How Can This Improve Your Life? | The Color of Your Thoughts

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: It was never meant to be seen by prying eyes. It certainly wasn't meant to be published as a book. It was written in an antiquated foreign language full of ancient philosophy that, until recently few had ever even heard of. And the man doing the writing lived a life unimaginably different and distant from yours. Why would you bother reading a book like that? How could it possibly affect and improve your life? Yet this is a book that Frederick the Great reportedly rode into battle with in his saddlebags, as did four-star General James Mattis, who carried it with him on deployments throughout the Middle East.

0:56Ryan Holiday: It's a book that American presidents have read and raved about. It is a book that Robert Louis Stevenson, the great novelist, described as unlike any other. It's a book that actresses and musicians and entrepreneurs are still reading to this day. So why has Meditations by Marcus Aurelius endured and influenced across so many centuries? and what makes its ancient wisdom still relevant to the modern problems we face today. It's because in meditations, Marcus attempts to answer the questions we all end up asking ourselves at some point. What's the good life? How do I live it? How do I stop running from pain and misfortune and start dealing with my problems?

1:41Ryan Holiday: How do I learn how to treat other people when they It can be so petty and miserable and annoying. How do I treat myself better too? And Marcus Aurelius answers these questions with clarity and wisdom in meditations. In fact, he gives us a kind of guidebook for living, a set of rules to live our life by practical exercises that made him a better person and can make you one too. That is why people have read meditations for the last 2 ,000 years. That's why it's the favorite of presidents and prisoners, men and women, soldiers and activists, entrepreneurs and everyday people. But as Heraclitus said, you can't step in the same river twice because the river changes and so have you.

2:25Ryan Holiday: And meditations in that way is a book you're supposed to read more than once. And while meditations can be easy to read, it's also the work of a lifetime to explore its vast depths. which is what we've been working on over here at Daily Stoic for the last couple of years. We've been trying to create like a kind of a guide to meditations, a companion to help you make your way through the book, not just once, but over and over and over again. And we've spent hundreds of thousands of hours, not just with the text itself, but also with experts and translators and biographers and students of Stoicism to help understand what each phrase and idea and concept in it means.

3:10Ryan Holiday: And we put that together. It's called How to Read Marcus Aurelius. It's a guide we've done. And we're relaunching it. We're going to do a book club discussion and Q &A. So anyone who takes the course can participate in that. And if you haven't read Meditations, we've got a great edition. We've got a leather edition in the Daily Stoic store. I think that's really exciting. So you can grab that. I think you will enjoy it. It's really awesome. I'll link to all this in today's show notes, obviously. Or you can just go over to dailystoic.com slash meditations to check it out.

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4:25Ryan Holiday: It doesn't store your information. It helps stop it from being stored and tracked and misused. There's no signups, no subscriptions, and no learning curve. Just visit Duck.ai and start chatting. Duck.go has been protecting privacy online since 2008. And if you want to use AI without giving up your privacy, visit Duck.ai. Today, that's Duck.ai. A private way to chat with AI from Duck.go, where AI is always optional and private. This month at Wayfair, they're putting on their biggest annual sale of the year. From April 25th through the 27th, it's Way Day. and you can score the best deals in home, like 80 % off with free shipping on everything.

5:04Ryan Holiday: And Wayfair makes it easy to find exactly what fits your style and needs, furniture, decor, home improvement, outdoor essentials. It's all on sale on Wayday. Upgrade your space with quality pieces that work within your budget. And as I said, everything ships fast and free during Wayday. If you shop Wayfair Verified, You get their team of product specialists who vet everything by hand using a 10-point quality inspection, so you know you're getting a quality piece no matter your budget. Wayfair's got a ton of options. Even bigger furniture that would normally be a pain to ship is conveniently delivered right to your door.

5:39Ryan Holiday: Wayday is the sale to shop the best deals in home. Get up to 80 % off with fast and free shipping on everything. Head over to Wayfair.com from April 25th through the 27th to shop Wayday. W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com. Wayfair. Every style, every home. The color of your thoughts. This is the Daily Stoic entry for April 1st. Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impressions. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 516. If you bend your body into a sitting position every day for a long enough period of time, the curvature of your spine changes.

6:27Ryan Holiday: A doctor can tell from a radiograph or an autopsy whether someone sat at a desk for a living. If you shove your feet into tiny, narrow dress shoes each day, your feet will begin to take on that form as well. And the same is true for our mind. If you hold a perpetually negative outlook, soon enough, everything you encounter will seem negative. Close it off and you will become closed-minded. Color it with the wrong thoughts and your life will be dyed the same. I wanted to show Gregory Hayes' translation of that same quote. I think you guys will like it. He says it interesting too. He says, the things you think about determine the quality of your mind.

7:09Ryan Holiday: Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts. Color it with a run of thoughts like this. He says, anywhere you lead your life, you can lead a good one. But lives are led at court. Then good ones can be. Things gravitate toward what they were intended for. What things gravitate towards is their goal. A thing's goal is what benefits it. It's good. A rational being's good is unselfishness. What were we born for? That's nothing new, remember? Lower things for the sake of higher ones and higher ones for one another. Things that have a consciousness are higher than things that don't. And those with the logos still higher.

7:46Ryan Holiday: Really what meditations is, is an example of Marcus Aurelius trying to dye his soul with good thoughts. He's trying to write every day these little mantras, these little reminders of what he believes, of who he wants to be, of what life should be. You know, people believe in the law of attraction, this idea of, you know, like attracts like. Of course, the law of attraction is bullshit. It was created by con artists to trick people. Not saying that, but I am saying if you are a negative person, you are going to see things negatively. If you are a positive person, you are going to see things positively.

8:24Ryan Holiday: Being positive doesn't attract positive things in your life. It does allow you, however, to see positive in situations that other people see negative. Even the idea of the obstacle being the way. Marcus Aurelius is not saying life's going to be rosy and fun and awesome. Marcus is saying life's going to roll obstacles in your path. But if you have this kind of stoic optimism, if you've dyed your soul with the right thoughts, you'll be able to find the good inside that. So what I try to do in this podcast, what I try to do in my own life, what I try to do with the tattoos on my arm is dye my soul with the right thoughts.

9:01Ryan Holiday: Literally dye my skin with the right thoughts to be a reminder. It's why I made the Daily Stoic medallions, why I carry the four virtues one and the memento mori one in my pocket. I want these things to be a part of me. I want them to be mantras. I want them to be reminders. I never want to lose track or sight of them. It's what I try to do in my journal. I know all this stuff intellectually, but it's taking the time to write them down on the page, to write it down for the thousandth time, for the fifth year in a row, whatever it is. It's the practice. It's the dying. It's the reminding. It's the going over.

9:36Ryan Holiday: This is what shapes us. This is what makes us who we can be. I hope you can do that. I hope you're getting what the point of this practice is. Even if you've heard me say this stuff before, that's the point. It's supposed to come back through you. It's supposed to be the practice of it. So we're dyeing ourselves repeatedly with the right thoughts. We're not trying to magically make the world something different than it is, but we're trying to make ourselves different inside that world because that's what we control. So I hope you dye your soul with some good thoughts today. I hope this meditation helps you do that a little bit.

10:09Ryan Holiday: Our soul is dyed by the color of our thoughts. We are dyed by the impressions. Our life becomes what our mind makes it. Our life is what our thoughts make it. That's what Stoicism is. And I hope you follow that today.

10:28Ryan Holiday: Hey, 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.

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