The Who’s Who of Who’s That | Balance The Books Of Life Daily

0:00I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$149 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$299 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

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1:18Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

1:58The who's who of who's that. Marcus Aurelius' meditations is full of names, not just in his debts and lessons at the beginning, where he names Varus and Sextus and Antoninus Pius, but also throughout the book, where he mentions Heraclitus, Epictetus, Helvidius Priscus. These names, they're all put together. You could say they make for a veritable who's who of who's that, to quote the Taylor Swift song. The names aren't utterly unfamiliar, or perhaps a few are familiar to you, but the vast majority have been lost to time. And that's because 2 ,000 years have passed. That's because the Roman Empire is no more.

2:34That's because people move on pretty quickly, which was Marcus Aurelius's intended point. And it's also the process of history proving him right. Words once common in use now sound archaic, he writes, and the names of the famous dead as well. Everything fades so quickly, turns into legend, and soon oblivion covers it. And those are the ones who shone, the rest unknown, unasked for. He says they're forgotten a minute after death. Marcus Aurelius mentions his predecessors. He mentions kings and conquerors. He mentions powerful people, important people. Yet by 160 AD, many were already going the way of Ozymandias, half buried by the desert and the decades, their immortal reputation increasingly worse for the wear.

3:25What is eternal fame, Marcus asks? Emptiness. It doesn't even last. So what should we prize instead? Well, we need to do good. We need to tell the truth, to be our best, to accept what happens and prepare to be forgotten as everyone who came before us eventually was, as Marcus is himself to nearly 99 % of the world. And look, Meditations is the definitive text on self-discipline and personal ethics and humility and self-actualization and strength, but it's shockingly not well read. Maybe you've heard of it, but never actually cracked it because it seems old and dusty and unfamiliar. But we, We made a really cool version.

4:12My favorite translation is the Gregory Hayes translation. I think it's the best. So we got the rights and we make this awesome leather bound edition. One that will hopefully stand the test of time. Let you pass that wisdom on from one generation to the next. And if you are trying to make sense of this somewhat archaic distant book, we've got a really cool course called How to Read Mark Surreels' Meditations, A Daily Stoic Guide. If you get them together, there's a bunch of savings. I'll link to that in today's show notes. But you should definitely check it out.

4:45thanks to toyota trucks for sponsoring this episode when i bought my ranch in 2015 out here in basco 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. 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.

5:30We 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.

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6:23This week's entry from the Daily Stoic Journal. 366 days of writing and reflections on the art of living. It's our companion to the daily stoic. Balance the books of life daily. One of the reasons we journal is as a way of gathering up life's experiences, its insights, its frustrations, its unexpected struggles and triumphs, and more. And in all of this, we are making a reckoning of our progress on life's way. Seneca, whose father-in-law was in charge of keeping the books on Rome's granary, like the metaphor of balancing life's books each day. Rather than postpone, our impulse each day should be to bring things as much as possible to completion.

7:11Why? Because we never know what tomorrow might bring. Epictetus, too, would tell his students that the important thing was that they had begun. Begun to practice, to learn, to get better. So give yourself some credit this week for the journey that you're on. and reflect on how far you have come and how far you have left to go. And we have three quotes, two from Seneca, one from Epictetus. Seneca says, let us prepare our minds as if we'd come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life's books each day. Life's greatest flaw is that it is always imperfect and a certain portion of it is postponed.

7:55The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time. And that's from Moral Letters 101. And then Seneca, and he's writing this to his father-in-law, he says, believe me, it's better to produce the balance sheet of your own life than of the grain market. He says this on the shortness of life. And then Epictetus says, I am your teacher and you are learning in my school. My aim is to bring you to completion, unhindered, free from compulsive behavior, unrestrained, without shame, free, flourishing, and happy, looking to God in things great and small, and your aim is to learn and diligently practice all of these things.

8:33Why then don't you complete the work? You have the right aim, and I have both the right aim and the right preparation. What is missing? The work is quite feasible. It's the only thing in our power. Let go of the past. We must only begin. Believe me, and you will see. I was thinking about this idea of keeping life's books with the fact that I just finished my fourth go-around on the Daily Stoic Journal, and I know some of you have been on that path with me as well. So as I cracked open a fresh one, that was pretty cool. And I'm about to finish my first go-around all the way through of my five-year one-line-a-day journal.

9:15So I've been doing it every day for five years. Just to have that finished is like an incredible and cool experience. And to think of the reflection that went into this. And so when we talk about journaling, it's not just a sort of a cathartic thing. It's not just a moment of stillness in the morning or the afternoon or whenever you happen to do it. To me, the power of it is recording your progress as you go. When I look at some of the things that I wrote five years ago, when I think about what I was going through five years ago, right? I just, I am proud of myself for the work that I have been putting in on myself.

10:02There's a great line that's not in today's entry, but Epitida says, he says, some people delight in improving their farm. Me, I delight in my own improvement day to day. And I think that's what the journal is really capturing is that day to day, that work that I've been putting in. And listening to this podcast is a little bit of work. Your journaling is a little bit of work. The reading you're doing is a little bit of work. The conversations you're having with a spouse or a friend or in the Daily Stoic Life group, that's a little bit of progress. And all of this, it might not seem like much as you're doing each individual thing.

10:36But as George Washington liked to say, Many mickles make a muckle, or as Zeno said, well-being is realized by small steps, but it's not a small thing. And so as we chip away at this stuff, as we make a little bit of progress, it might not feel like much today or in the moment, but cumulatively, it is adding up. It is taking you somewhere, and that is not to be underrated. and yeah, when I did the journal four years ago now, I didn't know where it would go. I didn't know how it would work. I didn't have this kind of daily journaling practice like prompt-based, but it's been a wonderful addition to my routine and I've heard from so many people who've had the same experience.

11:23And anyways, it's been wonderful. I hope you can do more than just follow along with the podcast, but you can grab a version of it yourself.

11:33Hey, 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 of 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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