Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ A Leader Must Be a Reader | You Are The Project About this episode Ryan talks about the importance of establishing a great reading practice, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day. If you want to become a great reader, the Stoics can help. We built out their best insights into ourRead to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge. Since it first launched in 2019, Read to Lead has been our most popular challenge, taken on by almost ten thousand participants. Today, we’re excited to announce that, for the first time ever, registration to jointhe 2022 live cohort is officially open. Framebridge makes it easier and more affordable than ever to frame your favorite things - without ever leaving the house. Get started today - frame your photos or send someone the perfect gift. Go to Framebridge.com and use promo code STOIC to save an additional 15% off your first order. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:06 Speaker 00 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, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.
0:43 Speaker 00 A leader must be a reader. A leader will be forced into countless situations that they have never been in before, trying painful, stressful, baffling dilemmas and difficulties unlike any they have ever known. Nothing could have prepared Kennedy for the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it's a good thing he had read a book of B. H. Liddell Hart a few years before, and it was Hart's wisdom that helped Kennedy rationally and calmly deal with that unprecedented moment. Nothing could have prepared Churchill for the outbreak of World War II, except, of course, for the decades he had spent as a historian, which intimately acquainted him with the strategic insights and moral clarity required to bravely fight on.
1:27 Speaker 00 "One common characteristic of virtually all great leaders I have known is that they have been great readers," Richard Nixon would later write in Life. "Reading not only enlarges and challenges the mind, it engages and exercises the brain." "Today's youth, who sit mesmerized by a television screen, is not going to be tomorrow's leader. Television is passive; reading is active." Great advice. That a reader of history also knows that Nixon didn't quite live up to. In all, Nixon watched more than 500 movies while in office in less than six years. Might he have been better served by engaging and exercising his brain? Might he have been better off had he had more of his
2:10 Speaker 00 Assumptions challenged and fewer of his paranoid delusions indulged. Marcus Aurelius does not become Marcus Aurelius without having read Epictetus at his teacher Rusticus's urging. Seneca would not have been Seneca without Attalus introducing him to the works of the Stoics, but equally, he would not have been Seneca without his diligent reading of Epicurus, which actively challenged his mind and his assumptions. How did he bravely face death at the hands of Nero's goons? He was aided by his reading of Cato's life, just as Cato faced his death by reading of Socrates. A leader must be a reader. We must learn from the experiences of others. We must be challenged. We must exercise our brains.
2:53 Speaker 00 We must prepare ourselves for the things we'll only be able to experience once by learning from the experiences of others. It's not just the best way, it is the only way. And obviously, this is what we built the Daily Stoic Read to Lead Challenge about. It's great. It's like two weeks of Stoic-inspired insights about reading. It's built on my own reading practice that's helped me write the books I've written and do the things I've done. Check that out right now at dailystoic.com/readtolead. I think it's a bunch of great stuff in there to start the new year off right. And of course, remember, Daily Stoic Life members get all the courses for free, so you can check that out at dailystoiclife.com.
3:35 Speaker 00 You are the project.
3:39 Speaker 00 And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of the Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it spend more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the bestseller list. It's just an awesome experience, but I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. "The raw material for the work of a good and excellent person is their own guiding reason. The body is that of the doctor and the physical trainer and the farm of the farmer." This is Epictetus's Discourses 3:3.
4:25 Speaker 00 Professionals don't have to justify spending time, training, or practicing their work. It's what they do, and practice is how they get good at it. The raw materials vary from career to career, just as the locations and duration vary depending on the person and the profession. But the one constant is working on those materials, the gradual improvements in proficiency. According to the Stoics, your mind is the asset that must be worked on most and understood best. Something that hit me when I read one of my favorite books ever for the first time, this is Steven Pressfield's The War of Art. He talks about how in Hollywood, writers create what are called loan-out corporations. So you don't work for the movie studio or on the project.
5:10 Speaker 00 They hire your company, your LLC, and you loan out your labor to that company. It's sort of a complicated industry thing that we don't need to get into. But the idea that you have to start a company and then you work for that company, or that you are that company, is really important as you turn pro, which is Steven Pressfield's other book. And you should read The War of Art and Turning Pro. I carry them both in the Daily Stoic Stoic. In fact, I carry them both in the Painted Porch. In fact, I think Steven just sent us a big box of signed ones, if you're looking for one. But the point is, a pro sees themselves as a business. So if you need a pair of headphones to function better at your job, like, it's not, oh, do I deserve a hundred dollar pair of headphones? It's my job requires a hundred dollar pair of headphones, right?
5:54 Speaker 00 Me, running, if I don't run or walk, if I don't take my walk in the morning or run in the afternoon, if I'm not actively engaged in some sort of physical practice, my writing suffers. So I'm not a professional athlete, but if I am not investing in and actively spending time on running and working out, my professional life suffers. So it's part of my job, right? Reading is part of my job. I've always thought this way, and my wife hasn't. Until we started this bookstore together, she thought reading was this fun thing she did on the side. But realizing, no, like, me following what I love about books, me spending time reading, this makes the bookstore better. It also makes me as a person better.
6:37 Speaker 00 And so I'm not going to feel guilty or self-conscious, I'm not going to short-change that, I'm going to do it. It's part of my job.
6:46 Speaker 00 Look, it does say something that we make more allowances for our job, for our profession. We understand investing in, spending on, etc. In ways that we don't for just like pure personal development, or acquiring knowledge, or whatever, but if that metaphor is helpful for you to see the silliness of that distinction, so be it, right? Seeing this stuff as your job, right? Like, I think about this again, like, if I'm sitting on my computer, that feels like work. But if I lean back in the chair, kick up my feet and I'm reading, I'm like, is someone gonna walk in and be like, "Oh, you're having a fun day."
7:25 Speaker 00 But that book, I might learn 10 times from that book what I would learn browsing ESPN articles when I should be writing, or whatever, right? Like, think about what's making you better, and are you seeing yourself as a project? Epictetus says this, he goes, "Look, some people delight in improving their farm. Some people delight in improving their body." He says, "Me, I delight in improving myself day to day." So are you seeing yourself as a project? Are you willing to invest? In the way that, yeah, like, you'd say, "Hey, to start, to open this store, to buy this stock, I have to put up some money, I have to put up some time, I have to do some research,
8:09 Speaker 00 I have to do some development, to put up a plan." Well, do that for yourself also, because you're worth it. And by the way, like, once you pick the low-hanging fruit of life, it gets harder, right? The professional level is harder, and you're gonna have to invest and spend some serious time. So you are a project. And the Stoics marvel at how the things we're willing to do to have some physical pleasure, or whet our appetites, or make some more money, but how little we're willing to invest in ourselves and in our own personal development, even though that contributes also to our personal development, but also to our happiness and fits in with our obligations as human
8:54 Speaker 00 beings and all that. So that's the prompt for you today. You are a project. You as the startup, you as the LLC, you as the corporation, invest, operate accordingly. Take your obligations seriously accordingly. And I think you'll be very impressed and pleased by the results.
9:21 Speaker 00 You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa Pochyle, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about like today's episode, you could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic Meditations over the weekend, just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best of Meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts.
10:05 Speaker 00 And this is the best part, all our Daily Stoic Courses and Challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You Challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial totally for free. Check it out at DailyStoicLife.com.
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