This Is What You Must Be Chasing | Marks Of The Good 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.

1:09to generate new and beautiful art. This is all wonderful and important, but we know it is not the same thing as wisdom, because wisdom is all those things and more. Wisdom is being smart, the possession of knowledge and facts and insight. It's intelligence, it's intuition, it's experience and education, philosophy and practical understanding, awareness and wit, perspective, persipacity, and yes, the prudence that the ancients sometimes called wisdom. It is also humility, self-awareness, patience, curiosity, and empathy. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius had wisdom. So did Gandhi. So did Abraham Lincoln.

1:52There were people who knew more, people with more impressive minds, but no one saw further. No one went deeper. And they fused this wisdom with the other virtues, with courage and discipline and justice. And more important, perhaps most impressively, they were able to take this wisdom, this virtue, and do one of the hardest things there is to do with it. Bring it into the world. Were they born this way? No, they were not. Wisdom might be hard to define, but one thing we can all agree on is that no one is born with it. Wisdom is cultivated. Wisdom, as we have been saying, as I title the new book, wisdom takes work.

2:37Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus had great teachers. Gandhi had law school, but that's not enough. Wisdom also came from their own reading and exploration. Lincoln didn't have formal school, but he read widely. He spent decades traveling, trying various jobs, meeting people from all walks of life. Wisdom also comes from painful experiences. Gandhi's life was changed by the discrimination he experienced firsthand. Lincoln experienced failure after failure after failure. And Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus might have occupied opposite ends of society, but both endured unimaginable suffering and tragedy.

3:17All these wise men spent time reflecting and processing what they'd learned, slowly, painfully transforming it into wisdom, wisdom that they then shared with us. And where would we be without them? The world would be worse. The world would be darker. Wisdom then is the work of our lives, the culmination of all we are doing and all that we are. And it's also the final book in the Stoic Virtue series, which I began back in 2019. I'm now finishing six plus years later. The fourth and final book in the series first came Courage is Calling, when Discipline is Destiny, then Right Thing Right Now. Now Wisdom Takes Work.

4:02Dailystoic.com slash wisdom. It would mean so much to me if you could support the book. And hey, I would love to have dinner with you and talk about it. I'd love to even send you a signed page from the manuscript. all that is available on the pre-order page dailystoic.com wisdom if you've gotten anything out of this podcast over the years it would mean a lot to me if you could pre-order it dailystoic.com wisdom and i can't wait to hear what all of you think

4:32we just took our kids to an outdoor performance the nutcracker they had a snow cone and then uh they went insane in the car ride home and one of the things i try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

5:08Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It Over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being.

5:50And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events. Look, when you're hiring, you don't want just anyone. You need the right person with the right background who can move your business forward. And when I need candidates who match what we're looking for at Daily Stoic for any of my businesses, we trust Indeed Sponsored Jobs, because when you're hiring, Indeed is all you need. You can give your job the best chance to be seen with Indeed's Sponsored Jobs. They can help you stand out and hire quality candidates who can drive the results you need.

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7:29Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to today's entry from the Daily Stoic. Today is October 20th. Marks of the good life. You have proof in the extent of your wanderings that you never found the art of living anywhere. Not in logic, not in wealth, fame, or any indulgence. Nowhere. Where is it then? In doing what human nature demands. How is a person to do this? By having principles be the source of desire and action. What principles? those to do with good and evil. Indeed, in the belief that there is no good for a human being except what creates justice, self-control, courage, freedom, and nothing evil except that which destroys these things.

8:11Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 8.1. Then the entry reads, What is the meaning of life? Why was I born? Most of us struggle with these questions, sometimes when we're young, sometimes not until we're older. Rarely do we find much in the way of directions, but that's simply because we missed the point. As Viktor Frankl points out in Man's Search for Meaning, it's not our question to ask. Instead, it is we who are being asked the question. It's our lives that are the answer. No amount of traveling or reading or clever sages can tell you what you want to know. Instead, it is you who must find the answer in your actions and living the good life by embodying the self-evident principles of justice, self-control, courage, and freedom, and abstaining from evil.

8:58There's probably nothing that Marcus talks about in meditations more than the virtues, you know, deeply earnest about them too. I think, you know, cynicism is this kind of idea that nothing matters, but there's a self-fulfilling prophecy to that. Conversely, when you take the virtues as important, as significant, and you try to live by them, and you follow them, and you try to live up to them, I think you create meaning, as Viktor Frankl was saying. You know, the decision to say, hey, this is who I am. This is what's important to me. This is what I think I was put here to do. This is what I know I'm capable of being.

9:33That elevates us, right? You just read about people who experience so much adversity, so much difficulty, so much pain, who never gave up, who never quit, who never said, eh, nothing matters, never said, fuck it, who stuck with that sense of decency and goodness because they felt like there was meaning in that. To me, that's what Stoicism is all about. That's the journey that we're on. That's the journey that I'm trying to be on in this series. That's what I try to talk about here at Daily Stoic. I don't know what put us here, right? I'll leave that question to a much wiser person. But I know that we are here.

10:15And so how do we make that meaningful? It's not by doing whatever we want. It's not by chasing our pleasure. It's not by avoiding pain or risk. It's by standing up, stepping forward, doing what we can, trying to leave this place a little bit better than we found it. So I try to do my writing. So I try to talk about here. That's what I know so many of you try to do. And whatever it is that you do professionally, it's what I try to do as a parent. It's what I try to do as a spouse. Marcus says that life is what our thoughts make it. And deciding to think that virtue is important is important. You could argue it's the most important thing.

10:52And this idea of the good life, right? Cardos, which is where the phrase cardinal virtues comes from. That means hinge or pivot. pivot point. I think, put aside the marks of good life. The good life pivots on this, pivots on virtue, pivots on those four key ideas that Marcus was talking about. And I hope you're hanging your hat, your life, your sense of meaning and value as a person on those four things too.

11:27Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say, We so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

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