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1:17Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. That's toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics. We're trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording.

2:00but thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you.

2:11Here's a good way to feel good every single day, no matter what happens. A way to appreciate a day stuck in the airport or putting out fires. It's an exercise from Seneca. He said that a person who wraps up each day as if it was the end of their life, who meditates on their mortality in the evening has a superpower when they wake up. When a man has said, I have lived, Seneca wrote, then every morning he arises is a bonus. And you know how it feels when you're playing with house money or when your vacation is extended? In a word, better. You feel lighter, nicer, you appreciate everything, you are present.

2:51All the trivial concerns and short-term anxieties go away, because for a second you realize how little they matter. Well, that's how you ought to live. Going to bed, having lived a full day, appreciating that you may not make it. Appreciating that you may not get the privilege of waking up tomorrow. And if you do wake up, which we hope for all of you, it will be impossible not to see every second of the next 24 hours as a bonus. Because they are.

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5:01Let's do some of these questions that have come in. What should we do first? All right. There's one from Maureen about Marcus overlooking Commodus' derangement and sort of the complexity of that question. It is very complex, right? Because on the one hand, almost all the emperors before Marcus, like five in a row, do not have a male heir. So they're able to choose their heir. They're able to choose who succeeds them. And that was something that Marcus didn't have the luxury of doing. that's one way to think about it and to make some sort of excuse for it it doesn't fully excuse him though because you know Commodus is clearly unfit right for at least from what we know historically and and the way he's portrayed in Gladiator probably understates how awful he actually was if you there if you can read some of the pages in Gibbon's decline and fall of the Roman emperor empire.

6:16And you just see that Commodus is just unimaginably bad. To Marcus's defense, I'd offer a couple of things. So number one, he doesn't choose Commodus. Marcus loses something like six children before adulthood. So imagine you're in this difficult position where you have to give a job, If to give a job to your son, and it's the most difficult job in the world, and millions of lives are dependent on it. So you try to pick which son is right for it. And so you pick a son and you're grooming him for it, and then he dies. And then you have twin boys, and you think, oh, maybe you'll have two emperors take my place, just as Hadrian set up for me and Lucius Verus.

7:04And then both of them die. And then you think, well, maybe my son and Lucius Verus' son can rule together. And then again, one of them dies. So imagine just all this horrendous death and what that would do to your own judgment and what that would do to your own family. I think that part of it has never fully been explored. It's not like Marcus Aurelius had one kid and that kid turned out to be a real shithead. It's more complicated than that, right? And I think I just, as I was writing Lives of the Stoics, I just really tried to wrap my head around how devastatingly difficult that would be. And there's this, let me see if I can find this really fast.

7:47There's a really crazy passage in, oh, here it is. Okay, so notebook 11, 33 and 34. Okay, so this is notebook 1133. He says, it's crazy to look for figs in winter, and it's no less crazy for someone to look for his child when it's no longer possible. And then notebook 1134, he says, Epictetus used to say that when you kiss your child, you should silently tell it, tomorrow you will die. But that's an inauspicious thing to say. No, he says, it's not at all inauspicious, but it expresses a natural process. Otherwise, it would be inauspicious to talk of wheat being harvested. So the point is here, Marcus is meditating on the unimaginable reality of losing children.

8:41He's probably writing that fresh off of a funeral, you can imagine. The idea being that Marcus is devastated by this loss. And I would suspect that this both clouds his judgment and puts him in an utterly impossible

9:02situation as a parent and leader. Jeff Belton wrote, my goal is not just to attend this great Zoom lecture, but also to maintain my tranquility when people forget to mute themselves. Very true. So, yeah, I just I to me, that's one of the few sort of where all Marcus's sort of defenses are dropped and you really see the real human being struggling with something. And I think that's where I think that's where Marcus probably was when it came to Commodus. There was another question I saw that was good, Billy. What was it? Yeah, Kyle. Kyle had one about how the Stoics were sort of ahead of their time in some aspects.

9:44Like they're thinking about women studying philosophy, but other issues like slavery, they're assumed to be behind. Yeah, to me, the lesson here that the Stoics believe that, you know, both men and women should be taught philosophy is an indication of how progressive and ahead of their time they were. At the same time, almost none of the Stoics, including Epictetus, say anything about whether a human should be able to own another human being. So they were very much a product of their times or, you know, sort of barbaric, even according to their times. To me, the lesson there is not, oh, were the Stokes hypocritical?

10:30How where does this invalidate what they have to say? I think it's I think it's different. I think it's that we are exactly the same. There are some things that our children and grandchildren will look at us and go, wow, they really got that right. They really helped move the ball forward. And then they'll look at other things that we accepted or declined to question and wonder how we could have possibly gotten it so wrong and how we could ever possibly defend such an indefensible status quo, whether that's income inequality, whether that's sweatshops, perhaps that's our relationship with meat and factory farming.

11:22There's going to be so many things that the future is going to find that we were just totally off about that I think we want to be careful at how high we get on our horses about judging the past. To me, we should look at these figures as tragic figures who fell short in a lot of ways that we can then learn from. All right. What else have we got here? Is that Tanya? Hi. I'm really new to all this, but I'm a long time yogi, teaching yoga here in Austin. Yeah. Yeah. I was reading about creative output and they had it quantified into 20 to 70 2010 so 70 of what you do is going to be okay 20 is going to be really good and then the 10 is going to be really great which of course corresponds with coach pop in san antonio talking about passing the ball to uh get a good better and then the best shot to really be successful.

12:36So I was wondering if the Stoics have some kind of guideline like that for quantifying our efforts, quantifying our output. As we write in our journals and have our self-conversation, well, how good was my day or did I miss the mark? I think one of the things I think about is this sort of pivoting from your question a little bit, but I think like when am I most effective and do I line up that time with the work that most needs to be done? Right. So for me, I'm clearest in the morning and I'm most locked in in the morning and I've been least sort of distracted or jarred by interruptions in the morning.

13:24So that's when I try to spend time with my kids and when I try to do my writing. Then everything else, if I want to focus on the stuff that I don't like doing, the stuff that doesn't really matter, where quality control is less important, I want to do that later in the day when fatigue has set in or the stakes are lower or I've already completed my important tasks. So when I think about, I don't think it's just about outsourcing or delegating. It's also about how do you prioritize and organize stuff in your own life? I think there's a reason that a lot of CEOs, for instance, work out early in the morning.

14:08It's because that's when they have time to do it and they have the most control over their time and schedule and they don't want to miss that opportunity. But this is a great question. I appreciate this. How do you rectify the 70 % that's just the average or not even average? I think that's probably just the reality of life. I mean, I guess you could spend some time focusing on, you know, if you can get it from 10 % to 12%, you have a huge advantage over other people. if you can, you know, if you can, you know, get the 20 % from 20 to 25%. I mean, maybe that's a place to think about is just sort of chipping away at the margins.

14:52But I might just sort of take the ratio for granted and then focus on how I assign tasks to those different buckets. Okay. Yeah. Thank you.

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