This Is Not For The Weak | Stake Your Own Claim

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2:26Welcome 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.

3:05In meditations, Marcus Aurelius says that what we throw on top of a fire is fuel for the fire. But anyone who has ever had a little campfire going knows how easily you can snuff out flames with a poorly placed log or even a few sticks. Marcus is speaking metaphorically of obstacles, not an actual campfire. But the metaphor only works with a few assumptions. For one, he's assuming that everything is flammable. Is that really true? Not exactly. But even if we grant that everything will incinerate at some temperature, we're still admitting that things can burn at a wide range of temperatures. So perhaps what Marcus really means is that your fire has to be really hot.

3:46It has to be really roaring. If you want to be able to turn what is thrown into it, as he says, into flames and brightness. If we look at the metaphor Marcus uses right before this fire one, his message is clearer. A strong stomach digests what it eats, he says. So then a small weak fire is not going to be able to handle a big dry log. So just as a weak stomach isn't going to be able to digest what you put in it, a small weak fire is not going to be able to handle a big dry log, let alone something hardier. And it's definitely not going to be able to melt steel or glass. And so it goes for us with obstacles.

4:24If we want to be the metaphorical fire that turns everything into fuel, we must be quite strong. We must have real momentum. we must be operating at a high and heated level by the very materials that others are able to make use of.

4:51Stake your own claim. This is the December 22nd entry in the Daily Stoic. Our quote today comes to us from Seneca Moral Letters 33. For it's disgraceful for an old person or one in sight of old age to have only the knowledge carried in their notebooks. Zeno said this, but what do you say? Cleanthes said this, what do you say? How long will you be compelled by the claims of another? Take charge and stake your own claim. Something posterity will carry in its notebook. Musing in his own notebook about the topic of immortality, Emerson complained about how writers dance around a difficult topic by relying on quotes.

5:35I hate quotation, he wrote. Tell me what you know. I'm going to tell you a little backstory about that in a second. Seneca was throwing down the same gauntlet some 20 centuries before. It's easier to quote to rely on the wise words of others, especially when people you're deferring to are such towering figures. It's harder and more intimidating to venture out on your own, to express your own thoughts. But how do you think those wise and true quotes from those towering figures were created in the first place? Your own experiences have value. You have accumulated your own wisdom to stake your claim, put something down for the ages in words and also an example.

6:14So I was maybe like 20, 21 years old. I was writing for the college newspaper and I'd written this review and And I published it and did okay. And then I actually heard from the person I was reviewing in it. And they were like, I said, you know, they gave me some feedback. And I said, hey, could we get on the phone? I would really, I just want to grow as a writer. Can you give me some feedback? And they're going through it. And he was pointing out all the quotes in it. And he gave me that Emerson quotation for the first time. He said, Emerson said something like, I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

6:43And that lesson has stuck with me in all of my writings. Yes, I talk about the Stoics. My writing is influenced and is in many ways an attempt to introduce the Stokes people. But one of the passes that I do on my own books as I go through them, after I've written, I write them just, what do I want to say? What's my supporting arguments? How do I want to illustrate it? And then I go through and I go, where am I over-relying on quotes here? Where can I get rid of them? Where can I, where am I over arguing things or not telling you what I know, but telling you what someone else knows? Speaking of quotes, there's a rule I heard from Nassim Taleb where he actually said, you should only quote people when you disagree with them.

7:27The point is make your own arguments on your own merits. But I think this is a really important part of the Stoic practice. If you think about what meditations was for Marcus, right? It's not him arguing Stoicism to the public. It's him arguing the Stoics to himself. So he does use quotes from time to time, but he's not really having to think that much about attribution. And he's not really trying to think about publication or the audience at all. He's just thinking about what does he need to hear? What does he know to be true? And what needs to be said? What does he need to be reminded of? And I think it's important that we understand that Stoicism, the study of Stoicism is not a one-way street.

8:07It's not just downloading the information from the originals, from me, from other people. It's also putting your own spin on it. It's disagreeing with them. It's adding your own view. Stoicism should be better, different, added to as a result of you having studied and learned about it. That doesn't mean you're all going to publish bestselling books or articles or videos. It's all going to be well known, but make your own contributions, put your own spin on it. Feel free to disagree, feel free to argue, feel free to push back, feel free to add. I feel like one of my contributions to stoicism was the connection between stoicism and Nietzsche, the idea of amor fati.

8:50I brought that in also with the help of Robert Greene, but I brought that together. And that's a practice of stoicism that did not exist before or an explicit connection that did not fully exist before. In Lives of the Stoics, I put all the Stoics, their biographies in one place. In the Daily Stoic itself, I combined the Stoics in a way that they'd never been combined before. And I made arguments that some people disagree with. I made statements that I think are true, but again, not everyone agrees with, but they didn't exist before. I put my own spin on it. I put my own stamp on it, which is what you and everyone listening needs to do, not just with words.

9:31In fact, with words, least of all, most of all with our actions, with what we do, with who we are. So that's today's message from the Daily Stoic. I hope you enjoy it. Just a reminder, we're getting close to the end of the year. The Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge is almost ready to start. Don't wait till the last minute. Don't procrastinate. I'd love for you to sign up now, dailystoic.com slash challenge. I'm going to be in there. Thousands of Stokes from all over the world are going to be in there. I think this is our best one yet. We've done it for five years. Now this is our fifth one.

10:06It's going to be awesome. I'd love to see you in there. Sign up dailystoic.com slash challenge. And remember also, if you sign up for daily stoic life at dailystoiclife.com, you get this challenge and all the challenges totally for free. So I'll see you on Jan one when we get rolling into this thing.

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11:37That's toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like The Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads? Well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad free version of Daily Stoic.

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