The Daily Stoic - Don’t Just Settle For a Shortcut, Do The Work | Peace Is In Staying the Course

Episode Date: January 14, 2021

“When things are scary, when we’re overwhelmed, when we’re struggling, it’s tempting to look for a shortcut, for a pill that makes you feel better, for a TV show that helps you turn off your brain. Nothing makes that clearer than the last couple years of alarmingly destabilizing global events. People have turned to all sorts of magical solutions to get through these dark days, from meditation to self-help gurus to sending countless tweets and petitions off into cyberspace.”Ryan discusses how to find freedom in the process of improving yourself, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. Visit http://linkedin.com/stoic to get fifty dollars off your first job post.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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. 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 Steve Enhancelman. And so today we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the stoics from Epipetus Markis Relius, Seneca, and some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works. Don't just settle for a shortcut. Do the work. When things are scary, when we're overwhelmed, when we're struggling, it's tempting to find yourself looking for a shortcut, for a pill that makes you feel better,

for a TV show that helps you turn off your mind. Nothing makes that clear than the last couple of years of destabilizing and alarming global events, to which people have turned all sorts of magical solutions from meditation to self-help gurus, descending countless tweets and petitions off into cyberspace. These things help us cope with the overwhelming world around us, but of course only temporarily. Tim Ferris and Tyler Cowan recently talked about this on Tim Ferris' podcast. Tim asked what Tyler might recommend besides the wisdom of the Stoics, and what would help

people find equanimity and peace amidst the craziness. Tyler's answer was counterintuitive, as always. He said, I feel a bit of the people in that position, it's like they want a kind of talisman, like a voodoo object. I don't know if they really want to be more detached and dispassionate, or if they just want the talisman, and maybe my advice to think through would be, do you just want the talisman? That's a great question to ask ourselves when we're reading the stoics watching the news or considering an experiment with plant medicines. Are we after a talisman or the real thing? Are we actually trying to improve or do

we just want to make ourselves feel better for a second? Do we just want to do something or really anything will do? There is a time and place for both strategies, but of course the Stoics would favor focusing on the real work, on deeds not just words. They wouldn't want you to settle for letting yourself off the hook for some symbolic gesture or tidying consolation. They'd want you to do the real uncomfortable work on yourself or on the world around you. The training we're doing as Stoics is not easy, it's not a matter of reading one book, it's not signing up for an email or buying a coin, it's a process, it's an ongoing thing, it's committing to a hard path,

it's committing to a way of life, it's about doing the work. This morning, this evening, tomorrow, right, this very moment. Peace is in staying, of course. Tranquility can't be grasped except by those who have reached an unwavering and firm power of judgment. The rest constantly fall and rise in their decisions, wavering in a state of alternately rejecting and accepting things. What is the cause of this back and forth? It's because nothing is clear, and they rely on the most uncertain guide, common opinion, at Seneca Moral Letters. In Seneca's essay on Tranquility, he uses the Greek word euphemia, which he defines as believing in yourself and trusting that you are on the right path

and not being in doubt by following the myriad of footpaths of those wandering in every direction. It is this state of mind who said that produces tranquility. Clarity of vision allows us to have this belief. It's not that we're always going to be 100% certain of everything or that we even should be. Rather, it's that we can rest assured that we are heading generally in the right direction, that we don't need to constantly compare ourselves with other people or change your mind every three seconds based on new information. Instead, tranquility and peace are found in identifying our path and in sticking to it,

staying the course, making adjustments here and there naturally, but ignoring the distracting sirens who beckon us toward the rocks. This is just one of my favorite passages from Senacat, this idea of Yuthymia. He talks about, he says it's the sense of being on the path that you're on and not being distracted by the paths that Chris Cross yours. He says, because they are hopelessly lost. I think one of the things that brought this home for me is, I remember this, Bivoli, it is one of the first things I ever wrote on the internet. You probably find it but I was out for a run in college and I was running around this track and I started going at my pace, thought I was going well and then someone comes rushing

up behind me and I can hear them and I pick quick in my pace and then they run faster and then I you know follow them or whatever and it struck me and then this person quit like two laps later. And I had like 30 laps left to go, or forget how far I was running. But the point was, it struck me then, it was like, oh yeah, you don't know what race other people are running.

And you don't know if they started before you, then you don't know if they're ending before you, you don't know if they're running way after you. And so you have to have this sense as a runner or as a swimmer in any of the sort of endurance ports of like what your pace is, what your race strategy is. And you can't be distracted by other people. You can't, you have to know why you're doing what you're doing, and you have to stick with it. And you can't let the other past then intersect yours or parallel to yours, you know, throw you off and or you'll mess up your own strategy. And so this sense of who you are and what you're doing is it's essential.

And I think the pandemic has been good for that. For me, it's like, oh yeah, this is what I want my life to look like. Oh yeah, this is what I think is right or safe or good. And the fact that other people are doing stuff on social media, you know, first off, who knows how honest they're being, but other, you know, just because they're doing it doesn't mean it's a good idea. For me, I remember that thing your mom would say, if everyone else jumped off a bridge, I remember I was talking to Austin Clean and he said, look, you got to remember, because see now we're talking about it, you got to remember that people who are being safe and smart are not posting about it because there's nothing

to post. It's the crazy people who are showing themselves doing smart are not posting about it because there's nothing to post. It's the crazy people who are showing themselves doing things, right? But that's what can mess with our compass. The sense of euphemia is not just essential to tranquility. It's essential to success. I remember in American Apparel, Dev Charney's big mistake was you got distracted by what H&M was doing and what Forever 21 was doing. But these are fundamentally different companies, fundamentally different business models. It was a colossal mistake for him to try to compete with them. So let that be a lesson, let's stay on our path, let's not be distracted by the paths of those who are lost and around us and do our best

while we can with what we've got to do. 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. You just go to dailystoke.com slash email. So check it out at dailystoke.com slash email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stokeic 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, 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

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