Are You Willing To Be Taught? | 11 Stoic Books That Will Improve Your Life

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2:36On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

2:49Are you willing to be taught? Wisdom isn't just what you seek out. In fact, much of the most important wisdom we learn in life seeks us out. The piece of unsolicited advice from someone who's been in our position, the painful consequences of a bad decision that become undeniably clear, the feedback from the audience or the customer after all those years of work. The question, as we talked about in our recent Daily Stoic episode, is whether you're willing to be taught. Life is constantly speaking to you. The world is always trying to teach you. But do you hear it? Are you open to it? Epictetus said that we cannot learn that which we think we already know.

3:29Zeno reminds us that conceit is the impediment to growth and change. If you're not willing to be taught, you cannot learn. In this regard, let us take Marcus Aurelius as our model and example. That he loved to read and study was only a part of what made him great. Marcus was willing not just to respect the unique position of being emperor in waiting to Antoninus, but also willingly showed up to class for the next two decades. It's incredible. No one had the power to force him to submit to that, to be open to being taught and tutored. That was something he chose. Will you choose the same? Are you willing to be taught?

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5:34My job is to read books. That's one of the perks of being a writer is that you can't write without reading. Stokes would say also, though, you can't be wise, you can't have a good life if you don't read from the greatest works ever written. That's why I like reading. I like learning from the experiences of others. And I've been reading every day for as long as I've been able to read. And that's what's made me successful. It's also made me happy. It's made me a better human being. That culminated in a couple of years ago, I opened my own bookstore. In today's episode, I want to talk to you about some of my favorite books, books that have changed my life, Books that I think you absolutely need to read and that will make you healthier, wealthier, wiser, and many, many other things.

6:14Let's get into it.

6:19This is not only one of the greatest books ever written. It's maybe the only one of its kind. It's written by the most powerful man in the world who has no intention of publication. He'd probably be mortified that his thoughts on everything from losing his temper to his fear of death would ever be known to people. It's a person who had enormous wealth, enormous fame, and yet he's talking to himself about justice, self-discipline, wisdom, and courage. And the writing is so beautiful, so specific, and yet so universal at the same time that there's never been a book like it before, and there'll probably never be a book like it again.

6:53Talking about Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, if you haven't read it, you must.

7:02They didn't think the guy that wrote this book was important enough to have a name. I mean that his name literally means acquired one. One of the greatest works of philosophy ever created, a work that inspires Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Rome, that inspires POWs in Vietnam 2 ,000 years later as they go through isolation and torture and loneliness. These are the discourses, meaning that it wasn't written down, it was recorded by a student of the one and only Epictetus. His name basically meaning slave. And these discourses about how we manage to be good in a world that's so bad, how we seize what we control when so much is outside of our control, how we find freedom, happiness, and peace, confidence.

7:44It's all right here in the writings of Epictetus. Marcus Aurelius loved it. James Stockdale loved it. In fact, as he parachuted down into Vietnam, he said, I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. If you haven't read this book, you absolutely should. It's totally life-changing.

8:02This is a book that you can tell when I read it for the first time, I was struck by a few things. In fact, I think it's impossible to read this book and not be struck by its brilliance. It's written from a very real place. This is written by one of the most famous Romans of all time. As he's near the end of his life, he was the advisor to the emperor. He probably knows that he's a marked man that the emperor is soon going to kill him. He's been studying philosophy his whole life. And he has this friend who's in a prominent position of power. He's a governor of a Roman province. And he wants to write some advice to that guy.

8:36They have this exchange back and forth where they're writing these letters to each other about life, about the world, about how to be better, about how to deal with all the things that make us uniquely human, the things we struggle with, what it means to die, where to find happiness, where to find peace, how to avoid the traps that other people fall into. I'm talking about Seneca. This is not actually what Seneca looked like. Long story. But Seneca writes these letters, his famous letters to his friend Lucilius. And I think it's one of the most incredible books written about life, about success, about failure, about learning.

9:09And ultimately, he defines philosophy. I think this is great. He says, how do you know you're making progress with this philosophy? He says, I know because I've begun to be a better friend to myself. So read Seneca's letters. It's amazing.

