This is Calling You | We Are A Product Of Our Habits

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• 0:02Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  This is calling you. "The good life is simple," the Stoics say. "It's quiet, defined by ataraxia, or stillness. It shouldn't require fancy things or high honors. It's internal. We find it within ourselves," Marx really said, "not in far-flung destinations or accomplishments." And yet, the Stoics also hold up courage as an essential virtue. The great Thomas Wentworth Higginson, translator of Epictetus, abolitionist, and a leader of Black troops in the American Civil War, explained that "life is sweet, but it would not be sweet enough without the occasional relish of peril and the luxury of daring deeds." "Perhaps every man sometimes feels this longing, when he would fain leave politics and personalities,

• 1:28Speaker 00

  even endearments and success behind, and would exchange the best year of his life for one hour at Balaklava with the six hundred." That's why the Stoics, for all their focus on tranquility, also lived lives of adventure. They answered the call to courage, whether it was on the battlefield or in the causes of their time. They got up there on the rostrum and gave speeches. They stared down tyrants. They wrestled and boxed, hunted and explored. Seneca started each year by hurling himself into the freezing Tiber River, which would have been no easy swim. You were not made to sit on the couch. You were not made for idleness. You were made for adventure, for daring deeds. Fortune favors the bold, went the ancient saying. Life is short.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Seize it, be brave. Courage is calling. Will you answer? And if you didn't get that reference there from Higginson, he says, spend an hour at Bala Klava with the Six Hundred, he's referring to the charge of the Light Brigade, which actually it's a more complicated story. They were brave, they're also stupid, as I talked about, in Courage is Calling, because it's a fascinating sort of moment of discipline and courage, but also thoughtlessness and recklessness and irresponsibility. I talk a lot about that story in Courage is Calling. I also use that saying, Fortune Favors the Bold, as the subtitle of the book. So if you want to learn a little bit more about that Stoic virtue of courage, which

• 2:56Speaker 00

  is, some say, the one that all the other virtues descend, or depend, really, check out Courage is Calling, Fortune Favors the Bold. It's my first in the Stoic Virtue series. I'm really proud of it. I'll sign your copy if you buy it from stuart.dailystoic.com, click the sign copy link, or swing by the painted porch and pick one up also.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  We are a product of our habits. This comes from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living. Journaling, of course, is a critical exercise to the Stoics. It's really hard to separate journaling from Stoicism. Meditations is Marcus Aurelius journaling and talking to himself. And so today's entry comes from the prompt and the sort of meditative part of the Daily Stoic Journal for this week's, and it's all about habits. The Roman Stoics put a heavy emphasis on dealing with habitual behavior in order to make progress in the art of living.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  The great Roman Stoic educator Musonius Rufus, he's Epictetus's teacher, held that all the theories in the world couldn't trump good habits, and they couldn't overcome bad habits either. Epictetus followed Musonius in this focus on habit with an eye on not reinforcing bad habits, such as anger, and finding a way to replace them with better ones. We all recognize bad habits when they see them in others, but it's harder to see them in ourselves. So this week, meditate on the habits and recurring behaviors that are holding you back, and even ask others around you for their view. And the first quote comes to us from Epictetus. He says, "Every habit and capability is confirmed and grows in its corresponding actions, walking

• 4:44Speaker 00

  by walking and running by running." You remember, we talked about this earlier in the week. "Therefore, if you want to do something, make a habit of it. If you don't want to do that, don't, but make a habit of something else instead. The same principle is at work in our state of mind. When you get angry, you have not only experienced an evil, but you've also reinforced a bad habit, adding fuel to the fire." It's Epictetus's Discourses 218. Then he also says, "If you don't wish to be a hothead, don't feed your habit. Try, as a first step, to remain calm and count the days you haven't been angry. I used to be angry every day, and now every other day, then every third and fourth, and if you make it as far as 30 days, thank God. For a habit is first weakened and then obliterated.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  When you can say, 'I didn't lose my temper today,' or the next day, or for three or four months, but I kept my cool under provocation, then you are in better health." That's, again, Epictetus's Discourses 218. And then, this is the funny one. He says, "What assistance can we find in the fight against habit? Try the opposite." The point is, the Stoics thought a lot about habits. They had to, right? It's not just enough to think philosophical thoughts to, to sort of have high principles or standards, but how do you make them real in your life? How do you turn them into muscle memory? Right? An athlete can watch videos, can be coached, can, can review painstakingly their swing, or their shot, or their throw.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  And then they're going to get tweaks and thoughts, but then that has to become habit. That has to become part of the routine. That's why they sit in the gym and take, you know, a thousand free throws or a thousand jumps, jump shots. That's why they practice doing this or that, so that under immense amounts of pressure, under the stresses of life in the game, they can revert back to that training. They can do what they need to do. And I love this little expression from Seneca about how bad habits, the old way of doing it, first we weaken it, then we obliterate it. You don't just magically do the new thing. You weaken it. And he's saying one way to weaken it is to try the opposite. You know, it's like you have a piece of paper with a crease in it or a bend in it. You can fold it the opposite way and it kind of flattens it out.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  I just think that's an interesting way of thinking about it. But look, habits make the man, right? The habits that you do, the things you habitually do day in and day out, this is what we're talking about earlier in the week, that's who you are. Who you say you are, who you want to be, who cares, right? Who, the habits you habitually do, the choices you regularly make, that's what make you who you are. That's what make you beautiful. As we also talk about from Epictetus, we are a product of our choices, our routines, our habits. As a writer, how does it work? You create a routine, you create a structure, you follow it every day, work comes out the other side of that. It's not about fits of inspiration. It's not about genius.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  And I think this is true for all crafts that one seeks out to master. It's about habit. But I've also found even as a parent, if you want to do good, if you want to manage this or that, you create habits, you create routines, you create structures, and then you stick to it. That's the key. So habits, we are a product of our habits. The Stoics believe that. And I hope you are working on your habits. You can check out the Daily Stoke Habits Challenge at dailystoic.com/habits, which you get free if you're a Daily Stoke Life member. But the point is habits will make you happier. They will give you a better life. I'm not saying they're easy. They're very difficult, but habit is everything. And it's also the hardest thing, but let's keep working on our habits.