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We are coming up on the 10 year anniversary of the Daily Stoic book Daily Stoic website which also means we're coming up on the 10 year anniversary of the Daily Stoic Shopify store. We've been using Shopify since the very beginning. With Daily Stoic we sold a print I think first and then shortly thereafter we came out with the memento Mori coin. And we've used Shopify because we love it. We even expanded it out to the bookstore when we opened the bookstore. I guess this would have been in 2020, 2021. So we've been using Shopify forever because Shopify is the best and the biggest commerce platform there is. It's behind millions of businesses all around the world. 10% of all e commerce in the US is with Shopify. It helps you tackle inventory, payments, analytics and more. You don't have to have multiple websites, you don't have to figure out who hosts or, you know, all this stuff. Shopify is everything all in one place, making your life easier and your business operate smoother. They've also got great customer service. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify and start hearing with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at shopify.com stoic go to shopify.com stoic this month at Wayfair, they're putting on their biggest annual sale of the year. From April 25th through the 27th. It's way day and you can score the best deals in home, like 80% off with free shipping on everything. And Wayfair makes it easy to find exactly what fits your style and needs. Furniture, decor, home improvement, outdoor essentials. And it's all on sale on Wayday. Upgrade your space with quality pieces that work within your budget. And as I said, everything ships fast and free during Wayday. If you shop Wayfair Verified, you get their team of product specialists who vet everything by hand using a 10 point quality inspection so you know you're getting a quality piece no matter your budget. Wayfair's got a ton of options. Even bigger furniture that would normally be a pain to ship. It's conveniently delivered right to your door. Wayday is the sale to shop the best deals in home. Get up to 80% off with fast and free shipping on everything. Head over to Wayfair.com from April 25th through the 27th to shop Wayday. W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com Wayfair Every style, Every home. Welcome to the Daily Stoic. Podcast designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. You know, Daily Stoic is a beast. It is a content machine. There is an insatiable amount that I have to record and write and produce. Whether we're talking about the Daily Stoke email or the YouTube channel or this podcast, it's a lot of me talking. And when people go, I listen to the podcast every day, or, you know, I listen to your audiobooks or I watch the videos when come out and go, it sounds like a lot of me talking. It's also a little exhausting to hear me talk that much. So we're going to flip it a little bit in today's episode, and I'm going to share your stories. I'm going to share what Stoicism has meant to some of our listeners, what they've learned from it, what they've taken from it, how they apply it, and hopefully they can spur something in you. And then maybe you want to share your story with us as well. You can send an audio of what stoicism has meant to you, how you came to it, what resonates with you, what you're struggling with, how you apply it. All that you can send, send that audio recording to podcastailystoic.com higher audio quality is better. If you got an external mic, that's best. Claire can work a lot of magic. She's our producer, but she can't work unlimited magic. And you'll hear in today's episode some audio differences, but I think these are pretty good. And most of all, the stories are what's powerful. And here's our first. Here's Marty.
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Hi, my name is Marty. My journey into Stoicism began in the summer of 2021. As I read the Daily Stoic, the lessons captivated me. I was astonished how this ancient wisdom could be delivered in such a readable, understandable way. And I question why I never came across this before. What initially resonated with me was a passage from Marcus Aurelius that I first read in the Daily Stoic and then reread in Meditations. In the passage, Marcus advises that we do not procrastinate, do not confuse others in conversation, do not allow our thoughts to wander, do not be passive or aggressive, and do not be all business. I thought to myself, if I can follow these rules, it'll be difficult to steer myself in the wrong direction. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I played back and forth with getting sober. I would go weeks or even months at a time without drinking. But then I'd give up and find myself amid another weekend bender In July of 2021, around the time I began studying stoic philosophy, I hit my form of rock bottom. After that, I finally quit drinking. While I can't say for certain that it was stoicism that got me sober, I can say that stoicism has helped me stay sober. I started to realize that coping with stress and enjoying life will not come from external pleasures and vices, but from my internal values and living through virtue. I came to stoicism with the idea that it would help me improve from a performance aspect. As an educator and basketball referee. My goal with stoicism was to learn how to control my emotions and be self disciplined while maintaining poise and self confidence. Stoicism involves so much more the afterword in Right Thing Right now is one of the most powerful chapters I've ever read. Ryan writes, like most people, when I was first drawn to stoicism, I was attracted to what it could do for me. But the thing about stoicism is that it does its work on you. I am lucky that I found stoicism not just because it kept me calm and collected under pressure, but because as the years went by, the deeper message of the stoics sunk in. I was initially interested in self discipline, courage and the process of acquiring wisdom, but I'm starting to understand the justice side. Doing what's right for those closest to you and for the greater good. Keeping your word to yourself and others, remaining honest and loyal and showing true empathy. This doesn't mean attempting to save the world, but instead doing your small part each day without excuses. Stoicism has become my guidebook for life, something I did not have before. Trying my best to focus on what I can control and to live through courage, self discipline, justice and wisdom has helped me control my emotions and be more intentional in my career and relationships. I read books, I write a newsletter, and I cherish the simpler parts of life. I am more open minded and eager to learn and I am more aware of what's truly important because I realize that our time is finite. I have an entirely different view on how to embrace challenges and obstacles, and I care more about other people, knowing that we're all in this together.