9:24The guy that wrote this book knew a thing about hardships. He's exiled four times. He lives in a brutal time to be alive. He's persecuted by tyrants. He saw some of the worst things that people do to each other. And so when he says that we should disdain hardships, this is Musonius Rufus, known as the Roman Socrates. When he says that we should disdain hardships, he's not saying that we should avoid them, we should run away from them. He's saying that we should look at them with a sneer or a smirk in the sense that we're better than them, that we're challenged by them, but we don't shy away from this challenge.

10:00One of Musonius Rufus' greatest students was Epictetus, who would go on to shape Marcus Aurelius. One of his great lines, he said, if you accomplish something good with hard work, the work passes quickly but the good endures. And then he says, though, if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, you take the easy way out, right? the result doesn't last long, but the shame endures. And most of all, he said, we earn respect of others by earning the respect of ourselves, by disdaining hardships, by conquering them, by doing the hard work. And that, in this little book, which has only recently been retranslated, you learn all about the teachings of one Usonius Rufus, the Roman Socrates, and how this great thinker-shaped Epictetus, who in turn has been shaping people for thousands of years since.

10:49The author of this book says that everything can be taken from us. And in fact, everything was taken from him. Home, his livelihood, his work. The original manuscript of this book is lost. He loses his entire family in the Holocaust and nearly loses his own life. In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl says, Everything can be taken from us, but our ability to choose our attitude in any set of circumstances, to make our own way. This is the essence of Stoicism, that we don't control what happens to us, even something as cruel and awful as the events in the 20th century. We choose how we respond to it.

11:19Suffering is inevitable. We also have the ability to find meaning in suffering, to grow from the suffering. This is one of the most beautiful and inspiring books ever written. There's a reason. So millions and millions of copies. If you haven't read Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, you absolutely should. My aunt gave me a copy when I graduated from high school. I've read many times since. One of my absolute favorite books. You have to read it.

11:40This book has a weird title. It's a word you wouldn't recognize. It's a word you don't immediately know how to pronounce. And it translates in a kind of a strange context, but basically it means a defensive weapon. It means at hand. I'm talking about Epictetus's Inchiridion, the handbook, which was seen as a defensive weapon against adversity and difficulty and the blows of fate. This is something that Epictetus would, of course, know himself quite well. Epictetus, born a slave, he endures incredible adversity and difficulty. He's tortured. He walks with a limp his whole life. He serves in the corrupt, decadent court of Nero.

12:15and then is eventually exiled. But from all this difficulty and adversity, Epictetus cultivates a life of resilience and strength and fortitude and honor. This is a new translation by Robin Waterfield that's got all the stuff in here. If you haven't read Epictetus, you're doing yourself a disservice. You're not as strong or as well-armed as you could be, so you must read this book.

12:38This is a short little pamphlet-looking thing. I get that. Maybe it doesn't seem like it could be one of the greatest philosophical works ever written, but it is. Obviously, the Stoics wrote for a long time about adversity and difficulty, and we take them at their word. What's incredible about this book is that it's written by a fighter pilot who shot down over Vietnam, and he'd studied the Stoics. He studies Epictetus most of all, and as he is parachuting down, knowing he's going to be taken prisoner, knowing that he very well could die, this man says to himself, I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.

13:09What he's doing is testing the doctrines of Epictetus in the laboratory of human experience. James Stockdale spends seven plus years in what now is called the Hanoi Hilton. He's locked in solitary confinement. He's clapped in irons as Epictetus was. He grievously injures his leg, never fully regaining the use of it as Epictetus did. He's tortured as Epictetus was. And yet all the time he's focusing on what Epictetus talked about, that there's some things that are up to us, some things that are not up to us, that a podium in a prison is each a place, Epictetus says, and Stockdale is fond of quoting.

13:45He says, in any of these situations, good or bad, we have a certain freedom of choice. And what will we do with that choice? Who will we be with that choice? This book by James Bond Stockdale, Medal of Honor recipient, goes on to be an admiral. He's this heroic figure who comforts the other prisoners, who helps steal their will and make them determined and strong. It's one of the great books called Courage Under Fire. And really what it is, is an exploration of the Stoics in one of the most difficult circumstances you could possibly imagine. And that's why it's worth this very short, very brief, but very life-changing read.

