When Weakness Turns Your Ego Up | A Simple Way To Measure Our Days

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2:26Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

3:06When weakness turns your ego up. There are some things that look like strength, but aren't. An aggressive, mean person can seem strong, but oftentimes they aren't. It's an act. All cruelty, Seneca wrote, springs from weakness. The bully almost invariably has been bullied. And so it goes for ego. To the untrained eye can be mistaken for confidence. The person's self-centeredness, their certainty, their entitlement. This seems like the way that only the most important and gifted person in the world could get away with acting. In reality, that person doesn't feel that way inside at all. On the contrary, they feel very small.

3:44Nero, for instance, demanded that enormous audiences celebrate his greatness. This was also the same emperor who banished a poet from Rome for being too talented, and thus, a threat. We have to be wise enough to recognize these signs of weakness in our leaders, in our bosses, and the people that we look up to. But most of all, we have to recognize it in ourselves. Confidence is quiet. It doesn't need to be celebrated or worshipped. True strength and power are restrained. They are not easily threatened. they don't need to make themselves felt, except for in the most extraordinary of circumstances.

4:18Ego is not just the enemy. It is the canary in the coal mine. It is a sign that you're going in the wrong direction. You're not as good or as strong or as secure as you think you are. Ego is the enemy. I mean, I got it tattooed on my arm and of course I wrote a book about it, which you can grab signed copies of here at The Painted Porch or at store.dailystoic.com. And we have the ego is the enemy coin, which I know plenty of people carry around with them. I've seen coaches hand them out to their teams. You can check all that out at store.dailystoic.com.

4:50A simple way to measure our days. This is the December 15th entry in the Daily Stoic. This is the mark of perfection of character, Mark Cirelli says in Meditation 769. to spend each day as if it were your last without frenzy, laziness, or any pretending. The Stoics didn't think that we could be perfect. The idea of becoming a sage, the highest aspiration of a philosopher, it wasn't realistic. This was just their platonic ideal. Still, they started every day trying to get a little closer to that mark. There was so much to gain in the trying. Can you actually live today as if it were your last? Is it even possible to embody completeness or perfection in our ethos, our character, effortlessly doing the right thing for a full 24 hours?

5:40Is it possible to do it for even a minute? Maybe not. But if trying was enough for the Stoics, it should be enough for us too. And I think as we get older, as we go through life, we should get better at this. Better at not wasting our time. Better at not taking it for granted. Better at rejecting the busyness or the chaos, the laziness and the procrastination. Ceasing to pretend or try to impress other people or other things that don't matter. but being content and contained within ourselves, concentrating like a Roman, as Marcus really says in meditations, right? Facing the day with responsibility and poise and dignity and self-control, doing what has to be done, doing it well, right?

6:37Doing the things right that have to be done but not the things that don't have to be done focusing living loving living each day not just as if it was your last but as a complete day as a representation of the person that you want to be that you aspire to be and i look back on my days in my 20s i see I wasn't as good as it as I am now. I look back at my teenager, I was even more ridiculous. Look back when my kid was one, now there's six. I feel like I'm getting better at it. That's what progress is. It's not perfection of character that we're after, right? But it is about perfecting, improving, making strides in our character.

7:30That's what we're after. That's what we're doing here. And the fact that we don't have that long should put an exclamation point on all of it. It should hang over it like the sword of Damocles, put it in perspective, let you know that you can't waste a minute of it. That's what we're meditating on in this final month of the Daily Stoic. And it's also what we built the Daily Stoic New Year New You challenge about, which is going to start in a little less, which is going to start in roughly two weeks. Again, I'm not promising you perfection through it. I don't think anyone can be perfect, but we can get better.

8:10We can be a little less frenzied, a little less lazy, have a little less pretending. We can be more in line with the ephemerality of life, do the things that really matter. And I hope you join us in the challenge. You can sign up now at dailystoic.com slash challenge. Speaking of laziness, procrastination, busyness, it's always funny. I watch and wait as people get to the very last minute, right? They hear me talk about it on the 15th and then they, they, so, oh yeah, I meant to sign up for that. And then they email us frantically on the first, hey, you know, I want to sign up. Is it too late?

8:41Is it too late? Is it too late? That's one of the things we don't want to do or be like. So if you're thinking about signing up, will you join us now? And I look forward to seeing you all in the daily stoic new year, a new you challenge, sign up at dailystoic.com slash challenge. And let's measure our days. Let's measure who we are this upcoming year by how unfrenzied we are, how diligent we are, that is to say, not lazy, a little pretending we do. And do we spend each of those days as if we were fully aware of how unpredictable and non-guaranteed the future happens to be.

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10:33That's toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That'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.

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