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It's amazing, Marty, to hear the role stoicism has played in your sobriety. It actually reminded me of something I talked about with Jamie Alexander on the podcast. She was saying that stoicism was a big part of her sobriety journey as well. Here is what she said.
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I'm almost eight years sober now, God willing. And I think that was by far the best thing that has ever happened to me. So I. I learned a lot from that. So this is. This ties into a higher power thing is like, I really don't know what's good or bad. And I'm holding up air quotes here because I really don't.
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Yes.
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You know, something can be, you know, we're not dumb. We can realize when we're like, oh, you know, like, I broke my shoulder, that frigging hurts, that that really sucks. But that could lead to something that, you know, really wonderful. And this has put me stoicism and my sobriety and the way my life has gone over the last few years, which is not like I thought it would kind of in. I'm not even gonna say in the worst way, because I don't believe that now.
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Yeah.
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But it has positioned me in a way, and I'm now in a place where I can be, I think, a lot more useful to a lot more people.
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Thanks, Marty. I appreciate the kind words about the afterword to write thing right now. That's actually been my favorite part of writing the series. Didn't want the books to feel real preachy, like I was an expert on these things. In fact, no, I'm struggling with them as much as you guys are, and I wanted it to be clear where I was coming from in writing them. Next we're going to hear from Jordan.
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My story of stoicism doesn't harbor around a single event, but rather, it's the glue that made all of these seemingly disjointed pieces come together in alignment. Who am I to be submitting to a platform like this? I am not a community leader. I haven't written a book. I'm not a titan of industry or an exceptional athlete. I haven't been subjected to decades of slavery and servitude. I'm one ingredient in the soup of humanity. But I think it's in that being that I feel the call to this. It's in this commonality, this thread that near most can pull, and it will tug somewhere on the fiber of their being. My foundational years were formed by people with severe codependency, chemical imbalances, and intense anger issues. I adopted a learned behavioral pattern. Trigger fiery explosion, deep emotional damage, cry massive guilt trip, hug, sweep it away and pretend everything is better. Even though I noticed how this destructive behavior pushed people away and affected relationships. I still carry this with me into my early 20s. This behavior played itself out in a toxic long term relationship and when it ultimately came to a heinously painful ending, I was struck with an epiphany that was a massive turning point in my life and my behavior. I never want to feel this way ever again. And I never want to be someone who makes someone feel this way ever again. I knew what I had been doing up to that point in my life had to change. I started caring more about how my actions, my words and my behaviors affected others. I told myself no more lies, no more half truths, no more raging anger. I learned that anger is typically a secondary emotion and there is usually something behind it. Fear, sadness, guilt, betrayal or confusion. Very rarely was anger erupting just for the same sake of anger itself. It was an indicator that something else was going on behind the scenes. I started to examine places in my life where I felt anger and so much of it sprung from my anger towards my mother. And after many months of not speaking with help from my partner at the time, I realized there would be a world one day where I wouldn't be able to reach out to my mother. No call, no text, no no letter, nothing. And that feeling filled me with grief. She was alive and she was a person. A human just like me who was dealt an unfair hand in life. And when I took her off the pedestal of this is what a mom should be and just saw her as a person with an entire life and parent was just one of the roles where she did her best with what she had, it released years of animosity and tension from my mind, my heart and my body. Few things have spoken clearer to me than stoicism and it has been my grounding rod and my guiding star ever since then. When my current partner had a cancerous brain tumor recurrence and I was his caretaker, stoicism guided me. All the times my chemically imbalanced mother tested my boundaries and my patience, stoicism guided me. When other family members were held in the strong grip of addiction, stoicism guided me. And when the weight of the world feels overwhelming and uncertain, stoicism guides me. I cannot control the world or the people in it, but I can always put in the effort to be the best version of me I can be at the time and give myself grace in my learning and my becoming. I always carry my copy of Meditations and have highlights and notes in the margins. I have gifted meditations to friends and family. I've shared the podcasts and posts for years because I carry within me a lived truth of its potency. It's a buoy within the sea of chaos and I am eternally grateful for the moments and chapters and seasons through which it has and continues to keep me afloat and shape my character.
