The Daily Stoic - This Is How To Own Everything | You’re a Product of Your Training

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

Ryan talks about the vital importance of stillness and presence, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day.Try Surfshark risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals/STOIC. Enter promo code STOIC for 83 % off and three extra months free.As a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get all our current and future courses, 100+ additional Daily Stoic email meditations, 4 live Q&As with bestselling author Ryan Holiday (and guests), and 10% off your next purchase from the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/life/Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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.

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 Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book, 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 Markis, 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. Celebrity feuds are high stakes.

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And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Britney. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondery App. This is how to own everything. John Graves had a large farm. Like Kato the Elder, he worked the property, he cultivated it, he made money from it. But he once joked that property owners had to be careful.

The little child he said, roaming the hills and playing in the streams, may own it out from under you. Because while your busy worrying, stressing, solving one problem after the next, they are actually experiencing it. They're the only ones truly living on it. What Grace was speaking about was the power of being present. Remember the story we told about Seneca walking his estates one day and suddenly realizing how much time had elapsed. The trees were old, the house was worn. It was something we can all relate to. He had been so busy he hadn't noticed. And we can contrast this to some of Marcus Aurelius' beautiful observations about the wheat and the olives and hogs on his farm.

He slowed himself down enough to really see, to really experience. Even if he sold the property, he'd always possess those memories, that connection to the land. As the emperor, he controlled so much, but it's funny to think that a child or a starving artist could be his equal just by looking and noticing and being present. When we talk about stillness, that's what we're really talking about, slowing down, really seeing, really owning.

If you're going a thousand miles an hour, if you see everything as a problem to be solved, what kind of life is that? And especially in a world where time once passed can never be recovered, where everything is so fleeting, it's a terrible shame to waste. Forget what your books and budgets say. Forget what's on the deed. If you really want to own something own this moment in front of you own what you're doing, be present, be here now, be still.

My book, Stillness is the key is built around. That idea of stillness which appears in meditations like almost a dozen times. But we also see it in Buddhism and we see it in Hinduism and we see it in Christianity. The ability to slow down to be present to be here now is so important. I think it's more important than ever. And I don't just think it's important for the purposes of inner peace. You can't do great work unless you can get to that place. And all my writing, all my thinking, all my happiness, it comes from there.

And so I wish you much stillness today. If you haven't checked out the book, I think you'll like it at debuted at number one on the New York Times list. Stillness is the key. You can get it anywhere, books are sold. And I think sitting down with the book, of course, is a great way to get some stillness. You're a product of your training, and I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic 366 Meditations on Wisdom Perseverance in the Art of Living by yours truly, my co-author

and translator, Steve Enhancelman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store, over a million copies of the Daily Stooke in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the best cell, it's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoke.com as well.

But let's get on with today's reading. Chasing what can't be done is madness, but the base person is unable to do anything else. Marcus Arelius meditations 517. And let me grab you another translation of that one too. Let's do Gregory Hayes. What does Gregory Hayes have to say today on 517? This is one of my favorite little passages.

And sometimes what I like to do is pull up more than one. He says, it is crazy to want what is impossible and impossible for the wicked not to do so. And then turning to Robin Waterfeld, which I also love. He said, to pursue impossibilities is madness. It's impossible for bad men not to behave like that. And then his little translation or his little note there. He said, Marcus is again commenting on something. One of his acquaintances has done that is unknowable to us. Interesting. So I love that. I love both those translations. I love Steve's and the Daily Stoic, best of course. But here's what I rift on in the book.

I said, a dog that's allowed to chase cars will chase cars. A child who's never given any boundaries will become spoiled. An investor without discipline is not an investor. He's a gambler. And a mind that isn't in control of itself that doesn't understand its power to regulate itself will be jerked around by external events and unquestioned impulses. And that can't be how you'd like tomorrow to go. So you must be aware of that. You must put in place training and habits now to replace ignorance and ill-discipline, only then will you begin to behave and act differently.

Only then will you stop seeking the impossible in the short-sighted and the unnecessary. The dictum from Herodcletus is that character is fate. It's sort of who we are, who we've become, what the work we've done, right, on ourselves, what this thing that we are, determines who will be what we'll do. It's predictive and deterministic.

And I think the idea, the tragic part is like, we've seen this, I won't get too into specifics, but let's just say we've seen this play out politically over the last couple of years. People tell themselves that it will be different once this person gets elected or that they hope they'll be able to control themselves. They help the office will make them, you know, more this way or that way. They help the checks and balances.

Well, they hope they'll learn their lesson this time. But that's not how it goes. We're a product of our training. We're a product of the standards we hold ourselves to. We're a product of our character. And when one is deficient, or in the illusion I'm making here, woefully deficient in those areas, the results are pretty easy to predict. Especially when the future, what the future holds, is the inevitable difficulties, tests,

challenges, temptations, corruptions, right? Of course, it was never gonna go any other way. It was only gonna go the way that it went. You see this in sports, of course, right? Hey, maybe Antonio Brown will be different this time. No, Antonio Brown is Antonio Brown. And I say this as someone who was quite pleased a couple of years ago to hear that he was reading my books.

But of course, the books didn't really make a difference, you know. Of course, the people weighing in, trying to get through to a Kanye West or in Elizabeth Holmes or whomever, it's never going to get through. They're always going to go down that path. It's who they are, right? It's tragic, it's sad. I wish it was otherwise. I wish people were more malleable than they were, but they're not. And that's why now early on before the concrete is set, before the pain is dry, you got to do that work, you got to do that training, you got to set those standards, because they ultimately determine who we're going to be. You're not just magically going to reinvent yourself. You're not just magically,

you know, people go, oh, when the moment arises, I'll step up to it, right? And that's not how it is, right? As they say in sports and in the military, we fall back to the level of our training. We don't rise to the occasion, we fall back to the level of our training. To me, that's really what Stois is a means. It's training. We're training to become what we need to become who we need to be. If we don't do that work, well, we're gonna cause a lot more work for ourselves, a lot more problems for ourselves in the future. You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa, Pocule, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds

of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You can talk about like today's episode. You can talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using stoicism to be better in their actual real lives. You get more daily stoke meditations over the weekend, just for the daily stoke life members, quarterly

Q&A's with me, cloth bound edition of our best of meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts. And this is the best part, all our daily stoke courses and challenges, totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our new year, new U challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two week trial, totally for free.

Check it out at dailystokelife.com. 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,

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