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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. Change is hard. That's why we avoid it. It's easier when things stay the same, when we have familiar ways and routines. Our morning coffee, our job, the way we learned it, where no news is good news. Change, on the other hand, requires adjustment. It requires acceptance. It requires us to change. So naturally, yeah, we avoid it. We fear it. But as Marcus Aurelius points out to those of us who are frightened by change, nothing could exist without it. And you know what else change is? It's growth. Or at least it is the opportunity for growth. Without change, we stagnate. Our minds grow complacent, ignorant to new ideas. Our bodies grow weak from disuse. We remain stuck. We lack clarity. We, as part of the world, part of nature, part of the logos, need to change in order to maintain our well being. With the new cycle of spring, of regrowth and renewal finally upon us, it is time to change. It's time to listen to the rhythm of the seasons, to begin afresh, to grow back stronger than before. Foreign. Well, here we are, well into a new year, and it's worth taking some stock. Who do you want to be this year? What changes do you want to make? How could you be better? That's where today's sponsor comes in. And it's where something I have been doing myself now, I guess, since college, which is working on myself with a therapist. And although I used to when I lived in la, drive an hour in traffic to sit down in someone's office for an hour now I do it on the phone, I do it while I'm walking, I do it in the car. I do my therapy online. And BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform. And I'm not the only one. More than 6 million people have gotten help through BetterHelp. It's just easier to keep the appointment. It's less of an imposition, cheaper, it's more efficient. And I honestly find it easier to just get into the stuff you're there to get into when I do it remotely. BetterHelp will match you with a therapist based on your preferences. You can easily switch at any time at no extra cost. You can click the link in the description below or you can just go to betterhelp.com dailystoke to get 10% off your first month of therapy. It's funny. People wanna level up their business, but they always focus on like big stuff and they neglect some of the small, basic stuff like how do you talk to your customers and keep your team on the same page. Sometimes just a cleaner, more modern setup can make feel smoother and work better. And that's why today's episode is sponsored by Quo Q U O the modern alternative to help run your business communications. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2 with over 3,000 reviews. And it's built for how modern teams work. More than 90,000 businesses, from solo operators to growing teams, rely on Quo to stay connected, professional and consistently reachable. Your entire team can handle calls and texts from one shared number. They don't miss messages. Conversations don't get disconnected. Everyone sees the full thread, making replies faster and customers feel genuinely cared for. And Quo isn't just a phone system, it's a smart system. Quo's AI automatically logs, calls, generates summaries and highlights next steps so that nothing gets lost. Can even qualify leads and respond after hours, ensuring your business stays responsive even when you yourself are enjoying some much needed offline time. Make this the year where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try quo for free. Plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.comdailystoic q u o.comdailystoic quo no missed calls, no missed customers. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome back to the Daily Stoic podcast. It was like 84 on Friday here in Austin, and then it was rainy and wet and cold all weekend. As I'm recording it now, it's I got a sweatshirt on and got muddy boots by the back door. In Austin we have something called false fall and false spring. It's hard to know exactly the transitions of the seasons. We have some false starts. But even to be there, right? Even to be here where the clocks have just changed is a reminder that time is flying, right? There's not that much left of winter and spring is basically right here. I was in Phoenix. I was just finishing up that run of four dates. And by the way, we also just announced five more dates in the US and five in New Zealand and Australia. You can grab tickets for that at dailystokelive. Com. I hope to see you. I think San Francisco and Portland. I think there's Minneapolis, Detroit. I'm forgetting some of the others. Where have we got? We've got Sydney, Auckland, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth. They're all there. Dailystokelive.com if you want those dates. But anyways, while I was in Phoenix, I guess this would have been two weeks ago by the time you're Hearing this. And that was one of the things that I talked about with them. I'll just play that right, because if you're anything like me or them, you had a rough go of it the last couple months.
