When Are You Going To Get This Together? | Count Your Blessings

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1:29Welcome 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.

2:08When are you going to get this together? It doesn't matter how old you are, it looms before you. Not death, although that's always there, but the future itself. The future when you're not going to be so young anymore, when you're not going to want to be hustling entry-level jobs anymore, or doing this or that kind of work anymore. When you're going to have things you want to do, a house you want to buy, kids to send to college, trips you want to go on, a potential retirement? Look, at some point you're going to have to get it together. You know this. You're going to have to get your spending under control.

2:41You're going to have to get your savings together. You're going to have to get your investments started. But when? When? As Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, we know what we need to do to be good today, but instead we choose tomorrow. We throw our lot in with the fools that Seneca talks about, the ones who are always getting ready to start. But they never do. You never do. How long have you been saying some version of this to yourself about money and finance, about how you need to sit down and read that book, or fill out that paperwork for that account, or follow up with that person, or learn the difference between a Roth and an IRA and a 401k, or cancel those services that keep showing up on your credit card, or do something about those credit cards themselves, the ones with the debt on them, the debt that keeps increasing and increasing.

3:36Discipline, growth, success, these things are about starting. It's not magically transforming yourself. It's not one big thing. No, all growth, all mastery comes slowly, comes as a result of process. But it can only come if one begins, if one takes the first step, starts the clock, gets serious. Not later, not tomorrow, now. Because the sooner you start, yes, the sooner you'll get results, but also as any finance expert can tell you, the bigger the results will be. Because time and the compounding returns inherent therein is one of the most powerful forces on earth. Use it to your advantage or don't.

4:28Get it together today, which is actually what I've been working on here at Daily Stoic. I think it's one of our most important and urgent courses that we've built. This is the Wealthy Stoic, a Daily Stoic guide to being rich and free and happy, which will set you on a path the happiness and prosperity, using the wisdom of the Stoics as well as the experts we've interviewed in the course, as well as my own entrepreneurial and financial journey, to wrapping your heads around money, about defining financial security, about taking the steps, doing the things you need to do to have that financial security.

5:10It's an awesome course. It's nine weeks. We're going to dive deep every single week. Emails from me, almost a book's worth of content. We're going to look at how a slave became the richest Stoic, how the richest man in Rome was actually one of the poorest Stoics, the ambitions and the motivations that fueled the Stoics and their understanding of money, how the Stoics spent and saved, what they prized more than money, how they dealt with setbacks and adversity and uncertainty and risk. All of these things are in the challenge. I'm really proud of this one. I think it's great. There's live video sessions with me.

5:49There's a bunch of resources that come along with it. If you've done any of our courses, you know we always over-deliver and we're going to do that in this one. Today is the launch. It's going to start in just a few weeks, but you got to sign up now to secure your spot. It's a live course. We're all going to be doing it together. I want to see you in there. If you've said any of these things to yourself that we were talking about, like, hey, I know I got to get started. I know I should do better, blah, blah, blah. stop, stop, right? Just get started. Take this with us today. I think it's going to be awesome.

6:18I can't wait to see you in there. The Wealthy Stoic, A Daily Stoic Guide to Being Rich, Free, and Happy. Can't wait to see it in the course. Also remember, if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life at dailystoiclife.com, you get this course and all our courses for free. It's a way to save money and also invest in yourself. And I'll see you in the course. I'll link to it in today's show notes. More from us on the course soon, but sign up now while there's still spots.

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7:48Count your blessings. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living, by yours truly and my wonderful collaborator, Stephen Hanselman, who I also worked on the Daily Stoic with. This week's entry begins with the following meditation. It's easy to complain about things missing in our lives and so much harder to appreciate what we already have. Seneca reminded us that everything we need to be happy is right in front of us, while the luxuries we might be missing could themselves come at a great cost, the cost of what we already have.

8:26Marcus agreed and reminded himself to count those blessings present in our lives and try to imagine what it would be like to not have them and how much we'd miss them. So take a minute and list some of your blessings this week. Take a conscious note of what you are fortunate to have and enjoy so you can see clearly, as Epictetus put it, where they come from and feel a sense of gratitude for that. The first quote is from Mark Surrelius' Meditations, 727. He says, don't set your mind on things you don't possess as if they were yours, but count the blessings you actually possess and think about how much you would desire them if they weren't already yours.

9:05But watch yourself that you don't value these things to the point of being troubled that if you should lose them. That was a really helpful exercise for me about envy. You know, you can look at all the things that other people have that you'd want to have, but it gives you a whole nother perspective if you take a minute and think about all the things that you have that other people would be jealous of. And it is funny how often we lust or crave things that other people not only don't like, but they would lust or crave for our life. And that should give you some sense that this is all crazy. This is all some freakish evolutionary drive that's making us miserable.

9:39Focus on what you have. Be grateful for that instead of craving what you don't have. But of course, don't be so obsessed and grateful for the things you have that you would miss them if you lost them. This is from Seneca's Moral Letters. The founder of the universe who assigned to us the laws of life, provided that we should live well, but not in luxury. Everything needed for our well-being is right before us, whereas what luxury requires is gathered by many miseries and anxieties. Let us use this gift of nature and count it among the greatest things. Seneca is a bit of a hypocrite here. He's a very, very rich man, famously has something like 300 tables that he uses for entertaining.

10:18But the point is, he knew even richer people, and he knew people who were not as rich but craved what he had. And he saw that marble and gold, you know, he said marble and gold are forms of slavery, that the people who live under them are slaves. He said that these things are won at the cost of life. And so when we're not counting our blessings, what we are doing is, by definition, is chasing other people's blessings or more blessings or other blessings. And this is preventing us from being satisfied with what we have right now in front of us. And then we have a quote from Epictetus's Discourses 1.6.

10:55He says, it is easy to praise providence for anything that may happen if you have two qualities, a complete view of what has actually happened in each instance and a sense of gratitude. Without gratitude, what is the point of seeing? And without seeing, what is the object of gratitude? And look, it's not just gratitude about possessions. It's not just focusing on material items. but it's also just grateful that you were born here to these parents, to this or that, grateful for your set of experiences because they made you who you were. And that it's impossible, for instance, to have had different parents or be born to a different nationality or to have had this or that, and it not change the whole course of your life, right?

11:41You can't just pick and choose. You have no line item veto over the things that happened to you in life. So in that sense, you have to be grateful for the whole of it because all of it made you who you were. All of it shaped who you are and will become. And so this sense of gratitude for everything, for the stuff we have, as well as the stuff we haven't had, as well as the experiences we've had, and as the different experiences that were out of reach or didn't happen to us, or the things we thought we wanted, but we didn't get, right? Gratitude for all of it, gratitude for what it is because it made you who you were and it couldn't have been any differently.

12:18The Stoics would say, this is what fate chose for you. This is how it worked out. There's no reason to feel anything but gratitude for this. And that's what Amor Fati is really about. I spend a lot of time journaling about this this week. I hope you do as well. Enjoy, focus on gratitude. Enjoy what you have instead of lusting over the things you don't have. Keep working on it. I'll talk to you soon.

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