The Daily Stoic - Life Comes At You Fast (Pt III) | Don't Be Inspired, Be Inspirational

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

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I'm Alice Levine and I'm Matt Ford and we're the presenters of British Scandal. And in our latest series, Hitler's Angel, we tell the story of scandalous beauty Diana Mosley, British aristocrat, Mitford sister and fascist sympathiser. Like so many great British stories, it starts at a lavish garden party. Diana meets the dashing fascist Oswald Mosley. She's captivated by his politics but also by his very good looks. It's not a classic rom-com story but when she falls in love with Mosley she's on a collision course with her family, her friends and her whole country.

There is some romance though. The couple tied the knot in a ceremony organised by a great uncelebrated wedding planner, Adolf Hitler. So it's less Notting Hill, more Nuremberg. When Britain took on the Nazis, Diana had organized by a great, uncelebrated wedding planner, Adolf Hitler. So it's less Notting Hill, more Nuremberg. When Britain took on the Nazis, Diana had to choose between love or betrayal. This is the story of Diana Mosley on her journey from glamorous socialite to political prisoner. Listen to British Scandal on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Business Wars is a podcast about the biggest corporate rivalries of all time.

And our newest season digs into the power struggles within OpenAI, culminating in Sam Altman's shocking firing. Make sure to listen to Business Wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more deep dive and daily business content, listen to Wondery, the destination for business podcasts. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living,

which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works. Life Comes at You Fast, Part 3. It's not exactly a representative sample, but it's a pretty diverse one. Mothers and fathers, executives and artists, entrepreneurs and academics, young and old, white and black, and everything in between. A quick rundown of the experiences of the people who have come on the Daily Stoic podcast over the last several years gives you a sense of what life can have in store for any of us. When he was young, George Raveling's mother was institutionalized and effectively turning him

into an orphan. Julia Baird, as she writes in her wonderful book, Phosphorescence, was diagnosed with rare abdominal cancer. She endured several painful surgeries for its removal, all while going through a difficult heartbreak. Brent Underwood was celebrating being featured in the New York Times for living in a ghost town. He went to sleep and then woke up to find the place was on fire. Jake Seliger, who had never smoked a day in his life, was diagnosed with mouth cancer. Captain Brett Crozier was on track to make admiral when he was stripped of command and bounced out of the Navy for doing the right thing. Randy Blythe was suddenly arrested when his band landed in Prague, charged with responsibility for a fan's fall at a concert.

Zach Braff was hit back to back when he lost his sister and his father all in a few months. Lt. Dan Carey was shot down over Vietnam and spent 2,000 days as a POW alongside James Stockdale. Some of these folks drew on stoicism specifically, but as a group, they all had to look inside themselves and find strength they were not previously sure they possessed. That's actually something Captain Carey said on the podcast, Echoing Seneca, that no one is sure what they're capable of until they are tested. But life will test all of us. Life comes at us fast. Fortune behaves as she pleases.

A moment of triumph can turn into a disaster in seconds. 20 years of peace and prosperity for Mark Cirillis' predecessor became 20 years of war and plagues and natural disasters for him. Things can go from bad to worse. Seneca buried a young child and then found out he was to be exiled on false charges. We study this philosophy as a way of preparing.

We study the example of these brave and inspiring figures as a way of drawing lessons and insights for our own future battles and difficulties. And we study that so that once we make it through those battles and difficulties, we can share our hard-won wisdom with future generations, just as so many did before us. Be inspirational.