14:22This guy said that basically almost all the study of ancient philosophy gets it wrong. That we're thinking about, you know, the ideas, we're thinking about the writing, we're thinking about the theory, when in fact what philosophy was, was a series of spiritual exercises, notes, discussions with the self, right? Talking to the self about how to solve the problems of life. This is Pierre Hedot. He wrote this great book on the meditations of Marcus Aurelius called Inner Citadel. And he wrote this other book called Philosophy as a Way of Life, which is really drilling down on some of the ideas in this book.

14:54This is actually one of my favorite books about Marcus Aurelius. He's saying that when Marcus is writing meditations, he's not thinking of you and I at all. That Marcus isn't trying to explain all the ideas or the insights of Stoic philosophy. He's trying to work on the very specific parts of Stoic philosophy that he is dealing with. So people would say that Marcus Reulius repeats himself too much in meditations, or that he's depressive, or that he's hard on himself. Well, he's hard on himself about the specific things that he's struggling with. And so Hedo reframes and reimagines meditations as a set of spiritual exercises, philosophy as a way of life.

15:28Mark Zerulis wasn't making philosophy for you. He was philosophizing to himself. And I think these are two important stoic books that everyone should read.

15:39It really should have been an incomprehensible life, totally foreign way of thinking. The most powerful man in the world, a head of an enormous army living 2 ,000 years ago, totally different time with totally different customs. How did he go through the world? What was his perspective on life? It sort of baffles us. And yet, when you read Marcus Aurelius, you find that there's something very relatable, very human about all of it. Despite all the pressures and temptations and everything that he faced, he had a really unique worldview. He thought about things in a way that was both peculiar and unique to his extraordinary circumstances and then also incredibly applicable for all of us.

16:16That's why I love this book by Donald Robertson, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. It's a biography of Mark Strelius and Meditations, but really it's trying to put ourselves in the shoes of this guy, a guy who's worshipped as a god in his own life. You see statues of him all around. He has incredible power, incredible responsibility. He's trying to stay sane in the midst of all that and a pandemic and corruption, decay, betrayal, warfare, floods. It's just one thing after another for Marcus, and he survives through it. He's great inside of it. And that's the idea in this book, The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius by Donald Robinson.

16:52I've interviewed him before. He's a great guy and he's really thoughtful and you can tell really loves the subject of the book. So if you're looking to read a book on Stoic philosophy, definitely recommend this one.

17:04The problem with most philosophy books that this one I think is a little bit different than is that they focus on what the philosophers said, what they thought. This is, of course, all very interesting and can be important. But what really matters is what the philosophers did, who they were, how the ideas were applied to their life. Actually, the Stoics talk about not having much respect for the so-called pen and ink philosophers, just the writers. They were interested in the doers, how they lived up to the ideals. And some of the Stoics did a great job. You look at Marcus Aurelius, he's not corrupted by absolute power.

17:37You look at Epictetus surviving slavery and exile and torture. And then there's Stoics like Cicero or Seneca, who wrote very beautifully about the ideas, but then failed to live up to them. And that's the premise of Lives of the Stoics, the art of living from Zeno to Mark Zerullis, which I happen to know the author of. But as I put together this book, what I was thinking about is really that question. How and when did their actions speak louder than their words? What can we learn from their examples and not just their ideas?

18:08I want to give you my all-time favorite quote from Seneca, and I actually, I opened my book, The Daily Stove, with it. Of all people, only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy. Only they truly live. Not satisfied merely to keep good watch over their own days, they annex every age into their own. All the harvest of the past is added to their store. Only an ingrate would fail to see that these great architects of venerable thoughts were born for us and have designed a way of life for us. Only those who make time for philosophy are truly alive. That's what Seneca is saying. He's saying we access all of the wisdom of the past by reading.

18:47So if you're not reading, what are you doing? You're wasting your time and you're wasting your life. Every day I send out one Stoic inspired email totally for free. Almost a million people all over the world. If you want to take your stoicism journey to the next level, I would love for you to subscribe. It's totally for free. You can unsubscribe at any time. There's no spam. Just go to dailystoic.com slash email. Love to see you there.

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