The Secret To Better Habits In 2025

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1:20Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

1:59Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It is insane to think we are at the halfway point of the 2020s. The first half, it seems like it was both yesterday and forever ago, right? One of my favorite Latin expressions is this phrase, Tempus Fugit or Time Flies. It's true. It does. It does. But as time passes, as the world changes, a lot of us stay the same. Incredible, unbelievable events transpire, but I don't know if I would say I've transformed in any incredible or unbelievable way. What we do is we go on being the way we always were, not unlike as the more vivid analogies in meditations where Mark Surrealist talks about these gladiators at the games who are torn half to pieces, covered in blood and gore and still pleading to be held over till tomorrow, he says, to be bitten and clawed again.

3:08So there's nothing magical about a new year or nothing particularly special about being halfway through a decade. There can be something powerful, I think, in the artificial construct in deciding to mark a turning point. There's a power in rituals and moments that encourage us to pause and reflect and reset. Even the Stoics embrace this. Seneca is said to have begun each year with a plunge into the icy Tiber River. It's a bracing ritual to wash away the old and prepare for the new. And so in today's episode, I'm going to talk about some habits and practices that I'm going to ask of myself in 2025 and in the second half of the 2020s.

3:53A lot of them are inspired by some stuff we're going to do in the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge, which you can still sign up for. Daily Stoic dot com slash challenge. I want to see you in there. By the way, you can get the Daily Stoic Life Challenge and all our challenges in 2025 for free. If you sign up for Daily Stoic Life, that's one of the benefits you get for being a member. Sign up there at dailystoiclife.com. I do want to see you in the challenge. And speaking of first, that's one of the things, which is do the essential things first. This is where you all start. I went hunting, actually, just a few days ago with the person I got this from, the novelist Philip Meyer.

4:30He wrote this book called The Sun, which I love. And he talked about it on the podcast. He said, you have to be very careful about what and to whom you give the best part of your day. And I think this is wisdom that productive people focus on. Like, I find that I fall apart towards the latter half of the day. So I want to get the important things done early. Today, I got here, I got up early, and I did the big chunk of editing I have to do on the new book. and then my kids showed up because they're out of school with my wife and now we're going to go to lunch. Now I can be more flexible because I got the important things done first.

5:05You want to protect the mornings, family, big picture work projects. My assistant knows not to schedule anything before mid-morning because early calls and meetings, that stuff doesn't just take up time. It saps the energy, the important energy that I need for the essential stuff. I want to get my best self to the most important things, that's a rule for the year. The other one is this idea of thinking small. We just interviewed James Clear on the podcast. And when he talks about atomic habits, again, a great book, I love the play on that, right? An atomic habit is a small thing, like an atom, that has an enormous amount of power within it, something that is the building blocks for other habits and practices.

5:53He talks about this British cycling team that transforms themselves by these little 1 % improvements. And, you know, Zeno said the same thing. He said, well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing. So, like, if you want to read more this year, it's not about finishing 50 books. It's about, hey, I'm going to read 20 pages a day, right? It's not about promising to run a marathon. It's starting with walking or getting a new pair of running shoes, right? You don't overhaul your diet in one night. you find one healthier option that you can use. As George Washington's favorite proverb went, many nickels make a muckle.

6:31And again, this ties into the next one, which is we want to focus on process, not goals. People start off the year, I want to lose 20 pounds. I want to write a book. I want to learn a new language. But as I talked about recently on this podcast, I don't have goals. I focus on not on finishing books, but on making day-to-day contributions. Am I doing my note cards? Am I sitting in the chair doing the writing? Did I come up with one idea that this is a writing or just a couple crappy pages a day? Focus on process, do the day in and day out stuff and publishable work comes out of the other side. Progress comes out of the other side.

7:08Yeah. And then let's think about where we can create or remove friction, right? You want to make bad habits harder to do. If you want to spend less time on social media, log out of the various apps, right? Delete the app, set screen time limits. It's just this little thing you have to click, oh, ignore to go back to it. But that makes it hard. Move the stuff around, shuffle it around and just make it a little bit harder. The extra step just makes you have to think twice and then you spend less time scrolling. And for good habits, you want to do the opposite. Make them as easy as possible. You pack your lunch the night before, you won't splurge on something unhealthy last minute because your hunger snuck up on you, right?

7:53Pick out the clothes the night before, maybe the whole week for your kids. And then there's less arguing, less delays in the morning, right? I have my journals on my desk or my bedside table. It's right there. I have to push them aside to not do the habit, right? How can you create friction to prevent negative habits, remove friction to encourage positive habits. One of my habits this year is like, how can I do more good? How can I be more generous, right? What are the points of friction that's preventing me from being generous? How can I reduce that? How can I do more good? Mark Cerullus talks about how if we move from one unselfish action to the other, we can find delight and stillness.

8:35We've been raising money for Feeding America. We just did something with GiveDirectly, trying to come up with things. I put them in the promotional calendar for Daily Stoic to encourage not just me to do it, but to bring the whole team along with it. And then as always, I'm always trying to do less, right? So how do we do less better in 2025? Matthew McConaughey told this great story on the Daily Stoic podcast. I'll run that little clip of his audio talking about getting A's and B's. Am I spending too much time on the minors and not majoring? Am I majoring too much in my minors? For me, like in my life, I had, it was around, I don't know, somewhere in the late nineties.

