The Daily Stoic - This Is A Debt To Be Proud Of | They Can Throw You In Chains, But...

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

While it may seem like a “waste of time” today, you’re paying that debt for a better version of your future self tomorrow.🎙️ Listen to Lt. David Carey’s interview | Apple Podcasts, Spotify, & Wondery📕 Pick up a signed copy of Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday | https://store.dailystoic.com/📓 Grab your own leather bound signed edition of The Daily Stoic! Check it out at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow 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.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audiobooks in the car. Instead of having that be dead time, we want to use it to have a live time. We really want to help their imagination soar. And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories,

self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audio books without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app.

And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing right now on Audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30 day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing right now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. 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 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. This is a debt to be proud of.

Every day, every decision we make is one that our future self will either be indebted to or let down by. What we eat, the work we do or don't do, the habits we build, the standards we set, all of this is adding up or taking away from who we will be in the future. Think about it, Marcus Aurelius' emperor

was indebted to the 20-something philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, as well as the 30-something Marcus Aurelius' emperor was indebted to the 20-something philosopher Marcus Aurelius, as well as the 30-something Marcus Aurelius, who was an apprentice of Antoninus. Had he been less diligent, less disciplined, any hope he had of not being Caesar-ified, not being stained purple, would have just been that, hope. Epictetus said that we want to work and prepare so that some someday in the future we can say to ourselves earnestly and accurately, this is what I trained for. And so it goes with our discipline and our diligence. We want to make decisions, make commitments, make efforts so that someday in the future

we can earnestly and accurately say, I owe the younger me for this rather than I wish I'd done it differently. I should have made better investments back then or I resent the younger me for this. Today, right now, we can create a good kind of debt. We can choose to eat healthy, which can provide us a longer life. We can choose to get up early, even when we don't want to,

to work on that manuscript before our day job. We can choose to start a daily journaling practice, because while it may seem like a waste of time today, you're paying that debt for a better version of your future self tomorrow. And that's basically what discipline is destiny is about, that the debts you make, the payments you make today determine who you're gonna be in the future.

As we've said here before, everything is a lagging indicator. That's why you gotta do it today. That's what I wrote the book about, it was years and years. In fact, there's a story in that book I found the note card for that I had picked out as a story I might use in the future 10 years previous, right? So you do the work today so that in the future

you can draw on that capital, get those dividends. That's what that book's about. If you haven't checked out Discipline is Destiny, The Power of Self-Control, pick it up anywhere books are sold and you can grab signed copies at store.dailystoke.com or just swing by the painting porch here in Texas and grab one from me.

They can throw you in chains, but this is the September 6th entry in The Daily Stoke. I've got hardcover here. Looks like it's been in the sun a little bit, but anyways, you can grab The Daily Stoke, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living anywhere books are sold, including signed copies at store.dailystoke.com.

This is a quote from Epictetus. He said, you can bind up my leg, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice. This is Discourses 1-1. It was said that Epictetus walked with a permanent limp as a result of being chained up as a slave. 2000 years later, James Stockdale also had his legs

chained in irons and his arms bound behind his back and pulled from the ceiling, repeatedly wrenching them from their sockets. Future Senator John McCain, who was alive when I wrote this, was in that same prison, subjected to much of that same abuse. Because his father was famous, McCain was repeatedly offered by his captors a chance to abandon his men and be sent home early. He too held tightly to his freedom of choice, declining to submit to that temptation even

though it meant a loss of the physical freedom he must have ached for. None of these men broke. No one could make them sacrifice their principles. That's the thing. Someone can throw you in chains, but they don't have the power to change who you are. Even under the worst torture and cruelties that human can inflict on one another, our power over our own mind and our power to make our own decisions can't be broken, only relinquished. You know, I was thinking about this entry because I wrote this back in 2016.

As I said, John McCain was still alive then. I've come to understand McCain and Stockdale's story a bit more. It wasn't that they didn't break, they were like super humans. In fact, part of Stockdale's heroism was that he did break and that he understood that the men in there with him would break,

but it was how they pulled themselves back together, how they faced and dealt with their shame, that they felt, how they forgave each other, how they supported each other, how they understood they would have to give some things up, but there were some things they would not do that actually made it so impressive. That was the choice that they ultimately had. They didn't choose who they, they didn't choose that they were there. They didn't choose how long they were there. Although in McCain's case, he did in a sense, he chose to be there longer. They didn't choose what they would be subjected to, but they

did choose within that, as Dr. Famously said, that this would become a transformative experience for them, something they would in retrospect not trade away. But I had a very fortunate experience a couple months back to interview someone who was in that prison with Stockdale and McCain. And so instead of me riffing about this today, I wanted to bring you some of what he said about this because it's pretty mind blowing. Stockdale, I think said that the optimist though,

that's who got crushed, that there was something problematic about hope and that it could always be ripped out from under you, but I can't imagine that Pessimism serves one particularly well either not at all. Yeah, I don't think I First of all, let me give you a disclaimer. I Haven't read kegs work on the Stockdale paradox. I haven't read how he frames that up. I have read some clips. Yeah.

Okay. When I was in Hanoi, what I thought we were told, and Keg was a genius. I mean, What I thought we were told, and Kag was a genius. I mean, Admiral Stockdale, you know how God raises up people for certain situations like Churchill in World War II? Sure. Destiny taps you on the shoulder, he says. Stockdale was that kind of guy. So I can tell you a Kag story. Please. So one day, we communicated by tapping on the walls, and it did take a long time, weeks or months maybe for stuff to get around, but one day we were in a, we were, I was living with some guys and we're in this cell and we get a message tapped on the wall and it says,

Cag sends the following. Remember what Epictetus said? I'm paraphrasing. So we get off the wall and say, first of all, who was Epictetus? We know anything about Epictetus. What might Epictetus have said? The Navy didn't send you all to get a postdoc in ancient philosophy. But it was a great thing because we could talk, I mean, we passed weeks talking about who you think Epictetus was. What's Keg talking about? You think he's smoking dope over there? What is going on with Keg? And so eventually somebody,

somewhere in the chain, sent a message back, or maybe we did, and said, sent a message back, or maybe we did, and said, okay, we give up. We don't know who Epictetus was and we don't know what he said. And so he comes back, this all takes a lot of time. Eventually it comes back and I can only paraphrase, but he said, Epictetus said, don't spend your time worrying about stuff over which you have no influence or control. And we thought that's great. I mean, so we talked about that for a lot. I mean, this is what we did. We would dissect everything.

But we decided, of course, what he's telling us is, tend to our knitting here and don't get all wrapped around the axle about the war and what's going on in the United States or stuff. Just do our job here, which I thought was absolutely brilliant. This was one of my all-time favorite interviews. I was honored to be sitting across from him. It was a beautiful, inspiring, very moving experience. And I'm very glad to share it. You should listen to the whole interview because it was fantastic. And I don't know, I feel like, look, I'm writing the book,

but I am growing and changing and learning. And it's partly because of these conversations that I've been lucky enough to have with these people who really did test these stoic ideas explicitly or not in what Stockdale would call the laboratory of human experience. And anyways, I'm studying and learning. Maybe someday I'll update the book, but for now I just wanted to bring you that little bit of extra perspective.

Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at DailyStoic.com slash email. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey. Welcome to the Offensive Line.

You guys on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some sh**, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agar. So here's how this show's going to work, okay? We're going to run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like no offense. No offense, Travis Kelce, but you got to step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year.

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