for justice,

and then a man sprinkling water into wine, deluding wine, that's the image of temperance and moderation. One of the weirdest parts of obstacle and stillness and ego and then the stuff I've talked about with the videos about this, but meant to more, at more faculty. Is I hear from people who those ideas so resonated with them that they got their own tattoos?

The book hit them at a time, they needed something where that idea was something they needed a reminder of, and I've seen pictures from people all over the world that have sent these in and it's been a cool, unique experience. Some people have a negative opinion about tattoos. For me, the tattoo is for me. As I was sitting down with Andy, he wanted to put it this way because that's typically how you do it so you could show other people. But the tattoo, as I was saying, I'm like, no, the tattoos, these are reminders for me, these are reminders that I repeat. I'm getting them in my skin so I can't forget

about them. I can't make excuses about them. I can't pretend I don't know. I do know they're right there. But I've seen all these cool tattoos from people all over the world. So if you're thinking about getting a stoked tattoo, I think you should obviously rules, laws, health issues aside, but the reminders have been incredibly helpful for me. And they've helped me do what stoicism is meant to do, which is not be abstract, not be theoretical, but is something you actually apply and use and do. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon

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