You Must Return Again and Again | If You Want To Be Steady

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.

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1:19Welcome 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 in 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.

2:00You must return again and again. By the way, today is the last day to get the Daily Stoic e-book for just$2.99. That's as cheap as it'll ever be. I used to say that people didn't always believe me. We do it$1.99 the first week of January every year. And now it's$2.99 because that's inflation and that's what they discount e-books to. Anyways, you can grab that. I'll link to it in today's show notes or just go to wherever you get your e-books. But if you want a leather edition or a signed edition, you can find that at stuart.dailystoic.com. So Marcus Aurelius read Epictetus a lot. And we know this because meditations is proof of it.

2:35Almost every page has some direct quote or an allusion to the teachings of Epictetus. And we also find upon deeper inspection references to the work of Panitius, Chrysippus, the plays of Euripides, Zeno, Socrates, and countless other philosophers. So how does someone develop a recall like that? How did Marcus Aurelius become so wise, not just on the page, but in life? Through repetition and practice. Marcus Aurelius never refers to Seneca, but it's clear that he internalized a piece of advice from that stoic too. You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers and digest their work, Seneca wrote, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.

3:20Again and again, the Stoics poured over the same texts so that the ideas could take firm hold, so that they could be absorbed, so it could become muscle memory infused into their DNA. For a Stoic, once is not enough. It's about reading and rereading, writing and journaling, discussing, reflecting, and experiencing it too. Marcus Reuss did this so much that it became almost a vice at one point in meditations. He has to command himself to put down his books and get back to living. When I published The Daily Stoic back in 2016, which, as I said, is$2.99 as an e-book right now, I had, of course, no idea that it would go on to sell millions of copies and spend hundreds of cumulative weeks on the bestseller list.

4:00But one of the things I'm most proud of is the way that it's most often not on the top selling list on Amazon, but the most read books on Amazon, meaning that people are picking it up and using it each day. Selling a book is not that much of an accomplishment, honestly. Certainly, I don't mind, but that's not what it's about. It's about creating something that sticks with people, that becomes part of their lives. That's what Stoicism is supposed to be. And I think the book tapped into that now timeless Stoic practice of reading and rereading, of people never stepping in the same river twice. Of course, the Daily Stoic Journal did the same, and the Daily Stoic Page a Day calendar did the same because I see the pictures on social media, people with their desks and the calendar there, or they're posting it on social media or whatever.

4:49The idea is that you're supposed to engage and re-engage and interact and re-interact. And so if you want these ideas to take firm hold of your mind this year, you have to do more than skim. Stoicism isn't something you have read. It is something you are reading. It's not about reading a book and finishing. It's not about getting the gist of it as Marcus derided. It's about making sure you're finding ways to engage with it each day. And then it's about lingering and digesting it until it takes hold, never to be dislodged. And as I said, tomorrow's going to be the last day that you can get the Daily Stoic ebook for just$2.99.

5:28The leather edition obviously is available all year round. I'll sign your copy or you can get a cloth bound edition. The page a day calendar is another way to just have it.

5:39It's of memento mori of tearing off a page each day. And the Daily Stoic Journal, if you're thinking about starting a journaling habit this year, that can be great too. I'll link to all that, or you can just go to store.dailystoic.com. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone, and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr.

6:16Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids.

6:58And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It Over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. Today is January 10th, And we are reading from The Daily Stoic, 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living. Today's entry is If You Want to Be Steady, and we get it from Epictetus' Discourses.

7:44The essence of good, Epictetus says, is a certain kind of reasoned choice, just as the essence of evil is another kind. What about externals, then? They are only the raw materials for our reasoned choice, which finds its own good and evil in working with them. How will it find good? Not by marveling at the material. For if judgments about the material are straight, that makes our choices good, but those judgments are twisted. Our choices turn bad. That's Epictetus' Discourses 1, 2, 9. The Stoic seeks steadiness, stability, and tranquility. traits that most of us aspire to but seem to experience only fleetingly.

8:29How do they accomplish this elusive goal? Well, it's not luck. It's not by eliminating outside influences or running away to quiet and solitude. Instead, it's about filtering the outside world through the straightener of our judgment. That's what our reason can do. It can take the crooked, the confusing, and the overwhelming nature of external events and make them orderly. However, if our judgments are crooked because we don't use our reason, then everything that follows will be crooked and we will lose our ability to steady ourselves in the chaos and the rush of life. If you want to be steady, if you want clarity, proper judgment is the way.

9:10I would argue that stoicism is going to be uniquely suited to this moment that we are in, not just 2025, but the next four years, the next several years. We have clearly chaos, dysfunction. We have angry, disturbed people. We have propaganda, misinformation. We have just plain too much information, right? These are crazy times. And the challenge of crazy times is to not be made crazy by them. I'm not saying there's any way you can escape what's happening in the world. We are at the mercy of events in that way, just as Epictetus was. Epictetus couldn't convince Nero to not be crazy. He couldn't convince Nero's successor not to exile all the philosophers.

9:59He couldn't tame the weather or human irrationality any more than any of us can. But his point was that if you have good judgment, if you are in command of yourself, of your reasoned choice, your ability to interpret and understand what's happening around you, you can at least not be made crazy by what's happening around you. You can have clarity inside this chaos, even if that clarity is just an understanding of how chaotic and dysfunctional and screwed up the moment around you is. You know, a stoic doesn't stick their head in the sand. They don't run away from it. They don't also put on rose-colored glasses and say everything is awesome.

10:36But they do have the ability to sift through bullshit, to get to the essence, to know what's important and what's not important, what's true and what's not true, what's designed to rile them up and what's actually outrageous. And, you know, justice dictates that they stand up against and speak out against. You know, it's not just this geopolitical stuff. It's what's happening in the market. it. It's your neighbor bought a new car or the other parents at your kid's school dress and act a certain way or prioritize a certain thing. And the ability to not get caught up in that, to not have your priorities screwed or worked by that.

11:17That's what we're talking about. That's what this is. This sense of the path that you're on, as Seneca talked about, and not being distracted by not just the paths that crisscrossed yours, but also the sirens that try to tempt you from that path, that try to corrupt you, break you, degrade you. That's what we have to cultivate as we go into this new year. That's what I'm trying to cultivate. I'm thinking about my inputs, sure, but I'm also thinking about how I filter those inputs, my sense of values, reminding myself what's important, reminding myself who I am. I do this in the pages of my journal, do it in conversations with my wife.

11:55I do it on this podcast. I do it in my writing. Who am I? What am I focusing on? What's important? What is good? What is true, right? What is not? What is wrong? What is evil? You got to have clarity about that. That's what we need to go into this new year with. That's what you need to go into this new year with. And that's what we're trying to do here at Daily Stoic. That's what we do in the pages of the Daily Stoic. That's what we do in the pages of the Daily Stoic Journal also. I'll end it there. I wish you a good day and I'll talk to you again soon.

12:31Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com slash email.

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