This Is The Most Important Virtue | A Hard Winter Training

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0:56This is the most important virtue. Courage is a pretty obvious choice for being the most important of the four Stoic virtues. It was Aristotle who said that courage was the mother of all the rest. In a world that's not virtuous, in a world that's scary, in a world that's difficult, it takes courage to go out there and do what needs to be done. Self-discipline is another obvious choice because, well, you can't do anything without it. And as Aristotle pointed out, courage that isn't checked by temperance quite easily veers into recklessness. And yet Marcus Aurelius himself said that justice was the source of all the other virtues.

1:38The Stoics were clear. The point of philosophy, the point of life, is to direct a person towards doing what's right. Courage and service of injustice, discipline aimed at selfish ends, that's not what Marcus or Epictetus or Zeno would have called the good life. but the fact that you can argue for any of these three as the most important virtue as i myself have done hey it's ryan here i did this when i announced courage is calling i said courage is the most important and when discipline is destiny was coming out i said discipline is the most important and when right thing right now came out i said justice was the most important virtue because it guides and balances the others but it is in fact wisdom that is the most important virtue.

2:20Because what situations call for courage? When is discretion the better part of valor? When do we know to push ourselves harder or hold back from overdoing it? What's the right thing to do and how do we even do it? Courage and discipline and justice, they all descend first from knowing what's what. That is, to say, wisdom. It's wisdom that gives us perspective, uncovers truth, shows us how the world works and guides us where to go. And it's this critical and all too rare ability. Discernment is not something anyone is born with, and yet all the virtues are born from it. Wisdom is cultivated. Wisdom is earned.

3:04It is essential. And there is no one or no thing that can give you this wisdom. No, wisdom is cultivated. Wisdom is earned. And it's earned with a timeless methodology. The methodology that the Stoics used, a methodology that remains available to us now. And this is why we say that wisdom takes work. That's the fourth and final book in the Stoic Virtue series that I have been working on myself now for the last six years. My argument is that wisdom is a byproduct of doing the right thing in the right way at the right time over the course of your life. It's mentorship. It's teachers. It's reading.

3:48It's experiences. It's travel. It's all these things and more. And my goal in writing Wisdom Takes Work was to not only share that wisdom, but to show you what it looks like in practice. And to remind us, of course, that nobody gets their wisdom for free. As Seneca says, no man was ever wise by chance. And, you know, I've loved getting to do this work myself, getting to write these emails to you over the last nine years. If you've gotten anything out of them, it would mean so much to me if you could pre-order the new book. It's how publishers decide how many copies to print, how many copies bookstores are going to order, whether it's going to appear on a bestseller list or not.

4:31The first week is sort of everything. So we came up with a bunch of awesome pre-order bonuses. is. I think you're really going to like this book in and of itself. But if you want some bonus chapters, you want the music I listened to when I wrote it, you want signed pages from the manuscript, you want to have dinner with me to discuss the book. All that is available if you go to dailystoic.com slash wisdom and grab your copy. We have signed and numbered first editions. It's the only place you can get those. We even have a box set of all four books. Anyways, it's coming out in October. If you could pre-order it now, that would mean so much to me.

5:03Enjoy.

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6:34That's human with two N's, dot com slash stoic for an extra 15 % off with code stoic at checkout. 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. 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.

7:13There 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. 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.

7:50And 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-detours. A hard winter training. The art of living has three levels of discipline, study, practice, and hard training. Reading the Stoics or listening to them, that's study. Trying out the lessons and reflecting on them in a journal, the friend, that's practice.

8:33What's left, though, is hard training. Epictetus liked to use the analogy of the Roman army's practice of training hard in the off months of winter so that they could be prepared to meet any challenge when they returned to battle in the spring. Seneca would spend time each month exposing himself to tougher than usual conditions. He too used a military analogy, pointing to the way that soldiers are tasked with hard jobs so they could be strong when the enemy eventually came. So what are you doing in your life to push yourself beyond mere study and practice? And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman.

9:20I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand, write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them. You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. This idea of keeping the thoughts at hand really ties into this week's entry. We've got two quotes from Epictetus and one from Seneca.

9:51We must undergo a hard winter training and not rush into things for which we haven't prepared. That's Epictetus and his discourses. Here's Seneca in Moral Letters 18. Here's a lesson to test your mind's mettle. Take part of the week in which you have only the most meager and cheap food, dress scantily in shabby clothes, and ask yourself, this is really the worst you feared. It is when times are good that you should gird yourself for tougher times ahead. For when fortune is kind, the soul can build up defenses against her ravages. So it is that the soldiers practice maneuvers in peacetime, erecting bunkers with no enemies in sight, and exhausting themselves under no attack so that when it comes, they won't grow tired.

10:31And then finally, Epictetus says, when a challenge confronts you, remember that God is matching you with a younger sparring partner, as would a physical trainer. Why? Because becoming an Olympian takes sweat. I think that no one has a better challenge than yours. If only you would use it like an athlete would use a younger sparring partner. So a couple of things here. One, I sometimes get this question, should I seek out adversity? If adversity is such a good teacher, should I seek it out? So I say, look, for the most part, life is going to give us most of the training we need. Life's going to throw most of the adversity we need at us.

11:08So you don't need to go like getting yourself into trouble so you can know what a prison cell feels like. Right. I don't think that's really what it is. As Epictetus is saying, look, instead of bemoaning the adversity, when you do feel it, go like, hey, this is good. This is training I needed. I'm going to use this. So I think about that way. How are you, though, actively engaged in training that makes you stronger, more mentally tough, more physically tough? So to me, this is where like a strong physical practice comes in. It's also where getting up early, maybe intermittent fasting, maybe cold showers, but mostly working out because I love working out.

11:44But still, every time I have to convince myself to do it right. I love running. It's almost painful not to run. but there's still lots of days when I don't want to do it and still be easier to go slower. I have to push myself every single time. But every time I do it, I get better at pushing myself, right? I usually do some sort of weight training about four days a week as well. And so that is much less fun for me. And I really do have to push myself to do it. And that training though, the act of pushing myself to do something that I'm uncomfortable with, that's not fun, that challenges me. This doesn't just make me stronger and more fit and better at chasing my kids around the house.

12:25What it really does is make me better at overriding that impulse that I don't want to do something because it's hard or that I'm afraid or that's going to be exhausting. And you think I don't wake up so many days and I don't feel it. I don't want to do it. It's hard. What if I phone it in today? Is anyone really watching? Will anyone know? Well, I've trained for exactly that kind of insidious opponent, as Stephen Pressfield talks about. I know the resistance well. I have built up a lot of muscles that make me stronger than the resistance. And that's where this training comes in. And I think that's a metaphor for all forms of adversity, difficulty, resistance, weakness in life.

13:04And so I hope you have some sort of active practice. Use the adversity, train against it when it's there, but also build some active daily practices or weekly practices in your life as well.

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