The Daily Stoic - Trust Your Prep List | No Blame, Just Focus

Episode Date: August 4, 2022

✉️ 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 Facebook See 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 Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stokeic, 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 Epictetus Marks, 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 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. Kwame on watch he got his first break in the catering business. He called his mother, who had run her own small catering company years earlier, for advice. Flying in with the crew of friends, she was ready to help her son in a mad dash to complete his first job. As Kwame writes in his book, notes from a young black chef, his mother gave him a piece of advice that his since stuck with him. Always trust the prep list she told

him in his apartment as they were getting ready. You've made it in your say-nest moment she said, in this kitchen, you'll be crazy. A few months ago we discussed a similar insight from the Superbowl winning GM Les Sneed, who spoke of panic rules. When things fall apart when stress and chaos hit, you need to have things that you revert to. Principles and guidelines, a plan. In a sense, this is what stoicism is. It's what the practice of journaling is really about. You're writing down these principles and guidelines and plans while you know things are saying, so that if or rather when they get insane, you know what to turn to. You know what to rely on. As we also heard from AJ Delario on this podcast, having emergency routines is also key, whether one wants to keep sober or stay at an elite level of performance.

Again, it's when the doubts or the cravings or the laziness kicks in that you want to have something to trust, something to lean on, something to follow. The work you're doing today, as you read these emails, as you write in your journal, as you review your pre-meditashomalorum, this is your hard winter training. As Epictetus would say, this is your preplist. And now, when a crisis comes, and it will, trust it, rely on it. Use it. You made it, rely on it. Use it. You made it in your sadest moment. No blame, just focus.

And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perse perseverance, and 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 Stoic 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 cellist. 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. You must stop blaming God and not blame any person. You must completely control your desire and shift your avoidance to what lies within you, your reasoned choice. You must no longer feel anger, resentment, envy,

or regret. Epic teed assist discourses, 322. Nelson Mandela was in prison for resistance to the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa for 27 years. For 18 of those years he had a bucket for a toilet, a hard-caught, and a small cell, and once a year he was allowed a single visitor for 30 minutes. It was vicious treatment meant to isolate and break down the prisoners, and yet in spite of that, Mandela became a figure of dignity within the prison.

Though he was deprived of many things he still found creative ways to assert his will, as one of his fellow prisoners, Neville Alexander explained to Frontline, Mandela always made the point if they say you must run and sist on walking. If they say you must walk fast and sist on walking slowly, that was the whole point we are going to set the terms. He pretended to jump rope in shadow box to stay in shape. He held his head higher than the other prisoners encouraged them when times were tough and always retained his sense of self assurance.

That self assurance is yours to claim as well. No matter what happens today, no matter where you find yourself, shift to what lies within your reasoned choice, ignore as best you can the emotions that pop up, which would be so easy to distract yourself with. Don't get emotional, get focused. What I always find so amazing about the stories of Anelson Mandela, Ruben Herking Carter,

a epitetus, a James Stockdale, is not only how they managed to comport themselves, the dignity in poise and resistance and fortitude they underwent in the prison, which was incredible and a feat of human survival. But as I get older and I've experienced things and I've been slighted or wronged or frustrated, I'm even more impressed with how they behaved after the forgiveness that they offered, the lack of resentment or bitterness that they carried, the way they brought people together, they could have come out of the prison like Bain in Batman, right? They could have been the origin of a villain's story, right? But it was the opposite of that. You think even Martin Luther King, you think of the horrible things, you know,

way, you think of Gandhi, and we've done a bunch of podcasts on Gandhi recently. You think of how unjustly they were treated, how people took things from them. Years that they would never get back time with their family, they would never get back, broke down their bodies in the way that epictetus experienced in their torture or stockdale experience in their torture. You think, if John McCain not being on the lift is arm a certain way, for the rest of his life, they were deprived of so much, but they chose not to see it that way. Hurricane Carter famously doesn't ask for reparations after he leaves prison. He doesn't even want to admit that that had been taken out from him. He was in control. And I just think of the incredible poise and strength and pride and all the stout virtues.

And I'm putting pride in there deliberately, like they're their carriage. This is who I am, you cannot break me. I decide. That to me is just the essence of stoicism. I hope none of us are ever tested in such a way, and I hope stocked as the only one who tests Epic Tidus' theories in the modern world and the laboratory, so to speak, at that level. But each of us, we have a period at an average, or we have a bad boss, or maybe

is how you think about the pandemic, but we have these periods of our life, where we were subjected to something that we didn't like. And we could be angry about it. We could didn't like. And we could be angry about it. We could so division afterwards about it. We could get even for it. But instead we focus on our reason choice. We focus on being good and decent. We don't hang on to anger or resentment or envy or regret, as Epictetus says. But we maintain that dignity. We don't perpetuate the same injustices that were perpetuated upon us. And we show, as Mark's really says, that the best revenge is to not be like that, to be better, to make a better world

where hopefully something like what we just went through doesn't happen again, or at the very least doesn't happen because of anything that we say or do. It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. We built this Memento Mori calendar for Dio Stooke to illustrate that exact idea that your life in the

best case scenario is 4,000 weeks. Are you gonna let those weeks slip by or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall, and every single week that bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show not just for your years but for every single dot that you filled in that you really lived that week that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystout.com slash m and calendar. 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. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life.

But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert-experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong, what would we do differently?

And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app.