We’re Broken…But Not Fixed | What Little Wins Can You Find?

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2:36Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

3:16We're broken, but not fixed. We all have bad habits. Some of us procrastinate. Nearly all All of us, as Seneca said, are slaves to something, food or sex or booze or ambition. We don't work as hard as we should, or we work too hard and too quick with our temper or we're too slow to ask for help. The point is, we're not what we could be. And in some cases, we're quite messed up. Indeed, we are all quite flawed. In a recent episode of the Daily Stoic podcast with Tim Urban, he's the creator of Wait, But Why, and he's the author of this new book called What's Our Problem? I talked to Tim about his lifelong struggle with some of these very habits.

3:53namely distraction and procrastination. And Tim was quite aware about how his weaknesses in these areas have made things harder for him over the years. But he also expressed a sincere belief in his ability to change and grow. In other words, he was broken but not fixed. He retains, despite this discouragement, a growth mindset. He refuses to relinquish what the Stoics believed was our ultimate power, our sense of agency over our own thoughts, our emotions, and our responses to life. You know, it's easy to be cynical about ourselves. We know more than anyone how long we've been struggling with things.

4:34We know how ingrained our bad habits are, how hard it's going to be to get over them. But we can't give up. We can't quit on ourselves. If we don't believe we're capable of change, who will? And if we don't believe we're capable of change, then we are definitely not capable of change. We must remember the hopeful note that Marcus Aurelius strikes at the end of meditations. Within 10 days, he says, you will seem a God to those to whom you are now a beast and an ape if you return to your principles and the worship of reason. And I really want to tell you about the Daily Stoic Habits course that we have.

5:11We're calling it Daily Stoic Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness. It helps you do what the Stoics are talking about, which is how to avoid bad habits, how to form better new habits. I think it's one of the best things we've done. It's six weeks of habit formation, thinking about philosophy, applying it to your everyday life. These are habits I try to apply in my life that Marcus and Seneca and Epictetus and Musonius and all the Stoics we've talked about try to apply in theirs. It's great stuff based on philosophy, psychology, research, history, and I think you're really going to get a lot out of it.

5:45You can check Check that out at dailystoic.com slash habits. Or if you join Daily Stoic Life, which you can join at dailystoiclife.com, you get that course and all our other ones for free. So check both those out, Daily Stoic Life and Daily Stoic Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness.

6:11What little wins can you find? Zeno, the Phoenician merchant who founded the Stoic school on the painted porch, the Stoipokile of the Agora after a shipwreck, said that happiness was a matter of small steps. While the Stoics believed in the perfectibility of human beings, they knew that so much stood in the way of realizing that potential. So they would be skeptical of the so-called epic wins and quantum leaps that our culture obsesses over today. Instead, they would urge you to focus on your daily duties, on making incremental progress. Spend your time this week thinking about small wins. What little gains can be had from this improvement or that one?

6:51A decision here or a decision there. Be satisfied with each small step. Keep moving and don't give up. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal. 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living from yours truly. But we have a quote from Marcus, a quote from Epictetus, and a quote from Zeno today. Do what your nature demands, Mark Cirelia says in Meditations 9.29. Get right to it if it's in your power. Don't look around to see if people will know about it. Don't await the perfection of Plato's Republic, but be satisfied with even the smallest step forward and regard the outcome itself as a small thing.

7:31Then Epictetus says we don't abandon our pursuits because we despair of ever perfecting them. That's Discourses 1.2. Well-being is realized by small steps, Zeno says, according to Diogenes Laertes, but it is no small thing. I was actually just thinking about this this morning. I'm in the middle of writing the book that I'm working on now. And there's a great writing rule, you know, just a couple crappy pages a day. Just put in the time, put in the work. That'll get you to a manuscript, like a draft one. then you can edit draft one, but you can't edit what doesn't exist. So people, as Epictetus says, who despair of progress because it's not perfection, they never get there.

8:18But the person who shows up and does work every day gets there. So I was actually writing this in my journal today. I was saying, okay, just show up, put your ass in the chair, do a little work. And as I was writing this in the journal, I was thinking, put your ass in the chair, be at the desk. And then this story popped in my head because I've been trying to write this chapter about like keeping your workstation clean. That'll be in like two books from now. But the point is, as I was thinking about this, I remembered this little thing that I'd read about Robert Moses in Robert Caro's book, The Power Broker.

8:50And I wrote down my note card and I just, boom, the chapter just unlocked itself. So my point is I was thinking about the process when the process got to work and solved a problem that I was having trouble solving. I got to my desk, I got to sit down, I pulled the power broker off the shelf, started going through my folded pages, and there on about page 280-something was it, the exact story that I needed. In about an hour, I busted out the first draft of this chapter, and that was all I have to do for today's contribution to the book. Now, a lot of days like this add up, as George Washington was fond of saying, many nickels make a muckle.

9:30you show up enough days, you do this enough times, gets you to phase one, then you improve, then you go on to phase two, phase three, and finally you get your completed product. So today it's not about sort of big, huge wins. Like this was a minor, minor win. This is maybe three paragraphs of a book that's going to be 60 plus thousand words. It's going to have to go through lots of rounds of editing that won't come out until 2023, probably. And who knows, maybe it'll even get cut from the book. But the point is, I followed the process. I showed up. I did the work. I didn't wait around. I put my ass where I wanted my heart to be, to quote Steven Pressfield.

10:13And I made the smallest step forward, as Marcus said. I'm not going to get too high about this. I'm not going to get too excited. I'm going to, as Marcus says, regarded as a small thing, but I'm also confident enough, experienced enough to know that these small things add up. And that's what I'm excited about. And I know that I just have to do this enough times for long enough that I'll eventually get to the other side of where I need to go. And that is true for your problems, for your projects, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, show up, put your ass in the chair, do the work, let the process guide you to the eventual inevitable accomplishment.

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12:15That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free, no interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for.

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