Better Days Will Shine Through | What Can Go Wrong… Might

“Imagine you are Seneca and tuberculosis has claimed ten years of your life in convalescence. Imagine you are Seneca and after climbing to the top of Roman life, you were cruelly exiled to some rock in the middle of nowhere.”Ryan explains how Fortune behaves as she pleases–what she gives she takes away, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. ***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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  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 happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:34Ryan Holiday?

  "These are better days shining through. Imagine you are Seneca and tuberculosis has claimed 10 years of your life in convalescence. Imagine you are Seneca and after climbing to the top of Roman life, you are cruelly exiled to some rock in the middle of nowhere. At each of these desperate, painful moments, when it seemed like all was lost, when the sky was dark and the light had vanished forever, do you know what happened? Eventually, imperceptibly, then suddenly, better days shone through. As Bruce Springsteen sings, "That's what happens. We're down and out, exhausted, our ass dragging, listening to the hours and minutes ticking away while it's all slipping away.

• 1:18Ryan Holiday?

  And then, boom, those better days shine through." That's how it went for Seneca, and it's how it will go for you. No one can say when, no one can say in what form it will happen, but it will. Fortune behaves as she pleases. What she gives, she takes away, but she eventually gives again. It's just how it works. You just have to hold on, you just have to be ready. As Seneca was not just once and twice, and even the third time when Nero's goons came to finish him off. Even then, he chose to seize the opportunity fate had presented to him and gave us his greatest performance, and then moved on from this life to better days once again.

• 2:04Ryan Holiday?

  What can go wrong, might. And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal. 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly. We call people who dwell on what might go wrong pessimists. Some even think that bad thoughts attract bad events. The Stoics found this all to be nonsense. In fact, they had a practice, premeditatio malorum, premeditation of evils, that specifically encouraged musing on the so-called worst-case scenario. Marcus would begin his day thinking about all the ugliness he would see on display in court, not for the purpose of working himself up, but precisely the opposite, to

• 2:45Ryan Holiday?

  calm and focus himself, to be prepared to act in the proper way rather than just to react. Seneca too practiced meditating in advance, not only on what normally happens, but on what could happen. Epictetus went as far as to imagine losing a loved one every time he would kiss them. The Stoics believed that all we have is on loan from fortune, and that negative visualization helps increase our awareness of the unexpected. So don't shy away from this in your thoughts. Then we have two quotes today from Marcus Aurelius and from Seneca. "When you arise in the morning, tell yourself, I will encounter busybodies, ingrates, egomaniacs, liars, the jealous, and cranks. They are all stricken with these afflictions because they don't know the difference between good and evil.

• 3:29Ryan Holiday?

  Because I have understood the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, I know that the wrongdoers are still akin to me, and that none can do me harm or implicate me in ugliness, nor can I be angry at my relatives and hate them, for we are made for cooperation." Before I get to the Seneca quote, I would say that the many first times I read this quote, especially when I read it young, I focused on that first part where you list just how awful and frustrating everyone will be. And I think that's sort of the rudimentary understanding is like, look. Don't go into the eyes all, you know, don't go into the world all rosy eyed and bushy tailed, or you're gonna get your heart stomped on, right? You gotta be aware, you gotta be prepared. Marcus really says, "Don't go expecting Plato's Republic." But it's really the second part of that that's hit me more, right?

• 4:13Ryan Holiday?

  Why is he doing that exercise? It's so when he's hit by it, when he's hit by a cheat, or a liar, or a person who is, you know, messing around on their spouse, or, you know, when, when he sees somebody do something wrong, he's not surprised by it, and it doesn't make him bitter, and it doesn't make him write off all of humanity as a whole. You know, he says, "I, because I know better. I know that the wrongdoers are still akin to me." And he says, "And none can do me hard or implicate me in ugliness, nor can I be angry at my relatives or hate them." That's something I've been working on. It's like, I was just dealing with someone who I really care about, and they're just,

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  you know, being, you know, not safe or smart, or who I know them to be. And, and I wanted to unload on them, and I had to go, "No, I care about this person. I'm not gonna do that. I'm not going to let, I'm, I should have prepared for this. I shouldn't have built them up in my head. They're a human being, they have flaws, they do the wrong things sometimes. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna cast them out of my heart, or out of my life for what they've done." And then this goes into the second Seneca quote. "Being unexpected adds to the weight of a disaster, and being a surprise has never failed to increase a person's pain. For that reason, nothing should ever be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent out in advance to all the things, and we shouldn't just consider the normal course of things, but what could actually happen?

• 5:40Ryan Holiday?

  For is there anything in life that fortune won't knock off its high horse if it pleases her?" You know, I, I have the, the Prima Mentatia Malorum coin here on my desk, and I, I just look at it, I go, "Look, look, Murphy's Law is real, man. Things can go sideways, fast." I mean, imagine where you were the first week of March 2020. Did you see the next 12 months coming? Very, very few people did. But we would have been better had we been more prepared, had we been more realistic, had we been less in our own fantasy world. You know, Seneca says, "The only unforgivable thing for a general to say is, 'I did not think it would happen.'" So of course, positive visualization is thinking of all the good things that can happen. You can succeed, you can break through, you can make it.

• 6:22Ryan Holiday?

  If it's humanly possible, no, you can do it, Marcus says. The same time... The law of attraction is not real. If you think about negative things, you don't attract negative things. You actually make yourself more prepared to wrestle with and deal with and conquer those difficult things. And that is why we do our premeditatio malorum. That is why we think of all the things that can happen. That's why we meditate on the people we're likely to meet, so that they can't drag us down, they can't implicate us in ugliness, and they can't make us unhappy.

• 6:54Ryan Holiday?

  If you're trying to not just wait for better days, but seize them, strongly recommend you check out the Daily Stoic Alive Time Challenge. It's 14 days of Stoic-inspired wisdom. How do we seize this moment? How do we use it to become our best selves? And that's why we designed some of our best Stoic practices over 14 days. Each one will challenge you, that's why it's called a challenge. But I think you will emerge better, stronger, less anxious, with more perspective, and hopefully, having done some good for the world. You can check that out at dailystoic.com/alive-time.