It’s About The Promises You Make To Yourself

0:02Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailysteak.com.

0:29It's about the promises you make to yourself. It's a famous story. It appears in all the great biographies of Theodore Roosevelt. Two of my favorites are The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris and Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough. It appears in Discipline is Destiny and the Obstacle is the Way. A young asthmatic teddy, smart but frail, is approached by his father who tells him that although the boy has brains, he hasn't got the body. He hasn't got the strength to make good on his intellectual gifts. I'll make my body, Roosevelt said in response and proceeded to lift weights, hike mountains, ride horses, wrestle, box, swim laps, and even learn judo.

1:08Thanks 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 into 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. It 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.

1:53We 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. Because 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.

2:33Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. But there's another perspective on this story that we often glide over, for it was Teddy's sister, Corrine, who witnessed the exchange between father and son. What struck her about it years later, she said, was that this was her brother's first important promise to himself. Watching him work out in the gym and on the porch of their brownstone, she was watching him fulfill that promise, keeping it to himself. And that's what the virtue of discipline is about. Self-discipline is about the promises you keep with yourself, and not just the physical ones.

3:15It's about doing what you say and not doing what you say you won't. The decision to wake up early, the decision not to reach for the bottle, the decision to show up on time, the decision to push yourself a little further even though your body aches, the decision not to procrastinate, the decision to do your best. We all make promises to ourselves, set goals, set standards, make plans. We don't all keep them.

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