The Daily Stoic - You Can’t Freeze Up | Turn Words Into Works

Episode Date: December 28, 2020

“Where this goes and what will happen is impossible to ascertain. The only certainty over the next few months and possibly years is uncertainty. But there is one thing you can bet on for sure: There will be a lot of decisions to make. A lot of things to do. It’s going to be essential that you don’t freeze up. You cannot become paralyzed. It is the surest way to defeat and failure.”Ryan discusses the importance of facing what life brings you with courage, and reads this week's meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.We created the New Year, New You Challenge to help you create a better life, and a new you in 2021. Sign up for the challenge at https://dailystoic.com/challenge.***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 Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wondery'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. on music or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic

intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about whatever it is you're happening to be doing. So let's get into it. You can't freeze up. Where this goes and what will happen is impossible to ascertain. The only certainty over the next few months and possibly years is uncertainty. But there is one thing you can bet on for sure. There will be a lot of decisions to make, a lot of things to do. It's going to be essential that you don't freeze up. You cannot become paralyzed. It is the surest way to defeat and failure.

Remember to the Stoics, the essential virtue was courage. Courage doesn't mean you're not scared. Courage means you proceed despite being scared. Courage means you keep going. It means you don't get discouraged, even when things are hard, when other people are falling down around you when it's been a long time since you heard anything resembling good news. Kato was there when the Roman Republic was in its death throes. Marcus lived through the plague as we have written about.

Santa Cah and Musonius and Epictetus were exiled and witnessed Nero's tyranny and insanity. The later Stoics from George Washington to James Stockdale experienced extreme stress and adversity. When all this was thrown at these stillyx they didn't freeze, they didn't despair, they found confidence in their training, they broke their very big and very complex problems down into smaller, more manageable pieces. They kept going, they stayed true, they thought about other people than themselves. No one can tell you what the next few months will bring you.

It could be surprisingly good news or it could be worse news than we can even conceive of right now. All that we can know for sure, all that is in our control, is what we bring to what life brings us. We can't freeze up, we can't fail our ideals, we must show up with courage, we must get serious, we must be our best selves. History demands it, our fellow citizens need it, your philosophy has trained you for it. Turn words into works. Marcus spent a great deal of time on his journals. Yet within their pages we find him admonishing himself to throw them away to never read their pages. Why? Because he didn't want them to be an excuse from the essential tasks at hand. The art of

living will never be found anywhere but in our own efforts to be a good person. Never forget that that is the aim of this writing of this podcast. It is not to fill up pages with pretty thoughts but to inspire you to take action to turn the words, as Seneca said, into works. In that, we have the perfect place to end the year, which is with the ultimate Stoic prompt to get active in your own rescue. Stop wandering about. You aren't likely to read your own notebooks or ancient histories or the anthologies you've collected to enjoy in your old age.

Get busy with life's purpose. Toss aside empty hopes. Get active in your own rescue if you care for yourself at all, and do it while you can. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 3-14. You have proof in the extent of your wanderings that you never found the art of living anywhere, not in logic, not in wealth, not in fame or in any indulgence. Nowhere. Where is it then?

In doing what nature demands? How is a person to do this by having principles be the source of desire and action? What principles? Those to do with good and evil. Indeed, in the belief that there is no good for a human being except what creates justice, self-control, courage and freedom, nothing evil except which destroys those things. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8-1. All study of philosophy and reading should be for the purpose of living a happy life.

We should seek precepts to help us, noble and courageous words that can become facts. We should learn them in a way that words become works. So here we are at the end of the year. Maybe the end of the year of a year of still study for you. Maybe picked up the daily stoke. Maybe start listening to this podcast. Maybe it's another year. But the point is it's a great time to stop and reflect and think, okay, what are the results, right? What am I getting? I sign my copies of lives of the Stoics, which we sell in the store, or when I do signings, although I haven't done any signings because I can't go anywhere. Deeds not words. Because that's what Stoicism is really about. It's about applying the

