How Could It Possibly Help You? | Test Your Impressions

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.

0:55How could this possibly help you? 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 Saddlebanks. as did four-star General James Mattis, who carried it with him on deployments throughout the Middle East.

1:41It'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?

2:26How do I learn how to treat other people when they can be so petty and miserable and annoying? How do I treat myself better too? And Marcus Reulius 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.

3:10And 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.

3:52And we put that together. It's called How to Read Marcus Aurelius. It's a guide we've done. And we're relaunching it because we're going to do a book club discussion and Q &A about it on April 26th, which is Marcus's birthday. 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. And then I'm excited to say that I wrote a new foreword for the Gregory Hayes translation, which is coming out in hardcover and paperback, I guess, audiobook and ebook. If you haven't read Meditations, you want to read this, I think that's really exciting.

4:29You can grab that. I think it'll do well. 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. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove in Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house.

5:08It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course.

5:48Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

6:24Test your impressions. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living, which I myself just worked on this morning. I do the journal every morning. One of Epictetus's key teachings was all about testing our impressions, any experience, perception, or circumstance that was in front of us. And he uses a key verb to emphasize this practice 10 times in discourses and once in the opening of the Inchiridion. And the word carries the meaning of the assayer, one who tests fine metals and coins to verify their authenticity. In one of the most memorable uses, Epictetus compares our need to test impressions to what is done with coins and how the skilled merchant can hear a counterfeit coin cast upon a table just as a musician would detect a sour note.

7:13So this week, go through the process of assaying everything that comes before you, assuming it all to be counterfeit or misleading until we can prove otherwise. And, you know, it's funny. I think I've really first wrapped my head around this idea of to assay or the word assay because at Cerro Gorda, you may have heard my interview with Brent Underwood, who's one of my longtime, I guess he was formerly my intern and great guy who works at Brass Check. He's one of the partners and he's helped build Daily Stoic and someone I talk to on the phone almost every day. And a few years ago, he bought this ghost town in the mountains of Southern California called Cerro Gordo.

7:47And he's been trying to sort of turn it into this like resort. But anyways, when I went out and visited, he showed me this building. It's called the assay office. So the miners would pull the silver out of the ground in the ore or whatever. And sometimes I don't know exactly how it works, but they would take it to this office. And this is where like the guy with a brain, the dispassionate observer, the money man would test it and let them know just what they found, how rich it was, how valuable it was, what percentage it was, this or that or this. This was like the filter through which all the rocks pulled out of this mining town were filtered through.

8:22And just because you thought it was valuable, didn't matter unless the essay office came through and said, boom, boom, boom, and stamped it and gave you, you know, another funny little thing is that the brothel was located immediately next door. So you'd find out you'd just become a rich man. And then, of course, you go do your business. But the idea is you have to put everything to the test. And that's what Epictetus is saying. He says, when it comes to money where we feel our clear interest, we have an entire art where the tester uses many means to discover the worth, just as we give great attention to judging things that might steer us badly.

8:52But when it comes to our own ruling principle, we yawn and doze off, accepting any appearances that flash by without counting the costs. That's from Discourses 120. And then he says in 2.18, first off, don't let the force of an impression carry you away. Say to it, hold it up a bit and let me see who you are and where you are from. Let me put you to the test. And then in Inchiridion, he says, from the very beginning, make it your practice to say to every harsh impression, you are an impression and not at all what you appear to be. Next, examine it and test it by the rules you possess, the first and greatest of which is this, whether it belongs to the things in our control or not in our control.

9:30And if the latter prepared to respond, it is nothing to me. So look, if you went and got your rocks tested at Sarah Gordon, they found out to be worthless stones. You wouldn't be like, but I want them to be what they are. I'm going to continue to pretend, right? You wouldn't spend money that you just found out you don't actually have. So this process of testing one's perceptions and one's facts is a really essential part of the process. You can't just go through life pretending things are what they are or taking them at first glance because there's so many factors at play from cognitive biases to your upbringing to just misleading appearances.

10:07You have to put everything to the test. You have to see things as they actually are. And this process of assaying everything that's in front of you is a key stoic exercise. And I hope you can build on this practice this week. Slow down, take a minute, put it to the test, see if it's real or counterfeit, see if it's what everyone else wants you to see. or, as Mark Cerelius says, see what is really there.

10:57wanted to say thank you.

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