What Are You A Slave To? | Stake Your Claim

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2:00Go to HelloFresh.com slash Stoic10FM to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. One box with active subscription. Free meals applied as a discount on the first box. New subscribers only varies by plan. That's HelloFresh.com Stoic10FM to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. welcome 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.

2:48So let's get into it.

3:02What are you a slave to? Dwight Eisenhower gave himself the order, quit smoking. It had become a four-day-a-pack habit. It had been part of his life for nearly 40 years. It was comfortable. It was more than a habit. It was an addiction, one he was by no means alone with. Yet his doctor told him that his health hung in the balance, that his ability to serve was at risk. So after nearly four decades of smoking, he made the decision to quit. Cold turkey. The only way to stop is to stop, Eisenhower would tell an aide, and I stopped. This story is in Discipline is destiny. It's also the basis of one of the best days in the 2024 New Year New You challenge we're doing at Daily Stoic.

3:45Because the Stoics were really big on this idea of quitting cold turkey, of quitting anything that has a pull over us. No man is free who is not master of himself, Epictetus tells us. And this is why Seneca talked about how everyone, even slaveholders, could be slaves to something. Whether it was a mistress or ambition or gossip or busyness, Self-mastery was the ultimate freedom. Being in command of your thoughts, your emotions, and actions is true liberty. And this is what we have to aspire to achieve. And the arrival of a new year presents another opportunity to break free. What are you hooked on?

4:24What is difficult for you to go without? What exerts control over you? Now ask, what are the costs of being hooked on whatever it is that has control over you? How much is it costing you financially, physically, emotionally, personally, professionally? How much would it be worth to free yourself from that which has control over you to be a better version of yourself? Are you looking to be freed to be your best self? Are you looking for guidance for people who hold you accountable for the concrete steps to take towards that better version of yourself? Well, one little step you can make, you can, if there's something you want to quit, you want to do it with thousands of other stoics all over the world.

5:02I would invite you to join us in the 2024 New Year Challenge that we're doing with Daily Stoic. Because at the core of Stoicism is this self-mastery, a reaction against anything that has control over us. We must be the boss. We have to quit cold turkey. If you're ready to do a clean break, well, let's do the 2024 Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge together. It's beginning on Monday, January 1st, so you don't have much time. And if procrastination is one of those things, the resistance, one of those things that has some control over you, why don't you break that right now and sign up with us.

5:39You can go to dailystoic.com slash challenge. And remember, if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life, you get this challenge and all of our challenges for free. So if you're thinking about doing both, now is the time you can do that at dailystoic.com slash challenge or dailystoiclife.com. Come on.

6:04We like to collect the sayings of great writers or of leaders we admire. They often become mantras for us on the path to life, providing guidance and assurance. But as Seneca reminds us, truth hasn't been monopolized. We need to spend some time and effort each week formulating our own wisdom, staking our own claims based on our study, practice, and training. And that's what the Daily Stoic Journal and this podcast has always been about, reflecting on Stoic wisdom and adding our own to it. Seneca urged us to blaze our own trail and to take charge and stake our own claim. Well, let's do that. Let the pages in your own journal, your own writing, reflect the insights you've learned through your own experiences.

6:51Let the inspiration you've taken from the Stoics help you create your own exercises, reminders, and perspectives. Then we have two quotes from Seneca and one from Marcus. The first from Seneca's Moral Letters. It's disgraceful for an old person or one inside of old age to only have the knowledge carried in their notebooks. Zeno said this, what do you say? Clientes said that, what do you say? How long will you be compelled by claims of another? Take charge and stake your own claim. Something prosperity will carry in its notebook. That's Seneca Moral Letters 33.7. And then in 33.11, Seneca says, Won't you be walking in your predecessor's footsteps?

