Do You Keep These Thoughts at Hand? | Clarify Your Intentions

0:05Welcome 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.

0:56Marcus Aurelius read Epictetus a lot. And we know this because meditations is proof of it. Almost every page has some direct quote or allusions to Epictetus. We can also find upon deeper inspection references to the works of Panathias, Chrysippus, the plays of Euripides, Zeno, and countless other philosophers. How does someone develop recall like that? How did he become so wise not just on the page, but in life? By repetition and practice. Although Marcus Aurelius never refers to Seneca, it's clear that he had absorbed a piece of advice from that stoic too. You must linger on a limited number of master thinkers and digest their works, Seneca wrote, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.

1:42Over and over again, the Stoics poured over the same texts so the ideas could take firm hold so that they could be absorbed, so that it could become muscle memory infused into their DNA. Once? No, that's not enough. It's about the reading and the rereading, writing and journaling and discussing and reflecting and experiencing. As Epictetus commanded every day and night, keep thoughts like this at hand, write them and read them aloud. Talk to yourself and others about them. When I published the Daily Stoic back in 2016, by the way, it's for sale for$2.99. You can grab that on Amazon or iBooks, wherever you get your eBooks.

2:22I had no idea it would sell millions of copies and spend hundreds of cumulative weeks on the bestseller list. But that's because it happened to tap into that now timeless stoic practice of reading and rereading, never stepping in the same river twice. Marcus would write about how the philosopher is one with their weapon, like a boxer more than a swordsman. A boxer just clenches their fist, a fencer has to go pick something up. And that's what we're trying to do as we study. We're trying to create a practice, get the reps that fuses us with our philosophy, that makes us one with it, that inserts it into our DNA so that we are forever changed by it.

2:59And if you want these ideas, these stoic ideas, to take firm hold in your mind this year, then you'll have to do more than skim. It's not about reading a book and finishing it. It's not about getting the gist of it, as Marcus derided. It's about making it a part of your life and your mind. It's about lingering and digesting it until it takes firm hold, never to be dislodged. And like I said, the Daily Stoic ebook has been dropped to$2.99 as an ebook right now. So if there's someone you want to give it to as a gift, if you want to get it in another format, you can grab that on Amazon or anywhere you get your ebooks.

3:34I'll link to it in today's show notes. If you want a premium edition, one that should stand the test of time, hopefully forever, you can grab the leather edition of the Daily Stoic. Also, that's in the Daily Stoic store. I'll link to that too. Happy New Year, everyone.

3:54A couple of years ago, one of my wife's words for the year, we try to think about it, a word that we're going to live by the next year. One of those words was systems. The idea was setting up better systems, putting systems in place that just make us better, more efficient, more effective, more responsible. and nowhere are systems more important than when it comes to your finances, right? Managing your money doesn't have to be a struggle. It can be automated. It can be accessible. It can be tracked. And that's where today's sponsor, Monarch, comes in. Monarch is an all-in-one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier.

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6:23Clarify your intentions. This is the January 5th entry from The Daily Stoic. Today's entry starts with a quote from Seneca. He says in On Tranquility of the Mind, Let all your efforts be directed to something. Let it keep that end in view. It's not activity that disturbs people, but false conceptions of things that drive them mad. And then I write, Law 29 of the 48 Laws of Power is plan all the way to the end. Robert Greene writes, by planning to the end, you will not be overwhelmed by circumstances and you will know when to stop. Gently guide fortune and help determine the future by thinking far ahead.

7:05And as it happens, the second habit in the seven habits of highly effective people is begin with an end in mind. Having an end in mind is no guarantee that you'll reach it. No Stoic would tolerate that assumption, but not having an end in mind is a guarantee that you won't. To the Stoics, false conceptions are responsible not just for disturbances in the soul, but for chaotic and dysfunctional lives and operations. When your efforts are not directed at a cause or a purpose, how will you know what to do day in and day out? How will you know what to say no to and what to say yes to? How will you know when you've had enough, when you've reached your goal, when you have gotten off track, if you have never defined what those things are?

7:48The answer is that you cannot, and so you are driven into failure or worse, into madness by the oblivion of directionlessness. One of my favorite quotes from Seneca, and actually Montaigne quotes it as well, he says, you know, if you know not what port you are sailing to, no wind is favorable. If you don't know where you're trying to go, if you don't know what the end is, if you don't know what you want your life to look like, what you want this project to look like, if you haven't defined what success is to you, you're going to have a real hard time, not just getting there, but making every individual decision in the course of your life.

8:27When I consult with people, that's one of the things I ask them almost always, especially authors, I go, what does success look like to you? Because so often we just go, well, I want what that person has and that person has and that person has and that person has. Or we go, oh, what other people are doing? That's what I want, right? This is what Renee Girard says. We don't know what we want, so we want what other people want. We just sort of default to the defaults. And we haven't actually thought about how that fits for us, what that means to us, what that actually looks like, if we'll actually be happy with that thing that we're sacrificing and working so hard for.

9:03So when you clarify your intentions, when you get clear about what you're trying to do, who you're trying to be, who you want to be when you get there, you're going to be in a tough spot. And so at the beginning of a year, it's a great time to think about that, to think about who you want to be, to think about what you want to do, to think about what success looks like and define it concretely, not abstractly, but concretely. You know, the reason Robert talks about planning all the way to the end is he talks about, like, this isn't just a problem of somebody at, you know, step zero, not knowing where to go, but this is the person who on step 99 doesn't stop after one more step.

9:39They go through that, they keep going and they turn, they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They go too far, They go past the mark they aimed for. So you plan all the way to the end so you're not taken to excess, so you're not distracted. And so you know how to plan, what to do, you know what's important. If you don't know where you're sailing, no wind is favorable, right? You can't ask for directions to a destination you haven't defined. So today, here at the beginning of the year, let's spend some time defining precisely that, our intentions, our goals, what success looks like to us. And it's fun to be starting the Daily Stoic again, and hopefully the same is true for you.

10:25All right. Talk tomorrow.

10:30Hey, 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.

11:07Thank you.