This Is Why You Do It | Be Ruthless To The Things That Don't Matter

0:00I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in 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.

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1:19Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

2:00This is why you do it. They lived in disorienting times. They faced change. They faced criticism. Many of them lived under tyrants. They lived through wars and chaos and dysfunction. So how did the Stoics stay sane through all of this? How did Seneca not lose his mind under Nero? How did Marks really not become Nero when anointed with the same power? The answer is, as for most things, hard work. The Stoics worked hard to maintain their perspective, to shake off the misinformation and the noise, to find the truth, to maintain control over the greatest empire themselves. To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle, Orwell wrote, of living through totalitarianism and authoritarianism.

2:49But there was a habit that most of the Stoics had that Orwell also recommended. One thing that helps towards it, he said, was to keep a diary or at any rate to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about important events. Otherwise, he said, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. In meditations, we see Marcus Aurelius trying to hold himself accountable on the pages of his journal. In Seneca's letters, we see him and Lucilius trying to make sense of the deranged world they lived in. And every day, tens of thousands of people all over the world use the daily and weekly prompts in the Daily Stoic Journal to find their bearings and to center themselves.

3:32What am I doing with my soul, Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. And then he says that he and you need to interrogate yourself to find what inhabits your so-called mind and what kind of soul you have. He says, is it a child's soul, an adolescence, a tyrant's soul, the soul of a predator or its prey. Marcus Aurelius was an all-powerful emperor. No one else was interrogating him. No one else was subjecting him to these hard questions. He knew that if he didn't do it, no one would. Well, today, no one else is concerned with your soul, and it's no one else's business. So if you don't interrogate yourself about it, if you're not examining your own mind, who will.

4:17If you're not using the pages of your journal to get to self-awareness, to get to clarity, how will you ever stand a chance of seeing what's in front of your nose? You have to do it every day. And look, I have here, actually, it's under my computer. I'll lift it up. I have the Daily Stoic journal, and I have my one-line-a-day journal. I'm doing my journaling practice every night before bed. Sometimes I do it in the morning also. Look, a new year is a great time to build a journaling habit if you don't have one. That's what the Daily Stoic Journal is all about. There's a weekly stoic meditation.

4:55Then there's prompts for each day, a question that asks you a question to think about in the morning and at night that prompts you to sort of do this stoic practice. And I think you might like it. I have this cool leather cover that we make at the Daily Stoic store. It says, make time, the friend. It's a reminder. We got to make time for this essential practice. We got to make time to interrogate ourselves, see who we are, see how we're doing. And you can grab all this at store.dailystoic.com. I'll link to it in today's show notes. And then just a reminder that the Daily Stoic ebook is$2.99 on Amazon right now as an ebook in the US, I think in the UK also.

5:34So you can grab that, I think, at dailystoic.com slash discount. Anyways, get journaling. And as Orwell says, we got to see what's in front of us. 2025 is going to be a crazy year. And I'm going to be leaning on my journals. And I assume you'll get some benefit out of them too.

5:53Thanks 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. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields.

6:33and 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. 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.

7:13If 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. Hello, welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today, we are reading the January 3rd entry in the Daily Stoic book. I am holding a cloth-bound edition. I don't know where, well, I know where this one came from. This came because it's got a Target sticker on the front. I guess they were briefly available in Target. Maybe they still are. We've got the leather-bound edition. And oh, the e-book edition is discounted right now.

7:51I will link to that in today's show notes. I believe the Daily Stoic ebook is like$2.99 for the first week or so of the year, which is really exciting. And grab that on Amazon or iBooks or wherever you get your ebooks. You can pair it well with the journal. But anyways, here we are. Be ruthless to the things that don't matter. Today's quote is from Seneca on the brevity of life. How many have laid waste to your life when you weren't aware of what you were losing, how much was wasted in pointless grief, foolish joy, greedy desire, and social amusement, how little of your time was left to you, you will realize that you are dying before your time.

8:36One of the hardest things to do in life is say no to invitations, to requests, to obligations, to the stuff that everyone else is doing. Even harder is saying no to certain time-consuming emotions, danger, excitement, distraction, obsession, lust. None of these impulses feel like a big deal by itself, but run amok, they become a commitment like anything else. And if you're not careful, these are precisely the impositions that will overwhelm and consume your life. Do you ever wonder how you can get some of your time back, how you can feel less busy, start by learning the power of no, as in no thank you, or no, I'm not going to get caught up in that, or no, I just can't right now.

