The Daily Stoic - Do This Unflinchingly | It’s Not The Thing, It’s What We Make Of It

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

Ryan explains why you must engage with the material that you study, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.List your product on AppSumo between September 15th - November 17th and the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1000, the next 2000 to list a product get $250. And everyone who lists gets entered to be one of 10 lucky winners of $10k! Go to https://appsumo.com/ryanholiday to list your product today and cash in on this amazing deal.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 Stood Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. 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 music or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the stoics from Epititus Markis Relius, 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. As an author, as an entrepreneur, as a creative in this world, I wear like a lot of hats. And that's why I'm excited about today's sponsor, actually from a dear friend of mine, AppSumo, the leading digital marketplace for entrepreneurs, has awesome tools for authors

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a template or any other digital product, this is for you. List your product on AppSumo between September 15th and November 17th. And the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1,000. The next 2000, Pellista project will get $250. Just go to AppSumo.com slash Ryan Holiday to list your product today. Cash in on this amazing deal. Again, AppSumo.com slash Ryan Holiday. do this unflinchingly. We've talked a lot about reading here at the Daily Stoic, but it's important to remember what Epic Titus had to say. It's not that you read.

It's what you read. To study history, for example, is important, but not if one goes through and only looks for the stuff that they like. You have to go through and read and study history unflinchingly. You have to engage with the good stuff and the dark stuff, the glory and the low points, and you have to look at it all with clear eyes. To study philosophy is similarly essential, but not if you only read stuff that you agree with. To study stoicism is important, but it's important, as we said recently, to look

at the failures of the Stoics as much as you look at their successes. The pursuit of wisdom is not always going to be pleasant. That's why Epictetus compared his school to a hospital. It's not always a fun place. You're going to see and feel some unpleasant things, but this is all a part of growth. People have done horrible things in the past,

including the Stelix. How can we hope to avoid or learn from missteps and mistakes and injustices if we refuse to see them? The job of a book is to provoke you, to challenge you, to be a hard sparring partner. Truth is not your friend, it is objective, it sits beyond us, does not care about our feelings. So be brave, be bold, be prepared, read and study unflinchingly. It won't be easy, but it will make you and the world better for that effort. If you want to read more about the Stoics and some of their failings and successes, check

out Lies of the Stoics. But I think if you do want to sort of engage in this unflinching reading practice, I do think you should have a reading practice. I recommend our Daily Stoke Read to Lead Challenge. Not all readers are leaders, as Truman said, but all leaders have to be readers. So do check it out. It's two weeks of really great strategies for being a better reader. Check that out, DailyStalk.com slash read. It's not the thing, it's what we make of it. When you are distressed by an external thing, it's not the thing itself that troubles you, but only your judgment of it.

And you can wipe this out in a moment's notice. This is Marcus Realis' Meditations, 847. 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 bestseller. 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. Now, this might seem familiar because we talked about this just last week. We have a little story to illustrate the idea. Imagine you've dreamed of a life in politics, you're young, you're vigorous, you've held increasingly powerful positions over the course of your career.

Then at 39 you start to feel run down. Your doctors tell you have polio and your life will never be the same. Your career is over, right? This is the story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt now widely regarded as one of America's greatest political leaders. This is the story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt now widely regarded as one of America's greatest political leaders. He was at middle-aged diagnosed with polio after spending years preparing for and dreaming of the presidency. It's impossible to understand FDR without understanding this disability, this external thing that said he was crippled, this literal fact, and then his judgment of it that it did not cripple him or his

personhood, let alone his career. Though he was certainly a victim of a then incurable disease, he wiped away almost immediately the victim's mentality. We must not confuse acceptance with passivity. There's another story about Theodore Roosevelt. He was told late in life that he was going to be confined to a wheelchair and he responds to this, ah, okay, I can work with that. So when we talk about acceptance, it's really important that we don't confuse it with apathy or resignation in the sense of how we understand those words. We ascend to it as the stoic say, ASS, S-E-N-T. We accept it. We say, it is a fact that I am short. It is a fact that I have gone

bald. It is a fact that we are in the middle of a pandemic or that you have lost your job or whatever that fact is. The acceptance of that as opposed to denying the reality of it, living in a world where it might magically be undone, living in a world where you are owed restitution for that. All of that is to waste time, but we should focus instead, the stoic say, on what we're gonna do about it, right? And we say it's not the thing. It's what we make of it

meaning. We don't control what it is. The event is objective. The event is frustrating. The event is heartbreaking. Sure. But what we do about it, that's what we have power. So we focus our judgments on that, on the potential, on the possibility, on how we're going to use it, how we're going to grow from it. This is, I think, what FDR and TR both do. Okay, this is my new normal. How am I going to use it? How am I going to push through it? How am I going to endure it? What advantages aren't in it, right? We can wipe out at a moment's notice

that victims mentality, that sense of hopelessness, that sense of resentment, and instead, again, focus what we're gonna do, what we're gonna make of it, how we're gonna keep going, how we're not going to be broken by it. That's what we're talking about in today's message. I hope that inspires you a little bit. It's nice when these themes line up.

We get to talk about them twice in a row. I'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Just go to dailystoke.com slash email. So check it go to dailystoke.com slash email. So check it out at dailystoke.com slash email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily Stoke early and add free on Amazon music.

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