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I think a lot of people can relate to that, right? I think we're all a slave to our emotions here, there. That's why stoicism is attractive. Like if that's a totally foreign idea to you, you're probably not like, oh, I'd like a philosophy that helps me not do that. Right? But anger is there for me. I've said this before, I don't think I have an anger problem. But anger is a problem for me as it is for most people. As it was for Marcus Aurelius. Right? He talks about how the consequences of anger are more harmful than whatever the thing we are ang angry about. So yeah, I appreciate you sharing and I hope you keep spreading the word and the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius. It's pretty remarkable. Our time is our most precious resource. It's the thing we have the least of. And then we spend it in the most frivolous ways. It occurred to me just how much time I was spending getting in my car, driving across town, finding parking lot, going up to my therapist's office to sit down for what? I thought I was spending one hour of my time on self care, on working on myself, on thinking about things, processing stuff, but actually I was spending like an hour and a half, sometimes two hours because the process was so inefficient. And that's where today's sponsor comes in. If you've considered going to therapy, but maybe you feel like you don't have time, you don't have the energy or you don't have money, you should check out BetterHelp because BetterHelp makes starting therapy easy and continuing therapy easy as well. BetterHelp matches you with a therapist based on your preferences, their clinical experience, and over a decade of matching expertise. You can easily switch therapists at any time, but most of all, you can do the therapy from your own home, from your phone. Join the 6 million plus people who've gotten help from BetterHelp, the platform you can trust. You can just click the link in the description below or you head over to betterhelp.com dailystoak to get 10% off. Your first month of therapy was just at the gym today and you know it's a pain. I had to drive there after my kids school, then I had to drive all the way back across Austin to Bastrop. I'm like, why am I not doing this at home? I should be doing it at home. And with Tonal you can, because tonal not just reduces the physical impositions to working out, but it reduces your mental load. It's the ultimate strength training system, helping you focus less on workout planning and more on getting results. Tonal provides the convenience of a full gym and the guidance of a personal trainer and anytime at home with one sleek system. Plus, there's no more second guessing your form. Tonal gives you real time coaching to help you dial in your form and help you lift safely and effectively. Tonal also sets the optimal weight for every move and then it ratchets that weight up as you get stronger. So you're always challenged. And right now, Tonal is offering our listeners $200 off their Tonal purchase with promo code TDS. That's Tonal.com and use promo code TDS for $200 off your purchase. Tonal.com, promo code TDS for $200 Off. For our final submission, we're going to hear from Herman from Argentina. I think I'm getting it right. G E R M A with an accento N from Argentina.
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I'm a school teacher and I wanted to share how I apply stoic ideas in my job. I first came across stoicism about 10 years ago through a YouTube video in Spanish. It was called something like stoicism, the best mentality you can have. Out of curiosity, I watched it and was introduced to the concept of the dichotomy of control, among other stoic ideas. And eventually I found a daily stoic. And that's where I really started to go deeper into stoicism. Now I've been watching Ryan's videos, listening to his podcasts, and reading his daily emails for a couple of years. One of my favorite daily stoic videos is the one about you control how you play.
