Money Isn’t Rare | with Learn, Practice, Train

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1:29Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

2:09It's interesting how infrequently money comes up in meditations. Here was a guy who had incredible wealth, whose predecessors obsessed over it, found it to be the source of both pleasure and conflict. Yet in his private meditations, it hardly comes up at all. In his actions, we see Marcus was conscious of money, though, but primarily as a means to an end, not as an end to itself. He was more interested in what it could do for other people. He declined gifts and inheritances. He gave liberally to the poor. He sold off palace furnishings at Rome's lowest point. But perhaps these attitudes are related.

2:45Because Marcus did not think particularly highly of money, he was comfortable in his ability to be generous. At one point, he told the Senate that he did not regard himself in possession of any of his wealth. Belongs to the people, he said. Even the house I live in is not mine. There can be virtue in frugality. Cleanthes seemed to be an incredibly hard worker, a manual laborer no less, who spent little of what he earned. But frugality and diligence with money can also be a vice. It makes finances loom too large in our lives, makes us throw good time after bad. After all, it's not just enough to earn money, but we have to manage it and make it grow.

3:21We can come to identify with the fruits of our labor and our success, which makes it hard to spend, even on necessary things. Hard to be generous, hard to share. Money isn't rare. There's nothing precious about precious stones. It's all incredibly common. Most of the people who have it are not impressive. Most of the great fortunes are, in fact, the opposite of great. The way to think about money is as a tool. And what do the Stoics use their tools for? To do good, to get better, to make the world better. We can all do the same.

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4:43Learn, practice, train. This is today's entry, May 19th, from the Daily Stoic. And the first quote comes to us from Epictetus 219 in the Discourses. That's why philosophers warn us not to be satisfied with mere learning, but to add practice and then training, he says. For as time passes, we forget what we learned and end up doing the opposite and hold opinions the opposite of what we should hold. And then we meditate very few Few people can simply watch an instructional video or hear something explained and then know backward and forward how to do it. Most of us actually have to do something several times in order to truly learn.

5:20One of the hallmarks of the martial arts, military training, athletic training of almost any kind is the hours upon hours of monotonous practice. An athlete at the highest level will train for years to perform movements that can last mere seconds or less. The two-minute drill, how to escape from a chokehold, the perfect jumper, simply knowing isn't enough. It must be absorbed into the muscles in the body. It must become part of us, or we risk losing it the second we experience stress or difficulty. And this is true with philosophical principles as well. You can't just hear something once and expect to rely on it when the world is crashing down around us.

5:59Remember, Mark Surrealis wasn't writing his meditations for other people. He was actively meditating for himself. Even as a successful wise and experienced man, he was until the last days of his life practicing and training to do the right thing. Like a black belt, he was still showing up to the dojo every day to roll. Like a professional athlete, he still showed up to practice each week, even though others thought it was unnecessary. I just, it's funny, I'm recording this shortly after I just got off recording the podcast with Admiral James Stavridis, his new book, To Risk It, All Nine Conflicts in the Crucible of Decision, which was a great book I recommended.

6:39I'm not sure if this is coming out before or after the interview, but it doesn't really matter. One of the things we talked about in that interview was his sort of framework for responding well to the crucible of decision. And he says that you have to prepare in advance, right? You have to train. You're not, as they say, in the military, you don't rise to the occasion. You sink to the level of your training. You have to meditate on this stuff over and over and over again. And he says two big things. He says, one, you have to know what you believe. You have to know your standards. He talks about in his other great book, which I recommend, Sailing True North, he's basically saying, what's true north?

7:20What do you believe? What do you hold important? What are you ascribed to? And that's partly why we study the Stoics, to learn what we hold sacred or dear, what the right thing is. And he says you also have to know yourself, what you're capable of, what your weaknesses are, what your tendencies are, what your biases are. So then in that moment of stress or difficulty or pressure, you know what you need to think about, what you need to turn to, what you default to. Epictetus says that the key of stoicism is so that when life hits you with stuff, you're able to say, this is what I trained for. And I do feel when I think about the pandemic, I mean, it's stressful and difficult, and I messed it up in so many ways, and there's things I would do differently.

8:12But I do feel some gratitude for what stoicism prepared me for, and I feel pride in how I deployed and used that stoicism to keep myself safe, to keep my family safe, to know what to value, to know what my obligations were, how to get through it, how to get through the boredom of it and the difficulty of it and the stress of it and all those things. I had prepared for it, right? And I think Epictetus is reminding us though that it's not a single preparation, that if you prepare once, the second you stop, entropy is working on that preparation. There's an expiration date to it. They have to constantly be updating and reinforcing and adding and reevaluating and going over it, over it, over it.

9:00And that's what meditations is to me. It's Marcus Aurelius saying stuff that he already knows. He knows this stuff. He studied it a bazillion times. He's heard it a billion times, but he's playing his scales each morning. He's reviewing his note cards before the test each day, right? He's going back over the advice from his father and stepfather and mentors and heroes. He's getting it fresh in his mind. He's reminding himself of who he is, what he needs to do, what true north is. So that in those moments of crisis, in his case, an actual pandemic, a war, a flood, a coup, all this stuff, he was there.

9:42And think about Epictetus, right? First off, he studies and learns Stoicism when he's a slave, becomes a philosopher. But then, right, exile comes for him, and he has to go through that again. But if he hadn't been preparing and thinking and talking, keeping these thoughts at hand, that's the other Stoke idea, to write these things down, talk about them, post them up, you know, get it, go through it over and over and over again, keep it top of mind. And that's what this is about. That's what we're doing here at Daily Stoke. That's why this is a daily practice. That's why I wrote the daily book.

10:18That's why the journal is there. It's about the daily practice and the daily training of it. And I hope you avail yourself of it. So when that moment comes, when you find yourself in the crucible of decision, you can do what you need to do. You can meet destiny as it hopes you will. And that's the thought for today. Do check out To Risk It All, Nine Conflicts and The Crucible of Decision. It's a great new book by Admiral James DeVritus. Carry it at the Painted Porch. You can get it anywhere books are sold. It's probably a great audio book too. And I really appreciated him coming on the podcast.

10:49So stay tuned or look at that interview if you haven't checked it out already. And I'll talk to you soon.

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