This is the May 10th entry in the Daily Stoic. Got the hardcover right here. Let us also produce some bold act of our own and join the ranks of the most emulated. This is Seneca's letters, 98. It was common in Greek and Roman times, just as it is now, for politicians to pander to their audience. They would lavish effusive praise on the crowd, on their country, on the inspiring military victories of the past. How many times have you heard a political candidate say, this is the greatest country

in the history of the world? As orator Demosthenes pointed out, we'll gladly sit for hours to hear a speaker who stands in front of some famous or sacred landmark praising our ancestors, describing their exploits and enumerating their trophies. But what does this flattery accomplish? Nothing. Worse, the admiration of shiny accolades distracts us from their true purpose. Also, as Demosthenes explains, it betrays the very ancestors who inspire us. He concluded his speech to the Athenian people with words that Seneca would

later echo and still resonate centuries later. Reflect then, he said, on your ancestors who set up these trophies, not so that you may gaze up at them in wonder, but that you may also imitate the virtues of the men who set them up. The same goes for the quotes in this book and other inspiring words you might hear. Don't just admire them, use them and follow their example. I would actually argue that two of the greatest orators, political leaders, leaders period in American history, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. did a particularly good job of exactly what we're talking about here. What Lincoln does is he incorporates the Declaration of Independence, which is

not technically part of the Constitution, but he incorporates it into the American story. And he makes it central to the story that he tells Americans at that time during the Civil War in the lead up to the Civil War. This idea that we were founded on this idea that all men are created equal. He was saying not just look at how great the country is,

look at how amazing we are, look at how superior, he was saying, look, for score and seven years ago, we made a promise, right? And we're not living up to that promise, right? That's what slavery was. And he forces Americans to stare that in the face, and he changes the national narrative. He roots this conflict, which was fundamentally

about slavery into something that transcends slavery, he makes it about human dignity, and he makes it about freedom, and he makes it about equality. Then you flash forward, right, a hundred years later, and I think most famously, I've talked about this with a bunch of guests on the podcast, Martin Luther King Jr. gets up in front of the Lincoln Memorial,

and he says, I'm here to cash a check, right? He says, Lincoln said it before Lincoln Jefferson said it, but we're still not living up to it. I want the thing that our ancestors, that your ancestors, that you purport to believe, right? He says, I want us to actually live up to that. And that's what I've found so inspiring. And that I come to think of it,

and I think it's important we talk about this during an election year. I've come to see America as having a series of foundings and a series of founders, right? So it's not just what happens in the late 18th century, but then America is refounded during the Civil War. It's refounded during the Civil Rights Movement. And then I think you could

argue we're in a battle for the soul of America right now. I think you could argue many different nations are battling for their souls right now. Democracy is on the ballot, it's also on the battlefield. And we're having to ask ourselves, we're looking at whether these ideas are going democracy is on the ballot, it's also on the battlefield, and we're having to ask ourselves, we're looking at whether these ideas are gonna triumph, whether we're gonna sort of bask in the undeserved legacy or inheritance of our ancestors, or we're gonna try to live up to it.

And again, I think we can apply this to Stoicism too, right? There's a passage at the beginning of meditations. I'll grab it for you, because it always leapt out at me. This is Mark's really book 114. He's thanking his brother Severus. He says that basically Severus taught him to love my family truth and justice. And he says, it was through him that I encountered

Thrasya, Helvidius, Cato, Dion, Brutus, and conceived of a society of equal laws governed by equality of status and speech and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else. Now that is a beautiful idea in theory, an inspiring idea in theory. Is that the Rome that Epictetus lived in? Is that the Rome that Justin Martyr, the Christian martyr who dies at the hands of Rusticus, who's Mark Shureles' philosophy teacher? No, it is not.

But it's a good idea. It's beautiful in theory. And then our job is to try to live up to it, to get a little bit closer to it, to get a little bit closer to embodying and living up to those ideas. And in some cases to write our own new and better ideas, because we don't have to leave things as they were in the past. We can have innovations. We can have creations We can have new ways of conceiving things Anyways, that's today's episode. I'll leave you there. Hope you have a good weekend. I'll talk to you soon You know if I would have applied myself I could have gone to the NBA. You think so? Yeah, I think so. But it's just like, it's been done. You know, I didn't want to, I was like, I don't want to be a follower.

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