You Struggle With This Everyday | Looking Out For Each Other

Epictetus said that to live a good life, you have to make good choices. You are what your choices make you, nothing more and nothing less.📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:03Speaker 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 really, a 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.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  You struggle with this every day. Epictetus said that to live a good life, you have to make good choices. You are what your choices make you, nothing more and nothing less. It's simple, and it's true in theory. In practice, it's really hard. And that was certainly true in Epictetus's world. It feels all but impossible in ours because we have smartphones that are designed to be addictive. We have food that is genetically engineered to be as irresistible as it is nutrient deficient. We have apps that bring us pleasures and distractions with the click. We have the ability to work from home, to wake up and start working whenever we want. We can go wherever we want, do whatever we want, say whatever we want. We have to struggle in just about every moment of every day to make good choices.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  From the moment we first awake, are we going to get up or hit the snooze? Go for a run or back to bed? Do the deep work or go down a deep Twitter rabbit hole? Make ourselves lunch or order Grubhub? Go to the gym or to happy hour? Get a good night's sleep or watch another episode? It's these small choices that add up to make you you. You are the sum of one small choice stacked upon one small choice stacked upon one small choice, ad infinitum. If your life were a painting, these choices would be the brushstrokes that compose it. In other words, your life is defined by your choices, by your discipline. Which is why the new book makes the claim that Discipline is Destiny. So I can't wait for you to check out the new book, Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control,

• 2:16Speaker 00

  the second in my Four Virtues series on the cardinal virtues of Stoicism, courage, discipline, justice, wisdom. The new book is out now. We're still honoring some of the preorder bonuses, which you can grab at DailyStoic.com/preorder. You can pick up Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control anywhere books are sold. Grab it on Audible. You can grab it on Kindle. You can pick it up at your local indie bookstore. If you want me to sign your copy, you can also do that at DailyStoic.com/preorder. And we even have some signed manuscript pages for people who order five copies. Plus, you get a bunch of other bonuses, which I'd love to give you. So sign up at DailyStoic.com/discipline.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Looking out for each other. 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 and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold and also get a signed, personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. "It is in keeping with nature to show our friends affection and to celebrate their advancement

• 3:44Speaker 00

  as if it was our own. For if we don't do this, virtue, which is strengthened only by exercising our perceptions, will no longer endure in us." Seneca's Moral Letters, 109. Watching other people succeed is one of the toughest things to do, especially when we are not doing well ourselves. In our hunter-gatherer minds, we suspect that life is a zero-sum game, that for someone to have more means that we might end up with less. But like all parts of philosophy, empathy and selflessness are a matter of practice. As Seneca observed, "It's possible to learn to rejoice in all their successes and be moved by their very failure." This is what a virtuous person does. They teach

• 4:25Speaker 00

  themselves to actively cheer for other people, even in cases where it might have come at their own expense, to put aside jealousy and possessiveness. You can do that, too. I was actually just talking to someone I work with. We were talking about the sort of pettiness of writers' groups. And I said, "They're all kind of frenemies," right? They see it as a zero-sum game. And I said, "There's a joke I heard about academia that the reason the knives are so sharp is because the pie is so small." If you think of the pie as finite, if you think about life as zero-sum, it inherently makes everyone your enemy, right? It means you're having to get what's yours, which means you're having

• 5:08Speaker 00

  to get it from them or get it before them, as opposed to seeing it how it actually is, how the Stoics want us to see it, which is a collective, a whole, an infinite game. I've had to do work, especially as a competitive person, to understand that the success of another writer has nothing to do with me. It doesn't come at my expense. It helps me. More people reading is good, right? More people talking about Stoicism is good. I'm sure there are people that see the success of my books as being somehow limiting to them, or unfair, or undeserved. Meanwhile, they're benefiting from the rising tide

• 5:50Speaker 00

  that's lifting all the boats, right? So you've got to think about how you look at it. But you have to practice this. Robert Greene, in his book, The Laws of Human Nature, he talks about the difference between schadenfreude, wishing bad things, and other people, and mittenfreud, probably pronouncing this horribly wrong. This is also a day we broke out in The Daily Laws, which I was lucky enough to work on. If you haven't read, you should. We carry it in the Painted Porch. I think we even have some signed copies. Again, there's another awesome daily book out there. Like, I remember Robert going, "Is that going to be a problem with your book?" And I was like, "No, this is amazing. More people reading something every day is good for the world and probably good for the category,

• 6:35Speaker 00

  too." Anyways, there's also a section of this in The Daily Laws. But Mitten Freud is the active wishing of success or goodwill towards people. I heard love once defined as, as willing the good of the other, like wanting good for the other, wishing them happiness, wishing them success. As an author, wishing, wishing you the biggest first week sales you could possibly have, I want that for you. It doesn't come at my expense. And even if it did, who am I to root against you? I'm going to do my best. I'm going to put out my best work. I'm going to go into this already knowing that I'm playing with house money, that I've

• 7:18Speaker 00

  succeeded beyond my wildest dreams and expectations, that I've written something I'm proud of, that I think deserves to be read, that I have faith in the long term will do what it needs to do. So there's, there's no pettiness in me. There's no need for you to, to do poorly. I just wish everyone success. Are there moments where I get caught in a, with a pang of jealousy, where I might say something that, you know, if I played it back to myself later, I'd be like, ew, that's not a good look. Of course, this is something you have to work on. It's like ego. In fact, it's rooted in ego. So it's something you have to constantly sweep away and push away. But it gets you to a place where you are happier and you are better.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  It's not just by wishing other people good, you're making them happy. Theodore Roosevelt is right. Comparison is the thief of joy. Joseph Epstein is right when he said that, that of all the deadly sins, envy is the only one that's no fun. Living that way sucks. It punishes you most of all. Meanwhile, not being petty, not wanting to hold other people back, being happy, being generally celebrating all the things that are good things that are happening to other people and not seeing them as somehow. Bad for you. Well, this is a much happier and much more wonderful way to live. And I wish that for you. I wish that for you, but what I control is whether I try to

• 8:42Speaker 00

  live and act that way myself, which I do. And speaking of which, Discipline is Destiny, The Power of Self-Control is now out. This is, I guess, now first full week out in the world. And I appreciate all the support from all of you. Thank you so much. If you haven't picked it up, you can pick it up at dailystoic.com/preorder. We're honoring the preorder bonuses, signed copies, et cetera. I hope you can check that out. Or you can pick it up anywhere books are sold, including there's an audiobook version, which I read. There's an ebook version, physical versions everywhere. Support your local bookstores. Come get it at the Painted Porch if you're in central Texas. But otherwise, thank you all, and I hope you enjoy the book. I'm really, really proud of it. Whether it sells a million

• 9:25Speaker 00

  copies or 10 copies, I know I did my best, and I'll leave it to you to decide. But I do appreciate the support and hope you enjoy the book.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoic, the Stoic 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 Sto, we're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You can talk about, like today's episode, you can 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, and, this is the best part, all

• 10:23Speaker 00

  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.