You Don’t Love Yourself Enough | Ask Daily Stoic

0:00I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$149 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$299 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

0:37Everything they sell has high standards to help you shop with confidence. Enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market. Why choose a Sleep Number smart bed? Can I make my sight softer? Can I make my sight firmer? Can we sleep cooler? Sleep Number does that. Cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side. Your Sleep Number setting. Enjoy personalized comfort for better sleep night after night. It's the final days of our Black Friday sale. Recharge this season with a bundle of cozy, soothing comfort. Now only$17.99 for our C2 mattress and bays, plus free premium delivery.

1:11Prices higher in Alaska and Hawaii. Check it out at a Sleep Number store or sleepnumber.com today.

1:18Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

1:59You don't love yourself enough. Each morning you wake up and life presents you with an opportunity. It's an opportunity to show up, to make a difference, to become the best version of yourself. But then what do you do? You hit the snooze button. You stay under the covers a while longer. You get a late start on the day and suddenly all your plans get pushed back. You chastise and berate yourself. You'll start to feel like you'll never catch up, like the potential life you envision for yourself will remain elusive, out of reach. Almost 2 ,000 years ago, Marcus Aurelius was the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man on the planet, and he faced this exact dilemma.

2:39He found himself making excuses that it was nice and warm under the covers, as he told himself. So you were born to feel nice, he writes in meditations, instead of doing things and experiencing them? He looked outside himself to the birds, the plants, the ants, all of which were going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order as best they can. So what was his problem? Why couldn't he get out of bed in the morning and do the same? You don't love yourself enough, he said, or you'd love your nature too and what it demands of you. And you could say that each year presents the same opportunity, right?

3:19chance to show up, to make a difference, to become the best version of yourself, to do what you need to do. The world needed Marcus Aurelius to become the person we admire and study today. It required conscious and consistent effort on his part. It required him to challenge himself, demanded that he woke up each morning and got to work on his individual tasks, putting the world in order as best he could. You are no different and you know it. You have the ideas. You've made the plans, but you haven't acted. So let's do it now. Now is the best time to start. Not Monday, not 2026, not when life feels easier or more convenient.

3:55If you wait for the perfect moment, it'll never come. Someone has to take control of someone, and that someone is you. The question remains, how? Well, we created the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge to answer just that, to help you create a better life, a better you in 2025, to help you show up and challenge yourself today. Since August, me and the Daily Stoic team have been developing these challenges, one per day built around the best, most timeless Stoic wisdom. It's 21 challenges in a row to kick off a new you in a new year. And this year's challenge is new stuff designed to help you stop procrastinating, learn new skills, conquer insecurities, be more generous, appreciate the world around you, become the best version of yourself.

4:39And these aren't pie in the sky theoretical discussions, which the Stoics loathe, but clear, immediate exercises and methods you can start right now. We'll tell you exactly what to do, how to do it, why it works. We'll give you strategies for maintaining this way of living, not just for the rest of the year, but hopefully for your whole life. Because this version of you, the one that you know is there, is what the world needs right now. Just like the dancer was born to dance, the social climber for status, the miser for money, you were born for something too. Is helping others less valuable to you, Marcus writes, not worth your effort?

5:12You know the answer. You know what you're capable of. You know you weren't born under the covers to stay nice, to let another year pass by not being what you're capable of being. And the Daily Stoic 2025 New Year New Year Challenge starts on January 1st. Don't procrastinate. Don't put it off. I want to see you in there. I'm going to be in there with you. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash challenge.

5:38Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You know we do Q &As, and one of my favorite parts of the New Year New You Challenge is the Q &As. We do a bunch of live sessions. We're all trying to kick the new year off right. We're doing it together. So thousands of Stoics all over the world do the New Year New You Challenge. It's going to start on January 1st, but we've been doing it now for like seven years. So we have lots of those sessions recorded. And so for today's Q &A, I thought I'd bring you some questions that popped up in the 2022 session from the Daily Stoic New Year New Year Challenge.

6:17These are some awesome questions from some folks, and we'll just get into it. And if you want to join us in the Daily Stoic New Year New Year Challenge, you can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash challenge and maybe ask me a question as well. I'll talk to you soon. thanks to toyota trucks for sponsoring this episode when i bought my ranch in 2015 out here in basco county i drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on thought this isn't going to work stopped parked it walked the rest of the way home borrowed my wife's car drove in austin and bought a truck what i bought was a toyota tacoma and this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house.

