← The Daily Stoic
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- [00:00]
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Welcome to the daily Stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. It's not a fact. It's bad. It's dangerous. It's awful, it's mean. But is it? How quickly we as the Noah Khan lyric puts its state of feeling like a fact. We take our initial impression of something, our partial view of an entire event, past, present, future, and decide we know what this is. We no longer get curious about why someone acted the way they did, or why something happened the way that it did. We know because we can feel it. We take a strong stance on an issue without taking time to understand what it means, what caused it, who it affects, or its impacts. We immediately jump to a negative conclusion instead of asking ourselves what we might. We miss it. And this is madness. The Stoics remind us it's misery. Our feelings are not only not facts, most of the time they're wrong. When we decide our emotional reaction is the truth. Curiosity disappears. Humility disappears. Patience disappears. We stop trying to understand. We stop listening. We stop seeing things as they truly are. So instead of mistaking feelings for facts, let's pause, let's get curious. Let's be humble, let's be patient. Because the way we feel about something in the moment is rarely, if ever, a fact. It all comes down to hiring. You gotta find the right people for your team and you gotta bring them on board and you gotta onboard them quickly. You know, just throwing up a job posting and hoping you get lucky. I've just found. Well, you don't get lucky enough if you want to find quality hires. Well, you should check out Indeed. Right now. People are finding quality hires on Indeed right now. In just the 30 or so seconds we've already been talking, people have made dozens of hires on indeed. According to Indeed data worldwide, their sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than a non sponsored job. So join more than 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less time, less stress, more results when you need the right person to cut through the chaos. This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs and listeners of this show get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves@ Indeed.com DoIC that's Indeed.com DoIC right now and support the show by saying you heard about it on this podcast. Indeed.com stoic terms and conditions apply. I don't know if you've ever done any live shopping, but it's blown up. And some of the kids, I don't know if I call them kids, but some of the Gen Z kids on my staff had to tell me about it. They really love it because you can find vintage stuff and collectible stuff. I was looking at some videos of people selling vintage band tees and records and watches, and it's real people selling, like, if you're going to an estate sale or a really cool trendy shop, not, you know, overpriced stuff, not produced stuff, there's no ads, no marketing, and people are on there explaining their stuff, why you'd like it, what's cool about it, where they got it. Like, I love buying stuff on auctions, so I think I'm going to like Whatnot. And I think you will, too. There are people making over $1 million a year on Whatnot. In fact, that number has doubled in the last year. Whatnot is the largest dedicated live shopping platform. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury, fashion, even cookies. Sellers are building real thriving businesses on Whatnot. Whatnot buyers spend more than an hour a day on the app. And they're not just browsing. They're bidding and buying and coming back so you can go live, show off your projects, and turn that into real income. People selling on whatnot sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces. And that's because you're not just listing products. You're building real connections with buyers. Download the Whatnot app today and get free shipping on your first order. Just search Whatnot. W H a T N o T in the App Store to start scoring amazing deals.
- [04:32]
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One of the best stories in all of stoicism comes at the founding of Stoicism Zeno. He's this successful merchant. He comes from a long family of merchants, and he suffers a shipwreck and he loses everything. He washes up in Athens. He has nothing. And there he discovers philosophy. That's how stoicism starts. And so, reflecting on this journey, this. This thing that he never would have wished happening, changing the entire course of his life and then and now history. We wouldn't be talking had he not gone through this. He says, I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered a shipwreck. Meaning the worst thing that ever happened to him was actually the best thing that ever happened to him. And that's what a stoic says. We don't control what happens. Bad stuff is going to happen. But we control how we respond to it. We control what we turn it into. And whatever it is, whatever metaphorical shipwreck you're going through, you can make it a prosperous voyage if you think about it that way. The Stoics have this line. They go like, if you don't know what port you're sailing towards, no wind is favorable. You have to know where you want to go. And this is really true even for successful people. Like, if you don't know where your stopping point is, what you want your life to look like, now all of a sudden, you're in this wonderful fortunate position where people are like, hey, you want to do this? You want to do this? They're offering you this. Do you want to take this amount of money to do this or more money to do this? And, you know, if you don't know, like, what's important to you, what kind of work you want to do, what you want your life to look like, you end up defaulting to one of two things. What pays most or what are other people doing? Those are not the worst proxies in the world. Like, it's better than no proxy. But you can end up very far from what you actually want, and you'll only know that when you get there. So you have to have a very clear sense of. Of where you're trying to go or these things, these opportunities, are really chances to get super off track. You gotta blow your own nose. To me, that's the core idea of Stoicism. Nobody's coming to save you. Nobody can handle this for you. You're not magically gonna get better on your own. Your problems aren't gonna solve themselves on their own. You've gotta do it. You. You've got to make the changes if you want to be beautiful. Epictetus says, make beautiful choices. Work on getting better. Focus on getting better. Focus on what you can do today. That's how you solve your problem. Step by step, action by action. As Marcus really said, that's how we improve day by day, by making the little choices, the little actions, not by waiting for other people to save us, but by blowing our own nose, getting active in our own rescue. You have to be strict with yourself, but tolerant with others. Marcus really struggles with this his whole life. It's why he writes about it in Meditations. He has these exacting high standards. He thinks that the right thing is not just everything, it's the only thing. And yet he works really hard to remind himself that it's called self discipline for a reason. It's not. Not a thing you get to project on other people. You don't get to go around insisting other people follow your standards, your code. And this is a thing that disciplined people have struggled with for all time. There's even a saying in ancient Rome, we can't all be Cato's. Kobe Bryant went through the same thing. He couldn't wrap his head around the fact that not everyone else was Kobe Bryant. So this idea that we can be as strict with ourselves as we want to be, but we have to be tolerant and accepting and encouraging and forgiving of other people because they don't have the gifts we have, they don't have the drive that we have. Most importantly, they never agreed to sign up to the code or standards that we have set for ourselves. There's an amazing story about Marcus Rios. He didn't want to be emperor. In fact, when he's given the news he's to be adopted by the Emperor Hadrian, he weeps because he thinks of all the bad kings of history. So Marcus was scared. Maybe he had a little bit of imposter syndrome like you and I have. But the night before, he's to escape. As we ascend the throne, Marcus Aurelius has a dream. And in the dream, he feels that his shoulders are made of ivory. And that's how he knows. He knows he's strong enough to bear the weight. He can carry the load. He can do this. And you have to know you have shoulders of ivory, too. You're stronger than you know. You're stronger than people think. You've got this. You can do it. You have shoulders made of ivory. We all do, because we've done the work, because we've been training, because we've been watching videos. We've been working up till this moment, and now it's here, and we're ready to do it. Marcus Aurelius writes to himself, he says, fight to be the person philosophy wants you to be. And I just love that so much. It's that stoicism has this ideal for you to be someone who's resilient, someone who's strong, someone who's virtuous, someone who's kind, who cares about the common good, someone who isn't easily rattled, someone who's committed to bettering themselves. That's what Stoicism wants for you. That's what the Stoics have been writing about for centuries. That's what we do in these videos, in the daily Stoic email. That's the ideal. But the question is, are you fighting for yourself? Are you fighting to be that thing? Are you striving today to get a little bit closer to that perfect ideal? Are you fighting for yourself? The stoics can't make you be or do anything. They can just lay out the flesh formula. But it's ultimately on you to follow it, to step up and actually be it. That's what I want you to think about today.
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