Tie Your Well-Being To This | You Are The Project

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1:29Welcome 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, and 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 in to works.

2:09Tie your well-being to this. Today we know F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the great novelists of the 20th century. Tragically though, in his own time, many regarded Fitzgerald as a failure. Sure, he was one of the highest paid writers of his time, but his novels sold poorly and the critical reviews were precisely that. They were critical. And this weighed heavily on Fitzgerald, who had a sensitive and vulnerable soul, as many great artists do. As Sarah Churchwell, an expert on 20th and 21st century American lit and the author of one of my favorite books, Careless People, Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, explained here on a recent episode of the Daily Stoic podcast.

2:48He pinned so much personal hope and ambition and desire and sense of his self-worth as an artist on Gatsby. And its comparative failure devastated him. And in my view, it really precipitated his spiral. With Gatsby, he made this choice that he was going to write a masterpiece and then it was met with bafflement. And that, I think he lost a lot of his self-confidence and a lot of his momentum at that point. Fitzgerald was really dogged by his inability to practice what Epictetus called the chief task in life, differentiating between what is in your control and what isn't. And when things didn't go Fitzgerald's way, he had trouble coping.

3:32And after the reception, or lack thereof, of The Great Gatsby, he began drinking more. He had trouble focusing. He constantly battled thoughts of what will the critics think of this? What will the public say about that? And this headspace made it hard to write. And consequently, Fitzgerald would only finish one more complete novel following Gatsby. Like an athlete who suffers an injury and has to retire in their prime, Fitzgerald left a lot of potential on the table. If only he could have defined success the way Marcus Aurelius talked about it. Real success, real mastery, real sanity, Marcus writes, is that is in tying your well-being to your own actions, to your effort, not to the results, to your judgment, not what the critics say, to what is in your control, not what isn't, and to be tough enough and brave enough to endure what isn't in your control.

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5:13you are the project this is today's entry may 5th for the daily stoic the raw material for the work of a good and excellent person is their own guiding reason the body is that of the doctor and the physical trainer and the farm of the farmer this is epictetus's discourses 3-3 Professionals don't have to justify spending time training or practicing their work. It's what they do, and practice is how they get good at it. The raw materials vary from career to career, just as the locations and duration vary depending on the person and the profession. But the one constant is working on those materials, the gradual improvements in proficiency.

5:58According to the Stoics, your mind is the asset that must be worked on most and understood best. Something that hit me when I read one of my favorite books ever for the first time, this is Steven Pressfield's The War of Art. He talks about how in Hollywood, writers create what are called loan-out corporations. So you don't work for the movie studio or on the project. They hire your company, your LLC, and you loan out your labor to that company. It's sort of a complicated industry thing that we don't need to get into. But the idea that you have to start a company and then you work for that company or that you are that company is really important as you turn pro, which is Steven Pressfield's other book.

6:38And you should read The War of Art and turning pro. I carry them both in the painted porch. In fact, I think Steven just sent us a big box of signed ones if you're looking for one. But the point is a pro sees themselves as a business. So if you need a pair of headphones to function better at your job, like it's not, oh, do I deserve a$100 pair of headphones? It's my job requires a$100 pair of headphones, right? Me running, if I don't run or walk, if I don't take my walk in the morning or run in the afternoon, if I'm not actively engaged in some sort of physical practice, my writing suffers. So I'm not a professional athlete, but if I am not investing in and actively spending time on running and working out, my professional life suffers.

7:23So it's part of my job, right? Reading is part of my job. I've always thought this way. My wife hasn't. Until we started this bookstore together, she thought reading was this fun thing she did on the side. But realizing, no, like me following what I love about books, me spending time reading, this makes the bookstore better. it also makes me as a person better. And so I'm not going to feel guilty or self-conscious. I'm not going to shortchange that. I'm going to do it. It's part of my job, right? And look, it does say something that we make more allowances for our job, for our profession. We understand investing in, spending on, et cetera, in ways that we don't for just like pure personal development or acquiring knowledge or whatever.

8:07But if that metaphor is helpful for you to see the silliness of that distinction, so be it, right? Seeing this stuff as your job, right? Like I think about this again, like if I'm sitting on my computer, that feels like work. But if I lean back in the chair, kick up my feet and I'm reading, I'm like, is someone gonna walk in and be like, well, you're having a fun day. But that book, I might learn 10 times from that book what I would learn browsing ESPN articles when I should be writing or whatever, right? Think about what's making you better. And are you seeing yourself as a project? Epictetus says this.

8:48He says, look, some people delight in improving their farm. Some people delight in improving their body. He says, me, I delight in improving myself day to day. So are you seeing yourself as a project? Are you willing to invest in the way that, yeah, like you'd say, hey, to start to open this store, to buy this stock, I have to put up some money. I have to put up some time. I have to do some research. I have to do some development to put up a plan. Well, do that for yourself also because you're worth it. And by the way, like once you pick the low hanging fruit of life, it gets harder, right? The professional level is harder and you're going to have to invest and spend some serious time.

9:33So you are a project. And the Stoics marvel at how the things we're willing to do to have some physical pleasure or wet our appetites or make some more money, but how little we're willing to invest in ourselves and in our own personal development, even though that contributes also to our personal development, but also to our happiness and fits in with our obligations as human beings and all that. So that's the prompt for you today. You are a project. You as the startup, you as the LLC, you as the corporation, invest, operate accordingly, take your obligations seriously, accordingly. And I think you'll be very impressed and pleased by the results.

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