You Don’t Have to Do It Alone

0:00We are coming up on the 10-year anniversary of the Daily Stoic book, Daily Stoic website, which also means we're coming up on the 10-year anniversary of the Daily Stoic Shopify store. We've been using Shopify since the very beginning with Daily Stoic. We sold a print, I think, first, and then shortly thereafter, we came out with the Memento Mori coin. And we've used Shopify because we love it. We even expanded it out to the bookstore when we opened the bookstore. I guess this would have been in 2020, 2021. So we've been using Shopify forever because Shopify is the best and the biggest commerce platform there is.

0:37It's behind millions of businesses all around the world. 10 % of all e-commerce in the U.S. is with Shopify. It helps you tackle inventory, payments, analytics, and more. You don't have to have multiple websites. You don't have to figure out who hosts or, you know, all this stuff. Shopify is everything all in one place, making your life easier and your business operate smoother. They've also got great customer service. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing with Shopify today. Sign up for your$1 a month trial at shopify.com. Go to shopify.com.

1:16slash stoic. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

1:33Ryan Holiday: You could do it on your own. You could wing it. You could hope to stumble through and come out the other side with a comprehensive understanding of a book that, while pretty short and to the point, is still, as we said earlier this week, pretty difficult. Marcus Aurelius, the author of that book we're talking about, Meditations, would steer you in a different direction, though. Mastery of reading and writing requires a master, he said, and he knew this from experience. Sometime around the year 140 AD, Marcus was introduced to the philosophy that would change his life by his teacher, Rusticus. The remembrances of Epictetus, as Marcus would refer most gratefully to that book that Rusticus gave him, he said, which he supplied to me out of his own library.

2:14Ryan Holiday: We can imagine the underlinings in Rusticus's copy that would have called Marcus's attention to particularly important passages. We can imagine the marginalia that would have provided valuable context and insights. We can imagine the discussions the two might have had as Marcus was familiarizing himself with this wisdom. In fact, Marcus would write in meditations about going straight to the seat of intelligence. By that, he meant asking questions, hearing from the experts, really wrestling with ancient wisdom as it was meant to be wrestled with. So if we're going to sit down and read Marcus Aurelius' meditations today, why wouldn't we do the same?

2:50Ryan Holiday: For the past decade here at Daily Stoke, we've been engaging with meditations day in and day out, wanting to understand its wisdom so we can apply it to our own lives. We spent hundreds and thousands of hours with the book itself and spent just as many hours hunting down papers and analysis by scholars and historians and translators many of whom we've gotten to talk to and interview. It's been the work of a lifetime exploring the depths of meditations, making sense of what Marcus wrote and what those writings can do for us. And as Marcus said, it requires the help of a master. And if you want to go deeper into meditations, along with me, and thousands of other Stoics all over the world, well, this is the time, because it is Meditations Month here at Daily Stoic.

3:29Ryan Holiday: April is the month Marcus Aurelius was born, and in honor of that wonderful birthday almost 20 centuries ago, we're going to be diving into meditations as a community doing a kind of book club about it and if you want to grab that guy we'll actually throw it in for free you can join me in the live session we're going to be doing about it and all of that grab the meditations month bundle i'll see you in there let's do a deep dive together into one of the greatest books of all time i'll link to that in today's show notes i think this is awesome and i hope you like it

4:06Thank you.