ideas to life, right? Theodore Roosevelt said, I've always had a horror of words not turned into deeds. Indeed, that's something that keeps me up at night, right? I write about this stuff. I have the the the the the privilege of having this podcast and being able to to to to philosophize as a profession as it were, but what really matters to me is how am I getting better at this in my own life, right? How am I getting better at applying them in my own life with my temper, with my ambition, with my desires? How am I getting better at applying these things in the real world. And I do when I look back at where I was at my early 20s and to where I am now, I like that trajectory. More importantly, I hope that if I'm patient, if I keep going, I like where that's going. The Stoics were not theoretical philosophers,

and you can't be one either. This is about applying this stuff in the real world. It's about applying it in life. In your life, big and small. And look, the last year, this pandemic, this political division, these crises were experiencing. These have been opportunities to try these things. That's why I was so heartened by the fundraiser we did for feeding America, we tried to raise you know $20,000 to provide something like 200,000 meals for people who are struggling because of the pandemic. What's together we raised a hundred plus

thousand dollars or a million meals and it was wonderful to see oh okay we're talking about sympathy we're talking about acts for the common good, we're talking about helping each other, and people really got it. Like you guys got it, you saw what this is about, it's about doing something, right? It's not about talking about it, it's about doing something. And that's something I'm working on in my life.

Again, it's easy to talk about generosity, harder to be generous when it's coming under your wallet. But this is the work that we're doing, right? It's easy to talk about managing your temper and then you get frustrated and you go, where did that come from? But, but how can, how can that be less and less each time? Right? So this idea of the words becoming works, how are you applying the philosophy?

And I think that's maybe something to take a minute and sort of sit down and journal about and think about, how are you using this? How is it, how are you applying it? What action steps are you taking? What's your plan for the year and what can you do about that plan right now? So like when we do the new year, new year challenge, right? A lot of people sign up for it, right? A lot of people open the emails. Not everyone actually does the stuff, right? Because it's when the rubber meets the road that this thing gets hard. That's when you're uncomfortable. That's when you're challenged. That's when you when you're struggling, right? So I really am encouraging you guys to go out there and take some action today. Start small, right? The French talk about sort of petite actions. I'm sure I'm pronouncing that terribly.

I never know how to do things in other, in other languages. But the point is it's starting small. What's the small thing you can do? What's the thing in front of you right now? Right? The process. What's the littlest thing you can do and you stack those on top of each other? Even Marcus is saying action by action, no one can stop you from that. So what's a little thing you can do today? What's a little bit of difference you can make? How can you throw away the journals, turn off the podcast,

stop watching the videos, not too much. I'm just saying, how can you take a break from the study and make a concerted effort to focus on the application? What can you do. I have a line there's an expression I forget where I got it but it's in. It's in the obstacles way you know a workman by the chips they leave right. Like the the sawdust on the floor is proof that a craftsman has been working in the workshop well what Well, what's the proof of that for you? What do you have to show, right?

Could you be convicted of being a stoic or could you just be convicted of studying stoicism? And there are days when I look at how things when I go, I don't think I would be convicted. I don't think if anyone, you know, if you took my name off of it and you just looked at my actions for the day, would I have been a stoic? No. And those are the days I'm trying to work on. Those are the days I'm trying to get further from. And I want the actions to speak louder

than the words, to speak louder than the books, because in the end, that's the real legacy we leave. So get active in your own rescue, as Marcus says. Get out there, prove that you mean this, and show us what you're made of. Hey, it's Ryan. Look, our new year, new U Challenge is on sale now. It starts January 1st, which means you have to sign up now to join it. You can't put this off.

Marcus really says, you could be good today. Instead, you choose tomorrow. People put these things off, so stop procrastinating. Let's do this challenge together. You get a whole bunch of awesome stuff. You get 21 custom challenges, almost a book's worth a new content.

Weekly checking calls with me. Daily audio message for me. A principal 21 day calendar with illustrations. A group Slack channel for accountability. All sorts of awesome stuff. We'd love to have you. You can sign up now at dailystoward.com slash challenge. You'll be doing it alongside me and thousands of other stoics. It's our best thing we do every year. People love it.

We can't wait to have you sign up at dailystove.com slash challenge. But there's not much time left. Don't delay. It starts on January 1st. You can't do it after that. No exceptions. I'll see you on the other side. January 1st, you can't do it after that. No exceptions. I'll see you, the Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for? FTX Founder's Sam Bankman Freed lived that dream life,

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