7:00It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course.

7:40Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. So I wanted to ask you, I remember yours is presence, your word for the year, which is awesome. I wanted to ask who you were, what leader you were going to study this year.

8:17Yeah, I've been going back and forth on that. And that was the question I was going to ask everyone. I was going to ask what you chose for that day. I would an important caveat, because I think hero is important and that is a big part of it. But it's also, it's not just like, who are you worshiping, but how are you studying that person? Right. So what I see that as being the imperative this year is studying that person, warts and all, really sort of going in depth on those people. um so so the book that i'm going to write next uh i'm i'm just finishing the the discipline book um which is the second in the the four virtues series is going to be on justice um so i'm thinking about justice a lot and so i haven't quite i i read the taylor branch series on martin luther king uh over the last sort of two years uh and now i'm reading the david halberstram uh bio on the, it's called The Children, and it's about the men and women who orchestrated the first sit-ins and freedom rides.

9:23So I think I'm going to do some civil rights figure. I'm sort of going back and forth as to who that might be. I might be more of a sort of a general bucket of that, but that's sort of what I'm going to build the book around. It's a little different for me because I sort of have my personal heroes, and then I have like, well, who am I needing to really focus on for the specific thing that I'm thinking about or writing about. But I was just reading about John Lewis this morning as part of it. And I know there's a new biography of John Lewis coming out. So I'll probably do something in that space.

9:56Yeah, I haven't exactly nailed down the figure, but I have the sort of bucket. And I'm sort of reading generally in that space right now. But thank you for prompting me on that. If anyone wants to share as they go through, we'll do more of that and Nick thank you very much for the kind words and for starting us off the thing that I want to ask you like you know stoicism is a path which requires you know immense discipline but I'm just 25 years old and I have a lot of you know social circle but still you know I have seen people calling me indifferent like indifferent I don't feel anything or like you know I've been doing the path and there are a lot of disbeliefs for my beliefs out there so how do I cope up with that staying positive, maintaining that positive aura around me.

10:43Yeah. So indifferent is a tricky word, right? Because I think a lot of people think indifferent means that you are apathetic or that you're somehow resigned. I think for the Stoics, indifference was more, I think the word has more a connotation of resilience or flexibility. um so uh actually um when i interviewed shaka smart uh who was the head basketball coach at at uh at university of texas and then he he's now the head coach at marquette um i was asking him how he this is part of the daily stoke leadership challenge um which which i recommend if people uh want to check it out uh you can you can listen to the whole interview but anyways i was asking him how he was adjusting to the cold because i remember uh when when i met him a few times while he was down here, he was talking about how much he enjoyed, you know, the hot Texas weather.

11:36It was very different than where he was from. And I said, how are you adjusting to the cold? You know? And he said, I said, are you a warm weather guy or a cold weather guy? And he said, you know what? I'm a dress for the weather guy. Right. Which to me, that's what indifference is. Right. So indifference isn't like I have no emotions, I have no thoughts, no opinions. indifference to me is I make whatever it is work right and so often to me I I see that as a very optimistic attitude right a pessimistic person would be like oh I hate the weather here or like oh I wish I was somewhere else um to me the the stoic idea of indifference is like this is nice I like this right it's finding what you like in that thing so to me that's what it's about so there's there there is yes kind of this little bit of resignation this little bit of passivity or acceptance to it, but there's also a kind of an optimism and a resilience to it that I try to cultivate in my life.

12:32I'm not perfect at it. I don't think Marcus Aurelius was perfect at it. He reminds himself many times in meditations not to complain, not to be depressed, etc. But to me, that's the idea. Someone's saying they have a question about humor, but then they don't actually give the question about humor. So I will bring up a funny story about the Stoics and humor, which I have talked about on a couple of daily Stoic podcasts that are coming up. But there is this, again, tendency that this stereotype that the Stoics don't have any emotion and don't have a sense of humor. But it's important to remember that Chrysippus, one of the early Stoics, dies of laughter.

13:10He enjoys it. So he's laughing at one of his own jokes so hard that he keels over and dies. and I've always taken that as a reminder of, you know, the Stoic can have a good time and laugh of it.

13:28Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded of these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

13:59Look, 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. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free.

14:47No interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for. And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there. just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now, or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.