Forget Your Dreams. Do This Instead. | Our Duty To Learn

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.

0:55Forget your dreams. Do this instead. Epictetus was born into slavery and he spent the next 30 years in that institution. the Roman kind, which meant he was considered property, had no rights, could be abused or killed without legal consequence. He wasn't even given a name. Epictetus just means acquired one. He was tortured. And when Epictetus finally found freedom, he was almost immediately exiled by a tyrannical emperor. You know in Les Mis where she sings about how the dream she dreamed was so much different than the hell she was living? That was basically Epictetus' real-life story. He was treated like an animal, designed to be used up and cast aside.

1:38And while no one would say that Epictetus was the lightest or the most fun of the Stoics, considering what he went through, his writing and his philosophy could have been, perhaps should have been, a lot darker. He had every right to be bitter, every right to be angry, every right to be a nihilist. After all, the world he lived in was nihilistic and cruel and dark. But instead, Epictetus was funny. He was inspirational. He was strong. wrong. We have a daily stoic video that focuses on some of his keys to resilience, but one of the main reasons he wasn't broken by his experience was a simple stoic insight.

2:11The key to life, he said, was not to dream for things to be a certain way, but to dream for them to be the way they are, to be grateful that you had the fate you had, to be the best you are capable of being inside that. If anyone ever had an excuse to give up, to grow cynical, to hate the world that was Epictetus, but he chose something different. And so can we. No matter what we're going through, we always have the power to respond with virtue, with humor, with grace, with wisdom. That's real strength. And that's real freedom.

2:49I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually I 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.

3:27Everything 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. Our duty to learn. This is today's entry, July 7th, in the Daily Stoic. 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living. This is what you should teach me, how to be like Odysseus, Seneca writes in Moral Letters 88.7. and how to love my country, wife and father, and how even after suffering a shipwreck, I might keep sailing on course to those honorable ends. And I write, many school teachers teach the Odyssey all wrong. They teach the dates.

4:07They debate whether Homer was really an author or not, whether he was blind. They explain the oral tradition. They tell students what a cyclops is or how the Trojan horse worked. Seneca's advice to someone studying the classics is to forget all that. the dates, the names, the places, they don't matter. What matters is the moral. If you get everything else wrong from the Odyssey, but you're left understanding the importance of perseverance, the dangers of hubris, the risks of temptation and distraction, well then you really learned something. We're not trying to ace tests or impress teachers here.

4:41We are reading and studying to live, to be good human beings always and forever. Of course, there's an entertainment element to something like The Odyssey or really any great book. That's why it's survived for thousands of years as a text. There's literary value as well. You'd study it as a writer. And by the way, my favorite translation of The Odyssey is this one by Emily Wilson, who's also Seneca's biographer. If you haven't read The Greatest Empire by Emily Wilson, you absolutely should. and you should read her newer-ish translation of the Odyssey, which I quite, quite enjoyed, and I actually carry both of them in the bookstore.

5:22It's perennial. It stands the test of time. All of which is to say, I also love how perennial Seneca's example is, right? Like, I'm sure you remember the pedanticness and the boringness with which you dissected texts in English class or whatever in high school. It's like quizzes. What year did this happen? And what is the name of so-and-so's father in insert novel, right? They're trying to test whether you read it or not as if just reading it is the accomplishment. No, you have to internalize the ideas, the lessons that the author was trying to teach. You have to understand it and translate it into insights as a human being, not recite trivia from it.

6:10And sadly, that's what so much mediocre education focuses on. They get us to memorize things. I think this is funny, too. This is like the knock on kids who have been raised in this digital era about how they don't remember things. They can just Google it. What matters is that they remember the gist of the insight, not like the dates and places. Screw that, right? Does it actually matter to you in a tangible way whether Napoleon was a real person or a literary character, right? No. The insights that you can learn from his life, the strategic lessons, of course, even if they were fictional, obviously the fact that they are real makes them more worthy of study.

6:48But my point is, you don't study Franco-Prussian battles unless you're going to become a general or something. You study them to learn about hubris, to learn about celerity and hustle, to learn about creativity and courage, right? To also learn about overreach and stupidity and the power of alliances, right? We study history to learn those things. But again, you mispronounce Chrysippus or, you know, sometimes I'll refer to Epictetus as a Roman slave and someone will give me an angry email. Actually, he's Greek. It's like, okay, but he lived in Rome and was owned by a Roman. I think we're getting into a rather pointless conversation.

7:30What matters is what you learn from Epictetus and his example, right? I bet if you'd asked Stockdale, if you said, oh, you know, the Roman slave Epictetus, he wouldn't have been like, oh, I think he's Greek, right? No, what he took from Epictetus was the power of the courage and the fortitude and the strength and the lessons. And that's what he applied there in the Hanoi Hilton. That's why we're studying the Stokes. And that's how we learn. This is how I try to teach my kids. This is what I try to study. The trivia is not important, right? The trivia is not important. What matters is internalizing the moral lessons.

8:05Epicurus would say that vain is the word of the philosophers, does not heal the suffering of man. I would say vain are most facts that you're not going to apply and use, not even in your work, but to be a better human being. That's the purpose of this study. That's the purpose of this philosophy. That's what I try to talk about here on this podcast. And it's a wonderful reminder, again, from a really smart person. Seneca was brilliant. He knew lots of facts. He knew all those things about the Odyssey. But what he really wanted to learn how to do, what the study of his life was, was how to be like Odysseus.

8:38Although I think when you read Emily Wilson's translations, you're also reminded how not to be like Odysseus, because I saw in her translation that he was much more of a flawed character than perhaps I'd felt early on in my readings of that wonderful poem slash play. Again, is it a play? Is it a poem? Who gives a shit? What matters is what you do with it. And I do urge you to read it and read it for the right reasons and read all the things that you read for the right reasons just to become a better human being in the world.

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