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If there's one thing that philosophy can teach any athlete, whether you're an amateur, whether you're a collegiate prospect, whether you're a top ranked recruiter, whether you're making millions of dollars in the pros, it's
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something that I talked about to the
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Cleveland Browns this year when they had me talk about stoicism. What I said, I started my talk and I said, look, everyone in this room controls one thing. They control how they play. You don't control what your teammates do. You control how you play. You don't control what they say about you on Twitter. You control how you play. You don't control the size of your contract. You control how you play. You don't control what they say about you from the stands. You control how you play. You don't control what the ref says. You control how you play. You don't control whether it's snowing. You don't control whether it's raining. You don't control whether it's 100 degrees. You control how you play. You don't control whether your teammates get hurt. You don't control if your teammates are fair. You don't control if the guy in the position ahead of you wants to groom you and mentor you or not. You control how you play. You don't control whether your opponents cheat. You control how you play. You don't control if your coach is a bully and he screams at you. You control how you play. You don't control if people are doubting you, if they don't believe in you. You control how you play. You don't control yesterday's game. You control how you play today. You don't control if you've lost to this team a thousand times. You control how you play. You don't control if your team wins. You control how you play. You don't control if you lose. You control how you play. All you control, if it's not clear enough is how you play right now, right this second, whether there's doubters, whether you're being adored. All you control is how you play, the effort that you bring, the decisions you make, the principles by which you operate. And that's ultimately all you can judge yourself on. You don't control the outcome. You don't control the facts. You don't control anything but how you play. But if we can focus on this, the Stoics said if we can focus exclusively on what we control, not only be happier, we'll have way more energy and way more to focus on what is in front of us. While everyone else waits time whining about, complaining about, worrying about, thinking about, bragging about what they don't control.
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Thinking about my job as a school teacher and all the setbacks that come with it, mainly students behavior toward their teachers. I borrowed this idea of you control how you play and turned it into you control how you teach. And I came up with this. Life is like a classroom and you only control one thing. You control how you teach. You don't control whether your students misbehave or not. You control how you teach. You don't control if your students Pay attention to you. You control how you teach. You don't control if your students do their homework, study for their tests, or turn in their assignments on time. You control how you teach instead of focusing on what your students do or don't do. Just make sure you're teaching the best class you can teach, because that's basically the only thing you control. The only thing that is really up to you. What your students do, say and think, that's not up to you. At the end of the day, you shouldn't ask yourself, did my students do everything they were supposed to do? Instead, you should ask, did I teach the best class I could teach? Did I respond to my students behavior with courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom? Or did I just lash out at them like a wild beast because they didn't do what I wanted them to do? In other words, did I just get angry at my students for not behaving the way I wanted them to behave? But students are not the only people schoolteachers have to deal with. We also have to deal with our own colleagues, students, parents, principals. Just a few days ago, a principal told me German, you have to make your students respect you. You have to make them be quiet. And I was like, I can't make my students respect me or be quiet. I don't control what they do in the classroom, what they say to me, or what they think about me. Whether they respect me or not, that is not up to me. That is up to them. When I started to become more aware of what was really up to me and what was not, I began to feel a sense of relief because I started saying things to myself like, I don't control whether things go the way I want them to or not. I did the best I could and I can't do more than that. Because of this and other stoic ideas like don't suffer imagine troubles, put every impression to the test, and don't ask for the third thing. As Marcus Aurelius would say, you can't record something for the Daily Stoic podcasts without mentioning Marcus Aurelius. So there you go, Ryan.
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You know, I love this mantra of I control how I teach. Mantras like that can be really helpful. And it sounds like you're doing the best you can and you're really thinking about how you apply the virtues, right? Courage, discipline, justice, wisdom to your job, which is a great job and an important job. And we appreciate your service. And I think you're providing a great example. Thanks to everyone for submitting their stories for today's episode. Let us know if want to share your story what you think of this episode. If you like this format, I think it's great and I'd like to do more of it. As I said, the email there is podcastdailystoic.com.
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