It All Depends on How You Look at It

Ryan contrasts the experiences of Seneca and Napoleon on the island of Corsica, and why perspective is so important in how we shape our experiences, on today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***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. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  It depends on how you look at it. Seneca was not excited to be exiled to Corsica, a mountainous and rough-hewn island 60 miles off the coast of Italy. It was over 180 miles from Rome. It was a rock in the middle of the ocean with a single paved road. It was far from his friends and family. Anyone who reads the consolation he wrote to his mother during his time there can see that he was really consoling himself because he was miserable in this godforsaken place. So it catches a student of history off-guard to read Napoleon's descriptions of the bucolic boyhood and beloved homeland he loved so much: the island of Corsica.

• 1:14Ryan Holiday?

  This was a place he was willing to fight and die for. This was the place he wanted to see one last time before he was exiled, the place he wept to think he would never see again. That's sort of how things go, isn't it? It's what that expression that "one man's trash is another man's treasure" means, but also that "one man's nightmare is another man's dream." What matters is how we choose to look at things. What matters is the perspective we bring to the situations we face. Seneca could have drank in the beauty that Napoleon did. He could have approached Corsica with more childlike eyes, but instead, all he could see was what he lost. All he could do was compare his fate to his life in Rome. In so doing, he deprived himself of what was actually around him, and he

• 1:57Ryan Holiday?

  made his sentence more difficult. So the question for you today is: where are you doing the same thing to yourself? With where you live, with the job you have, or the person you're married to, or the so-called punishment you think you're enduring? If you like the podcast that we do here, and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.