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Foreign 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. 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 you get to choose this so don't Things will go wrong. Fortune will turn on you. You will make mistakes, plans will be disrupted, dreams will be dashed. This is life we don't control so much what happens When I interviewed happiness expert Dr. Laurie Santos for the Daily Stoic podcast. Her class at Yale is one of the most popular in the school's history. She told us that in addition to wearing a Memento Mori ring every day, I wear one too. You've probably seen it if you've ever seen videos of me or I'm doing talks. She also has this bracelet that reminds her of the Buddhist story of the second arrow. What is the second arrow? The first arrow is all the stuff we've talked about. Someone says something rude to you, a car breaks down, a business fails, a deal falls through, a job opportunity slips away. What follows is the second arrow. When we ruminate on our suffering, when we blame ourselves, when we tell ourselves we'll never recover, when we choose to feel singled out. In Meditations, Marc Sorillos would talk about how the harm doesn't come so much from the event, but from feeling harmed by it. That is the second arrow. We choose to say we've been insulted. We choose to to think I'll never recover. We choose resentment. We choose self doubt. Afterwards, we choose to despair or give up on humanity. And it is here, not in the event itself, that the real harm is done, not just in our perceptions, but in how it changes us and our behavior going forward. The first arrow is coming. Let's avoid shooting ourselves the second one this podcast is sponsored by Zbiotics and their game changing product Pre alcohol. By taking ZBiotics pre alcohol drinking alcohol no longer means you have to make the choice between a great night or a great next day. You can enjoy a night out and still feel ready to have a productive day the next morning. ZBiotics Pre alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Because when you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. And it's a buildup of this product, not dehydration, that's to blame for those rough days and rough mornings after drinking. And pre alcohol produces an enzyme to help break this byproduct down. You just take it before your first drink of the night. You drink responsibly and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com stoic to learn more and get 15% off your first order when you use code STOIC at checkout zbiotics.com stoic thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Basto County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work. Stopped, parked, it walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation, it getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the Hill Country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven it across the country. And by we I mean not just my wife, but both my kids, who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota Adventure Detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at Toyota Adventure Detours. We reap what we sow. This is the October 27 entry in the Daily Stoic. Crimes often return to their teachers. This is from Seneca's play Theestes, which is a dark, disturbing play, to put it mildly, but a fascinating read. It's ironic that Seneca would have one of his characters utter this line, because, as we know so for many years, Seneca served as a tutor and mentor to the Emperor Nero. And while there is a lot of Evidence that Seneca was in fact a positive moral influence on this deranged young man. Even at the time, some of Seneca's contemporaries found it strange that a philosopher would serve as the right hand man to such an evil person. They called him the tyrant teacher. And just as Shakespeare taught in Macbeth, bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague the inventor. Seneca's collaboration with Nero ultimately ends with the student murdering the teacher. And it's something to think about when you consider whom you work with and whom to do business with in life. If you show a client how to do something unethical or illegal, might they return the favor to an unsuspecting you later? If you provide a bad example to your employees, to your associates, to your children, might they betray you or hurt you down the road? What goes around comes around is the saying or karma. The notion we have imported from the east teaches us a similar idea. Seneca paid the price for his instructions to Nero, and as has been true throughout the ages, his hypocrisy, avoidable or not, was costly. And so too will yours be. There's a great tweet that came out March 12, 2019 that I think of often. It says me sowing haha fuck, yes. And it says me reaping. Well, this fucking sucks. What the fuck? And then there is of course, the other famous tweet that says, well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions, as the expression now goes, right? Fuck around and find out. That's what happened to Seneca, right? Seneca rolled the dice, thought he could feed the monster, thought he could strain Nero. He was exactly like a lot of the figures that I talked about in my podcast episode with Tim Miller, the right wing political operative who, who saw so many people convince themselves, he said, these sort of minor savior complexes, that they were very important. They were important enough they could constrain, Trump or get something out of him that would be good for them in the short term. It always comes back to bite us, right? The consequences of our actions come back to us. Crime return to their teachers, you reap what you sow. And this was the biggest mistake of Seneca's life. It's a mistake I've made in my life. I thought it was different. I thought I could make it work. I thought I was making a bargain that would work out. And it didn't. It never does. We learn from the Stoics not just what they tell us, what they teach us, what they write about, but the mistakes that they made in their life, right? Marcus Aurelius Example shows us, hopefully, something about being a better parent. Seneca teaches us, you know, who to work for, who not to work for, how to detangle ourselves from clearly toxic, unchangeable situations. Seneca never, unfortunately, speaks about this explicitly or explicitly enough. He just sort of hints at it at his plays. But we can learn plenty from this example, and it's why I put it in the Daily Stoic. And it's just a reminder. Crimes return to their teachers. 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. Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided if at all possible. I understand, as a content creator why they need to exist. 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