7:33I surely will use the older path, but if I find a shorter and smoother way, I'll blaze a trail there. The ones who pioneered these paths aren't our masters, but our guides. Truth stands open to everyone. It hasn't been monopolized. And then Marcus Aurelius Meditations 3.5, he says, don't act grudgingly or selfishly or without due diligence or be a contrarian. Don't overdress your thoughts in fine language. Don't be a person of too many words or too many deeds. Be cheerful, not wanting outside help or the relief that others might bring. A person needs to stand on their own, not be propped up. I mean, obviously, this is something I think a little bit about as a writer, a popularizer of stoicism.

8:18I rely quite a bit on the ideas from the Stokes. That is what the daily Stoke is. And it's funny, I'll see comments from people. They'll say like, well, you're just quoting other people. What do you have to say? But then of course, when I say what I have to say, if I don't make enough nods to the Stokes, people go, well, who's this guy? You should just read the originals. And so it's a delicate line that I walk, but I think it's analogous to the line that we all walk, which is smarter, wiser people came before us. And they said they picked so much of the low hanging fruit, but we have to, I think, use kind of the Austin Kleon approach to steal like an artist, take from here and there and there and there.

8:59And it's in the taking and the synthesis and the arrangement that we make something new. For instance, it's funny. Now I watch people talk about the relationship between stoicism and amorphati, but I know I'm the one that made that connection explicit and popular because it was something I was introduced to when I was a research assistant on Robert Greene's book with 50 Cent. And he talks about the idea of amorphati and it struck me just how deeply connected that idea was with stoicism. And it's something I integrated in my own books and that became popular. Now it's, I see people going, Hey, you know, the Stoics never really said Amor Fatih.

9:39That's from Nietzsche, not from the Stoics. I know, but I made the connection. And so the idea then of relying on these ancient ideas, but not relying so much or too much, not being dependent on them using just the right amount, but also understanding you can't listen to this. I mean, I think it was Cleanthes put together one of his books and he quotes so much from the play Medea that he said, this is Cleanthe's Medea. He included almost the entire book in all the quotations that he'd use. And I guess at some point, if I keep doing this, I'll have quoted from every single passage from Marcus Aurelius.

10:18But the arrangement that I do it in is different. The reading I have is different. And my interpretation might be different than your interpretation, which might be different than the interpretation that even I myself might've made a few years ago. So we put our own spin on these things. We make them our own, right? And to not do that, to not do that is also a shame. I think it was Nassim Taleb, again, I'm quoting, but he says, most of the quotations you make should be of people you disagree with. Now, I would disagree with the idea of most, but the point is, if all the quotes that you have, that you use, that you write down are just ones that you accept, that you agree with, you're probably not being critical enough.

11:03You're not challenging enough. And so I want to push you to do that too. You shouldn't agree with everything the Stokes say. You certainly shouldn't agree with everything that I say. You should be blazing your own path. And that's something I think about even as I'm doing marginalia in the sides of the books that I read is like, am I just unthinkingly agreeing with everything I said, or I think it's better if the reading process is a bit of an argument. If you agree with everything that I say, that means probably you're not thinking enough for yourself, but also it means I'm probably not being courageous enough in what I say.

11:42I'm not pushing the envelope enough. I'm not being honest or vulnerable enough. So you got to be comfortable both quoting and carving your own path. You got to be comfortable agreeing as well as disagreeing. And it's in how all that shakes out that we have our original voice. And Seneca does say that. Again, quoting, noting the irony, Seneca says something like, how do you prove that you really understood these masters? It's by putting their thoughts into your own words. And you see that illustrated in the Stoics, the sort of constant illusions or reframing or tightening of sort of Stoic mantras or ideas in one's own voice, one's own expression.

12:31And to me, that's partly what journaling is. I'm writing the ideas down, writing them down in my own voice, putting my own spin on them, staking my own claim, as Seneca says. As we wind up this year and we go into the new year, I hope you can put a stamp on this new year. You can stake out your own claim, claim your own original voice. And that's what stoicism is about. And I'll talk to you soon.

13:01If you're ready to do a clean break, well, let's do the 2024 Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge together. It's beginning Monday, January 1st. So you don't have much time to do that at dailystoic.com slash challenge or dailystoiclife.com.

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