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What a calm and normal and not at all alarming or incredibly long and scary winter it has been. Certainly no need for anything like stoicism, Focusing on what you control, not losing your mind, making sense of chaos, resiliency, turning obstacles upside down. Right. No need for any of that. Of course, that's what the ancient world was too, I think. Sometimes we think, oh, it was simpler back then. They would have been simpler times. No, you didn't. They live in exactly the same type of stuff that we're experiencing in now. That problems, they have difficulties, they lived in the future. They just didn't have that. Everything else, though, everything else, it's always been like, this is, I guess what I'm saying, which is what stoicism is there for. Although it. It does feel like it's been extra crazy lately. You know, there's been crazy news, crazy people, crazy weather. We. We had that storm in Texas. Some temperatures dropped way down and then it was rained a bunch, so just everything froze. Kids couldn't go to school, we had to shut down the bookstore. People's pipes froze. It was really bad. If you have a heart, I think the only thing you can think in moments like that is fuck ice.
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Right? I'm not an expert or just in,
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but we're just going to have to like, abolish. You just can't reform ice like that. Sorry, that's neither here nor there. But no, just. Just a few months ago, we were thinking about our resolutions, right? What do we want to start doing in the new year? What we're going to stop doing in the new year. What kind of new person did we want to be in the new year? And I think it's worth thinking about, like here, almost all the way through the first quarter of that year, like, how did you do? Did you start doing the stuff you said you were going to start doing? Did you stop doing the stuff you were going to stop doing? Did you make those changes? Did you start those habits? Are you doing it? Or did you get raveled? Did you get distracted? Did you get sort of thrown off the path? Like, in my family spent the entire month of January sick with one strain of flu after another and one kid getting it after another and just watched it go like waves through the whole house. And so, you know, that happens. That is a timeless thing. Right. We have our plans, we have our expectations, we have what we want to do, we have what we know we're supposed to do. And then, you know, life says, I don't think so. Right? And as I said, this is true in the ancient world. The best quotes in meditation. This is Mark Aelius, 6, 11. This is what he says. He says, when jarred unavoidably by circumstances, and I think that word unavoidably is key. When jarred unavoidably by circumstances, you have to revert at once to yourself. And don't lose the rhythm more than you can help. You'll have a better grasp of the harmony if you can keep going back to it. So stoicism isn't like perfection or even consistency, because we're all human beings and therefore inconsistent and imperfect. Stoicism is the ability to get back to it as quickly as you can, to reset to level set, to restore, to repair. And I feel like every sort of milestone in the year is a chance to do that. The seasons are changing. How do we change? The clocks are springing forward. How do we spring forward? That's actually something we've done with daily Stoic for the last several years. Like, we do a challenging New Year's, and then we just take for granted a good chunk of us, myself included, have already screwed up by March. And so we do, at the end of the March, we do, like, 10 days of stoic challenges about sort of cleaning up the junk that's already accumulated in just those couple months. And so as you get those opportunities, you want to take them. And that's sort of what I wanted to talk about tonight. Like, how do we use this as an opportunity? Having been jarred, having been thrown off, having been distracted or rattled a little bit, how do we get back to it? Because it's too early to give up on 2026, even though it feels like this, this is the longest year ever, it's too early to give up on 2026. We don't know what the rest of the year has in store for us. Maybe it'll be calm and chill from here on out. Probably not, though it never is. We can say for certain, though, that what is ahead is uncertain and it's probably not going to take their preferences into account. And so it's a good chance then to take stock of ourselves, to get back to those first principles, to get back on track, right? A reset, a return to the rhythm. And for the stoics, those four principles, the core best practices, would be the cardinal virtues. And I thought we could talk about that tonight. Courage, discipline, justice, wisdom.
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And look, if you're looking for a spring reset, if you want to renew, if you want to refocus, if you want to get back to the rhythm as Marcus Aurelius talks about, well, I think you would love this challenge. It's going to be awesome. I'd love to see you in there. We've got a special offer for podcast listeners. 20% off when you use code DSPOD20 at checkout. You can join me and thousands of other Stoics in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. Just head over to dailystoic.com spring and enter code DSPOD20 to get 20% off. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.
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