This is What Money Is Jealous Of | The Stoic Is A Work In Progress

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: This is what money is jealous of. You think they have it all. You think they have the good life. You think they have everything they could possibly want. But the rich, the powerful, They are actually incredibly jealous people. They are jealous not just of other rich people, and therefore often feel quite poor, according to Seneca, but they are also jealous of seemingly ordinary people. Like who? People with freedom. People with time. People who are happy. You think Marcus Aurelius, for all his wealth and power, didn't wish he could trade places with the philosophers he so admired? Of course he did.

0:52Ryan Holiday: You think Seneca, at the end, having gotten so much money from Nero, and thus unable to escape his clutches, didn't envy the more austere philosophers who shied away, was his dying regret, no doubt. Gold, power, fame, as elusive and rare as these things are, time is a much more precious resource, and yet it is wasted on the young and the rich alike. But you can have those things easily. In fact, you may well have them right now. You do not need to strike it rich. You were born rich. You do not need to climb to the top. You can simply step off the treadmill. Because every opportunity comes with a trade-off.

1:34Ryan Holiday: And not every sum of money is worth the price. And this is one of the things we talk about in the wealthy Stoic, our sort of course on Stoicism and money. Maybe it sounds like from the name, it's like, here's how to make more money. No, no. It's how the Stoics thought about money. It's how they thought about their finances. It's how they change their relationship to those things. There are definitely some stoic ideas that will help you be more successful. There are also some really important stoic ideas that will change how you think about success. And it's one of the best courses I think we've done.

2:10Ryan Holiday: It was controversial when it came out, but we've got some really interesting interviews in it, some really good ideas. To me, it is urgent and important. It's changed how I thought about a bunch of things in my life. and I think you'll really like it. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash wealthy. Of course, remember, if you are a Daily Stoic Life member, you get it and all the Daily Stoic courses for free. So that might be a great little sort of two-for-one there, which is, you know, savings? I don't know. Anyways, check it out, dailystoiclife.com, and I'll see you in there.

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5:20Ryan Holiday: The Stoic is a work in progress. Show me someone sick and happy, in danger and happy, dying and happy, exiled and happy, disgraced and happy. Show me, by God, how much I'd like to see a Stoic. But since you can't show me someone so perfectly formed, at least show me someone actively forming themselves so, inclined in this way. Show me. That's Epictetus' discourses. Instead of seeing philosophy as an end to which one aspires, see it as something one applies. Not occasionally, but over the course of a life, making incremental progress along the way. Sustained execution, not shapeless epiphanies.

6:07Ryan Holiday: Epictetus loved to shake his students out of their smug satisfaction with their own progress. He wanted to remind them and now you of the constant work and serious training needed every day if we are ever to approach that perfect form. It's important for us to remember in our own journey to self-improvement that one never arrives, that the sage, the perfect stoic who behaves perfectly in every situation, is an ideal and not an end. I'll actually give you a story about Epictetus in this very regard. Epictetus is in his house one night. He hears a noise. He walks down the hallway and he sees someone is broken into his house and stealing one of his lamps that he had burning in a shrine in his house to the Roman gods.

6:49Ryan Holiday: And at first he's mad, at first he's upset. And then he says, you know what? No, actually the problem is me. Why did I have such an expensive thing that I was worried someone would steal? And he says, tomorrow I'm going to go and get an earthenware lamp. Basically he says, I was in the wrong. I wasn't practicing the philosophy that I preached, the idea of practicing detachment, the idea of not being materialistic, and now I need to make an improvement. And that's what he went and did. And I think there's a bunch of things to take out of that story. We don't need to get into them. But I like the idea of Epictetus telling this story, which is how we hear about it, that he knew he himself was not perfect, and that he knew that he himself had improvements and changes that he needed to make.

7:35Ryan Holiday: I think this is another important way to read meditations, right? There's a reason that different passages hit differently, and sometimes they feel like they contradict each other. There's a reason that even at the end, right, the passages have Marcus Aurelius sort of near death, we think, show an evolution of a person because he's evolving and changing. But there's also in those pages some frustration with himself that he's not there yet. He says, you've been studying this your whole life. You're an old man, and you're not getting any better. So I guess I tell you all that to get you to understand that it's a journey, that none of us are perfect.

8:08Ryan Holiday: We don't just get it, but it's something we work at. And I'm having this unique experience, right? I wrote The Daily Stoic in 2015. It came out in 2016. That was like my 10-year point in my study of stosis. So I've been at it for 10 years and I'm rereading it to do these weekly episodes. And you know what I see? I see sometimes I disagree with stuff that I wrote in the book. I see ways that I would change it. I see things that I don't like. I see things that I wish I'd put in the book, different quotes that I wish I'd put in the book. Because I'm evolving as a writer, I'm evolving as a human being, and I'm evolving as a student of stoicism, which we all should be.

8:49Ryan Holiday: So it's important that we understand that stoicism is a journey, not a destination, and that we're never going to be perfect. We're never really going to get there. But one of the things that Epictetus says, right, he says, you know, you're basically joking that you'll never be able to show him such a stoke. But he does say elsewhere that just because we despair of perfecting something doesn't mean we give up trying, right? That we're still trying to do it. We're trying to get closer to it. And just because we know we can't be perfect doesn't mean we can't be better. So that's the lesson in today's entry.

9:27Ryan Holiday: And just to illustrate the idea, all the things that I just told you, those stories that I just told you, those are what I wish I'd put in the original book. But I didn't because I didn't fully know them or I didn't understand them or hadn't made the connection yet. So one of the things I'm trying to get better at as a writer is taking a little bit more time, understanding that the more time I give myself, the better the finished product will be. And anyways, I feel like I'm getting better. I feel like my understanding of stoicism has gotten better over the years. and I hope the same is true for you.

10:00Ryan Holiday: Thanks everyone for listening and I will talk to you again very soon.

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