The Daily Stoic - Don’t Just Be Tough, Be Practical | 7 Stoic Stories To Guide You Through Life

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

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Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. 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. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree'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. Asterok is tough, as we said. Asterok doesn't look for or make excuses, but does that mean Asterok is also a glutton for punishment? Partly. As Stephen Rinella writes in his wonderful book, American Buffalo, a story of the great American mammal and his hunting trip in Alaska to hunt a wild one, there is a fine line between being practical and being a candy ass, which is a word that Steve's father used to describe someone who was the opposite of tough. He said, when I'm in the woods and I run into a situation that seems like a bad idea, whether

it's climbing up a steep icy mountainside or taking a canoe through a nasty stretch of rapids, I always ask myself which of these two words, practical or candy-ass, best defines my decision-making. Putting aside the fact that this is an outdated term, which some may find offensive, that's a perfect distinction. A stoke is not a candy-ass. A stoke is tough, but also practical. Marcus really is himself a hunter writes in meditations that the response to brambles in the path is not to plunge into them

unnecessarily, but to go around them. Unless, of course, there is no other alternative in which case the obstacle was the way. We endure the blows and twists of life. We have a heart for any fate. But we also have a brain. We are practical. We look for sustainable, painless solutions. If they exist, we compromise. We look for efficiencies We don't care how something looks to others. Only whether it gets the job done if we need help will ask for it There's an easier path. We'll take it provided we can still hold tight to our standards and our self-respect We're tough, but only when we need to be. We're practical first. As I've said many, many times, my favorite translation of Mark's Relias is meditations by the one and only Gregory Hays. So it's a real experience for me last year when he reviewed, Gregory Hayes

did, reviewed some of my books and some of the other more recent books about the Stoics in the New York Review of Books, just an incredible honor. Anyways, in this piece, he actually, he was talking about my writings, deserves a surreal experience, but he described something that I like to do in my writing that I didn't know had a name for it, but so I'll read you this in choices. Storytelling is another typical feature of diatrap. As Seneca remarks, learning by precepts is the long way around, the quick and effective way to learn by example. He says, holiday is also a great teller of stories. Here is one about Ulysses S. Grant, which is a story I tell in St. Louis's The Key and it goes like this, before the Civil War, Grant experienced a long

chain of setbacks and financial difficulties. He washed up in St. Louis selling firewood for a living, a hard fall for a graduate of West Point. An army buddy found him and was a guest. Great God Grant, what are you doing?" He asked. Grant's answer was simple. I am solving the problem of poverty. And then Hayes continues, an ancient reader would have recognized this passage at once as what the Greeks called a Craya, an exemplarary story about a famous person often culminating in a memorable utterance. Diogenes' layer to assist lives of the philosophers is full of such antichotes, and so are the biographies of Plutarch. So very nice words which set up today's episode that I have for you,

which is seven stoic stories to guide you through life. Like Plutarch, like Diogenes, I believe that truth is best delivered in stories, often in fables, that's why Jesus speaks in parables as well. And so in today's episode, I'm going to tell some of those stories, some Stoic stories that I found throughout my time researching and writing about this philosophy that I think we'll stick with you and make a big difference. One of the best stories in all of Stoicism comes at the founding of Stoicism. Zino, he's this successful merchant who comes from a long family of merchants, and he suffers a shipwreck and he loses everything. He washes up an Athens, he has nothing.

And there he discovers philosophy. That's how Stoicism starts. And so reflecting on this journey, this thing that he never would have wished happening, changing the entire course of his life, and now history, we wouldn't be talking, had he not gone through this? He says, I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered a shipwreck. Meaning, the worst thing that ever happened to him was actually the best thing that ever happened to him. And that's what A Stoic says, we don't control what happens.

Bad stuff is going to happen, but we control how we respond to it, we control what we turn it into, and whatever it is, whatever metaphorical shipwreck you're going through, you can make it a prosperous voyage if you think about it that way. There's an amazing story about Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller who wrote Catch 22 and Slotter House 5. They're at the party of this billionaire. And Vonnegut is teasing Heller and he says, this billionaire whose house we're at, he made more money this week than your book

will make it its entire life. Heller says, but I have something that he doesn't have. Vonnegut says, what's that? Heller says, I have some idea of what enough is. He says, I have enough. This idea of enough is so powerful. Santa Cahue quotes Epicurus, says, if you don't regard what you have as enough,

you will never be happy, even if you rule the entire world. Enough is never enough, the Epicurians in the Stoic say, for the person who enough is too little. And if you can get to a place of enough, what I have is good, everything else is extra than everything you get is a bonus. And the rest of your life is amazing. But if you tell yourself you'll only be happy if, if I'll feel better when you'll never get there,

the finish line will move, I promise you. Enough is enough. There's an amazing story about Marcus Realis. He didn't want to be Emperor. In fact, when he's given the news that he's to be adopted by the Emperor Hadron, he weeps because he thinks of all the bad kings of history. So Marcus was scared, maybe he had a little bit of imposter syndrome like you and I have. But the night before he's to ascend the throne, Marcus Realis has a dream. And in the dream, he feels that his shoulders are made of ivory. And that's how he knows.