9:12I got a phone call from my office where I had a badass office, production office in Venice, had a staff of six paying the rent, paying the salaries. And I'm in Texas, my phone rings. I see it's from my office. I reached out to pick up the phone and my hand stopped. And I remember looking at the phone and then looking at my hand going, Why'd your hand stop mid grab? And I went, cause I don't want to, I don't want to pick up the call from my office. And I let it ring out and I went, you don't want to pick up the phone call from your office, from one of your employees that you're paying from the office in Venice that you're paying the rent for.

9:55What are you doing? What, that doesn't make sense. Yeah. And I let that phone ring out. And as it did, I picked the phone back up, dialed my lawyer and said, I want to shut down my music label and I want to shut down my production office. I want to pay a solid severance to everybody, but I want to work on my charity. I want to work on my family and I want to be an actor for hire. And so what that did was I got rid of, I had like music label, I had movie development and I had a couple other things that I was kind of doing minors. And so I had like eight proverbial campfires on my desk every morning, including my charity, including my acting career.

10:37They were all campfires. So what I did is I got rid of about five of the campfires and I was left with the three things that were most important to me. And those three campfires turned into bonfires. So I'm majoring in my majors and I got rid of five minors that I was majoring in, trying to major in. And I was kind of making C pluses in everything. And when I got rid of five classes and concentrated on the three that I really wanted, I started making eights, majoring in my majors. And when Maya Smart was on the podcast, she talked about needing to set boundaries. She was on all these boards and it was taking away from her writing and she had to resign from these things, right?

11:17Mark Shrela says when we eliminate the inessential, we get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. What are you going to say no to in 2025? Right. That's get back to the idea of boundaries. My wife and I are thinking about this, you know, who is bringing drama into our lives and how do we stop that as we hire new people for the business, bring on new team? How do we make sure that's something we are filtering for? And then the other side though, is, yeah, we want to set boundaries, but we also have to let people in. If you have too many boundaries, they become walls and you become isolated.

11:54Mark Sreelius says, don't be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. He says, if you've been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up, so what? And I just love that. I love that Mark Sreelius is shrugging his shoulders at the idea of needing and asking for help. Of course, we should ask for help. A Stoic isn't invulnerable. A Stoic isn't an island. That's one of the best parts of the Daily Stoic New Year new challenges is I get to do this thing with people that I've now done these challenges with for so many years. And then we do the live Q &A sessions together.

12:27We hang out. We learn from each other. I get benefits from being part of a community. So let's think about community in 2025, right? The Stoics famously have the Scipionic Circle, which was this group of Stoics that would get together and ask questions and help each other. So, you know, again, not thinking of yourself as an island.

12:52We just took our kids to an outdoor performance of the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that. But I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author. and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

13:29Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December first, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It Over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being.

14:10And daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

14:25I am working on escaping my most expensive habit, as I have called it, which is to say anxiety. We're traveling for the holidays. Okay. Yes, you want to get your flight on time. You want to have a little extra time. But you don't need to be nervous. You don't need to stress it out. What's the worst case scenario here? The worst case scenario is you catch the next flight, right? The worst case scenario is you ruin the experience before it's even begun. As my son likes to say, we don't have nowhere to be and nothing to do. And just remembering that anxiety has a cost to it. We suffer more in imagination than in reality, Seneca says.

15:04Anxiety drags us into a future that doesn't exist, forcing us to live out those worst case scenarios that rarely happen. And yet it steals from us the present moment that is good, which is why Mark Scherz talked about escaping from anxiety, or rather he said, discarding it because it's within us. We are carrying it around with us. Working on sleep this year, as always, track it with my eight sleep mattress and I have not been prioritizing it the way that I should. So that's something I'm focusing on. And then there's this idea, I think the Stoics talk about, you know, when we fall short, when we screw up, the Stoics are not perfect.

15:43We know they are not perfect. We know Mark Sturbelius isn't perfect because of what he writes in meditations. He's talking over and over again about the same things because he's still struggling with the same things, whether it's anxiety, whether it's his temper, whether it's his longing for immortality or fame. And he's having to remind himself over and over again, what's important, what he believes, what he wants to do, who he wants to be. So the Stoics didn't expect you to be perfect, but they expected you to work, right? To work at it. When we are jarred unavoidably by circumstances, Marcus said, we want to pick up that rhythm.

16:21He says, revert at once to yourself. Don't lose the rhythm more than you can help. You'll have a better grasp of harmony if you keep going back to it. When you mess up, come back to the habits you've been working on. Come back to those best practices, right? Come back to the ideas in the stoves. I notice when I'm drifting, I go, I want to pick up meditations and do some work on it. So as I wrap up here, I'll leave you with Epictetus, who spoke sort of eloquently about feeding the habit bonfire. I think it's a good message to think about today. He said, from now on then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside.

17:01And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable or highly or lowly regarded, remember that a true man is revealed in difficult times. And so when trouble comes, think of yourself as a wrestler whom God, like a trainer, has paired with a tough young buck. For what purpose? To turn you into an Olympic class athlete. So the last couple of years have been tough. The next couple of years surely will be tough. But there are these sort of foundational habits and practices that we can think about, that we can work on. And that's what I am thinking about this year. I hope you are as well.

17:37I hope you're having a great Sunday. And I hope to see you in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. You can sign up now at dailystoic.com slash challenge, or you can get it for free. As I said, if you join us in Daily Stoic Life, if you're looking for more community, that's a great place to find it. Daily Stoic Life is all us Stoics all over the world. We're doing these challenges and courses together throughout the year and sign up there at dailystoiclife.com. And I will see you all in the new year. Be well, everyone.

18:09Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, That would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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