All Success Is A Lagging Indicator | Always The Same

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1:43Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from The Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

2:21All success is a lagging indicator. From the outside looking in, the author Philip Meyer had the kind of success that is easy not just to be envious of, but angry about. His first two published novels, American Rust and The Sun, were massive critical and commercial hits. American Rust won the 2009 Los Angeles Times Award for Fiction, and The Sun was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2014. Both were adapted into TV series. If those were the accolades collected over the course of an entire career, it'd be enough to put that writer up there with the all-time greats. Indeed, outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times compared Meyer to literary greats like William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.

3:04But with his first two at-bats, Meyer hit two grand slam home runs, or so it seemed. As Meyer told me on a recent episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, he wasn't the overnight success he appears to be. We don't pay enough attention to Seneca's first exile, those 10 years he spent recuperating from an illness in Egypt. We see Epictetus as a freed slave, ignoring those long, dark years, those decades he spent learning about the human experience and the human soul and the worst laboratory imaginable. Marcus Aurelius waited in the wings for 23 years before putting on the imperial purple. All success is a lagging indicator.

3:46So too is wisdom and insight. Nothing comes from nowhere, not success, not awards, not a TV series. Everything is a lagging indicator of years and years of working, trying and failing, of enduring, of whether or not you keep going when most would give up. That's what you're going through right now. So keep going.

4:17Always the same. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic. Think by way of example on the times of Vespasian, and you'll see all these things, marrying, raising children, falling ill, dying, wars, holiday feasts, commerce, farming, flattering, pretending, suspecting, scheming, praying that others die, grumbling over one's lot, falling in love, amassing fortunes, lusting after office and power. Now that life of theirs is dead and gone, the times of Trajan, again, the same. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 4.32. And then the meditation. Ernest Hemingway opens his book, The Sun Also Rises with a Bible Verse.

5:00One generation patheth, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever. The sun also rises, and the sun goeth down, and resteth to the place where he arose. It was this passage, his fascinating editor, Maxwell Perkins, who I urge you to read about. Perkins would say that it contained all the wisdom of the ancient world. And what wisdom is that? One of the most striking things about history is just how long human beings have been doing what they do. Though certain attitudes and practices have come and gone, what's left are people living, dying, loving, fighting, crying, and laughing.

5:43Breathless media reports or popular books often perpetuate the belief that we've reached the apex of humanity or that this time things are really different. The irony is that people have believed that for centuries. Strong people have to resist this notion. They know that with few exceptions, things are the same as they've always been and always will be. You're just like the people who came before you, and you're but a brief stopover until the people just like you who will come after. The earth abides forever, but we will come and go. And I mean, I think meditations itself is a remarkable demonstration of this, probably not accidentally, right?

6:32Marcus, all the things that Marcus is talking about, complaining about, worrying about, seizing on, are immensely familiar and accessible to all of us, right? 2 ,000 years ago, sometime in the year, let's say 160 AD, Marcus struggles to get out of bed and writes a passage about how he likes to huddle under the blankets and stay warm. Exactly the same, right? You think about the struggles Marcus Aurelius has with Commodus. Maybe that's what you're going through right now. You think of Seneca trying to contain Nero, telling himself, I'm one of the good guys. I'm one of the adults in the room. And you think Think about how politically people in the Capitol, which is named after Capitoline Hill, senators, right?

7:22Same position as people like Seneca had, were telling themselves about the current president, right? The same thing over and over and over and over again. People are people. Places are places. I did a meditation on this, and actually it's in the video like a year ago I did this. but we did this road trip and we stopped in tombstone arizona which you know is the site of the the gunfight at okay corral and what i what's fascinating you walk down the streets of tombstone this is a place that's burned to the ground been rebuilt to look historic for the most part some of the buildings actually are pretty old but the point is these bars what what stickers do they have in the window the sticker is new that wasn't a technology in 1880 or whatever they got these stickers in the window.

8:10What do the stickers say? You can't carry a handgun inside this establishment, right? Same sticker I have on the front of the painted porch. But in the 1880s, that's what the gunfight at the OK Corral was about. It was about whether people could openly carry guns in town. I'm not making a Second Amendment argument here. I'm saying that people were fighting and arguing about the exact same thing, just as the Earps had moved to Tombstone, Arizona. Why? To make their fortune, to make a name for themselves, to have a better life, the same reason that maybe you're moving to Arizona or Austin or Europe, right?

8:51It doesn't matter. People are people, and they've always been doing the same things. And I think what's so beautiful and reassuring, but also humbling about stoic philosophy is these reminders that not that much has changed, that the hardware issues remain the same, the software issues remain the same, despite all the updates and attempts to fix the bugs. So we can calm down a little bit, right? You know, I think the last couple years, the media has been loved to say, this is unprecedented. It's very precedented, right? I recommended The Great Influenza, right? What he talked about 100 years ago in that pandemic would have been quite familiar to Marcus Aurelius in the Antonine Plague.

9:43People are people, places are places. History is the same thing happening over and over and over again. Time, as Matthew McConaughey's character says in True Detective, quoting Nietzsche, time is a flat circle. And it's beautiful, as I said, haunting, humbling, all these things at the same time. And it's something we can't lose track of. And it's something we have to think about constantly. And when I hold meditations, that's what I think of. I've actually got the leather edition right here in my hands, which you should check out, which we're just launching it. I've so worn through my paperback edition that I wanted something a little bit more hardcore and sturdy, but it's just remarkable to me as I hold this edition.

10:31I've usually been, since I got my first copy of Meditations, I've been going through that one. I have a very worn copy, has lots of notes in it. But when I compare this new one, because I got one of the first meditations, leather ones off the presses, I went through and I've been rereading it. It's on my nightstand. As I've been going through and rereading it, what strikes me most when I look at that one and this new one, when I look at this new one and the old one, is that I'm still making notes in the same spots about the same things, just as other people have been doing for thousands of years.

11:06Maybe you have Seneca on your nightstand, just as Jefferson had Seneca on his nightstand when he died. Just as Cato died holding a copy of Socrates, right? It's a timeless tradition we're a part of, both intentionally and unintentionally. And there's something beautiful and terrifying in that. That's it for today's meditation. Enjoy. Do check out the new edition of Meditations. I'll link to it in the show notes. You can check it out at steward.dailystoic.com as well. But I'm really proud of this one. I think you'll really like it.

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