Don’t Waste Your Gifts | The Secret To Better Habits in 2023

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1:29Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On 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.

1:54Don't waste your gifts. There is, as we have talked about many times, a tinge of sadness in the story of Seneca. This immensely talented and wise man spent the best years of his life advising and collaborating with one of the worst emperors in history. As James Rahm illustrates in his fascinating book, Dying Every Day, and you can listen to our podcast episode with James, I'll link to it, Seneca's ambition, his drive, it took him fatally off track from where he should have been. We should all see this as a cautionary tale. Nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand, Oscar Wilde writes in De Profundus.

2:32Wilde himself traded his genius for pleasure and parties and fame. He let his ego get the best of him. He let his anger get the best of him. I ceased to be the Lord over myself, he said of himself. I was no longer the captain of my soul. It wasn't his fault that he was ultimately persecuted under unjust laws, just as Seneca was unjustly killed by the man he taught. but Wilde had committed his own crime against himself long before that. As Seneca said, we must always be under our own power, even as we walk the halls of power or chase success. We must be the captains of our souls, even if we are the captain of industry.

3:07We cannot waste the gifts we have been given. We cannot give ourselves over to superficial pleasures or honors. Both Seneca and Oscar Wilde were victims, and they couldn't have stopped that, but they were first victims of themselves and that in the end was what they regretted most as will we

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4:31There's never a bad time to examine your habits, to set new ones. But at the end of one year and the beginning of a new one, there is the opportunity for what you might call a clean break. Seneca starts each year plunging into the Tiber River in Rome. I think he's washing off the old year and starting fresh for a new year. He's also, I think, starting by doing something hard and difficult and challenging. That's one of my favorite parts of stoicism and one of my favorite parts of the year. Every year, I try to think about who I want to be in the year to come and make real choices about how to get there.

5:08One of the most important habits you can practice is patience. One of the things I learned with this bookstore is the truth of what they call Hofstetter's Law. Always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstetter's Law into account. We want our progress now. We want our success now. We want our rewards now. But if you can practice delayed gratification, if you can understand that it takes a while, that it's part of a process, you're almost always going to be more successful. Think of Marcus Aurelius. He's told he's going to be emperor, but Antoninus is going to rule first, and they think it's going to be one or two or three or four or five years.

5:43It's like 20 years. He has to wait 20 years before he can become the emperor of Rome. So if Marcus doesn't have patience, if life doesn't force him to practice the virtue of patience, he'd have gone crazy. He'd have lost his mind, and then he wouldn't have actually been as good as he was as emperor. All things require patience, whether you're writing books, whether you're being a leader, whether you have kids, learning how to practice patience is critical. And what I think when I'm stuck in traffic, when a flight is delayed, when my book's going slower than I thought, I go, this isn't frustrating.

6:13This isn't annoying. Although it is those things. I say, this is an opportunity to get reps with patience. This is the opportunity to practice patience. And I will be better for having gone through this. I own the morning. I'm a morning person. I tackle the morning. I kick the shit out of the morning. I am successful in the morning. I wake up early. I take my kids outside. We run or we go on a walk. One of my rules, I don't touch my phone for the first one hour that I'm awake. Then one of my big habits is I tackle my big creative project first. I don't get sucked into email first. I don't have a meeting first.

6:52I don't watch TV first. I tackle the big creative project first. That wasn't just naturally who I was. This is something I had to develop and build. Seneca says that life without design is erratic. Build a routine and stick to it.

7:08Little things are not small. Well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing. Marx really says we assemble our life action by action, step by step. No one can stop you from that. So today, as you get discouraged, as you look at this goal, it's way, way off in the distance. Don't focus on that. Focus on the immediate task in front of you. Concentrate like a Roman, as Marcus Aurelius says, as if it's the only thing that matters, as if it's the last thing that you're doing in your life. Many mickles make a muckle, as Washington said, stuff adds up. That's how you get there. One step at a time, one day at a time, one action at a time, one insight at a time.

7:44Just go now. Most people don't read enough or at all. Those of us that read, there's all these books out there that we haven't read that we want to read. But what about the books that we read when we were 20 and we didn't even understand what we weren't understanding about it? What about a book like Marcus Aurelius' Meditations that every time you read it, something new or better appears in it. One habit we can practice this year, it's not just reading, but it's rereading. Seneca talks about lingering on the works of the master thinkers. One of the pieces of advice that Marcus says he gets from Rusticus, his philosophy teacher, is that he can't just be satisfied getting the gist of a book.

8:18He has to really understand what it means, which means reading it not once, but twice or 10 times or a hundred times. Think about better habits in 2023. Think about going back to books that were influential when you were younger, that you didn't like when you were younger, that challenged you when you were younger, or just feel apropos or of the moment right now, go back and reread them this year and you'll be surprised what you find out and learn. Who do you associate with? Studies show like if you have unhealthy friends, you're going to be unhealthy. If you have ambitious friends, you're going to be ambitious.

8:49My father said this to me as a kid. He said, Ryan, you become like your friend. So who do you surround yourself with? who's your peer group? We have the Daily Silk Life community, by the way, which I'd love to have you join. I have a Facebook group, get extra emails, you get Q &As with me. But the idea is, who's your community? In the ancient world, the Stoics had the Scipionic Circle, a group of Stoics who would get together and have dinner parties and events and debate philosophy and read books and share with each other. Even the relationship between Seneca and Lunsilius, which we get in Seneca's letters of a Stoic, it's them talking to each other.

9:18He says, we learn as we teach. By having this peer group, they both get better. So who are you spending time with this year? One foundational habit for next year, I think would be free up precious resources. You say you don't have time, but here you are watching this video. You watch too much news, spend too much time doom scrolling. We spend too much time on things that don't matter. One of the best habits changes I've made is sort of winnowing my worldview. Of course, you have to know what's going on in the world, but you don't have to obsess about it in real time. You don't have to consume things that make you feel crappy or awful or suck you into the catastrophizing mindset.

9:56If you wish to improve, Epictetus says, you have to be willing to not know about some things. Lock in time to focus on making better habits by eliminating things that are sucking up too much of your time now. You have to say no to the inessential. Marcus Reilly says most of what we do is not essential. But when we say no to those inessential things, when we eliminate them, it gives us a double benefit because then we can do the essential things better. So you have to realize that everything you say yes to means you're saying no to something else. But conversely, and most importantly, when you say no to the things that don't matter, it gives you the opportunity to say yes to the things that really do matter.

10:32And not a little yes, not a soft yes, but an emphatic both feet yes. And that's what you need to be successful and happy and good.

11:01We'll see you next time.

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