He knows he's strong enough to bear the weight. He can carry the load. He can do this. And you have to know, you have shoulders of ivory, too. You're stronger than you know. You're stronger than people think, you've got this. You can do it. You have shoulders made of ivory.

We all do because we've done the work, because we've been training, because we've been watching videos. We've been working up till this moment and now it's here and we're ready to do it. People don't know this but John F Kennedy very nearly lost the 1960 presidential election. In fact he won by only about a half a percentage point and in the end it came down to about 30 35,000 votes. So what happened? Martin Luther King was arrested right before the election on Trump Dub charges and sentenced to four months on a prison shangang, and his wife was

actually very worried that he would be lynched or murdered in prison, and so she called both the Nixon campaign and the Kennedy campaign. Nixon, who was actually friends with Martin Luther King, decided not to get involved. He didn't want to piss off Southern voters. John F. Kennedy called the judge, called Coretta Scott King, and his brother also worked to get Martin Luther King released. And Martin Luther King would say after that, he was stunned by this, because Nixon had been his friend, and he said, I always regarded Nixon as a moral coward after that. And it was the news of this that rallied the black community to vote for John

F. Kennedy in the election in one of them. So it's really just a few seconds of courage that when Kennedy the election and lose Nixon the election. And I talk about this in courage as calling. We think bravery is this big thing, but it's really a very small thing. It's immediate thing. It was a call to Martin Luther King's wife. It was a call to a judge. It was the decision to get involved to ignore the reservations.

Marx really says, just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter. You do the right thing, and you trust that doing the right thing will pay off. You also trust in your ability to survive, even if people don't appreciate that you did the right thing. Encourage is always better than cowardice. There was a Spartan general who's marching through Greece, and as he would come to each nation, he would send emissaries to say, friend or foe, or you're gonna let us march peacefully, or are we gonna need to treat this as hostile territory?

Almost all of the answers came back, friend, friend, friend. But one king hesitated, and he wanted more time to think about it, and he kept deliberating, and he would say, hostile territory. Almost all of the answers came back friend friend friend, but one king hesitated. He wanted more time to think about it and he kept deliberating and he wouldn't come back with an answer. And finally the Spartan king said, let him keep thinking about it, we'll keep marching on. Emerson said, you cannot spend the day in deliberation. George Marshall said, don't fight the problem, decide the problem, right? You have to have the courage to decide, to make the decision, to make your choice, and then to get moving on the most important part

which is execution. Courage is calling. Make your decision, decide what you're gonna do, and then what? The still looks like, do it. Do it as if it's the last thing you're doing in your life. Do it as if you're fully committed to it, because you are fully committed to it because you are fully committed to it

and you know how much it matters because you made the decision. So Thomas Edison is, he's America's most successful inventor. He's sitting down for dinner with his family and a man rushes in, the factory is on fire. And Edison shows up on the scene and he sees it. His life's work up in flames.

His son is standing there shell-shocked. And what does Edison say? Edison says, go get your mother and all her friends. They'll never see a fire like this again. And some people thought he lost his mind, but he actually goes on to repeat a line from a Kipling poem about triumph and disaster treating these two imposterous just the same.

What Edison is realizing as a stoic does is that some things are just out of our control. We can't change them, no amount of whining or complaining or weeping is going to affect them, but we can control how we respond. And that's what Edison does. He tells a report of the next day, I've been through stuff like this before.

He says it prevents an old man from getting bored and he starts rebuilding. He actually takes a million dollar loan from Henry Ford. In six weeks, it's partially back up and running. In six months, it's fully operational. And the third act of Edison's life is rebuilding after this disaster. And I want you to think about that as well.

That's the idea that you'll never see something like this again. You can at least enjoy the absurdity, the surreal beauty of it. And then you can say this prevents me from getting bored. Now I'm gonna get back to work and I'm gonna turn this into something. If you wanna learn more about stoic philosophy, totally for free, you can sign up for a daily stoic email.

It's one free email every morning, the best of stoic wisdom,stoic.com slash email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Hey there listeners! While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy

from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app.