This Is A Debt To Be Proud Of | with They Can Throw You In Chains, But...

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1:05Welcome 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.

1:45This is a debt to be proud of. Every day, every decision we make is one that our future self will either be indebted to or let down by. What we eat, the work we do or don't do, the habits we build, the standards we set, all of this is adding up or taking away from who we will be in the future. Think about it. Marcus Aurelius' emperor was indebted to the 20-something philosopher Marcus Aurelius, as well as the 30-something Marcus Aurelius, who was an apprentice of Antoninus. Had he been less diligent, less disciplined, any hope he had of not being Caesar-ified, not being stained purple, would have just been that, hope.

2:25Epictetus said that we want to work and prepare so that someday in the future we can say to ourselves earnestly and accurately, this is what I trained for. And so it goes with our discipline and our diligence. We want to make decisions, make commitments, make efforts so that someday in the future we can earnestly and accurately say, I owe the younger me for this, rather than I wish I'd done it differently. I should have made better investments back then, or I resent the younger me for this. Today, right now, we can create a good kind of debt. We can choose to eat healthy, which can provide us a longer life.

2:57We can choose to get up early, even when we don't want to, to work on that manuscript before our day job. We can choose to start a daily journaling practice, because while it may seem like a waste of time today, you're paying that debt for a better version of your future self tomorrow. That's basically what discipline is destiny is about, that the debts you make, the payments you make today determine who you're going to be in the future. As we've said here before, everything is a lagging indicator. That's why you got to do it today. That's what I wrote the book about was years and years. In fact, there's a story in that book I found the note card for that I had picked out as a story I might use in the future 10 years previous, right?

3:39So you do the work today so that in the future, you can draw on that capital, get those dividends. That's what that book's about. If you haven't checked out Discipline is Destiny, the Power of Self-Control, pick it up anywhere books are sold and you can grab signed copies at stuart.dailystoic.com or just swing by the painted porch here in texas and grab one for me

4:01they can throw you in chains but this is the september 6th entry in the daily stoke i've got hard cover here looks like it's been in the sun a little bit but anyways you can grab the daily Stoic, 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living anywhere books are sold, including signed copies at story.dailystoic.com. This is a quote from Epictetus. He said, you can bind up my leg, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice. This is Discourses 1-1. It was said that Epictetus walked with a permanent limp as a result of being chained up as a slave. 2 ,000 years later, James Stockdale also had his legs chained in irons, and his arms bound behind his back and pulled from the ceiling, repeatedly wrenching them from their sockets.

4:51Future Senator John McCain, who was alive when I wrote this, was in that same prison, subjected to much of that same abuse. Because his father was famous, McCain was repeatedly offered by his captors a chance to abandon his men and be sent home early. He too held tightly to his freedom of choice, declining to submit to that temptation, even though it meant a loss of the physical freedom he must have ached for. None of these men broke. No one could make them sacrifice their principles. That's the thing. Someone can throw you in chains, but they don't have the power to change who you are. Even under the worst torture and cruelties that human can inflict on one another, our power over our own mind and our power to make our own decisions can't be broken, only relinquished.

5:43You know, I was thinking about this entry because I wrote this back in 2016. As I said, John McCain was still alive then. I've come to understand McCain and Stockdale's story a bit more. It wasn't that they didn't break. They were like superhumans. In fact, part of Stockdale's heroism was that he did break and that he understood that the men in there with him would break, but it was how they pulled themselves back together, how they faced and dealt with their shame that they felt, how they forgave each other, how they supported each other, how they understood they would have to give some things up, but there were some things they would not do that actually made it so impressive.

6:24That was the choice that they ultimately had. They didn't choose who they, they didn't choose that they were there. They didn't choose how long they were there, although in McCain's case, he did in a sense, he chose to be there longer. They didn't choose what they would be subjected to, but they did choose within that, as Stockdale famously said, that this would become a transformative experience for them, something they would, in retrospect, not trade away. But I had a very fortunate experience a couple months back to interview someone who was in that prison with Stockdale and McCain. And so instead of me riffing about this today.

6:58I wanted to bring you some of what he said about this, because it's pretty mind-blowing. Stockdale, I think, said that the optimist, though, that's who got crushed, that there was something problematic about hope and that it could always be ripped out from under you. But I can't imagine that pessimism serves one particularly well either. Not at all. Yeah. I don't think. First of all, let me give you a disclaimer. I haven't read Keg's work on the Stockdale Paradox. I haven't read how he frames that up. I haven't. Okay. I've read some clips. Yeah. Okay. When I was in Hanoi, what I thought we were told, and Keg was a genius.

7:49I mean, Admiral Stockdale, you know how God raises up people for certain situations like Churchill in World War II? Stockdale was that kind of guy. Destiny taps you on the shoulder, he says. He was that kind of guy. Yeah. So I could tell you a CAG story. Please. So one day, you know, we communicated by tapping on the walls. And it did take a long time, weeks or months maybe for stuff to get around. But one day I was living with some guys and we're in this cell and we get a message tapped on the wall and it says, CAG sends the following. Remember what Epictetus said. I'm paraphrasing. So we get off the wall and say, first of all, who was Epictetus?

8:38We know anything about Epictetus. What might Epictetus have said? The Navy didn't send you all to get a postdoc in ancient philosophy. I mean – but it was a great thing because we could – I mean we could pass – we passed weeks talking about who you think Epictetus was. What's Keg talking about? You think he's smoking dope over there? What is going on with Keg? And so eventually somebody somewhere in the chain sent a message back or maybe we did and said, OK, we give up. We don't know who Epictetus was. and we don't know what he said. And so he comes back. This all takes a lot of time. Eventually it comes back, and I can only paraphrase, but he said, Epictetus said, don't spend your time worrying about stuff over which you have no influence or control.

9:32Sure. And we thought that's great. Yeah. I mean, so we talked about that for a lot. I mean, this is what we did. We would dissect everything. But we decided, of course, what he's telling us is tend to our knitting here and don't get all wrapped around the axle about the war and what's going on in the United States or stuff. Let's just do our job here, which I thought was absolutely brilliant. This was one of my all-time favorite interviews. I was honored to be sitting across from him. It was a beautiful, inspiring, very moving experience. and I'm very glad to share it. You should listen to the whole interview because it was fantastic.

10:15And I don't know, I feel like, look, I'm writing the book, but I am growing and changing and learning. And it's partly because of these conversations that I've been lucky enough to have with these people who really did test these stoic ideas explicitly or not in what Stockdale would call the laboratory of human experience. And anyways, I'm studying and learning. Maybe someday I'll update the book. But for now, I just wanted to bring you that little bit of extra perspective. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day.

10:47Check it out at dailystoic.com slash email.

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