Today, You Have Two Choices | You're a Product of Your Training

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.

0:57Today, you have two choices. He's been doing it for decades. It's helped him make it to 88. 88 years old in a world that tried to break him, that discriminated against him, that made him an orphan, that threw every obstacle it could in his way. But here he is every morning putting his two feet on the ground next to the bed and saying, OK, George, you have two options today and only two. You can be happy or you can be very happy. As my dear friend George Raveling elaborates in his book, What You're Made For, he starts with a simple but powerful choice each morning. He says, it's a reminder to myself that I have the power to set the tone for my day, to choose the attitude and mindset that I'll bring to whatever challenges come my way.

1:49It's a simple choice, but obviously not an easy one. there's a very good chance today that you'll come across people who are incredibly frustrating. Just as Marcus Aurelius warned us about 2 ,000 years ago, the people we'll deal with today, he reminds us, can be meddling and ungrateful and arrogant and dishonest and jealous and surly. We might face criticism, warranted or not, from people who just don't get it. There will be delays and disruptions, frustrating inconveniences. People will let you down. Situations will bother you. Life will be unfair. But if everything that can possibly go wrong does, even if circumstances seem impossibly dark, you have to fight against the instinct to give up control over how these events affect your mood.

2:36You can bind up my leg, Epictetus would say. Indeed, his leg really was bound and broken, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice. No one and nothing can steal the control you have over your happiness. And that's why George starts his day with the most important decision to make, the decision to be in a good mood. And so should you. And I'm excited today. I'm in a good mood because George's book is out. I helped bring it into the world. I feel very lucky and fortunate to have done that. And George just sent me a text, so I'm smiling about that as well. what you're made for, I think is an awesome book.

3:18I'm super proud of it. I know George is really proud of it. And I'd love for you to read it. We got a bunch of copies over in the painted porch. I'll sign the copy if you want. You can grab those. I'll link to it here and grab the audio book also if you're interested in it. I mean, how many books do you think Michael Jordan writes the forward to? He made an exception for George. He's the best. I think you'll like it. Make a good Joyce today. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then 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?

4:01That'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. Becky'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.

4:38Becky 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. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

5:19You're a product of your training. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic, March 31st. Chasing what can't be done is madness, but the base person is unable to do anything else. Marcus Aurelius Meditations 517. And let me grab you another translation of that one too. Let's do Gregory Hayes. What does Gregory Hayes have to say today on 517? This is one of my favorite little passages. And sometimes what I like to do is pull up more than one. He says, it is crazy to want what is impossible and impossible for the wicked not to do so. And then turning to Robin Waterfeld, which I also love, he said, to pursue impossibilities is madness, and it's impossible for bad men not to behave like that.

6:14And then his little note there is, he said, Marcus is again commenting on something one of his acquaintances has done that is unknowable to us. Interesting. So I love both those translations. I love Steve's in The Daily Stoic best, of course. Here's what I riffed on in the book. I said, a dog that's allowed to chase cars will chase cars. A child who's never given any boundaries will become spoiled. An investor without discipline is not an investor. He's a gambler. And a mind that isn't in control of itself, that doesn't understand its power to regulate itself will be jerked around by external events and unquestioned impulses.

6:52And that can't be how you'd like tomorrow to go. So you must be aware of that. You must put in place training and habits now to replace ignorance and ill-discipline. Only then will you begin to behave and act differently. Only then will you stop seeking the impossible and the short-sighted and the unnecessary. The dictum from Heraclitus is that character is fate. Sort of who we are, who we've become, on the work we've done, right, on ourselves, this thing that we are determines who will be, what we'll do. It's predictive and deterministic. And I think the tragic part is like we've seen this. I won't get too into specifics, but let's just say we've seen this play out politically over the last couple of years.

7:37People tell themselves that it'll be different once this person gets elected or that they hope they'll be able to control themselves. They hope the office will make them, you know, more this way or that way. They hope the checks and balances, they hope they'll learn their lesson this time. But that's not how it goes. We're a product of our training. We're a product of the standards we hold ourselves to. We're a product of our character. And when one is deficient, and the illusion I'm making here, woefully deficient in those areas, the results are pretty easy to predict. Especially when the future, what the future holds is the inevitable difficulties, tests, challenges, temptations, corruptions, right?

8:21Of course, it was never going to go any other way. It was only going to go the way that it went. You see this in sports, of course, right? Hey, maybe Antonio Brown will be different this time. No, Antonio Brown is Antonio Brown. And I say this as someone who was quite pleased a couple of years ago to hear that he was reading my books. But of course, the books didn't really make a difference. Of course, the people trying to get through to a Kanye West or an Elizabeth Holmes or whomever. It's never going to get through. They're always going to go down that path. It's who they are, right? It's tragic.

8:57It's sad. I wish it was otherwise. I wish people were more malleable than they were, but they're not. And that's why now early on before the concrete is set, before the paint is dry, you got to do that work. You got to do that training. You got to set those standards because they ultimately determine who we're going to be. You're not just magically going to reinvent yourself. You're not just magically, you know, people go, oh, when the moment arises, I'll step up to it, right? And that's not how it is, right? As they say in sports and in the military, we fall back to the level of our training.

9:32We don't rise to the occasion. We fall back to the level of our training. To me, that's really what stoicism is. It's training. We're training to become what we need to become who we need to be. Because if we don't do that work, well, we're going to cause a lot more work for ourselves, a lot more problems for ourselves in the future.

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