This Is The Time For A Fresh Start | The Beauty of Choice

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.

0:57This is the time for a fresh start. As winter's grip loosens, some uncomfortable truths begin to emerge in the newfound spring sunlight. The bad habits we accumulated to get through the dark months, those inefficiencies and practices that claim too much of our time, those messes we've allowed to pile up in our houses and our minds, it's all there, but we have the courage to face it. Or will we, as Mark's really said of those animals at the games, bloodied and wounded, struggle on to fight again the same way? We can keep being the person we've always been, or we can change. That's the choice of life, the Stoics believed.

1:43The poet Philip Larkin said that the green and growth of spring was nature's way of reminding us to begin afresh, afresh, afresh. Will we? That's what spring offers us, a chance to spring forward, to clean ourselves up literally and figuratively. And it's what we've built the daily stoic spring forward challenge around each year too. Starting this Thursday, March 20th, the first day of spring, you will have the opportunity to systematically eliminate what doesn't serve you and build on what does. Day by day, step by step with 10 days of stoic inspired challenges alongside thousands of other stoics all over the world.

2:22We are going to be getting after it and we would love you to join us. Each morning is going to bring a chance to shed, what weighs you down and choose a better path. And the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge is your chance to examine all aspects of your life, your habits, your relationships, your choices and clean them up and get yourself back on track. Let's have this spring be the fresh start you have been waiting for. Hey, just to thank you for being an awesome listener of the Daily Stoic Podcast, which I very much appreciate. We are offering a discount to anyone who wants to sign up for the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge.

3:01We're going to kick spring of 2025 off with 10 days of stoic inspired challenges. And if you go to dailystoic.com slash spring right now and enter code DSPOD20, you'll get 20 % off the Spring Forward Challenge. It's going to be awesome. It starts on March 20th. So don't wait. I'll see you in there. Dailystoic.com slash spring with code DSPOD20 for the 2025 Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. Let's start off spring with a bang. I'll see you in there. 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.

3:50What 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. 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.

4:32Toyota 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. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

5:13The beauty of choice. This is the entry from March 17th in the Daily Stoic. Grab a leather edition at store.dailystoic.com. You are not your body and hairstyle, but your capacity for choosing well. If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be. It's that line in the movie Fight Club. You are not your job. You are not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. Obviously, our friend Epictetus never saw that movie or read the book. It's quite good. You should enjoy it. I know some people think it's a little weird or overrated, but we sell it on the painted portraits.

5:55It's a classic for a reason, I think, and not maybe exactly what you think it is. Anyways, but the consumerism of the 1990s existed in ancient Rome too. It's always existed. And it's easy to confuse the image we present to the world for who we actually are, especially when media messaging deliberately blurs that distinction. You might look beautiful today, but if that was the result of vain obsession in the mirror this morning, the Stokes would ask, are you actually that beautiful? A body built from hard work is admirable. A body built to impress gym rats is not. And that's what the Stoics urge us to consider.

6:40Not how things appear, but what effort, activity, and choices they are a result of. I don't know, this is just one of my favorite quotes from Epitetus. Every time we put it on Instagram, it does really well, because it is so simple. If you want to be beautiful, make beautiful choices, right? That beauty, of course, also exists in the superficial sense. But how often we find that behind that beauty is real ugliness, right? Selfishness or greed or vanity or vapidity or a focus on trivialities, right? Or worse, that perhaps beneath the beauty is really ugly choices, ugly habits, and an ugly foundation, right?

7:25Whether we're talking, I don't know, about plastic surgery or unethical choices or, you know, a prioritization of the things that don't matter. So you can be pretty, you can look rich, but you're not pretty if you made ugly choices to get there. And you're not rich if you have a poverty of the things that really matter. And so I like this because to me, I think it boils back down to what Epictetus talks about so much, that the things that matter are the things that we control. And that if we don't control it, it doesn't really matter. So what other people think you look like is something that you don't control.

8:10But you control how you look to yourself. You control your focus on the things that you have sway over. So today, when we think about the choices that we're going to make, think maybe a little bit less about the results or the externals or how they're going to be perceived by others and think instead about what's going into them. Think about where it's coming from. Think about what you're doing. Think about why you're doing it. And focus on that, right? Focus on doing the beautiful thing, doing the work, holding the standards, what you control, what's up to you. Because that's where beauty lies.

8:52And look, we don't control our genes. We don't control whether we're tall or short. We don't control, you know, so many of the features that people use to determine beauty or ugly these days. But we do control what's underneath that, right? You know, they go, oh, that person's beautiful, but they have a bad personality or they're ugly, but they have a great personality. You control the personality, right? Like you can't necessarily make yourself that much prettier, but you can change who you are. You can adjust your character. You can work on that. You can make yourself beautiful in that sense.

9:28And that's what we're talking about today. And I just urge you to go out and have a day defined by good choices. That's what I'm working on. Not perfect at it. I'm sure I already made some ugly choices today, but I'm going to work on the rest of the day then on making prettier choices. And I hope you do as well.

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