These Are No Good To You

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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1:19Welcome 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, dailystoic.com.

1:46So why do they do it? Why do thousands of people all over the world sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge? Maybe it seems crazy to you. Maybe it doesn't make any sense. It's like, oh, I could do without it. I could do it by myself. Well, I thought maybe I'd just let you hear it in their own words. Here are some folks that signed up for the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge over the years. I'm really loving the challenge and everyone I'm talking to about it's really kind of enjoying hearing about it. So I just want to say thank you for everything. This was a really cool way to start the year.

2:17Thank you. About three years ago, I discovered you. So I've been through Ego is the Enemy fairly recently. And of course, this year's challenge, I've been doing the challenge for three years. I'm kind of a real life embodiment of some of the stuff my wife passed from cancer. But just learn that it's day by day process, kind of cliche. I've been reading the Stoics and participating in your challenges the past few years. And look, I'll give you one testimonial on top of that. It's worked really well for me. I get something out of making the challenge, but I also do it alongside all of you. It's one of my favorite things.

2:51It kicks off the year right for me. So if you want to kick the year off right with a challenge, well, join us in the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash challenge. It's going to start on January 1st. Why don't you challenge yourself right now to stop procrastinating and do it, and I will see you in there. 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 into Austin and bought a truck.

3:30What 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. 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.

4:12Toyota 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. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. These are no good to you. The thing you're about to do is scary.

4:52It can be hard to be up there in front of people on stage. It's terrifying to step out onto a battlefield or rush into a dangerous situation. Of course, you're nervous. It's normal that you would be. But normal? Normal is not what leads to elite performance. On the set of Gladiator 2, Paul Mescal felt exactly those kinds of nerves. He was starring in a$210 million movie, after all, a sequel to a movie that won five Academy Awards. You nervous? Ridley Scott, the director, asked him on the first day of shooting. And when he answered in the affirmative, Scott looked at him and said, your nerves are no fucking good to me.

5:30And then he walked out onto set. Stoicism is a philosophy of nerve control. The first two virtues, courage and discipline, are all about this. We're going to face scary situations in life. Our mind can be our friend in these situations or our worst enemy. We can use it to calm ourselves down, to master our emotions, or we can allow it to stir us up, to drive us crazy, to paralyze us. Anxiety, worry, doubt, imposter syndrome, these things are no good to you. You must put these impressions to the test. Master them so they won't master you. so that you can do what you need to do. And speaking of Gladiator, the new movie is really good.

6:12I have no tie or stake in it. I wish I did. I wish they'd brought me on as a consultant or something. But we have a great video that we did over on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel about the first Gladiator, where I dive into the opening scene of that movie. I'm going to play it for you now. Here's this. I think you'll like it. There's a man walking through a field. The stalks of grain are bending low under their weight. The wind is blowing softly on what seems like a cold day. He sees a small bird land on a branch. And the bird takes flight and he follows it with his eyes, smiling at the beauty of what the Stokes would call nature's inadvertence.

6:48And then the man turns and you see that actually this isn't such a beautiful and pretty scene. That he's surrounded not just by mud, but by all the signs of war. Calvary is getting ready. Men are marching behind sharp palisades, checking their shields and their swords. They're about to do terrible damage to each other. There will be ceaseless, ferocious violence and death. This is, as you know, the opening scene of the movie Gladiator. Russell Crowe is preparing for a fictionalized version of the Macromantic Wars, the wars that Marcus Aurelius does in fact wage on the far-flung borders of the Roman Empire.

7:31Actually, this is Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe, and they've talked about this scene before. This is kind of an unscripted, improvised moment between the director and the actor in the earliest days of shooting when they realize that they have this incredible connection and they're going to do something magical together. I'm pretty sure I did every single thing he asked, and I put little strokes of color on certain things and then I brought the attention back to the battlefield and he just came up to me and goes, you and me are going to be fucking great together, mate. But it's also, through Maximus, an embodiment of a really key but easy to miss stoic lesson.

8:14In the midst of darkness and death and the worst things that human beings can do to each other, humans also have the ability to see light and beauty and feel wonder and majesty. Epictetus would say that every situation has two handles. We choose which one we're gonna grab. We also get to choose the angle, not unlike a director, that we look at a specific scene at, right? Maximus' gaze, how he's thinking, how he's looking, by framing it one way, he sees all the good, and then he zooms out slightly and he's able to see all the not so good, which is an exercise that we humans can do, whatever is happening in the world, whether it's the middle of a pandemic or political polarization, or your own impending divorce or bankruptcy or health crisis.

8:59You choose how you're going to look at this. The Stoics say that our life is dyed by the color of our thoughts. How we choose to look, the perception, the lens with which we look at the world shapes how we're going to see it and how we're going to feel as a result of it. The perspective that we take on life is everything. It's the most important thing. And we miss this power all the time, just as many of you have probably seen this scene in Gladiator and not noticed the subtext of what's happening, the stoic message that's underneath it. We have to really look. We have to hone our senses. And Marcus Aurelius's life is the quintessential example of this.

9:34Again, this is a life with a plague. This is a life where he buried multiple children, where he was betrayed, where there were natural disasters. There was one thing after another. And yet what you find in meditations, is there a certain amount of world weariness? Is this a certain amount of darkness? Is there a certain amount of depressiveness? Yeah, sure. and people have noted that for a long time. But you also can't read meditations and not see Marcus Aurelius' zest for life, his poet's eye, his gratitude, his perception about how lucky he is, about how wonderful life can be. And this is the power that we all have, an edge that the Stoic is trying to hone always.

10:14We should remember that in almost every way, Marcus Aurelius' times were worse than ours are now, more stressful than ours are now, darker than ours are now. We should choose to see all the positivity and beauty and change and progress and take solace and inspiration in the fact that if he was able to find good and things to be excited about and things to get out of bed for in the morning, then certainly we can too.

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