The Daily Stoic - Your Perspective Is Everything | Offense or Defense?

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

“Is your house dirty or just well-played in? Are you struggling or growing stronger through resistance training? Are you poor or unburdened? Are you rich or temporarily blessed?”Ryan explains why the way you view things can change how you respond to them, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50.***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/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic 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 Stood 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. music or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote

with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus 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. Your perspective is everything.

Is your house dirty or just well played in? Are you struggling or growing stronger through resistance training? Are you poor or unburdened? Are you rich or temporarily blessed? The way we choose to describe ourselves in our situations determines so much of it. The language we use gives us agency or deprives us of it, hurls judgment or provides hope. Which will it be? In his meditations, Marcus Aurelius repeatedly toys with language and logic this way. Multiple times, for instance, he tackles the concept of change, something that scares us all. He tries to rephrase it, re-imagine it as a new beginning, as a form of growth, as a

natural transition from the old to the new. Then once redefined, he later reminds himself that death itself is just change, and why be afraid of change. It's natural. The power of perspective is critical, yet most of the time we hand it over to other people or outside sources. We let others determine our identity. We commiserate about labels.

We accept the most pessimistic interpretation of things. Of course we're miserable. Of course we think we're stuck. We have to remember what Shakespeare said. That nothing either good nor bad, but thinking makes it so. Our life as Marcus Aurelius wrote is died by the color of our thoughts,

perspective is everything, so choose it wisely. Offense or defense, this is today's entry in the Daily Stoke, 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance in the art of living, which you can get anywhere books are sold. And of course, we've got the awesome premium leather edition designed to last forever there in the Daily Stoke Store, which you can check out at store.dailystoke.com. Seneca opens the entry today from moral letters 82.

Fortune doesn't have the long reach we suppose she can only lay siege to those who hold her tight, so let's step back from her as much as possible. Machiavelli who supposedly admired Senaqa says in the prints that fortune is a woman and it is necessary in order to keep her down to beat her and struggle with her. Even for the 16th century it's a pretty horrifying image. But for a ruthless and endlessly ambitious ruler, it was par for the course. But is that the kind of life that we're after?

Now compare Machiavelli's view with Seneca's. Not only is he saying that the more you struggle with fortune, the more vulnerable you are to it, but he's also saying that the better path to security is in the impregnable wall of philosophy. Philosophy, he says, helps us tame the mad frenzy of our greed and tamp down the fury of our fears. In sports or war, the metaphor here would be the choice between a strategy of endless exhausting offense and a strategy of resilient, flexible defense, which will you play, which

kind of person are you? Only you can answer this question, but you would be remiss not to consider the ultimate end of most of the princes in Machiavelli's books and how few of them died happily in bed, surrounded by their loved ones. I think what we're talking about here is something the seem-to-lebed talks about, which is how dependent is your life, your lifestyle, your business, how dependent is it, which is how dependent is your life, your lifestyle, your business, how dependent is it on luck, how dependent is it on things outside your control? Are you someone who needs things to always be going well, do you schedule down to the minute,

and then one thing goes wrong, ripples through your day or do you cultivate that kind of anti-fragility, that kind of resilience, that flexibility that allows you to absorb and bob and weave and change and adjust. And I think too many of us don't have enough slack. We are too dependent on fortune. And this is what makes us anxious. This is what makes us nervous. This is what makes us always busy, always doing, always

shoring things up. Try to get to a place, try to design a life that's got some give to it, that doesn't require you to hold fortune so close, that doesn't require you to watch the market returns every day, that doesn't put you at the mercy of your boss's moods, that doesn't that doesn't put you at the mercy of your boss's moods, that doesn't force you to live paycheck to paycheck, try to create some distance, a buffer, a moat around you that protects you from the whims of fate, because fate is and always has, Asenica says, doing their own thing, behaving exactly as they please.

You don't want to be on the wrong side of that. And look, this idea of deciding to see something as positive or negative, dead time or a lifetime, that is the core idea in the stoic challenge we built out of the pandemic almost a year ago now, the daily stoic, a lifetime challenge, the idea of making the most of however and wherever you are in life, whether you're stuck in a lockdown in some European country, whether you're waiting for a vaccine, whether you just lost your job, whether you're on a deployment overseas, whatever it is, you can choose for this to be a lifetime, you can choose to make the most of it. I really think you'll like this challenge. Go to DailyStoke.com slash Alive Time.

of it, I really think you'll like this challenge. Go to DailyStoke.com slash AliveTime or go to DailyStoke.com slash Alive. You can check it out. Five bucks of the course goes to feed five bucks from the course goes to feeding America to feed people displaced by the pandemic so you can check that out. And of course DailyStoke Life members, DailyStokeLife.com get all our challenges including the DailyStoke stock of lifetime challenge for free. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily stock early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.

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