The Daily Stoic - You Can’t Resent Them | What Little Wins Can You Find

Episode Date: August 8, 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 the Daily Stoke Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes 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 stoke, intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about whatever it is you happen to be doing.

So let's get into it. 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. You can't resent them. There are things a leader, particularly in times of success, can get away with. There are also things that people generally can get away with when no one is looking, or when we think there won't be consequences.

And yet most of us don't do these things. We try as best we can to observe the stoic virtue of temperance and moderation. Marcus Aurelius certainly did. He held incredible power. His predecessors has treated the Senate and laws as mere formalities. They treated Rome's treasury as their personal purse. They treated other human beings as pawns to use and abuse. So imagine the discipline and rectitude it took for Marcus, a guy who didn't even want the job in the first place, to be so strict with himself about what he would and wouldn't do as emperor.

Now also imagine how frustrating he must have found it to see other leaders operate with much lower standards. They had so much less power so far from absolute and yet it corrupted them absolutely. They had less means and somehow more vices. This is a common thing. You've probably experienced it in your own life. It's bafflin, it's exasperating. You tell yourself, I would never let myself get away with that. Then you wonder, how can they live with themselves?

But be careful. This self-righteous indignation can eat you up. If you're not fully in control of it. Marcus had to work very hard to be strict with himself, but tolerant with others. If he hadn't, he would have been consumed by resentment, by disappointment, and despair. Not everyone was as strong as him, just as not everyone is as strong as you. Not everyone has had the training.

Not everyone has been enlightened to the right principles. This is why they fall short. This is why they try to get away with things. This is how they live with themselves. All you can do is be patient and tolerant. All you can do is keep being you. All you can do is keep doing the right thing for no other reason.

And it is the right thing. and it is the right thing. What little winds can you find? Xeno, the Phoenician merchant who founded the Stoic School on the painted porch, the Stoic Poquillet of the Agora after a shipwreck, said that happiness was a matter of small steps. While the Stoics believed in the perfect ability of human beings, they knew that so much stood in the way of realizing that potential. So they would be skeptical of the so-called epic winds and quantum leaps that our culture obsesses over today.

Instead, they would urge you to focus on your daily duties on making incremental progress. Spend your time this week thinking about small wins. What little gains can be had from this improvement or that one? A decision here or a decision there. Be satisfied with each small step. Keep moving and don't give up. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoke Journal. 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living. From yours truly, you can find this anywhere, books are sold. And of course, we also have signed books in the Daily Stoke Store. But we have a quote from Marcus, a quote from Epictetus, and a quote from Xeno today.

Do what your nature demands, Mark Cerele says in Meditations 929. Get right to it if it's in your power. Don't look around to see if people will know about it. Don't await the perfection of Plato's Republic, but be satisfied with even the smallest step forward in regard to the outcome itself as a small thing. Then, Epictetus says, we don't abandon our pursuits

because we despair of ever perfecting them. That's discourse is one, too. Well, being is realized by small steps, Zeno says, according to Diogeanese laertis, but it is no small thing. I was actually just thinking about this this morning. I'm in the middle of writing the book that I'm working on now. And there's a great writing rule, you know, just a couple crappy pages a day. Just put in the time, put in the work, that'll get you to a manuscript, a draft one, then you can edit draft one, but you can't edit what doesn't exist.

So people as a practices who despair of progress because it's not perfection, they never get there. But the person who shows up and does work every day gets there. So I was actually writing this in my journal today. I was saying, okay, just show up, put your ass in the chair, do a little work. And as I was writing this in the journal, I was thinking, put your ass in the chair, be at the desk. And then this story popped in my head because I've been trying to write this chapter about like keeping your workstation clean. That'll be in like two books from now. But the point is, as I was thinking about this,

I remembered this little thing that I'd read about Robert Moses in Robert Carlos book, The Power Broker. And I wrote down my note card and I just, boom, the chapter just unlocked itself. So my point is I was thinking about the process, when the process got to work and solved a problem that I was having trouble solving. I got to my desk, I got to sit down,

I pulled the power broker off the shelf, started going through my folded pages in there on page 280 something, was it the exact story that I needed in about an hour? I busted out the first draft of this chapter. That was all I have to do for today's contribution to the book. Now a lot of days like this add up, as George Washington was fond of saying, many mickles make a muckle.

You show up enough days, you do this enough times, gets you to phase one, then you improve, then you go on to phase two, phase three, and finally you get your completed product. So today, it's not about sort of big, huge wins. Like this was a minor, minor win. This is maybe three paragraphs of a book that's going to be 60 plus thousand words. It's going to have to go through lots of rounds of editing that won't come out until 2020, three, probably. And who knows, maybe it'll even get cut from the book.

But the point is I followed the process, I showed up, I did the work, I didn't wait around. I put my ass where I wanted my heart to be, quote, Stephen Presfield. And I made the smallest step forward, as Marcus said, I'm not gonna get too high about this, I'm not gonna get too excited. I'm gonna, as Marcus says, regard it as a small thing, but I'm also going to get too high about this. I'm not going to get too excited. I'm going to, as Marcus says, regard it as a small thing,

but I'm also confident enough, experienced enough to know that these small things add up, and that's what I'm excited about. And I know that I just have to do this enough times for long enough that I'll eventually get to the other side of where I need to go. And that is true for your problems, for your projects, wherever you are,

whatever you're doing. Show up, put your ass in the chair, do the work, let the process guide you to the eventual inevitable comption. It's not that life is short, Seneca says, it's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of momentum-mory, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. When you built this momentum-mory calendar for Deo Stoke to illustrate that exact idea, that your life in the best case scenario is 4,000 weeks. Are you going to 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've filled in that you really lived that week that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoke.com slash M and calendar. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily Stoke early and ad free on Amazon music. 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. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court.

I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the

infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondering App.