These Make You Beautiful | Stake Your Claim

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.

1:58This will make you beautiful. Titus said the root of beauty was beautiful choices. If your choices are beautiful, he said, so too will you be. It's simple and it's true. You are what your choices make you, nothing more and nothing less. He was talking of the beauty of human virtue, one imagines, not of physical beauty, but actually it applies to both. Beauty in either case can't be separated from the process. That's the regimen that requires. It takes exercise. It takes discipline. It takes sacrifice. It takes weeks and months and years. It's the decision day after day to get out of bed early and go for a run.

2:37It's the decision to eat the healthy food or the not so healthy food. It's how often you pick up a book instead of the television remote. It's the groceries instead of eating out. The journal instead of the phone. It's saying no to cool opportunities and yes to your kids and the community and your responsibilities. So if you would like to look and feel and be better, that's a really good place to start in your choices. Every day presents us with plenty of opportunities to make a choice, to choose between beauty and ugliness, kindness or selfishness, mercy or vengeance, serenity or anger. There's the little choices we make daily about our habits.

3:17And on some days, there's bigger choices about whether we stand up for what's right, whether you reach down to help someone who needs it, what kind of work you do, what kind of standards you hold yourself to. If you want beautiful life, there's no escaping it. You've got to make beautiful choices. And a new year is here and now's a chance to make a great choice, to choose what kind of person you want to be. And that's a choice I try to make at the beginning of every year when I choose to be in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, right? To kick the year off with a beautiful choice to challenge myself, to push myself to be and to do better, to challenge myself, to get out of my comfort zone, to re-examine my habits, to build new habits, to get new perspective.

4:00That's what we built this challenge around, how we've done it for the last seven years. Every year, we spend the last quarter of the year working on this challenge, coming up with 21 Stoic-inspired challenges to help you kick the year off right to become a new you in 2025. They say it takes human beings something like 21 days to build new habits and skills and to create the muscle memory of making beautiful choices. That's what we're doing in this challenge. I would love to have you join us. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash challenge. Let's make a beautiful choice if we're going to do it to not procrastinate to sign up for it now, not later.

4:36And I'll see you in there with thousands of other Stoics all over the world, dailystoic.com slash challenge. Let's get after it.

4:46Thanks 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.

5:32We 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, discover your uncharted territory.

6:13Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

6:24Stake your claim. This is from today's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal. We like to collect the sayings of great writers or of leaders we admire. They often become mantras for us on the path to life, providing guidance and assurance. But as Seneca reminds us, truth hasn't been monopolized. We need to spend some time and effort each week formulating our own wisdom, staking our own claims based on our study, practice, and training. And that's what the Daily Stoic Journal and this podcast has always been about, reflecting on Stoic wisdom and adding our own to it. Seneca urged us to blaze our own trail and to take charge and stake our own claim.

7:07Well, let's do that. Let the pages in your own journal, your own writing, reflect the insights you've learned through your own experiences. Let the inspiration you've taken from the Stoics help you create your own exercises, reminders, and perspectives. Then we have two quotes from Seneca and one from Marcus. The first from Seneca's moral letters, It's disgraceful for an old person or one inside of old age to only have the knowledge carried in their notebooks. Zeno said this, what do you say? Cleanthe said that, what do you say? How long will you be compelled by claims of another? Take charge and stake your own claim.

7:46Something prosperity will carry in its notebook. That's Seneca Moral Letters 33.7. And then in 33.11, Seneca says, won't you be walking in your predecessor's footsteps? I surely will use the older path, but if I find a shorter and smoother way, I'll blaze a trail there. The ones who pioneered these paths aren't our masters, but our guides. Truth stands open to everyone. It hasn't been monopolized. And then Marcus Aurelius Meditations 3.5, he says, Don't act grudgingly or selfishly or without due diligence, or be a contrarian. Don't overdress your thoughts in fine language. Don't be a person of too many words or too many deeds.

8:28Be cheerful, not wanting outside help or the relief that others might bring. A person needs to stand on their own, not be propped up. I mean, obviously, this is something I think a little bit about. As a writer, a popularizer of Stoicism, I rely quite a bit on the ideas from the Stoics. That is what the Daily Stoic is. And it's funny, I'll see comments from people. They'll say like, well, you're just quoting other people. What do you have to say? But then, of course, when I say what I have to say, if I don't make enough nods to the Stokes, people go, well, who's this guy? You should just read the originals.

9:03And so it's a delicate line that I walk, but I think it's analogous to the line that we all walk, which is smarter, wiser people came before us. And they said they picked so much of the low hanging fruit, but we have to, I think, use kind of the Austin Kleon approach of steal like an artist, take from here and there and there and there. and it's in the taking and the synthesis and the arrangement that we make something new. For instance, it's funny now I watch people talk about the relationship between stoicism and amorphati, but I know I'm the one that made that connection explicit and popular because it was something I was introduced to when I was a research assistant on Robert Green's book with 50 Cent, and he talks about the idea of Amor Fati.

9:52And it struck me just how deeply connected that idea was with Stoicism. And it's something I integrated in my own books. And that became popular. Now I see people going, hey, you know, the Stoics never really said Amor Fati. That's from Nietzsche, not from the Stoics. I know, but I made the connection. And so the idea then of relying on these ancient ideas, but not relying so much or too much, not being dependent on them using just the right amount, but also understanding you can't listen to this. I mean, I think it was Cleanthes put together one of his books, and he quotes so much from the play Medea that he said, this is Cleanthes Medea.

10:32He included almost the entire book in all the quotations that he'd used. And I guess at some point, if I keep doing this, I'll have quoted from every single passage from Marcus Aurelius. But the arrangement that I do it in is different. The reading I have is different. And my interpretation might be different than your interpretation, which might be different than the interpretation that even I myself might have made a few years ago. So we put our own spin on these things. We make them our own. Right. And to not do that, to not do that is also a shame. I think it was Nassim Taleb. Again, I'm quoting.

11:10But he says, most of the quotations you make should be of people you disagree with. Now, I would disagree with the idea of most, but the point is, if all the quotes that you have, that you use, that you write down are just ones that you accept, that you agree with, you're probably not being critical enough. You're not challenging enough. And so I want to push you to do that too. You shouldn't agree with everything the Stokes say. You certainly shouldn't agree with everything that I say. You should be blazing your own path. And that's something I think about even as I'm doing marginalia in the sides of the books that I read is like, am I just unthinkingly agreeing with everything I said?

11:50Or I think it's better if the reading process is a bit of an argument. If you agree with everything that I say, that means probably you're not thinking enough for yourself. But also it means I'm probably not being courageous enough in what I say. I'm not pushing the envelope enough. I'm not being honest or vulnerable enough. So you got to be comfortable both quoting and carving your own path. You got to be comfortable agreeing as well as disagreeing. And it's in how all that shakes out that we have our original voice. And Seneca does say that. Again, quoting, noting the irony, Seneca says something like, how do you prove that you really understood these masters?

12:35it's by putting their thoughts into your own words. And you see that illustrated in the Stoics, the sort of constant illusions or reframing or tightening of sort of Stoic mantras or ideas in one's own voice, one's own expression. And to me, that's partly what journaling is. I'm writing the ideas down, writing them down in my own voice, putting my own spin on them, staking my own claim, as Seneca says. As we wind up this year and we go into the new year, I hope you can put a stamp on this new year. You can stake out your own claim, claim your own original voice. That's what Stoicism is about. And I'll talk to you soon.

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