Transcript
A (0:00)
My family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner, and honestly, it's my favorite vehicle that I've ever owned around town. It's smooth and reliable, but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry. We've taken it on backpacking adventures to Colorado and New Mexico, loaded it up with gear, and never had to think twice about whether it could handle the terrain. That's what Toyota Trucks are built for off road confidence, rugged durability, and the freedom to explore. Toyota has a long history with the outdoor community, and they're committed to helping more people get out there and experience what nature has to offer. From remote trails to scenic byways, Toyota Trucks empowers you to take the detour, roam freely, and discover places that still feel wild and untouched. And they're not just making great trucks. They're working to expand access to adventure so more people can connect with the outdoors and pass that passion on to the next generation. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more@toyota.com Trucks Adventure Detours that's toyota.com Trucks Adventure Detective Detours.
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit Dailystoic.com. Do you have one of these? One of the most interesting things you come to understand about Meditations is how unoriginal it is. It's largely made up of short quotes and passages from other writers. On one page we see Marcus Aurelius using a metaphor from Panateus. On another, he's quoting Epictetus from memory and then riffing on something he heard from Rusticus. Here he is quoting a lost line from a Euripides play. You shouldn't give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don't care at all. Here he is quoting Chrysippus, and then it's Socrates, and then Homer and Plato and Heraclitus and Democritus, and then Aristophanes and Pindar and Hesiod, and on and on and on. In a way, Meditations is really Marcus Aurelius commonplace book, a place where for centuries, even before Marcus, lovers of books and ideas have collected observations, quotes, ideas, diary entries, and anecdotes that they wanted to preserve. In fact, it was Goethe who said that a collection of anecdotes and maxims is the greatest treasure for a man of the world. He said we can draw on them not just in conversation, but in moments of crisis. Montaigne's essays, filled with so many quotes, read as if they might have been torn directly from his commonplace book. Emerson referred to his journals as his savings bank, and it's true many of his best talks and writing first appeared there. Anne Frank filled her diary with passages from biographies and history books she was reading, celebrating sentences she liked and anecdotes that meant something to her. Look, the Daily Stoic itself would not exist without my habit of collecting stories and quotes and ideas on 4x6 note cards, which I learned how to do as a research assistant. Every one of those cards is a story, a quote, a lesson, a moment. I wrestled with an insight. Those cards become chapters, those chapters become books. Sometimes those become Daily Stoic emails and episodes. The Daily Stoic is here because of my commonplace Book. And if you're not keeping one, you're missing out. Whether we're beginning some creative work or we're trying to solve some complex problem, we should never be starting from zero. Invariably, at some point in our lives, we will have seen or heard or read something that could be of use in this situation. The question is, will we remember it? Will we have access to it? So whether it's in a journal like Marcus, a diary like Anne Frank, or index cards like me, you should keep a commonplace book so that in the end it can keep you. And the new book, Wisdom Takes Work, has a whole chapter about how to keep a commonplace book, the power of journaling, and the power of clarifying your thinking on the page. I'm really proud of this new book. It's out now, thanks to everyone who's been supporting it. It's meant a lot, and if you haven't read it, you can grab it@dailystoic.com Wisdom thanks everyone. Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided if at all possible. I understand as content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad free. No interruptions. Just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for. And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20% off your first year. Just go to Dailystoic.com premium to sign up right now, or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.
