This Is The Point of Philosophy | You're Wasting Your Life

0:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

0:56This is the point of philosophy. What's the point? What is philosophy for? Is it for impressing people? Is it for exercising your brain? Is it to land a job in a university teaching philosophy? Certainly, it's not nodding along to a podcast or an Instagram video or a daily email. Philosophy is not supposed to pump you up or make you feel good. The point of philosophy, stoic philosophy anyway, is to make you a better person, to make your life better. And through that, to lift up the lives of the people around you. It was self-help in the truest sense, to help you live a good life and be a good person.

1:39But this is obviously easier said than done, because first you have to learn what the Stoics have to teach you, which is a lot, and then you have to apply it, putting ancient ideas into modern practice. And there's a lot to Stoicism, and it can feel overwhelming, and it has been overwhelming to people for thousands of years. So where do you start? How do you put Stoicism into practice? Well, this is exactly what we answer in Stoicism 101, Ancient Philosophy for Your Actual Life, a 14-day course designed to help you start integrating these ideas into your daily life. As I said, it is a 14-day course designed to help kickstart your study and practice of Stoicism, to introduce you to Mark Surrealis and Seneca and Epictetus and the other Stoics, to learn what made them great, what we can learn from them, what you should read and how to read it.

2:29And think about what it would be worth to be able to put these ideas in practice, to get upset with your spouse less, to be anxious less, to be stronger, to be more resilient, to be able to bounce back faster. Think about that over the course of your lifetime. And Stoicism 101 is there to do that, to help you live a great life. So real solutions to your real problems. I'm really proud and excited about it. This course is beginning on November 10th, which is right here around the corner. And we'd love to have you join us together. And you can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash 101. And remember, Daily Stoic Life members get this course and all our Daily Stoic courses for free.

3:15I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day and 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, everything they sell has high standards to help you shop with confidence.

3:56Enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market. 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 in 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.

4:33There 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 it 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.

5:10And 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.

6:02of 2025. It's time for the great lock-in. The start of the great lock-in. Basically, the idea is that you can't write these last few months of the year off. You got to double down on your goals. Don't wait. Don't push stuff off. Start now and let that new momentum carry you in to January.

6:24One of the things I talk about in The Obstacle is the way is this idea of the process. Now the officials are going to obviously instantly... If you've ever spent time around elite sports teams, whether it's college football or professional basketball, you hear them talk about this idea of the process. We decided to use the approach that we were not going to focus on the outcome, that we were just going to focus on the process of what it took to play the best football you could play, which was to focus on that particular play like it had a history and a life of its own. Nick Saban, the legendary coach in Alabama, talked about it the most.

6:57He was saying, you know, don't focus on the end of the season. Don't focus on the playoffs. Don't look at the scoreboard. Don't look at any other external factors. Just all your focus, all your concentration, all your effort, all your toughness, all your discipline to execute went into that particular play. And regardless of what happened on that play, success or failure, you would move on to the next play and have the same focus to do that on the next play. And that you would do that for 60 minutes in the game. and then you would be able to live with the results regardless of what those results were.

7:31What is your job in this moment, in this play? That's where your attention has to be focused. Carl Jung talked about the next right thing. That's the process. What is the next right thing? Most of us are trying to do too much. We set what they call big, hairy, audacious goals, right? They want to lose 100 pounds, write a best-selling book, build a business so they can quit their job. They set these goals, which are inspiring and exciting to think about, but then they almost immediately get overwhelmed by the sheer scale of what they're trying to accomplish. And then they end up giving up, or they quit, or they tell themselves it was impossible and they were stupid to even try.

8:15And I think what the process does is it flips that script. You got to break these big goals, the person you want to be in the future, down into these small, manageable steps. I am on day three of my next book. Let's see how many words I have. I am at 1 ,200 words, which doesn't seem like a lot, and it's not. But I know that basically this full book will probably be that 75 more times. If I show up every day, if I just show up every day and do a word count like that, in a few months, I will have a finished manuscript. I didn't say I will have a publishable manuscript. I didn't say I would have a bestseller.

8:53I would say I would have the first step in getting towards those things. Epictetus says, first, say to yourself what you would be and then do what you have to do. Piece by piece. You take where you want to go, who you want to be, and then you begin to break it down. As a parent, it's not, I want to have the perfect day tomorrow. You go, hey, I want to win the morning. If you're trying to lose weight, maybe you're thinking about one meal. Again, as a writer, it's not the finished manuscript. I'm breaking this book down into its composite parts. I've got an intro, a conclusion, how many chapters in the middle?

9:36How long is each chapter? what is the opening of this chapter, right? I'm breaking it down into small, manageable pieces. Now, breaking it down into small pieces only works as a strategy if you couple that with the day-to-day discipline of showing up and doing that work. I think that's the critical part of what Epictetus is telling us. First, you say what you want to be. you break it down in those pieces and then you do what you have to do what is mark's realest open meditations book five with he says at dawn when you have trouble getting out of bed tell yourself i have to go to work as a human being right but i want to huddle under the blankets it's warmer here he says you were born to feel nice instead of doing things and experiencing them he says don't you see the plants and the birds and the ants and the spiders and the bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order as best they can.

10:39Why aren't you running to do what your nature demands? So that's the consistency. That's the day-to-dayness. A writer wants to find all of Epictetus's thinking, all of his teachings about this virtue of discipline as two words, persist and resist. Do what you need to do. Don't do what you shouldn't do. Simple, but not easy. And then, of course, I think the other critical part of Stoicism is this reflection process. That's what Marcus is doing in meditations. He's set the intention of who he wants to be. He's trying to do that day to day. And then he's reflecting on it. Meditations is his private journal.

11:20Seneca talks about how every night when his wife would go to sleep, he'd sit down and he'd put the day up for review. What could he have done better? Where did he fall short? What was he proud of? What did he want to do more of? And so this loop of focusing on what's in front of you, adding the discipline and the commitment and the routine to it, and then the reflective process where we fine tune and tighten and improve. This is a feedback loop that helps us get better and better. It starts with these small, unsexy steps, but it is by no means a small thing. Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible.

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