The Daily Stoic - Just Keep Hammering Away | The Color of Your Thoughts

Episode Date: April 1, 2021

“There is something delightfully simple about Ulysses S. Grant. Napoleon seems like some sort of larger than life figure, a peerless genius like the freak athletes we see on television. The same for the incredible heroism of Admiral Stockdale. Their accomplishments are impressive, but not exactly relatable.”Ryan explains why you must keep your emotions under control to continue the work, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.This episode is also 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. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. ***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 Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in 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 Epititus Marcus 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. 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. Just keep hammering away. There's something delightfully simple about Ulysses S. Grant. Napoleon seems like some sort of larger-than-life figure, a pureless genius like the freak athletes we see on television. The same for the incredible heroism of an Admiral Stockdale. Their accomplishments are impressive, but not exactly relatable. Grant, on the other hand, is more like us, not just because he struggled in life,

or because he was uninterested in pomp or circumstance, but because his theory of war was so simple that even a grunt could understand it. As the brilliant historian, SC Gwen writes in hymns of the Republic, Grant's main approach was to punch the enemy in the gut, and then afterward worry about what the enemy had been planning to do to him.

Contemporary said that Grant was like the mythological thore. He just kept hammering away at problems until they fell. He did not stop Gwynn writes. He would not be deterred. He came directly at you and smashed into you again and again until you were beaten, and then persisted beyond that to the non-existent terms He came directly at you and smashed into you again and again until you were beaten and then persisted beyond that to the non-existent terms of your surrender.

Simple, but it worked. What's better is that it still works in war and life. Marcus Aurelius said, we solve our problems action by action, step by step. He said, we can't get deterred just because they are hard or because they are hard for us. If it's humanly possible to do it, he said, then commit to doing it and know that you can do it. Cato, like Grant, had that same kind of determination. The only way you could beat him was to break him and you were not going to break him, which was clear from boyhood on when a bully tried to intimidate him by

dangling Kato off a balcony, and all he got in response with silence and a stare that gave him the chills. We could all use a little bit of that in our lives. Cleanse your jaw, sit down or stand up and get to work. Don't get excited, don't get discouraged, just keep hammering away. That's how you win, a a war and win at life. You solve most problems by beating them into submission. You crush resistance.

You cannot be deterred and you cannot stop. If you can do that, then nothing can beat you. The color of your thoughts. This is the Daily Stoke entry for April 1st. Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought for the human spirit is colored by such impressions. Marcus Arellius' Meditations 516. If you bend your body into a sitting position every day

for a long enough period of time, the curvature of your spine changes. A doctor can tell from a radiograph or an autopsy whether someone sat at a desk for a living. If you shove your feet into tiny narrow dress shoes each day, your feet will begin to take on that form as well. And the same is true for our mind. If you hold a perpetually negative outlook, soon enough, everything you encounter will seem negative. Close it off and you will become close-minded. Color it with the wrong thoughts and your life will be dyed the same. I wanted to show Gregory Hayes' translation of that same quote, I think you guys will like it. He says it interesting too. He says, the things you think about

determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts. Color it with a run of thoughts like this. He says, anywhere you lead your life, you can lead a good one. But lives are let it court. Then good ones can be. Things gravitate toward what they were intended for.

What things gravitate towards is their goal. A thing's goal is what benefits it. It's good. A rational being's good is unselfishness. What were we born for? That's nothing new. Remember, lower things for the sake of higher ones and higher ones for one another. Things that have a consciousness are higher than things that don't, and those with the logos still higher. Really what meditation is, is an example of Marcus Aurelis trying to die his soul with good thoughts. He's trying to write every day these little mantras, these little reminders of what he believes, of who he wants to be, of what life should be. You know, people believe in the law of attraction,

this idea of, you know, like attracts like, of course, the law of attraction is bullshit, it was created by con artists to trick people, not saying that, but I am saying, if you are a negative person, you are gonna see things negatively. If you are a positive person, you're gonna see things positively. If you are a positive person, you are going to see things positively.

Being positive doesn't attract positive things in your life. It does allow you, however, to see positive in situations that other people see negative. Even the idea of the obstacle being the way. Marcus really is not saying life's going to be rosy and fun and awesome. Marcus is saying, life's going to roll obstacles in your path. But if you have this kind of stoic optimism, if you've died your soul with the right thoughts, you'll be able to find the good inside that. So what I try to do in this podcast, what I try to do in my own life, what I

try to do with the tattoos on my arm, is die my soul with the right thoughts, literally die my skin with the right thoughts, literally die my skin with the right thoughts, to be a reminder, it's why I made the daily stoic medallions, why I carry the four virtues one in the memento mori, one in my pocket. I want these things to be a part of me, I want them to be mantras, I want them to be reminders,

I never want to lose track or sight of them. It's what I try to do in my journal, I know all this stuff intellectually, but it's taking the time to write them down on the page, to write it down for the thousands time, for the fifth year in a row, whatever it is. It's the practice, it's the dying, it's the reminding, it's the going over.

This is what shapes us. This is what makes us who we can be. I hope you can do that. I hope you're getting what the point of this practice is. Even if you've heard me say this stuff before, that's the point. It's supposed to come back through you. It's supposed to be the practice of it.

So we're dying ourselves repeatedly with the right thoughts. We're not trying to magically make the world something different than it is, but we're trying to make ourselves different inside that world, because that's what we control. So I hope you die, your soul with some good thoughts today. I hope this meditation helps you do that a little bit. Our soul is died by the color of our thoughts.

We are died by the impressions. Our life becomes what our mind makes it. Our life is what our thoughts make it. That's what Stoicism is. I hope you follow that today. makes it, our life is what our thoughts make it. That's what stoicism is. I hope you follow that today. 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. or a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a you