What Commands Your Attention?

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1:29Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

1:43Ryan Holiday: What commands your attention? We'd like to think we're masters of our fate, that we're in charge of our own lives. But are we? Aren't you constantly checking your phone every few minutes? Don't you crave the approval of other people? What about that pull for a drink, the lure of various temptations, those things you know you should stop doing but just can't seem to quit? Epictetus, who was born into slavery, told his students that the critical question of life was, who is my master? Because many free, even powerful people are actually slaves. Slaves to their ambition, slaves to their urges, to their procrastination, to their emotions.

2:29Ryan Holiday: Today, we could add to this list the news cycle, social media, caffeine, nicotine, pot, keeping up with the Joneses. Whatever controls what we desire or dislike, Epictetus warned, becomes our master. Whatever we obey, we serve. Look, if someone kidnapped you and threw you into slavery, that would be one thing. Self-imposed slavery, though, the Stoics believed with something else, something shameful. It's a surrendering of the little amount of control we have in this life. So this question was what Epictetus encouraged his students to think about, to take action on, because it truly mattered how they lived their lives, what they let or didn't let control them.

3:12Ryan Holiday: And it was important advice 2 ,000 years ago, and it's utterly essential today. And it's one of the things that we're exploring here in Epictetus Month. We're doing a deep dive into Epictetus, how to read Epictetus, how to understand him. We're doing a live session about it. It's awesome. I'm really looking forward to it. At the end of the month, thousands of Stoics all over the world are going to be diving into it. I'd love to have you join us. I'll throw the link into today's show notes. You get Epictetus' Discourses for 50 % off. Then you get invited to our session and you can walk yourself through the module as well.

3:49Ryan Holiday: You can grab the guide and join us in the course. I'll link to that in today's show notes.