Do You Have One Of These?

0:00I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$1.49 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$2.99 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

0:37Everything they sell has high standards to help you shop with confidence. Enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market.

0:50Welcome 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 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to 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.

1:41Do you have one of these? One of the most interesting things you come to understand about meditations is how unoriginal it is. It's largely made up of short quotes and passages from other writers. On one page, we see Marcus Aurelius using a metaphor from Panathias. On another, he's quoting Epictetus from memory and then riffing on something he heard from Rusticus. Here he is quoting a lost line from Euripides' play, You shouldn't give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don't care at all. Here he is quoting Chrysippus, and then it's Socrates, and then Homer, and Plato, and Heraclitus, and Democritus, and then Aristophanes, and Pindar, and Hesiod, and on and on and on.

2:23In a way, Meditations is really Marcus Aurelius' commonplace book, a place where, for centuries even before Marcus, lovers of books and ideas have collected observations, quotes, ideas, diary entries, and anecdotes that they wanted to preserve. In fact, it was Goethe who said that a collection of anecdotes and maxims is the greatest treasure for a man of the world. He said we can draw on them not just in conversation, but in moments of crisis. Montaigne's essays, filled with so many quotes, read as if they might have been torn directly from his commonplace book. Emerson referred to his journals as his savings bank, and it's true many of his best talks and writing first appeared there.

3:08Anne Frank filled her diary with passages from biographies and history books she was reading, celebrating sentences she liked and anecdotes that meant something to her. Look, the Daily Stoic itself would not exist without my habit of collecting stories and quotes and ideas on 4x6 note cards, which I learned how to do as a research assistant. Every one of those cards is a story, a quote, a lesson, a moment I wrestled with an insight. Those cards become chapters, those chapters become books, sometimes those become Daily Stoic emails and episodes. The Daily Stoic is here because of my commonplace book.

3:48And if you're not keeping one, you're missing out. Whether we're beginning some creative work or we're trying to solve some complex problem, we should never be starting from zero. Invariably, at some point in our lives, we will have seen or heard or read something that could be of use in this situation. The question is, will we remember it? Will we have access to it? So whether it's in a journal like Marcus, a diary like Anne Frank, or index cards like me, you should keep a commonplace book so that in the end, it can keep you. And the new book, Wisdom Takes Work, has a whole chapter about how to keep a commonplace book, the power of journaling, and the power of clarifying your thinking on the page.

4:30I'm really proud of this new book. It's out now. Thanks to everyone who's been supporting it. It's meant a lot. And if you haven't read it, you can grab it at dailystoic.com slash wisdom. Thanks, everyone.

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