9:21It may hurt some feelings. It may turn some people off. It may take some hard work, but the more you say no to the things that don't matter, the more you can say yes to the things that do, and this will let you enjoy your life, the life that you want. I told this story before, but I have two pictures of my kids right here to the right of my desk. One's very cute. It's my boy. He's wearing an elf costume. We're mowing the lawn together. And then above it's my youngest. He's basically a baby. They've got their handprints on it. Beautiful little pictures of her kids. Everyone has those in their office, I imagine.

9:55And then in the middle is this sign sent to me by the sports psychologist, Dr. Jonathan Fader. And it's Oliver Sacks in his office talking on the phone, like I do many times, but behind him is a giant sign that just says, no, exclamation point. It was a reminder, Dr. Fader told me, to have pitch discipline. He works with a lot of sports teams who are saying, you know, what pitches are you going to swing at? What balls are you going to let fly right by? And I have to the right of it, two things signed by one of my favorite presidents, Harry Truman. And the first one is from July 7, 1969, after he'd left office, it says Independence, It's Missourian.

10:33And it says, Dear Mr. Hartuan, thank you for the campaign material. I appreciate your thoughtfulness. And we'll turn it over to the library for a collection of items of this kind. And he says, I regret that I cannot comply with your request as it has long been my policy not to respond to questions. I received so many requests similar to yours that I could not begin to keep up with all of them. I know you will understand. Sincerely yours, Harry Truman. Now, obviously, a secretary typed that up because it was part of a longstanding policy and all Truman had to do was scribble a signature. And I know it was part of a longstanding policy because I have an earlier memo from when Truman was president.

11:14This is just a little chunk of a tiny memo that has been cut out. It's like a little scrap of paper from, you know, secretary back in those days. And it says, since the president will be out of office when this celebration will be held, how do you think we ought to answer it? Should we say that because of many similar requests, the president must ask to be excused? And then underneath it, in Harry's writing, it says the proper response is underlined. The underlined, because of many similar requests, the president must ask to be excused. And then it's signed HST. Gotta say no. It's hard, but you gotta say no.

11:52And I was just in D.C. myself, actually at the White House. I told you why I was there, but it was funny. After I gave my talk, I went across the street. I ate at Old Ebbets with my speaking agent. And I was just telling him, man, look, I was too busy last year. I appreciate all the work that you got from me. I've loved every audience that I got to talk to, but I want to do less in 2025. And I said, how can we do this? Like, do we need to raise my fee? Will that make some of the requests go away? I need you to pre-filter some of them. I was like, I am not saying no enough. And it's hard for me to say no.

12:30So how can we get better at this? And he said, because some of my other clients do this, he said, going forward, we'll send you the offers. And then you can reply and say, tell me why I shouldn't do this. And not in the way that we sometimes mean that, like the opposite of how we mean it. He was saying, ask them for reasons not to do it. And he said, they're more than happy to provide. They will argue against their financial interests and help give me reasons not to. And they do sometimes. They go, hey, you know, this is going to be a really busy period. Are you sure you want to sign up for this?

13:05Or, hey, you know, this fee is lower than you normally accept and it's far travel. I think you should, you know, pass on this and hope maybe you get something closer to home that's maybe less, but will take less time. Or they go, you know, I just don't think this is the right thing for you to be associated. They do give me reasons. But, you know, ultimately it's a business. And so we're the idea of like defaulting to no and coming up with reasons, arguing why we shouldn't do it as opposed to the sometimes more seductive of why we should do it. That's what I'm working on in 2025. So that's just a little glimpse into my life and how I am getting better at this.

13:42Not perfect. We all struggle with it. But that is where we are. So anyways, I hope you are doing great. Hope the new year is off to a good start. don't think it's too late to sign up for the daily stoic near your new challenge we're just letting a few more people in you can play catch up a little bit that's a daily stoic.com slash challenge and then of course don't forget you can get the daily stoic as an ebook right now for$2.99 anywhere you get your ebooks and i'll link to that in today's show notes be well everyone

14:16thanks so much for listening to the daily stoic podcast if you don't know this you can get these delivered to you via email every day check it out dailystoic.com email

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